Why in the world would any respectable company want to associate their product with a sociopathic sack of shit like Glenn Beck? And what ad buyer at which advertising agency would be dumb enough in 2010 to tell their client they should be purchasing advertising on the Glenn Beck show?!?! Whoever sold TurboTax on the idea should be drummed out of the advertising business for good. What fucking idiocy.

Nice work over at the StopBeck blog. Note how fast it was for TurboTax to pull out:

On March 9th, TurboTax advertisements began running on Glenn Beck’s show on the Fox News Channel.  Participants in the StopBeck effort promptly sprang to action.  Less than 24 hours later, TurboTax announced that they would be pulling their advertisements from Glenn Beck’s show.

This brings the total number of advertisers to drop Glenn Beck to 120.  On a related note, the broadcast of Glenn Beck’s show in the U.K. has been running without any advertisers for over a month now.

TurboTax’s statement:

Thanks everyone for your feedback, & for reminding us of what we value. We’ve pulled advertising from the Glenn Beck show.

 
I refer you to the comments thread of this week’s Dangerous Minds interview with Charles Johnson, of Little Green Footballs. This afternoon Charles linked to the interview from his popular blog and within a matter of minutes people were posting about the interview both there and here. Some pro, some con (I get compared to Sean Hannity for instance!), but some just nasty and fairly pointless, such as one item (since deleted by us and not at the request of Charles, either) which managed to slip in both a homophobic epithet and a not-so-veiled death threat!

Charming.

As Charles replied “Welcome to my world! These are exactly the people I was talking about in the interview.” I sent him the IP address and in a matter of minutes he tracked the guy down and found several instances of his email address posted online elsewhere.

Views were initially slow on this episode, but are trending upwards quickly. I’ll leave this up for another day before posting part 2.

Jon Reiss has been a pioneer of DIY film-making since the punk era and he shares what he’s learned in his new book, Think Outside the Box Office: The Ultimate Guide to Film Distribution and Marketing for the Digital Era.

 
As if the self-serving clod-isms of Limbaugh and Robertson weren’t offensive enough, now Ann Coulter‘s waxing wise on the Haitian tragedy:

Ann Coulter is jealous of the attention Rush Limbaugh has been getting since making his comment about the Obama administration wanting to exploit the Haitian tragedy to “burnish” his credentials with the black community.  So she’s making a conscious effort to out-controversy the controversial radio host, and on Fox News on Sunday, she didn’t make much effort to keep that a secret.

“Stop asking about Rush’s statement. I made some controversial statements this week too,” Coulter said on Geraldo at Large.  Then she went on to prove it. Discussing the bi-partisan humanitarian effort by former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Coulter said Clinton is a “national embarrassment” and Bush shouldn’t be “forced” to partner with him.

“To force poor ex-President Bush—like he hasn’t suffered enough—to be hanging around with Bill Clinton, who’s leaving his essence on Kleenex in the White House…”

 
Coulter Does Her Best To Out-Limbaugh Rush

As anybody who has ever worked as a graphic designer (or with graphic designers) knows, there are certain fonts that are not so much as forbidden to use but, rather, punishable by immediate death and professional blackballing upon use. They also tend to be the ones that first-time or amateur designers go for first, and so you see them pretty much everywhere. The penultimate font horror is, of course, Comic Sans.*

The font is so ubiquitous and corrosive to all good sense that ByDesign has dedicated a podcast to it:

In just 15 years, the casual typeface Comic Sans has become one of the world’s most ubiquitous fonts, popping up everywhere from street signs to porn sites. Now there’s an international campaign to ban it. We meet the type designer who started it all.

(ByDesign: Comic Sans, Font of Controversy)

(Check out this Anti-Comic Sans Font Hoodie)

* There is only one font which can trump the evil of Comic Sans. It is the indubitably wrong, though mercifully much less used “Sand” font.

Ralph Bakshi apparently loaded some sneaky images of Mighty Mouse snorting coke in the 1980s Saturday morning cartoon. Hey, look, how do you think those poor animators work all night? Oh, I’m sorry, unless they’re chained to a desk in Southeast Asia… and hey, even then. Probably especially then. How else are they going to think like 8-year-olds constantly?

