a look at the cycle of consumerism with the aid of animation

Watch Story of Stuff >>

here’s a teaser:

wow. i’m totally going to kill a cyclist. thatsa’ no good-a

via | Do the Test

very accurate

via | NY Times Opinion

I thought these were good questions raised by a poll on AdAge.

BACKGROUND: Ad industry creatives apparently have a crush on Obama, with many launching high-quality pro bono work onto the web and elsewhere. While these individual efforts don’t involve overall agencies, what happens when an agency head signs up for a campaign? Taxi, New York, President John Berg says execs should turn down political work as it puts employees in a tough spot.

http://syama.blog3.fc2.com

the site is in japanese

Mike Myers and Deepak Chopra were on the Sundance Channel’s program Iconoclasts recently. It was basically a fusion/comparison of comedy and spirituality, which was pretty illuminating.

Here’s stuff Mike Myers said, or that he said other people said. I felt this was worth logging just because these types of utterances are such rare gems:

• “Lenny Bruce defined comedy as pain plus time.”
• “Rob Reiner said comedy is when you fall into a pit and are impaled by a spike, and tragedy is when I stub my toe.”
• “Haha and a-ha! are related industries.”
• “It’s like most comedians, I want to be the architect of my own embarrassment. I will slip on that banana peel, thank you very much.  I will drop my pants to my ankles, thank you very much.”
• Jerry Seinfeld on the Deiter character: “You’ve managed to break all the rules of American parody, you’ve parodied something that nobody knows”
• “My hope for what I do is not quite like progressive rock and it’s not quite I’ve suffered for my art and now it’s your turn. But there is just a little bit like I would like to do comedy where it did not exist before.”

It is amazing to have this insider look at comedy. It’s very meta. I don’t know if Mike Meyers would be who he was if he had all this “behind the laughter / behind the music / the making of / DVD extras” type of stuff available to him while he was developing his art. Nowadays there’s a SHITload, including another one to checkout, History of the Joke hosted by Lewis Black.

When you are actually amidst the act of creation, I don’t think it’s possible or even beneficial to actually be thinking of any of those things. You have to just let that kind of stuff sink in by giving it time, but just empty your head of any of it when you are live.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/005195.html

There are a lot of mistranslations around china that accidentally or purposely (?) translate to stuff like:

From the article:

People who see signs employing the f-word all over China, even in large stores and fancy restaurants, are not only aghast, they wonder how the dickens such a gross mistranslation could have originated and proliferated. I believe that the explanation given in the previous paragraph adequately and accurately accounts for the origin of the basic GAN1/4 = “fuck” mistranslation. The question that remains, then, is how did this virus spread? Theories abound, to say the least. I have intelligent colleagues who believe that naughty people do this on purpose just to scandalize customers and clients. Others hold that it is done to make English look like an uncouth language. Still others maintain that devious foreign translators plant these mistranslations all over the place to make Chinese look stupid and crude. And there are so many additional theories that attempt to account for the GAN1/4 = “fuck” misrendering that I can’t keep track of them.