The Girlfriend Experience

The Girlfriend Experience is a commercial movie trailer on Hulu.com.

According to Buzzfeed: "Steven Soderbergh's upcoming film The Girlfriend Experience has been getting a lot of buzz lately, partially because it's the mainstream debut of adult film star Sasha Grey, an attractive lady who is sometimes naked." They're so gentle with their understatements and quasi-euphemisms.

Hulu bills the premise of the movie as: "A high-priced call girl works on solidifying her economic future while her live-in lover seeks success as a personal trainer."

The FABLife explains more about why exactly Sasha is famous:

"On the x-rated screen, she’s known for asking to be punched in the gut while performing fellatio.

To top it off, she’s a total nerd, and named herself in honor of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Grey. Needless to say, we’re all a bit obsessed with her. In fact, her only flaw seems to be that she’s engaged to a photographer named Ian Cinnamon."

This is all a little bit weird, right?  I mean, media is pretty saturated with sex, but this is outrigh porn going mainstream. There it is. Handbasket and all. 

 

(PS: Is that a diaper?!   From Buzzfeed)

Marquee Fail

Marquee Fail is an entry on the failblog that is too good to ignore. It's a photo of a marquee advertising two movies, that reads kind of like your stalker's magazine-cut-out love notes. 

"There will definitely be blood... Maybe"

I love the follow-up by the commenter on Buzzfeed. "Bambi II isn't afraid to lay all its cards on the table. None of this 'maybe' stuff." 

(From Ted )

Colbert Report NOM Advert Responce [sic]

I don't usually do follow-ups, but these parodies have been gathering, and I am afraid.  Here are more NOM parody ads (previously featured) with better production values.  One from the Colbert Report, and one from Funny or Die. //

Colbert Report NOM Advert Responce [sic]

Winner lines: Forced to have beards, Abercrombie & Fitch, and hilarious best friends in TV and movies. 

The second, less good parody:

A Gaythering Storm by Funny or Die.

Jane Lynch, Alicia Silverstone, Lance Bass, George Takei, LizFeldman, Jason Lewis, Sarah Chalke, Sophia Bush. 
(From Kirk and everyone else) 

The Coco Before Chanel Trailer Translated By A Child

The Coco Before Chanel Trailer Translated By A Child is the French trailer of the upcoming Coco Chanel movie, translated by a high school freshman. (And yes, it's almost as good as Babel Fish.  Almost.)

Video Gum explains:

"Audrey Tatou stars in an upcoming biopic of legendary fashion designer Coco Chanel called Coco Avant Chanel. The French language version of the trailer was released today, but the subtitled American version doesn't come out for a few weeks. So we asked a high school freshman with one and a half semesters of introductory French to translate it for us. Enjoy."

It cuts quickly, but if you've had even a week of French instruction you will find this delightful.

My favorite gems:
--You resembled a near woman.
--I am have enough of making me the clown!
--She you like?
--She me pleases.

She me pleases indeed. Enjoy!
(From VideoGum and Buzzfeed)

Dan Ariely: Why we think it's OK to cheat and steal (sometimes)

Dan Ariely: Why we think it's OK to cheat and steal (sometimes) is a TED talk by Behavioral Economist Dan Ariely.  He speaks broadly about irrationality, but I found the most interesting part of the talk to be the introduction about pain.  

Dan was badly burned and spent a lot of time in burn wards. Much like band-aids, except wrapped all over your body, body bandages can be ripped slowly or quickly, starting from various parts of the body. There is no consensus on how to do it best. 

Dan's nurses thought faster was better. Dan felt otherwise, but could not convince them from their gut feelings, and had no research to back it up.  Once he got well, he embarked on some semi-sadistic scientific study about pain.  He found that since the mind doesn't really take duration into account, ripping slower is actually better. Taking breaks to recuperate is best. Also, starting from high-nerve density areas such as the face, and moving on to less innervated parts such as the back, lead to a sense of improvement. 

He went back to tell his former nurses and they related how hard it is to go back on their gut feelings. But now you know, there is research. So feel free to tell all your health-field friends to rip it slow. (That's what she said, pada-chk!) 

Oh yeah, then Dan moves on to tell us that we are predictably irrational, and we all tend to cheat by a little bit, or something like that. Enjoy!

Wrong Cards

Wrong Cards is a website for sending e-cards. The wrong kind of e-cards for all sorts of wrong occasions.

It's by an Australian named Kris, who explains the site's raison-d'être:

"Our ecards are free to send, and they will always be free to send. Wrongcards is not intended for mass-appeal, nor is it intended for the mainstream. If you are reading this, you are probably not a mainstream person yourself, which is good because Wrongcards will probably work for you.

No one will be able to buy t-shirts here with clever phrases on them. No one will be able to attempt to fill up that inner emptiness by buying a hat with a Wrongcards logo. We run ads to pay for our hosting but if we wanted riches, we'd have ecards here with pictures of dogs playing poker, or kittens covered in spaghetti. But then we'd be crying ourselves to sleep each night."

"

Enjoy!

