news round-up
Having a bad day? Can’t stand Bill O’Reilly? This will cheer you up: O’Reilly getting his ass handed to him by a high school junior. Watch as he gets so flustered with his sixteen year-old guest that he calls him a “pinhead”:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/g6cT-JSfdzM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
(via Mercury Blogtown. Read the follow-up interview here.)
In Australia, the Road and Traffic Authority of New South Wales is spending almost $2 million AUD on a campaign to reduce road deaths caused by speeding. Their weapon of choice: mockery.
The series of TV ads shows women shaking their little finger - a gesture used to symbolise a small penis - as speeding male motorists race past.
The “Speeding. No-one Thinks Big of You” campaign will run on TV, in cinemas, at bus shelters and online.
Personally, I think this a great idea, especially if it ends up working, because then I’m going to borrow the concept to launch my own series of ads here in the States, with variations for those behaviors I find most irritating in other drivers. For example: “Using Your Phone While Driving? Maybe You Have a Small Pecker” and “I Couldn’t Help But Notice You Can’t Figure Out How To Use Your Turn Signal — Perhaps It’s Because You’re Small and Flaccid.”
Over on the Make blog you can find a cutesy video called Thomas Edison Hates Cats which talks about something you may not know: early in the last century, as Edison duked it out with Tesla and Westinghouse over which type of current (DC or AC) would become the standard, he launched a campaign to discredit his rivals by portraying AC current as being inherently dangerous. To do this, he publicly electrocuted stray cats and dogs. Repeatedly. He even electrocuted an elephant once. This kind of intense rivalry for product supremacy sort of makes the format wars between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray look pretty tame by comparison.
And for our final bit, Jerry Falwell’s Wikipedia entry was briefly altered after his death by wacky vandals. Sure, it’s probably in bad taste, but it’s still pretty funny. And anyway, we know that’s not how he died: Avitable knocked him off.
That’s it for now — join me throughout the week as I continue to bring you slightly dated updates on assorted happenings while I work feverishly to clear out the huge number of unfinished posts in my Drafts queue from the last few months.
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