“Knockout game” maybe real, maybe racist news meme

By Dan Brooks in Hoaxes 8 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GT0SbPxsK5s

The video above shows a 16-year old woman in London being knocked out by an unknown assailant, ostensibly as part of a new game among teenagers called “knockout.” The way knockout works is you arbitrarily choose a person and try to knock him or her out with one punch. Or the way knockout works is you gather together a bunch of news stories about street violence involving young black men, and you present it as a disturbing trend along the lines of wilding or flash mob robberies. It’s hard to tell.

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The hands-free Whopper is not real, you guys

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 2 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd2YLgZqf3A

Brad alerted me last weekend to the existence of the hands-free Whoppper, ostensibly a product released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Burger King in Puerto Rico. Sadly, the HFW is not real. When you know that it is not real, the commercial above looks like exactly what it is: a gentle exercise in absurdity that also provides occasion to say that word “Whopper” 78 times. It seems impossible to believe that such a product could exist. Yet the hands-free Whopper was the first thing I thought of when I woke up this morning, and I was all set to write some funny (read: lazy) screed about it. Apparently, I was not alone. At all.

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Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s career

By Dan Brooks in Meanwhile 5 Comments
Michele Bachmann wants you to pull another quarter out of her ear, but this time she's watching.

Michele Bachmann wants you to pull another quarter out of her ear, but this time she’s watching.

Could this be the end of Michele Bachmann head science? It’s possible the wormhole is collapsing, as the four-term Representative from Minnesota announced that she will not seek reelection in 2014. Her decision is definitely not related to the 1.1% victory she won last year over Jim Graves, who recently announced that he would run for her seat again. Nor is it connected to the ongoing ethics probe into her 2012 presidential campaign. You can watch Bachmann explain how unimportant both of those things are in this eight-minute video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEjiLEc5z-M

I will miss her cadence most of all—like a children’s record played at the wrong speed.

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Tea Party video warns of dystopian present

By Dan Brooks in Tea Party 2 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xReYMOL8nZY

The best part of this video for the Tea Party Patriots—if you’re going to make me choose—is the way it goes from dystopian fantasy to informative commercial in the last three seconds. The second best part is everything else. From the evocatively-named Development Party, with its eerily familiar emphasis on “progress,” to the vaguely Palin-esque woman gazing contentedly at the shores of liberty before she is kidnapped, this trailer captures everything the Tea Party is about. Specifically: a fantasy of persecution and revolt.

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Seth MacFarlane is sexist because he sucks, not the other way around

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 8 Comments
"I'm great."

“Poop.”

I don’t know if you heard about this, but Seth MacFarlane upset some people at the Oscars. From the opening musical number—titled “We Saw Your Boobs,” in which he pointed out actresses in the audience who had appeared topless in films—to a gag about a nine year-old someday being too old to date George Clooney, to a series of gay panic jokes, an inordinate percentage of his comedy seemed to be about women or men who do not want to have sex with them. He also incisively observed that Jews run Hollywood. [Caution: link comes with irritating sound.] That last quote-unquote joke encapsulates why I dislike MacFarlane’s work, and also why calling him offensive misses what’s wrong with him.

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