(From Metafilter )

TMI Turkey and Awkward Turtle

TMI Turkey and Awkward Turtle are two ridiculous American hand gestures as explained by a frat boy. Or a Pomona-baseball-shirt-wearing dude. Same diff.

The turtle is used in awkward situations, and the turkey is for TMI moments. Personally, I'd heard of the turtle, but I think he just made up that turkey bit. I'm curiuos as to the origins of these gestures.

Also, I wonder how many people actually do this in conversation.  The only solid stats are that presently, 25,693 people have wasted their time watching this.

(From my curiosity)

Lindsay Lohan's eHarmony Profile

Lindsay Lohan's eHarmony Profile is a Funny or Die monologue by Lindsay Lohan. Yeah, it broke a couple of days ago, but I'm just now catching up.

I thought it was a cute spot.  Short, sweet, charming. Her PR person must be thrilled. "Lindsay Lohan is newly single and ready to mingle!"

(From all the gossip websites she keeps afloat)

The man who owns the Internet

The man who owns the Internet is an Internet article about the most powerful dotcom mogul you've never heard of: Kevin Ham. It's by Paul Sloan of CNNMoney.com. The article is an oldie but goodie. Basically, Kevin Ham makes money off your poor spelling and typing skills. He registers those domains that are commonly mis-spelled (among others). It leads to an add-ridden site, and when people click on those ads, Kevin makes money. "If you control all the domains," Kevin says, "then you control the Internet."

An exerpt:

" The man at the top of this little-known hierarchy is Kevin Ham -- one of a handful of major-league "domainers" in the world and arguably the shrewdest and most ambitious of the lot. Even in a field filled with unusual career paths, Ham's stands out.

Trained as a family doctor, he put off medicine after discovering the riches of the Web. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue. (Like all his financial details, Ham would neither confirm nor deny this figure.)

Working mostly as a solo operator, Ham has looked for every opening and exploited every angle -- even inventing a few of his own -- to expand his enterprise. Early on, he wrote software to snag expiring names on the cheap. He was one of the first to take advantage of a loophole that allows people to register a name and return it without cost after a free trial, on occasion grabbing hundreds of thousands of names in one swoop.

And what few people know is that he's also the man behind the domain world's latest scheme: profiting from traffic generated by the millions of people who mistakenly type ".cm" instead of ".com" at the end of a domain name.

Try it with almost any name you can think of -- Beer.cm, Newyorktimes.cm, even Anyname.cm -- and you'll land on a page called Agoga.com, a site filled with ads served up by Yahoo (Charts, Fortune 500).

Ham makes money every time someone clicks on an ad -- as does his partner in this venture, the West African country of Cameroon. Why Cameroon? It has the unforeseen good fortune of owning .cm as its country code -- just as Germany runs all names that end with .de.

...


Ham had no clue that there were rivals out there who were way ahead him, deploying software that purchased names at a rate that Ham's fingers couldn't match. Through registration data, he eventually traced many of those purchases to one owner: "NoName." Behind the shadowy moniker was another reclusive domain pioneer, a Chinese-born programmer named Yun Ye, who, according to people who know him, operated out of his house in Fremont, Calif.

By day Ye worked as a software developer. At night he unleashed the programs that automated domain purchases. (Ye achieved deity status among domainers in 2004 when he sold a portfolio of 100,000 names to Marchex (Charts), a Seattle-based, publicly traded search marketing firm, for $164 million. He then moved to Vancouver.)"

To find out how the story pans out, check out the rest of the article. Enjoy!

Truex

Truex.org is a website about various hipster things on the interwebs, ranging from Ad design critiques to poking fun at off-message right-wing protest signs. The postings are sporadic, but worthwhile.

The older posts contain writing samples. I especially like this one:

"Vinegar and Existentialism

April 8th, 2007

On a whim I bought some salt and vinegar flavored potato chips. “They can’t be that bad,” I thought. “People eat these all the time.” I didn’t actually try them until later that evening. The first chip went in my mouth and, though initially tasty, left a strange and chemical aftertaste in my mouth. Not entirely pleasant, that was, and I looked down at the package in my hands and decided that I should either give them away or through them out or something.

Instead, I ate another. It was just as strange as the first, and made my face pucker slightly. It almost stung, or rather tingled as if there were an active ingredient other than flavor. Picture me standing there, in front of the cupboard, asking with each chip just why I was subjecting myself to this. They were horrible! And yet I ate. Abominable! I had another. Each bite was accompanied by a silent questioning of my very existence. Why was I doing this to myself? Oh god, oh god.

Ten chips in and I realized that existentialism tastes like a salt and vinegar potato chip. I’ve yet to come to terms with this."

I myself eat existentialism all the time.  Sometimes I bust out chopsticks, so that my mouth feels the pain but my fingers don't get dirty.  If were felling clever or long-winded I would think about some corollary to the extended metaphor, but instead, I'll just stop. I digress.

The author remains elusive yet specific. He describes himself as, "My blood type is B+, I was born in the lunar year of the dog, and one time when I was a kid I had a blood vessel in one of my eyes blow out due to some medication for an infected ear. That was fun."


(From a fake newspaper)