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• Happy Thanksgiving from the AD Council

  2009 Nov 26

  Man, the first hour of the Macy's parade is so "Gamer guy who has more video games than friends."

• 1-800-555-5555

  2009 Nov 19

  I'll be damned.
  
  Everyone who's ever paid attention to a movie or TV show knows that any telephone number beginning with the 555 exchange is a non-functional number, meant to spare some poor soul with an unfortunately assigned phone number from fielding calls all day for, say, Doc Brown at 555-4385.
  
  Lately on my way to work every morning, I've been seeing billboards for an unnamed company running a "financial recovery hotline" at 1-800-555-5555.
  
  Now, living in Los Angeles, I see lots of fake ads on my commute. In recent memory are the warnings of bus benches for humans only, or ads for for Jules Cobb Real Estate. Heck, the new season of True Blood spawned a whole campaign of fake ads for real products.
  
  So when I saw the 1-800-555-5555, I assumed it was just another viral ad, yet I couldn't find any clues as to what it was supposed to be advertising. So I tried something crazy. I called it.
  
  The result? A real financial recovery hotline.
  
  As it turns out, the 555 exchange is no longer purely fictional, and apparently hasn't been since 1994.
  
  Huh. You learn something new every day. Or, if you're me, every fifteen years.

• A toast to the Quizmaster of 72 Whooping Cough Lane

  2009 Nov 17

  The year the '80s died continues with the tragic loss of TV's Ken Ober.
  
  Ken Ober is best known as the host of MTV's Remote Control, the greatest pop-culture game show ever made.
  
  Now, on days like these, people who remember will suddenly become huge fans. "Oh yeah! I used to love that show! I used to watch it all the time!" they'll say. "It had that guy on it. You know, what's his name. And he did that thing! It was so funnae!"
  
  Well I really did love that show. Really. As a kid, I always said that on my 18th birthday (so as to meet the show's eligibility requirements) I would be there, in Ken Ober's basement, winning myself a Mitsubishi Montero (It's a hot machine. It's the car you want to be in when you want to be seen.). Sadly, the show went off the air in 1990, four years short of my dream coming true.
  
  To this day, I have a period Remote Control T-shirt and a mint-condition edition of the home game, upon which I have never been defeated. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
  
  I loved Remote Control so much that, as a kid, I swear to God, I built a fully functional version of the show's basement set in my own basement.
  
  It had a "Big Zenith" made from a big cardboard box, complete with channel indicators made of different colored construction paper mounted on strings (to simulate turning off the bulbs when the category was finished) and a screen made from an old dishwasher front panel to which I could magnetically attach my own marker drawings of the category art.
  
  It had the three contestant chairs, with trapdoors rigged between the ceiling beams, allowing me to pull a cord and drop a load of snacks on my contestants at the end of the first round. It had the final round's big green TV monster, made of an old shower curtain with "TV screens" made from pages cut out of a rock magazine. I had an ancient organ keyboard propped up on a shelf to create Steve's little musical lair. And, in an insane level of detail understood only by true devotees to the show, I made a giant Bob Eubanks PEZ dispenser with a tiebreaker question hidden safely in his neck.
  
  When I said the set was fully functional, I meant it. I actually wrote enough questions for an entire episode, and convinced my parents and a cousin to play a full game, with me in the role of Ken Ober. If I remember correctly, Mom made it to the final round, but could not identify Def Leppard, Poison, or Ratt.
  
  Needless to say, the show had a profound effect on my adolescent psyche. I credit much of my love for the pop-culture trivia of classic TV and '80s hair metal to Remote Control, and I credit much of Remote Control's uniquely addictive voice and style to Ken Ober.
  
  You helped to make me who I am today, Ken Ober.
  
  You probably owe me an apology.
  
  Ken Ober - 1957-2009

• Tofurky and Gravy Soda!

  2009 Nov 17

  Yay! For once we vegetarians aren't left out of a disgusting Thanksgiving novelty!
  
  Has anyone seen this in stores?
  
  I want to drink some sweet soy-based-meat-substitute-with-gravy flavored carbonated beverage, but I'm ethically opposed to buying anything online where the item price and shipping price are equal. Plus I don't need their dumb lunchbox or potentially non-nauseating desert flavors.

• Bullet Point Review: The Fourth Kind

  2009 Nov 08

  • The Fourth Kind is, if the marketing is to be believed, based on "archival footage" of "the most disturbing evidence of alien abduction ever documented." This actual footage is combined with reenactments, with ghoulish real-world psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler played by hot model/actress Milla Jovovich.
  
  • First off, for the sake of argument, let's assume that the "real" footage in this film really is really real, with no quotes. In that case, the real footage in this film is absolutely chilling. If some of these real clips of real people don't send a shiver up your spine, you are simply not alive. They run the gamut from disturbing to outright terrifying. Because they are real. Really real. You believe they're real, because they have a lot of people screaming, and they get crazy distorted whenever something interesting happens.
  
  • The real footage is gold. The trouble with the movie comes in the reenactments, which are poorly acted and horribly shot. As I've said before, if a film is directed poorly enough that I notice it, then somebody has really gone out of their way to do a shitty job. Oh, I get it, aliens come from the sky! So we should have lots of really high crane shots, 'cause that's how aliens see us parking our cars! And there is no such thing as "too long" when it comes to tight profile shots of a man's talking lips. And, you know what? Go ahead and spin that camera whenever you can. It won't take us out of the movie and make us sick at the same time. It'll be great.
  
  • For example, we hear a horrifying totally real, real-world audiotape of Dr. Tyler's bloodcurdling screams while an unknown entity speaks Sumerian to her in an inhuman voice. After taking us to the edge of our seats, why on earth would you dilute the interview footage of the real Dr. Tyler's reaction to this with a frenetic bullshit montage of scrolling 24 squares full of a pensive Milla Jovovich and a tape deck rewinding? It's like the director is trying his damnedest to destroy all of the totally real, real-world tension of the moment.
  
  • By now, I think you can see that the only thing this movie has going for it is the incredible totally real, real-world archive footage that is its heart and driving force. Because, were this movie to be fictional, it would be completely boring and pointless. As they say, "Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense." We forgive The Fourth Kind for being an illogical mess of loose ends and unmotivated choices because it's totally real, real life, and not an unforgivably poorly written script that no rational person would possibly believe.
  
  • On an unrelated note, outside of a few scattered mentions on freshly made websites that no longer exist, nobody has ever heard of totally real, real-world psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler.