I once heard a story… “Whatever blooms from the Baobab is given back to the earth, because the mighty tree never forgets its roots.” Like the mighty Baobab, McDonald’s and I will not be moved.
You’re not going to believe this, but the statement above is a direct quotation from the official McDonald’s website. First of all, it makes no sense. The tree gives back to the earth, and the speaker “will not be moved.” I don’t really get the analogy. And I really don’t get how McDonald’s factors into it. Does McDonald’s give back to the earth? Is McDonald’s impossible to move? Here’s my best shot: McDonald’s gives the speaker the strength of a mighty tree. But it’s certainly a confusing way to put it, not to mention a silly thing to say. Not only that, McDonald’s is equating itself with one of the most sacred trees in African folklore, known as “the tree of life.” That seems sort of disrespectful to the culture they’re pandering to, and gloriously ironic given how unhealthy McDonald’s food is and the high rate of obesity among African-Americans.
So basically, it’s not the best two sentences of marketing copy ever written. But the Baobab quote is merely the gateway to something even stranger: 365black.com, McDonald’s special website for black people. I promise you this is real.
In scientific publications, most of the articles are original research. There are also review articles–overviews of the work that’s been done on a particular problem, for the benefit of those in the field who want to keep up.
This is a review article on the Tommy Westphall Hypothesis. I’m not introducing any brilliant new observations of my own. But if you’ve never heard of Tommy, and you like Overthinking™ stuff, let me get you up to speed.
Movie critic A. O. Scott has what appears to be a new series of retrospective video reviews of his favorite movies on the New York Times website, and much to my surprise, his latest entry is an independent art film from 1985 called Rambo: First Blood Part II.
Why my surprise? Find out after the jump.
“Surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago,” according to Bill Tancer, a researcher at Hitwise, quoted in a Reuters story, “and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.”
Has the whole world gone topsy-turvy?
For the record:
Charlize doesn't know, either.
Amanpour, Christiane (kris-tə-YAN ä-MÄN-pür)
Auel, Jean (OUL)
Baum, L. Frank (BOM)
Blanchett, Cate (KĀT BLAN-chət)
Buscemi, Steve (boo-SHEM-ē)
Clowes, Daniel (KLŌZ)
Coelho, Paulo (POU-lō KOO-ĀL-yoo)
Derrida, Jacques (zhäk dâr-ē-DÄ)
Fiennes, Ralph (RĀF FĪNZ)
Foer, Jonathan Safran (FÔR)
Fraser, Brendan (FRĀZ-ər)
Hedaya, Dan (hə-DĀ-yə)
Herge (ÂR-JĀ)
Inhofe, James M. (IN-hof)
Krugman, Paul (KROOG-mən)
LaBeouf, Shia (SHĪ lə-BOOF)
Lazenby, George (LĀZ-ən-bē)
Leto, Jared (LET-ō)
Limbaugh, Rush (LIM-bô)
Loggia, Robert (LŌZH-yə)
Lohan, Lindsay (LŌ-ən)
Milosevic, Slobodan (slō-BŌ-dän mē-LŌ-she-vich)
Rand, Ayn (ĪN)
Rhys-Davies, John (RĒS-DĀV-is)
Rushdie, Salman (SÄL-mən RÜSH-dē)
Silverstone, Alicia (ə-LĒ-sē-ə)
Stevens, Sufjan (SOOF-yan)
Stevenson, Adlai (AD-lā)
Takei, George (tä-KĀ)
Theron, Charlize (shär-LĒZ THER-ən)
Xiaoping, Deng (DUNG-SHYOU-PING)
Yeoh, Michelle (YŌ)
Yun-Fat, Chow (YOON-FÄT)
Zagat, Tim (zə-GAT)
Zeta-Jones, Catherine (ZĒT-ə)
The government says so.
One of my many vices is political blogs. I read a whole slew of them, several times a day (and lord help me, I even read the comments). I especially enjoy reading the progressive DailyKos, and the staunchly conservative RedState, to get two different perspectives.
So when they both publish nearly identical posts, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I got to this from the Onion AV Club’s “videocracy” feature, which tracks the most popular videos on the intertubes. This means that the odds of any of you not having already seen this are, to say the least, slim. But I still want to link to it, just to express my intense enthusiasm… both for the clip itself, and for The Soup’s treatment of it.
“Art,” says Leonard Bernstein, ” … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world—the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.” So yeah. For lack of a better word, I’d say this qualifies.
I present to you as a special peek into my other projects (most of which revolve around a very cool theatre in Greater Boston), an entry into the Providence, Rhode Island 48 hour film project, Monday the 13th, by Nature’s Credit Card Productions (a new team we put together earlier this year). You can watch other 48 hour films at www.48.tv.
Our movie was selected for Best of Providence and won the Audience Award at the Best of Providence showing as well as the “Best Rhose Island movie” for its references and jokes about Providence and the area, which they like to encourage.
To keep you honest, every team in the city gets the same prop, character and line of dialog, and each team picks a genre out of a hat. For us, it was:
Character — A hairdresser named Monty Chaney
Line — “If you see him again, tell me.”
Prop — A pear
Our genre — Horror
Enjoy!
Don’t know what the 48 hour film project is and want to find out? Already know what it is and want to talk about it? Just want to bash my movie? DO SO . . . after the jump –
I’m a two-blog man now.
As some of you know, I write and produce Hotnewz.tv, the best darn news show for college kids on the web. We recently started a blog where we talk about some of our favorite segments. After the jump is something I wrote for it, on the enigma that is Andrew WK.
