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I love this thing. I saw it at Crooks and Liars, and they got it from my.break.com. Spread the love, people. Let’s viralofy this bugger.

Bush Worried About New Threat

The interwebs are weeping tonight. Karina Stenquist, host of Mobuzz TV and my absolute favorite American expat who does a vlog from Madrid, has retired. She did her goodbye show on Friday.

For those not familiar with her work, she is a wondrous combination of smart, snarky, geeky, and sexy. And as fond as I am of Joanne Colan and Cali Lewis/Luria Petrucci, neither of them can match Karina’s on-air (do you call it on-air when it’s online?) banter. And she has a pierced tongue. Gotta love that.

Here’s an example of Karina working it on the show. You think Dan Rather ever went this far to report a story? Not a chance.

Dear T-Mobile,
I’ve got a few notes about the new set of commercials you’ve been running for the Sidekick, since you seem to be promoting something akin to flash mobs:

• Flash mobs involve large groups of strangers, not a handful of friends.
• Flash mobs tend not to leave something for some poor minimum wage earning schlub to clean up.
• Flash mobs are kind of passé

Basically, you’re just promoting minor acts of vandalism. But thanks, I guess.

By the way, if you want to watch the video below, turn the volume way down. Whoever recorded this thing must have thought he’d play it at a rave.

I found this at You Aint No Picasso, who found it at Boing Boing, who found it at the site of the Stanford University Law School Center for Internet and Society, who got it from Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University (lovely page, professor), an English professor who runs the school’s Film Studies program. That’s Faden over there.

What is it? Why, it’s a brief explanation of US copyright law, presented by characters from Disney films.

I’ve mentioned First Freedom First a couple of times already, but Blue Gal posted this video today, and it’s really good. Without further comment, this is the message:

Remember when Paul McCartney sold a piece (or maybe all) of his song catalogue to Michael Jackson and Beatles songs started showing up in commercials on the eye of hell? I’m not a fan, but I thought it was kind of sad. Of course now, you’ve got Dennis Hopper shilling for Ameriprise to the hippy sellouts with their hippy sellout music in the background. This is to be expected from that generation. They were born to sell out.

Apparently, I’m now old enough that the music of my youth is starting to show up in commercials. For example, this spot for the video game Major League Baseball 2K7:

What’s that song playing in the background? Why, it’s “Breed” by Nirvana. Courtney Love has taken on Larry Mestel as a “strategic partner,” which basically means she sold a percentage of the rights to the Nirvana catalogue for about $50 million. As she put it,

We’re going to remain very tasteful, and we’re going to [retain] the spirit of Nirvana and take Nirvana places it’s never been before.

Right, Courtney. Do you really think Kurt had a collection of men scratching themselves and spitting in mind when he wrote

I don’t care
I don’t care
I don’t care
I don’t care
I don’t care
Care if it’s old.
I don’t mind
I don’t mind
I don’t mind
I don’t mind
Mind. I don’t have a mind.
Get away
Get away
Get away
Get away
Way, way from your home.
I’m afraid
I’m afraid
I’m afraid
I’m afraid
Afraid, of ghosts!

If you have…
Even if you need…
I don’t mean to stare.
We don’t have to breed.
We can plant a house,
Or We can build a tree
I don’t even care.
“We could have all three,”
She Said…

I don’t pay a lot of attention to baseball, but does it really involve quite that much angst?

Naughty, naughty, Courtney.

Earlier today, I was avoiding work by catching up on my daily dose of a few quadrillion RSS feeds. The eye of hell was on CNN, but I wasn’t paying attention. But then I heard a voice talking about Moses and Joshua, and cheering and applause in the background, and I turned to the screen to see what the hell was going on.

It was Barack Obama speaking in Selma Alabama in memory of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches. I have to say, Obama is one hell of a public speaker.

He was connecting all the dots. The ripples sent out by the civil rights movement led to his father coming to America, so he owes his existence to the movement. He’s a product of the generation that began the movement, but his generation (Joshua to their Moses) still has a lot of work to do and can’t rest on what they’ve inherited. He talked about the responsibility of government, of communities, and of individuals, and wrapped the whole thing in hope. And of course, his generation is my generation.

