An artist’s rendering of 320,000 lightbulbs, or about the number of kilowatt-hours wasted every minute from a lack of efficiency in the home.
Part of a gallery of photographer Chris Jordan’s attempt to show people the staggering amounts of stuff we use up as a collective.
Great idea for a piece, though I would have have gone with a person by person account to hammer home the potential change that one dedicated individual can make. Also, I’d really like to see my personal lifetime bananas-eaten fractal image.
I must admit I hadn’t expected a reply of any kind from a fellow Mepper, though I considered the possibility that some Brandeis alumns might disagree (though, as Storey points out, the vast majority of Brandeis alumni are as annoyed about this as I am)–but I must say I was pretty flabbergasted at Storey’s take on my post about the closing of the Rose Museum.
This Superbowl Sunday, as you’re huddling into your inflatable beer chairs with your Tostitos NachoMan helmet strapped firmly to your attentive brain cans, know this:
You are about to spend five to six hours watching an event in which you will see approximately twelve minutes of actual sport.
The rest of the time you will be a semi-conscious participant in the real event of the day. For, this day, America’s largest and most prestigious corporate advertisers will line up and attempt to sell you useless shit that you don’t need in a mind-bogglingly extravagant cavalcade of shilling.
I’m not a full-fledged Pastafarian, but I’m definitely a sympathizer. Below, you’ll find an old Pastafarian parable of the first true test of the One True Noodly Deity, the Flying Spaghetti Monster…
This could not have been an easy decision for the lord almighty. But ultimately, this Kurt Warner arts and crafts project (pictured below) won the necessary divine favor to advance to the Superbowl…
Someone might argue that Jesus wouldn’t particularly warm up to this three-headed Cerberus-looking chimera that the All-Pro Quarterback has sketched here. But, then again, this man is the alternative:
Also, I’m pretty sure that Wolverine does not appear anywhere in the New Testament.
Not to mention his dabbling in voodoo rituals to ward off opponent field goals. Talk about mixing metaphors. These Eagles have gone well beyond the divine in a desperate effort to conjure a Superbowl ring.
Maybe next year Mr. Dawkins should try playing football the way that Jesus would. And that is to say, not at all.
Classic clip from my favorite comic (and soothsayer) of all time, Bill Hicks. Because of his heavily anti-commercial slant, he never got a great deal of mainstream media coverage. This is something that George Carlin was able to overcome, to some extent. But now they’re both gone, and we desperately need a like-minded voice…
By the way, the sound effect Hicks makes when he puts the mic inside his mouth is supposed to be the sound of pop stars selling out while fellating Satan.
You may recognize this commercial. It plays roughly every 12 seconds on every major television network:
Anything this repetitive and oversimplified is bound to trip my Homer Simpson-esque “urge to kill, rising” mental switch.
A new and increasingly annoying twist is a remix of this advertisement featuring actors pretending to be ordinary people. They go through the motions singing the jingle, while self-inducing awkward fake laughter and mimicking general outtake-like behavior.
There are few ways to more poorly reproduce reality than to ask actors to play self-conscious, untrained, shlubs with a camera pointed at them. You see, most commercial grade actors are already self-conscious, untrained shlubs with a camera pointed at them.
Forcing people this vapid and shallow to look inward is a very dangerous exercise in existentialism. And irony-challenged television commercial directors probably aren’t the pioneers that we would choose to lead on this particular front.
My DVR is ill-equipped to fully insulate me from this garbage. Even fast forwarding through it makes me want to assume a sumo wrestling stance while shouting “FIVE, FIVE, FIVE, FIVE DOLLAH. FIVE DOLLAH!! FIVE DOLLAH FOOT LONG!,” at random passers by.
Please, if you have access to anyone that took part in producing any part of this commercial campaign, ask the bad men to stop.
On a whim, Johannes and I decided to hit up a corporate headquarters and see if we could score an interview with a PR rep about their company’s anthem. Of course, you usually need more than one night to plan this sort of thing, so we got what we could get on the fly.
Storey vs. the Sloth Bear, Aloeverapathy, Hinduism in a Bag, Why Gandhi Gift Shops are not a Growth Industry, Justice Brandeis Heads to Hooters, TMR Welcomes a New Mepper, and Russ Hates 24 Year Olds.
Message Board Territoriality, The New Segue Sound Effect, THe Price is Right Chop Shop, Fairytale Elves vs. Fantasy Elves, The Last Great Viking Debate of ’07, St. Magnus the Fictional, Sabre-Tooth Tiger Soup, Dentist Holliday, And How Clangy was the Iron Age?
