Electric Luxury Cars From Rolls-Royce, Mercedes-Benz, & BMW

[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 1, 2011 by admin in Clean & Green

As luxury automakers explore the market, will electric cars finally shed their stigma as the preferred mode of transit for tree-hugging liberals?


The only car quieter than a Rolls-Royce is
an electric Rolls-Royce. Batteries included.

If you’re the sort of driver that has been repelled by the idea of an electric car because of the stereotypical image of the tree-hugging socialist making a stop at Trader Joe’s to pick up some tofu snacks as they drive their Prius to an Obama rally, you may have to finally give up your Luddite stance and accept the future of electric. You’ve almost certainly seen the Tesla and the Fisker , two of the more remarkable electric vehicles in production. But even the more adventurous buyer with the funds available to purchase a car like that would probably balk simply due to the fact that both companies are highly speculative startup ventures. Well, things are starting to take a serious turn in the EV market, a turn that may make it hard to argue against an electric as soon as 2013. High-end carmakers were already making some bold moves in the green car market; Porsche’s hybrid Panamera is just one of several examples, and Porsche also quietly rolled out the Boxster E prototype recently. But now three major luxury carmakers – BMW, Rolls-Royce, and Mercedes-Benz – are all making serious commitments to EV’s. And not just as quirky, awkward looking concept cars. Even the combustion engine addicts over at Car & Driver gave the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG E-Cell high marks – not as an electric, but as an “actual car”. BMW is also rolling out their ActiveE, and probably the most mind-blowing development is the Rolls-Royce 102EX. When a company that embodies a commitment to perfection in engineering and owner experience in the way that Rolls does is making a commitment, you know the electric car is truly arriving. Visit ElectricLuxury.com to learn more. Or watch the introductory video below. The abundance of umlauts in CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös’ name is exceeded only by the clarity and confidence with which he expresses his vision for making the Rolls-Royce 102EX a year-long global R&D adventure. Does someone have a bib? I keep drooling as I edit the photos of this thing. Read the rest of this entry »

7 Alternatives To Watching Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Video

[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 28, 2011 by admin in Music

Not so Goo Goo over the latest Ga Ga? We have some alternative moves for you.


Check out those implants. No, not THOSE
implants, the ones in her cheeks and shoulders.

I was really looking forward to Lady Gaga’s new video for the song Born This Way. And then, well, I saw it. I guess it’s pretty hard to follow up videos featuring your crucifix-clad vagina and jail time with Beyoncé. After a while, even sparkly unicorns in triangles, skullface dancers, uterine galaxies, and zippered nipples don’t have the impact they once did. On the bright side, we have a new word. “Zipple”. Say it. It’s fun. Zipple! But does this sound like criticism? It’s really not. It’s just mild disappointment. When an artist has millions of dollars to spend, and nearly unlimited resources at their disposal, you just expect more. Sort of like the movie Avatar. Come to think of it, Lady Gaga does look kind of like a Na’vi with those cheekbone implants in the video. Anyway, we said we had some alternatives to the new Lady Gaga video, and we do. If you’re looking for videos with cool music and skullfaced dancers, look no further than this dubstep-driven dance clip (also below) by French dance crew La Preuve par 4. Even Lady GaGa’s font of inspiration Madonna was willing to acknowledge her debt to dance moves from the club and the street, so why not go closer to the source? The music is more interesting, the moves are more compelling, and the whole thing costs us all a lot less. More vids below. Read the rest of this entry »

Euro Comedy Group Grotesco’s “The Trial”

[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 27, 2011 by admin in Popular Media

Finally, the Swedes get some comedic revenge for all those Swedish Chef clips on The Muppets, with an hilarious look at American courtroom drama, viewed through European eyes.


A typical American. At least through the
eyes of Swedish comedy group “Grotesco”.

I’ve always found it interesting that Swedish Chef – one of the liberal progressive Muppets who were otherwise best known for touting the virtues of political correctness and equalism – mocked the real Swedish tongue using a pidgin Swedish vocabulary consisting mostly of variations of the words “dirga” and “doinga”. Words which may have the same root as the Pidgin Arabic phrase “dirka dirka” from the movie Team America: World Police. A phrase which Urban Dictionary explains is “…one of the 3 words in the islamic [sic] language …’Dirka Dirka’, ‘Muhammad’, and ‘Jihad’…” As ignorant, monolingual Americans, we have a long history of comedy based on what we don’t know about other cultures, so I derived a perverse joy yesterday by seeing the tables turned in The Trial (also below), an episode of the Swedish comedy show “Grotesco”. It’s a brilliantly hilarious look at American courtroom drama viewed through Swedish eyes and ears. Although it’s subtitled in Swedish, the mock English dialog consists of dramatic courtroom moments in which an attorney might ask “why aren’t we at home, with our mammals, watching raceball?” But I’ve said too much. The episode “The Trial” is featured below, along with a music video by “DJ Trexx”, a regular on the show, which according to the Google translation of the site Grotesco.se, was aired in 2007. I hope we see more of Grotesco; even subtitled, a lot of their routines are hilarious, presented in a style that falls somewhere between Mad TV, Living Colour, and Kids in the Hall. They have a YouTube channel, but many more clips can be found simply by browsing YouTube. Read the rest of this entry »

Google Cleans Up Content Farm Search Result Spam – Finally

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on February 26, 2011 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

After some high-profile tech industry grumbling, Google has finally tackled the problem of content farms like Demand Media. Now if they would just remove Huffington Post from their index, we’d be all set.