Fans of edgy animation and cartoon vice rejoiced this week, as the infamous 1987-1988 Saturday morning series “Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures” finally hit DVD.  From the warped minds of Ralph Bakshi (“Fritz the Cat”) and John Kricfalusi (“Ren & Stimpy”), the show is often cited as a precursor to the era of wacky, subversive TV animation. So why the hold up on the DVD release? Well, it might have something to do with a controversial episode where the superhero mouse sniffed a very suspicious-looking white powder.

Premiering on CBS in November of 1987, “Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures” stood out in a field crowded with the mediocre likes of “Foofur” and “The Pound Puppies.” (This was a time when “The Smurfs” dominated two hours of prime Saturday morning real estate on NBC.) Bakshi—who began his animation career at Terrytoons, home of the original Mighty Mouse—assembled a team of future animation stars like Bruce Timm (“Batman: The Animated Series”) and “Wall-E” director Andrew Stanton, and granted them the creative freedom to poke fun at classic animation and superheroes (with characters like the Dark Knight stand-in Bat-Bat) in the guise of an innocuous Saturday morning ‘toon. As Kricfaulsi recently told Wired, the era of edgy, “creator-driven” animation that many credit “Ren & Stimpy” with starting actually kicked off two years earlier with “Mighty Mouse.”

But the show often veered into territory too risque for the Tiffany Network, including having characters shower together and hinting in a dream sequence that Mighty’s gal Pearl Pureheart had an illegitimate child with nemesis The Cow. The biggest controversy (and perhaps part of the reason why the show is remembered today) arose from the episode “The Littlest Tramp,” where Mighty Mouse is shown sniffing what appeared to be cocaine.

(ComicsAlliance: New Adventures of Mighty Mouse)

(Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi, The Force Behind Fritz the Cat, Mighty Mouse, Cool World, and The Lord of the Rings)

 
More mixed signals from the wild world of Danish advertising.  First came this highly questionable campaign to combat violence against women.  Now comes the video below.

“Karen” is an attractive young mother who’s looking for the father of her child, the product of a one-night stand.  She’s not obsessed, a bimbo, or looking to assign blame.  She simply wants to alert the baby daddy—whomever he may be—that their child “exists.”  But as Sociological Images points out:

The video was actually produced as part of a campaign by Visit Denmark, a Danish tourism agency.  The idea is, apparently, to market Denmark to male tourists with the implication that it?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s easy to have anonymous, unprotected sex with attractive local women who just want to introduce you to Danish customs. 

I don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t know that the possibility of unplanned pregnancy would be the best tourism draw, but she does assure us that she?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s not a slut and she?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s not wanting anything from the father, so perhaps that will reassure potential tourists that not only can they have unprotected sex with local women, there are no real consequences to doing so.  So the perception in many parts of the world of Scandinavian women as sexually liberated and promiscuous is used by a state-funded agency to promote tourism by turning female sexuality into another local attraction?¢‚Ǩ¬¶with the added benefit of being free, unlike in nations known for sex tourism.

 
Taking an ever-so-tasteful cue from the Nacho Libre playbook, here’s something from a new British campaign designed to encourage train-riding in its citizens.  Let’s see…he’s Mexican, he’s in England, and he’s equipped with no more than a cape and a kooky accent.  Oh, Loco, you so loco!

 
(via Sociological Images)

 
I have a love/hate relationship with CNN’s Rick Sanchez—I mostly like him, but his show can just as easily prove goofy rather than great. He’s CNN’s best showman right now, by far, but he can let off some real howlers from time to time, too (which, as I think about it, is probably why I find his show so watchable). Watch here as he really goes after scandal-chased—and conservative Christian, natch—Republican Senator John Ensign. The fun really starts at 1:32 in.

Senator?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Aid After Affair Raises Flags Over Ethics (New York Times)

Dear God, this makes me feel like I drank too much cough syrup.

