NYTimes has the most misleading headline of this political season: “Cast of 300 Advises Obama on Foreign Policy.”

“They asserted that readers would understand that they were laughing with the dwarf actors and not at them.”

I had to stop studying when a screaming fight broke out outside my apartment, so instead, as I threatened earlier, I made a goofy bumper sticker:

I think this one ultimately needs more work (my creative process is long, boring and seldom does much to improve my original work). Maybe it needs a spaceship or two…

Sources for Creative Commons pictures: Wil Wheaton and Joss Whedon.

Kissing With Ross is troubling as all hell.

Dasani, Coke’s water brand, has a line of drinks called Dasani Plus which includes Cleanse + Restore, Defend + Protect and Refresh + Revive. They’ve got some fruit in them. Anyway, the weird part is that they include both the word “plus” and the symbol “+” in their names, making their full titles Dasani Plus Cleanse + Restore, Dasani Plus Defend + Protect and Dasani Plus Refresh + Revive. It seems like an odd titling inconsistency.

This reminds me of my confusion about (and a little bit of anger towards) the naming of the 101 Dalmatians Sequels. First we had One Hundred and One Dalmatians, then a re-make titled 101 Dalmatians (we’d forgotten how to spell numbers, I guess), then a sequel titled 102 Dalmatians, and another sequel titled 101 Dalmatians II. They couldn’t come to an agreement on how to number sequels, so they just did, you know, whatever?

In fairness to Disney, 102 Dalmatians was a sequel to the remake, while 101 Dalmatians II was a sequel to the original, and they probably felt some obligation to maintain independent numbering systems, but I only blame them further for oddly deciding to do sequels to both a remake and an original in reverse order. They brought this bizarre inconsistency on themselves.

I saw a bunch of these posters in Hollywood and was drawn in because they decried the shooting of what appears to be a ten year old by the LAPD. “Yegads,” I thought, “how did the LAPD manage to shoot a ten year old?”

As I got closer I noticed that the man was 21 when he was shot, not ten. The poster’s maker used an 11 year old photo. Now, look, I have a lot of sympathy for the friends and family of anyone shot and killed by anyone, but it’s awfully misleading to use the picture of a child to draw people in to your rally.

The story itself, according to the LATimes, is that Chaudhry was sleeping in the bushes outside an apartment building when two police officers approached him and asked him for ID. There was some interaction and then he stabbed one of the officers in the hand. The officer then shot Chaudhry three times in the stomach.

The family seems to question (1, 2) the official story, but doesn’t really provide an alternative one. They mostly seem mad that the police took a full month to notify them of the shooting (seems like a fairly reasonable complaint considering that he had ID on him).

I just thought the use of the picture in the poster was interesting.

UPDATE: Thanks to a commenter, here’s a more recent picture of him from Facebook:

It’s been a long time since I posted anything about Amy Pressman, but I just noticed a webpage confirming that Suzanne “Suziey” Block will be playing the title character in the independent film Finding Amy Pressman. Read more about it at the bottom of the original Amy Pressman post.

I saw a trailer for Blindness the other day and was startled by the fact that someone appears to have made a less compelling version of Children of Men. Instead of being about a world where people can no longer have children, it’s about a world where people can no longer see… and they both star Julianne Moore.

Seems kind of lazy; Children of Men only came out two years ago, did they think we’d forget?

When I watch episodes of Lost on ABC.com, I don’t see any ads in between segments of the show. Does nobody see ads, or is my ad blocking software removing them? If so, that’s fantastic!

Yuck.

The best trailer ever… if only I knew ANY Japanese. Via Yes But No But Yes.

The poster for Towelhead isn’t nearly as good as the poster for Baghead.

Baghead has my favorite movie poster of the year:

Reminds me of this picture that Nacho used to have on his Friendster page, which would probably have made a better movie.

If this ad was 30 seconds long, rather than one minute, it would be fantastic:

I assume the problem is that, during a competitive election, it would take too much time and too much money to make really creative ads, but I wish political campaigns did more innovative work. Not every ad has to be stock footage and people talking straight to the camera.

Here’s a remarkable uninteresting video on the making of this commercial.

CNN has added a ridiculous new feature which allows you buy t-shirts printed with current headlines. Exciting, right? Well, what’s even better is that the system is based on easy alterable URLs, so instead of a shirt that says ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ Singer Pushes Education (a shirt that I’m sure you all wanted to buy), a quick change to the URL produces this:

Want to make your own? Just insert your own text into the following line of code, using %20 as a space:

http://www.cnn.com/tshirt/?headline=INSERT%20TEXT%20HERE &date=1208818653000&hash=4064bc5a5b643b3a01c4dfc651c1f538 &return_uri=http://www.cnn.com/video/%23/video/world/2008/04/21/verjee.shakira.int.cnn

So now you too can have official CNN brand t-shirts that say Watch FoxNews or We’re Know Where Osama Bin Laden Is And We’re Not Telling or Larry King is Boring even the the blunt Fuck Lou Dobbs. Ok, one more, CNN Reads RumorsDaily.

Ok, now go hack up your own. What’s your favorite?

Can “Very Sexy” ever really be listed as a “Product Feature”? (Amazon, but surprisingly close to NSFW)

Erin Esurance is my favorite television commercial character. I can explain neither why I have a favorite television commercial character, nor why it should be Erin Esurance.  Hypnosis may be involved.

Here are some interesting points of note about Erin Esurance:

1. She has a blog (though it doesn’t have an RSS feed so tracking it is difficult).
2. She is voiced by Mo Mellady which just has to be a stage name, right? It really should be the stage name of a brassy R&B singer (or a hard core rapper), but I guess that would be too much to ask for.
3. Doing a Google Image Search for Erin Esurance is… troubling (NSFW) .  Rule 34 of course applies.
4. They’re animated by GhostBot, who are kind enough to occasionally post step-by-step explanations of how such things get done.
5. She’s all over YouTube.

I can’t explain why I put this post together.  I promise, I’m as troubled by it as you are.