From: Ian Gray
To: glennbeck@foxnews.com
Subject: Forget That Advice & Inspiration, I Figured It Out On My Own
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2010

Dear Glenn-

I must confess I’m a little disappointed that you didn’t reply to my previous e-mail, but that’s okay. When I’M making millions every year, and you’re sitting in some dive bar with Geraldo Rivera slobbering in your drinks about the good old days, we’ll see who has the last laugh. By the way, I figured out a good “crying on cue” trick without your  help. I was using onions for awhile, but people kept looking around saying “do you smell fajitas?” whenever I was getting ready to speak. So I switched to dabbing a little pepper oil in my eye. That trick – combined with thinking for a moment about what people like you and Sarah Palin have done to my beloved homeland – releases a torrent of tears every time. Thanks for existing, if only to give me something to weep about.

Best Of Luck With Your Inevitable Tea Party Candidacy,
Ian Gray

So here’s what would happen with the old site. The visitor would arrive on this not-very-FoxNews.com-looking page:

We intentionally omitted a “contact” link on almost every page of the site, so they would have had to find the tiny link on the site’s home page. Please note the drab color scheme and bizarre site name repeated in the upper left.

When they clicked on the “Contact Us” link, they would arrive at a page like this. I’ll leave it to you to estimate the IQ of the person that would use this process to send an e-mail to Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, or ANYONE at FoxNews.com

You can easily see how “The End of the World”…

…could be attributed to Gröûp X (song kicks in around 0:56):

The most recent post on Gröûp X’s web site (from April 2010) informs us:

On Look off, we hev join your American disease channel know as Twetted

http://twitter.com/groupxarab

Here we will throw off for you for how to figure outh how to saind your saix to owse for free, or if you are mane, how to show your sister and momtron how to send ett.

OK?

Do a looke. Get raidy for vegina buttjowb.

In “Don’t Touch That” Gröûp X lives up to their “faux Arabian rock band” reputation:

“You Kicked My Dog” is an example of their Jerky Boys style phone pranks:

In spite of being in the no-man’s land of corporate color, BP couldn’t get a trademark.

It has been rumored recently that global fashion giant Christian Dior may have made a deal with Kate Moss to be one of their key spokesmodels. The rumor in fact is starting right here; the source that shared the information with me prefers to remain anonymous, and the best-placed people I personally know at Dior couldn’t confirm the truth of it. But it made for some interesting conversation about whom one would choose to represent a powerful and prestigious brand like Dior. In the case of Kate Moss, this could really go either way. She clearly has a “durable” kind of beauty that adapts well across a broad range – from classy and dignified, to naively innocent, to sultry, or downright vampy. And she certainly has the identity cachet for this kind of role; even after her drug and rehab scandal of 2005, Forbes ranked her amongst their top 100 celebrities, with a “Power Rank” of 77. But if Dior is signing Moss, they might want to do some Googlewashing before they launch the campaign; a quick search of the terms “kate moss dior” just now turned up a lot of stories like this one about the night she trashed a 1930′s vintage Dior gown while out partying. It would also be an interesting move if they put her on their fragrance line; one of their hottest fragrances is of course Addict. I jest a bit, because I for one would laud Dior for signing her as a key spokesmodel. In spite of the public’s eagerness to attack celebrities who have drug problems, addiction has been recognized for some time now as a disease or condition rather than a behavioral problem. I mean, you wouldn’t pass her over if she had a minor bout with cancer for instance, right? It would be a strong statement on Dior’s part, and I’m sure she couldn’t do any more damage to their brand than Sharon Stone did in 2008 when she implied that the earthquakes in China were “bad karma”  for China’s treatment of Tibet. I hope it’s true that they’re signing Moss, myself. Although I admire Natalie Portman, when they signed her on in June of this year, I didn’t really get it. Dior has done a great job of cashing in on Chanel’s brand damage as a result of their heavy association with NY party monsters and rappers (or Snooki) and Portman seems a little too “pop culture” to fit Dior’s prestige vibe in my opinion. More brand ideas for Dior below.

Since they’ve already signed Natalie Portman, it would be a stoke of genius to call George Lucas and start licensing some Star Wars characters. They’d reach a rabid new market of social-network addicted fan boys.