(Via Swen’s Weblog)

 
What’s wrong with “bite the wax tadpole” as a slogan for Coca-Cola ?
 
via Coca-Cola Conversations :

When Coca-Cola was first sold in China in 1927, it was obvious to the Coke employees in China that the Coca-Cola trademark must be transliterated into Chinese characters. To find the nearest phonetic equivalent to ?¢‚Ǩ?ìCoca-Cola” required a separate Chinese character for each of the four syllables. Out of the 40,000 or so characters, there were only about 200 that were pronounced with the sounds the Company needed, and many of these had to be avoided because of their meaning.

While doing the research for four suitable characters, the employees found that a number of shopkeepers had also been looking for Chinese equivalents for Coca-Cola, but with strange results. Some had made signs that were absurd, adopting any group of characters that sounded remotely like “Coca-Cola”—without giving a thought to the meaning of the characters used. One of these homemade signs sounded like ?¢‚Ǩ?ìCoca-Cola?¢‚Ǩ¬ù when pronounced, but the meaning of the characters came out something like ?¢‚Ǩ?ìfemale horse fastened with wax?¢‚Ǩ¬ù and another meant ?¢‚Ǩ?ìbite the wax tadpole.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

The character for ?¢‚Ǩ?ìwax,?¢‚Ǩ¬ù pronounced ?¢‚Ǩ?ìLa,?¢‚Ǩ¬ù appeared in both signs because that was the sound the sign makers were looking for. Anyone who knew Chinese would recognize the signs as a crude attempt to make up an arbitrary phonetic combination.

Although the Company was primarily concerned with the phonetic equivalent of Coca-Cola, the employees could not ignore the meaning of the characters, individually and collectively ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú even if the shopkeepers had done so. They chose Mandarin because this dialect was spoken by the great majority of Chinese. The closest Mandarin equivalent to Coca-Cola was ?¢‚Ǩ?ìK’o K’ou K’o L?ɬ™.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù The aspirates (designated by ?¢‚ǨÀú) were necessary to approximate the English sounds. There was no suitable character pronounced ?¢‚Ǩ?ìLa?¢‚Ǩ¬ù in Chinese, so they compromised on L?ɬ™ (joy), which was approximately pronounced ?¢‚Ǩ?ìler.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

This combination for the Chinese trademark meant ?¢‚Ǩ?ìto permit mouth to be able to rejoice?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

 
And on that note why not enjoy a nice, cold soft drink ?

Hazel Hill, the designer of Thee Psychick Bible and one of the masterminds of Show Cave, showed this video to an awe-struck crowd this weekend at her art space. Jaws dropped.

(Via Made of This)

Watch as Bill O’Reilly gets his panties in a twist! This REALLY bugs him. It’s obvious that this got under his skin and really drove him nuts! At approx 2:10 he says something so ridiculous I am surprised he didn’t spontaneously combust from the hypocrisy. Bill, tell us what you really think… And then he pulls out Laura Ingraham to help back him up, and she of course, obliges. It a classic! (Something tells me John Larroquette and Ice-T had a good time with this dialogue!)

From Yahoo News:

Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly lashed out at “Law & Order” franchise creator/executive producer Dick Wolf Thursday night. The bombastic host, upset over how he was recently characterized on the long-running NBC drama, called the “far left” Wolf a “despicable human being” whose show is “out of control.”

Sparking O’Reilly’s ire was an episode of “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” that aired earlier in the week, in which a crazed anti-immigration activist set out to murder the children of illegal immigrants. In one scene, a character named Randall Carver, played by veteran actor John Larroquette, is sitting on a park bench talking to Fin, the detective played by Ice-T. In defending the actions of the man who killed the immigrants?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ children, Larroquette’s character says, “Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly, all of ‘em, they are like a cancer spreading ignorance and hate…They’ve convinced folks that immigrants are the problem, not corporations that fail to pay a living wage or a broken health care system…”

After playing the clip of the “defamatory and outrageous” scene, O’Reilly slammed Dick Wolf as a “coward” and a “liar” before playing a montage of clips demonstrating his past defenses of “poor people who only want a better life.” O’Reilly went on to explain that his “beef” isn’t with illegal immigrants themselves, but rather with the federal government for doing little to control immigration and the “violent aliens who wreak havoc once they get here.” He concluded by chastising Wolf for “distorting and exploiting” the issue of illegal immigration.