I would have been even MORE pleased if the top
result for “content farm” were now “Demand Media”.

Let’s all take our hats off to Google for a moment for finally tackling the problem of their own crappy search results. If you have to do a lot of web research, you’ve probably noticed over the past few years that Google’s search results were getting spammier and spammier, thanks mostly to content farms like Demand Media, something we already belly-ached about a while back. Okay, now lets put our hats back on. Why did it take them so long to fix this? This was definitely a problem as long ago as 2006. It’s inconceivable that the Search Quality Team at Google hadn’t noticed it, and their recent fix seemed to come hot on the tails of the article by Michael Arrington on high-profile tech blog TechCrunch called Search Still Sucks , in which he said the thing many of us have thought for quite some time. So why did it take so long? The reasonable inference is that since Google’s largest revenue stream is ads, and content farms generated millions of page views with Google ad content, it would be a bit awkward to proactively blacklist them all. But that’s what Google has finally done; if you review lists like the ones at Search Engine Land and SYSTRIX, it’s immediately evident that the big losers in Google’s fix are mostly “Demand Media” sites. Which I find vaguely gratifying. If you’re not familiar with Demand Media, check out the PBS MediaShift series about companies like theirs. One of the most telling things about Demand Media is simply who the CEO is. While one has to acknowledge the drive and accomplishments of Richard Rosenblatt, about the only positive thing I can say about a guy who developed a company like MySpace is that he then managed to screw Rupert Murdoch by selling it to him for over half a billion dollars. In creating Demand Media, he’s shown that while he has incredibly savvy, drive, and management skills, he’s either entirely driven by the bottom line at the expense of any benefit to the human race, or utterly delusional. In this Business Insider piece about how Google’s algorithm change “hasn’t hurt their business at all” his EVP of Media and Ops says “We have built our business by focusing on creating the useful and original content that meets the specific needs of today’s consumer“. Yes Demand Media. I’m sure today’s consumer has been clamoring for more crap content to dig through to find any actual useful information. And while my greatest complaint about Google remains more about what I’d call their “imperial overreach” – in that their near-total domination as a portal to the web is the worst thing that’s happened to search in its relatively short history – we still have to give them an incredible amount of respect. The fact that you can dip into a global library of information and extract relevant information in seconds with relative ease borders on mystical. The unfortunate thing is that if we’re using a library as the analogy here, I think we now have the problem that everyone in the world is going to try to shove their book onto the shelves, and there are no librarians on duty, just an algorithm and an advertising department. A friend asked me the other day what I thought the solution to Google’s search problem was, and I said something I’ve said for several years when answering the question: “human edited content“. While the Open Directory Project (which was based on this concept) bit the dust ages ago from internal “link whoring” corruption, it doesn’t mean that the idea won’t work. Wikipedia is a great example of fairly reliable human-edited content. Why couldn’t this work with search? In any case, although I’m suspicious – as others are – of the continued presence of crap eHow.com content in results, I’m already relieved to see fewer “HubPages.com” and “Examiner” results. I just wonder if they’re going to fix that “bookmark site that links to a blog post that links to an article on HuffPo that steals an article wholesale from another site” problem.

Get Your MojoWijo On With Ubisoft’s “We Dare”

[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 25, 2011 by admin in Technology

Sex toys for the Wii? Not really my speed, but I imagine there’s a wiimote possibility that I have a FRIEND who’s a customer. C’mon and ‘fess up with a product review.

Look, I’m no prude. I mean, not only did I go to a progressive grade school where we received exceptionally explicit sex ed in first grade, but I was also a teen in the era when your folks were considered puritanical freaks if there wasn’t a copy of The Joy of Sex casually but strategically placed on the coffee table along with a copy of I’m Ok, You’re Ok and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. But in spite of this – or perhaps, to be more honest – because of this, I’ve never really understood the desire to introduce a lot of gadgets into the lovemaking experience. Especially the kinds we’ve featured as scary holiday workplace gifts. I mean, if one puts their existing digits, limbs, and lips to good use, the possibilities are quite extensive. And sure, the occasional oil, restraint device, or provocative apparel is a no-brainer. But will someone please explain to me who the people are in the target market for the Wii controllers and games Mojowijo and We Dare? I’m sure this customer is silently lurking amongst my friends;  a couple of years ago I was amused to discover that an otherwise rather conservative female friend was staging regular sex toy parties and was into bondage. No biggie. Just kind of funny, to be frank. If you haven’t heard of them, Mojowijo is a controller that sends the gesture from your device to a remote recipient. Or wiimote wiicipient, as the case may be. And We Dare (it took me a while to get the “Wii Dare” pun) is a complete multiplayer game. A game that the developer Ubisoft apparently deemed too sexy for the prudish American market. Something that they’re so adamant about that as of this writing, they block the ability to even view the ad on YouTube in the states. We managed to embed it below anyway, thanks to IGN.com. To tell you the truth, at first we thought it was just a viral campaign; there’s no reference to the game on their main site. But here it is on their UK site . And about that “MojoWijo” device: Is it just me, or does it look more like a tool for alien probing or dental work than a sex toy (see below)? If you’re a Wii sex toy enthusiast, feel free to explain yourself in the comments. Wii won’t judge you. Wii just don’t get it. MojoWijo image and We Dare clip below. Read the rest of this entry »

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