Atheist that I am, I have to admit that this particular style of oratory impresses me. MLK is my hero, and while I’d like to believe that he could have done what he did without bringing religion into it, I know that’s not true. He preached justice, and that’s just what Obama did today.

Shortly after Obama finished, Clinton started her speech at a church down the street. She tried to do what he did, but it just wasn’t happening. She’s simply not an orator. I could hear her shouting while the audience cheered, but I was losing interest like I do whenever the weather report comes on — I lived in Iowa for about 18 months, and I’m simply not a rural person. Half of the local news is dedicated to “drying times” out there, and I learned to just automatically ignore it. Now, 20 years later, I’m incapable of paying attention to a weather report. And I’m afraid that’s how Clinton’s speech felt to me.

It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if today’s speech is remembered for a long time. This “Joshua Generation” speech could be the start of something. If I can find video of the speech, I’ll update this post to include it.

I really wanted Russ Feingold to run for president. I thought he’d be the perfect person to deal with the mess Bush is going to leave us with. But in Feingold’s absence, I’m thinking Obama just might be the one who can get enough people to care that he might actually be able to accomplish something.

I found this at Crooks and Liars.

Mitt Romney was chatting up a group of people (I don’t know where this happened, but based on the pronunciation of the word “god” I’d say it has to be the Midwest, maybe Chicago) and one man indicated how important it was to him that he vote for “a man who stands for the lord Jesus Christ.” He then went on to say that he’d never vote for Romney because, as a Mormon, Mitt just doesn’t “know the lord.” He’s identified in the title of the video as a “heckler,” but as far as I can tell he was polite in the way he said what he said, whether you think the message was pleasant or not. The crowd booed. They’d have none of this religious persecution.

Romney’s response was so… American. Mitt understands that you don’t have to be a Methodist, a Congregationalist, a Presbyterian or some such thing to be President of the US of A. Why, we’ve got freedom of religion! It brought a tear to my eye.

One of the great things about this great land is we have people of different faiths and different persuasions, and I’m convinced that the nation does need to have people of different faiths, but we need to have a person of faith lead the country.

Translation: You may not like my religion, but at least I’m not some filthy atheist.

I love you too, Mitzi.

Andy Beal points us to this video that suggests that Google may be using all the data it collects for… evil.

Yikes! This means that there may be a clone of qwerty at the Googleplex performing slave labor! And I’ll just bet that the clones there aren’t given access to all the great benefits they give the human googlers: free gourmet food, health care, daycare, massages, company stock, lava lamps… I guess “do no evil” doesn’t apply to artificially generated people.

Tags: Google, Search, Cloning

You may have heard about some guy called “JP” who was trying to raise money to propose to his girlfriend on the broadcast of the Überbowl last week. I wasn’t really following along with it myself, although I’d seen a few mentions of it in the various search marketing sites I read. JP had a blog called “My Super Proposal” and he was getting some publicity assistance from Joe Morin, a well-known search marketer. JP even got interviewed on Good Morning America.

The plan to get the proposal broadcast during the feetsball game fell through, but JP ended up recording the proposal at a local TV station that broadcast it during last night’s episode of Veronica Mars.

It turns out that JP is none other than Rand Fishkin, aka Randfish, a highly respected (and far more famous than your faithful servant, qwerty) search marketer. The video of his proposal to Geraldine, aka Mystery Guest is here, and here’s her response. That’s them in the picture. The guy on the left is Danny Sullivan, Godfather of Search.

The weird coincidence is that I had emailed Rand yesterday because I’d read a post at Think Progress that indicated that this week’s episode of VM was going to be spreading misinformation about the morning after pill. I figured they’d be watching, since Geraldine had written about how much she likes the show, but I had no idea they had a much bigger reason to watch.

So I’m making a rare exception and writing a post here that’s at least somewhat related to my work, just to say congratulations to Rand and Geraldine. Now the big question is what couple name they’re going to be given, since they’re such a famous pair in our little world of search… let me think…

• Randaldine
• Gerafish
• Mystery Fish
• Gerand