Following the
March 2011 earthquake in Japan, commercials largely disappeared from television. To fill space between the news reports and lists of missing people, the
Ad Council of Japan put together a number of PSAs. Since there were only five or ten of them, the PSAs
played thousands of times over the course of a few months, searing themselves into the memory of the Japanese public. Most were typical messages about
common courtesy,
perseverance,
listening to your kids,
conservation, and
international support. But
one PSA in particular quickly took on a life of its own, instantly being mashed up with a classic Japanese TV trope:
Robot Transformation Sequences!
[more inside]
posted by azuresunday
on Mar 11, 2012 -
37 comments
Click judiciously; the site is called
instant epilePSY and not without reason. If you need annoying and occasionally baffling animated GIFs culled from Hungarian music videos, however, you'll be well served. (
Some of the
loopings are fairly clever.)
posted by Wolfdog
on Jul 12, 2010 -
18 comments
As those of you on the wrong email lists can probably guess, Snopes is overflowing with
gang initiation rumors. What you may not know is that the New Jersey police
recently arrested someone spreading those stories for "causing false public alarm."
[more inside]
posted by tkolar
on Dec 7, 2008 -
23 comments
Child prodigies. (Just in case you were starting to feeling content with your middle-aged achievements.) [Warning: YouTube-heavy posting] [Warning: Chopin-heavy posting]
posted by humblepigeon
on Apr 24, 2007 -
36 comments
The New York Press lists the
50 most loathsome New Yorkers. Time to get your hate on! Here's a sample to get you started:
#18 Moby Musician
IT WAS BAD enough when Moby started singing;
now he's singing and talking at the same time. When not crooning school-girl poetry (see "We Are All Made of Stars") or desecrating classic punk songs between hissy fits on stage, the techno prophet cum vegan ethicist of the early 90s is schooling credulous fans on a wide range of contemporary issues. Between lessons in Nicaraguan history and tales of Rummy's early-80s holidays in Baghdad, Moby pontificates in prose that would make even DJ Spooky cringe ("We're so inherently locked into our temporal and corporeal selves that we're irrevocably locked into subjectivity") and Michael Stipe wince ("cos at the end of the day peace is better than war, right?"). We're thankful for "Go" and the car commercial songs on Play, but mister, please put your space helmet back on, get in your space ship and don't stop till you hit Pluto.
posted by vito90
on Apr 7, 2004 -
42 comments
Am I Annoying or Not? I realize that the whole 'Am I X or Not' is
so 1999, but this is actually pretty entertaining. The amount of research is
astounding if you consider the massive
index that they maintain. As a side note, Jack Osbourne is sitting at
100% annoying.
posted by catatonic
on Apr 27, 2002 -
19 comments