When contacted by Yahoo! News, a representative for Dick Wolf declined to comment on O’Reilly’s accusations.

While not a general fan of the reality TV genre, I did catch the first episode of MTV’s new “Jersey Shore” show online recently and have to say it’s some of the best TV ever. Largely because there’s nothing funnier than NJ Guidos. Especially the prime specimens MTV has picked to star in the show: utterly self-obsessed, plastic freaks with names like “The Situation” (in honor of his abs) and “J-WOWW.” Apparently the MTV offices are getting regular death threats from real guidos incensed at the portrayal of their ilk. Amazing. Cracked did a rundown of the show so far here:

MTV?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Jersey Shore, a new reality show about self-described Guidos and Guidettes sharing a house in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, caught my eye. Not just because I spent the first two decades of my life in New Jersey, but because I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve been looking for something just like this show for a long time, because it finally means we can move on: MTV?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Jersey Shore is the Worst Thing to Happen to the East Coast Since 9/11. Unlike MTV?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s sponsors, New Jersey residents and Italian-American organizations I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m not worried that normal, thinking human beings will see the show and think ?¢‚Ǩ?ìThat must be what Jersey is like.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m worried that idiots will see the show and think ?¢‚Ǩ?ìFinally! A place where I can be with others! I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m gonna spend my summers in Jersey now, too!?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

That doesn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t change the fact that after only two weeks on the air, I friggin love this show. MTV found eight of the most ridiculously absurd humans on the East Coast, put them in a house together and built a jacuzzi on top of that house. Whereas the The Real World is usually good for a train wreck or two once it picks up enough steam, from a standing start Jersey Shore impossibly begins mid-train wreck, and promises to only get worse.

By the first night, the young Italian caricatures are all gathering around the kitchen, cooking up homemade Italian food and eating together. It?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s exactly like the Corleone family, except there?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s no morality and everyone is Fredo.

(Cracked: Jersey Shore: Worst Thing to Happen to East Coast Since 9/11)

(Watch Jersey Shore online here!)

A long article I just wrote about the bizarre, hallucinatory, sickening, purgatory, Bardo-like experience of browsing 4chan has just been published on R. U. Sirius’s h+ Magazine blog. Check it out!

In the last decade, we’ve seen the increasing acceleration of information (a la Terence McKenna and Moore’s law) heralded as the key to new business development, though it has, in fact, so ruined our attention spans that it is almost impossible for modern man to get any kind of productive work done. We’re too lost in the datastream, too focused on taking in new information to complete a task that takes more than a few minutes, at best. I think a direct correlation can be made, for instance, between the rise of social media and the fall of the economy. The kaleidoscope of the Internet is more endless, more distracting and more mutating than even the most potent psychedelic drugs could have ever prepared us for. And 4chan is the ultimate, final trip.

If the mainstream Internet-using world has driven itself to distraction and insanity with social networking, the denizens of the Chans have upped the ante past all conceivable boundaries, like switching from a light alcohol problem to crushing and injecting Oxycontin. This is the place where all senses are deadened, where the mind cannot function because it is trapped in its own overstimulation. This, I am sure, is where media theorists from Marshall McLuhan to Neil Postman to Douglas Rushkoff assured us that the inherently liberating force of information technology was leading us. And though I am sure they knew that the filth and fury would follow, I’m not sure they ever expected it to look quite like… this.

My own 4chan addiction crept up slowly. Once a casual user of gateway drugs like icanhascheezburger.com, ytmnd.com and Encyclopedia Dramatica, I followed a link to the black hole itself one day and—sucked past its event horizon—have since been unable to escape. Stuck there now, I am clicking back and forth from this article to peruse the halls of 4chan’s /x/ forum, afraid that I might have missed the latest spew from the Internet’s collective maw. It is the car crash that cannot be looked away from. Ever.

(h+: Lost in the Filth Simulacrum)