If things worked out they could call James Cameron, rebrand j’adore, and not even have to pay the model:

Because Charlize Theron won’t be young and beautiful forever, you know.

It had been a long time since I had thought of the game Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon. That is, until a friend recently turned me on to a production starring (among others; more on that further on) Burgess Meredith, Frank Gorshin, and Cesar Romero. Sounds like an episode of the Batman TV series, right? Well if you add Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, Mickey Rooney, Slim Pickens, and Groucho Marx in his final appearance in film, you have Skidoo, creating one of the weirder nexuses possible in the six degrees game. I have no idea how I managed to make it this far in life without having seen this star-studded masterpiece of late sixties psychadelic wackiness. It’s like Jackie Gleason on acid, because, well, it stars Jackie Gleason – on acid. Along with just about everyone else at one point in the film. The cast alone makes this flick worth watching, but you’ll especially enjoy it if you’re into other movies from 1967/68, a couple of years when it seems someone must have been pret-ty busy running around Hollywood spiking the punch and baking brownies. Movies like Head, The President’s Analyst, The Party, Barbarella, and Casino Royale. There’s also a ton of interesting background story relating to the movie. It was produced and directed by the legendary Otto Preminger, who – in an amusing twist on the connections mentioned above – played Mr Freeze in the Batman TV series once. And only once; apparently he wasn’t too popular on set. Also worthy of note is that aside from being Groucho’s last film, he tried LSD before taking the role, feeling that it would be irresponsible to play a character named “God” in what was essentially a pro-LSD propaganda film without having tried the stuff. Good luck finding a copy of Skidoo; although it’s been broadcast on cable and bootlegged, the only copy we could find was a poorly-seeded torrent that is apparently a really bad copy of an old Beta tape.

The Trailer For The Movie

God and His Sidekick, Played By The Ethereal 60′s Model Donyale Luna

The Original Dodge Commercial

The “PETA-Compliant” Version

Bonus Trunk Monkey Clip

Next
Chatroullete.com has an interesting new user…

Mockingbird
The pros and cons of technology and the home office

A Helping Hand
A selfless daughter, a caring mother, and undying love…

The Laundromat
Alone at a downtown laundromat with a maniac… what would you do?

Amazon wants to rekindle their relationship with you. They’re really, really sorry they were charging you so much for just reading a book with them, so they want to offer you another chance at making things work. And this time they’re only charging you $139. That’s right, Amazon’s Kindle, which just last year was priced at $299, is now only $139. In spite of the press about how the Kindle’s sales accelerated last quarter, the fact is that the iPad made quick business of mopping the floor with the Kindle, and the only hope Amazon has is to do exactly what they’re doing, which is price-slashing. If you read that Business Week article, you might take note of the fact that while Amazon expects to sell over 3 million Kindles this year, Apple sold over 3 million iPads in just EIGHTY DAYS. We poked a lot of fun at the iPad this year, and even rounded up aspiring “iPad Killers”, but the fact is, if any of those devices really intend to do any killing, they’ll mostly be killing themselves by marketing themselves that way. In his seemingly unending genius, Steve Jobs made us think Apple was launching a new device, when what they really were doing was launching a platform and shifting a paradigm. Although I’m still anxiously awaiting a more full-featured iPad-like device from whoever builds a good one first, I’d buy an iPad hands-down over a Kindle for media consumption. But I don’t want to use an iPad or a Kindle, I want to be on them. As a media creator, this is possibly the most exciting new publishing channel since the web itself gained a wide reach, and I’m more excited than you could imagine about the possibilities; it’s the first time in a while that a platform with such broad potential reach is accessible to “the little guy”. As this Ad Age article about Virgin’s new iPad-only magazine “Maverick” points out, major publishers have their hands tied because they can’t charge less for an app than they do for the print version of their established magazines, so they have less incentive to get involved, because they’d potentially be damaging their own struggling profit model. Expect to see an explosion of new development much like iPhone apps, but with much richer content and easier distribution of content if you’re a media creator. And look for us there soon.

This piece was NOT brought to you thanks to this five second Honda ad: