shrapnel

The Trailer Mash, featuring such modern classics as Must Love Jaws and 10 Things I Hate About Commandments. Shrapnel readers who like those trailers may also like Grand Theft Coca-Cola and the eBay Song (link to a parody of the Weird Al parody of the Backstreet Boys parody of a song).

Love Land is the latest entry in Shrapnel’s list of weird theme parks around the world.

Some graffiti artists take on the ad companies. Others go to work for them.

Google Earth is so 20th century. Google Mars is the in thing now.

There are many theories, and now documentaries and magazine articles, but we’ll never know for sure. And do we really want to know? Or, as one Metafilter poster puts it, is it just that

“we’ve become a nation of complete strangers, waiting and willing to hear and watch each other’s dying gasps via our media and entertainment outlets.

The question isn’t what the public gains in understanding 9/11 by tracking down the identity of this victim — which is nothing, really — but rather how much humanity we’ve lost since then, in consuming this flavor of death voyeurism that our media happily sells us.”

I’m leaning toward both myself.

Where you can hit someone dressed up as your boss. This is actually a scene from my new book. Seriously.

A small piece of shrapnel, but sharp nonetheless.

The audio of an office worker trapped in one of the towers as it collapsed, the release of which into the wild has been causing some controversy, and the audio from NORAD headquarters as the crisis unfolded.

He started a blog, of course, where he reveals what he really thinks about Alex Trebek:

Finally, Alex. I know, I know, the old folks love him. Nobody knows he died in that fiery truck crash a few years back and was immediately replaced with the Trebektron 4000 (I see your engineers still can’t get the mustache right, by the way.) But that’s beside the point: “Alex” is the franchise. You can’t just bring in Ryan Seacrest without warning, more’s the pity. But I think a few little host tweaks would do a lot of good.

1. On Price Is Right, Bob Barker ends every show with a plug for his personal favorite cause. “Spay or neuter your pet!” or whatever. Something like this would humanize Trebek. I propose a new sign-off, along the lines of, “Can our returning champion do it again on tomorrow’s show? Tune in and find out, everybody. Legalize cannabis. Good night.”

2. You know how Trebek likes to read foreign words in these thick, strained accents, thinking he’s being muy auténtico? He should continue to do this, but instead of delivering them himself, he needs to have a little ventriloquist’s dummy with a sombrero to pipe in with those words. (The sombrero can be switched with a beret for French words.)

3. Whenever Alex says “Correct!” to a contestant, he should do the two-index-finger point, like Isaac in the Love Boat credits.

Read the New Yorker history of the online encyclopedia — or read the even better Atlantic version.

Over at my other blog I recently posted about publishers launching ads for books on YouTube. Seems the YouTube approach is catching on, as even Petro-Canada is getting in on the act. Of course, if you don’t like watching ads, you can always stick to episodes of Chad Vader. But some ads are really, really good….