Unsought Input

Apparently the CBC in Canada thought they would involve the fans in a contest to pick out a new theme song for hockey broadcasts.  This is just the sort of interactive, crowd-sourcing, brand-building exercise the Internet excels at.  It’s also a ripe invitation to pranksters like the Something Awful forum goons.

Here’s the top-viewed, top-voted entry right now:

This is the most beautiful sound ever to be associated with hockey.

Please, do your part and log in and vote for this anthem. Give the other entries a fair listen, but I think you’ll agree nothing captures the spirit of hockey quite like this techno mashup of sheep and babies crying.

Here’s the official music video:

I had to share this, Russian dancing set to Run DMC’s “It’s Like That”.

In case you don’t get the references, here’s the original (ridiculously awesome) video:

Toxins.  They are all around you, in the air, in your food, in your drinking water.  So how are you going to get rid of them?

One way would be to realize that “toxins” is so broad a term as to be useless and that in order to avoid exposure to specific health risks like mercury you need to do some research, analyze costs and benefits of approaches, and participate in a modern society with environmental, health, and food inspection.

But that’s too hard.  So instead, turn off your brain and watch this commercial:

So let’s check off all the reasons why this smells scammy.  Have you ever had any of the following symptoms:

• Headaches?
• Backaches?
• The dreaded…  fatigue?
• And many more?

These symptoms could mean that you are filled with toxins! or more likely, that you are a human being, since everyone has a headache once in a while.  In any event, products that claim to cure everything usually cure nothing.

The pads “work” by sticking to your feet at night and removing everything bad from your body.  Everything bad includes:

• Heavy Metals
• Metabolic Wastes
• Toxins
• Parasites
• Chemicals
• Cellulite

Yes, it turns out that cobalt, chiggers and chubbiness all follow the same metabolic processes.  This is point number two – claiming to work in several, completely unrelated ways.

Point number three is easy.  Too easy.  Isn’t it a bit suspicious that it does so much without any effort, pain, or discomfort on your part?

How was such an amazing products discovered?  Through the amazing, ancient art of oriental reflexology.  And acupuncture, or something and nature.  Did they mention homeopathy?  They should.  Misusing a lot of scientific-sounding or hippie nature-sounding terms is point four.

So what did I miss?  What other ways does this seem ridiculous to you?

Senator Larry Craig from Idaho, who had plead guilty to disorderly conduct for coming on to a male police officer in an airport bathroom, says the whole thing is a huge misunderstanding.  In fact, he went on national TV to proclaim (again and again) “I am not gay!”

I don’t know if he’s gay, but the musical he’s been cast in is fabulous:

This goes out to all y’all web developers out there.  You know who you are.  In 1999 while others partied like it was…  1999, you slaved away trying to get your table-based layout working on Netscape and IE.  Thank goodness it’s now 2007, and you can just grab CSS-based layouts from A List Apart.

But off all the possible abuses of old-skool HTML, I bet you never thought of this one:  using table cells and bgcolor to build an image, one pixel at a time!

Link to video for those of you on RSS.

Brought to you by Japan and cutesy anime chicks.

This video is blowing up in the interweb, but if you haven’t seen it, take a look. Mike Daisey, probably best known for his descriptions of working for Amazon.com during the dot-com bubble, is performing a pretty funny monologue. Unfortunately, a Christian group is there to protest, and there ain’t nothing Jesus hates more than the F-bomb.

We can agree to disagree about the political messages in the movie 300, whether it was propaganda or gay-bashing.  But I think everyone who saw the movie will agree it was quite violent.

But was the violence excessive or gratuitous?  The only empirical way I can think of to find out is to remove the violence from the epic:

One of greatest tragedies of American history is the untimely death of Abraham Lincoln. Having done a great service to us all by ending slavery and preserving the Union, Lincoln had a plan for southern reconstruction that was more moderate than the measures taken after his death.

Although I sympathize with the radical Republicans of the time and their desire to quickly end slavery, give voting rights to freedmen, and crush the power of slavery as an institution, their methods lead to the “redemption” where conservative whites dominated southern politics for decades. This left a legacy of racial segregation and distrust that lingers to this day.
What if Abraham Lincoln had lived? Countless historians and authors have pondered this, but I think the video below gives the most insightful analysis.

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Is this really on Nickelodeon?  Keep in mind this is the network that brought you Ren and Stimpy and The Adventures of Pete and Pete.

In earlier science projects articles about sulfur hexafluoride gas and non-newtonian fluids, we at least had a little bit of theory and explanation to go with the goofy videos. Not so much in this entry. It turns out that filming a video in very high speed, then watching it in slow motion, is just fun.

What could be better than watching somebody get hit in the head with a water balloon over the course of a minute?

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Musicals. If you stop and think about it, it’s bizarrely amazing that musicals continue to exist. The fact that they make up a whole genre of theater and film is stranger still.

People just start singing, for no reason, or for contrived reasons. They dance around, in the middle of the day. Don’t get me wrong, musicals take a lot of skill to write, score, direct, and act in. But let’s face it – if there were no such thing as musicals, and you had never heard of The Sound of Music, or Grease, or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and someone tried to explain the concept to you, the only possible response would be, “WTF?”

Which is why I have developed a theory: the best musicals are the ones that make fun of musicals, or at the very least point out the absurdity of the whole business. Here is empirical, scientific proof. The ten best musicals that make fun of musicals:

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…Can be found in this 30-second video.

A few days ago news broke that Comedy Central had requested YouTube take down a bunch of video clips from their shows, including The Daily Show, South Park, and The Colbert Report. They have the right to do so under copyright law and the DMCA, of course, but the fact that they hadn’t bothered for such a long time made me think that maybe they understood why YoutTube works.

Did the takedown notice mean they didn’t get it after all? Were their lawyers just procrastinating? It looks like they do get it, after all – YouTube and Viacom have reached a licensing agreement.

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