The Smarmy Carny

Less than a week after Pants on the Ground made its debut on national television on the January 13 episode of American Idol, the song has exploded.

That same night, USA Today revealed that Larry Platt was a long time civil rights advocate. The following day, Jimmy Fallon performed the song in the style of Neil Young and Pants on the Ground remixes began popping up on YouTube. That Sunday, Brett Favre started chanting the song in the locker room. You can even get Pants on the Ground t-shirts.

I'm not sure how long this fad will last, but let's hope that Larry Platt can get some good coverage out of the deal. And I'm sure we'll see Larry back again in one of the last episodes of the season.

Thanks to the success of MXC and then Wipeout, we're seeing a rash of Japanese game imports coming to the U.S.

I'm not sure about the rules exactly, but it really does seem straightfoward. The contestant stands at the end of a runway in front of a pit of water. A large wall with a certain shape comes toward them, and the contestant has to contort their body into the shape of the hole so they remain in the playing area instead of being swept into the water. Some holes/shapes require laying down, jumping, and teamwork.

Fox's casting call earlier this summer requested same-sex teams of three players, which seems to have been the format for the original show as well.

Of course, reading about the show tends to be fairly boring, while watching these people play the game is much more enjoyable:

Now go ahead . . . start filling out that application. You know you want to try it yourself!

And the winners are . . .

Yet again, I made my annual Oscars predictions and joined many contests.

Three years ago I correctly guessed 13 categories and two years ago I guessed 14 correctly. (Last year I got lazy.) This year, I didn't take very much time making my picks, and obviously the results show. This is my worst showing yet, as I only correctly guessed 11 of the 24 categories — my first year under 50%. That said, I'm happy with getting seven of the eight major categories correct. I simply did horrendously in the lesser categories this year.

Without further ado, here is how I fared on each of the 24 Oscars categories:

1. Best Picture
   Winner: No Country for Old Men
2. Best Actor
   Winner: Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
3. Best Actress
   Winner: Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose
   My Pick: Julie Christie, Away from Her
4. Best Supporting Actor
   Winner: Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
5. Best Supporting Actress
   Winner: Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton
6. Best Director
   Winner: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
7. Best Original Screenplay
   Winner: Juno
8. Best Adapted Screenplay
   Winner: No Country for Old Men
9. Animated Feature
   Winner: Ratatouille
10. Art Direction
    Winner: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    My Pick: The Golden Compass
11. Cinematography
    Winner: There Will Be Blood
    My Pick: No Country for Old Men
12. Costume
    Winner: Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    My Pick: Atonement
13. Documentary Feature
    Winner: Taxi to the Dark Side
    My Pick: No End in Sight
14. Documentary Short Subject
    Winner: Freeheld
    My Pick: La Corona (The Crown)
15. Film Editing
    Winner: The Bourne Ultimatum
    My Pick: No Country for Old Men
16. Foreign Language Film
    Winner: The Counterfeiters
    My Pick: Katyn
17. Makeup
    Winner: La Vie en Rose
18. Original Score
    Winner: Atonement
19. Original Song
    Winner: "Falling Slowly," Once
20. Short Film, Animated
    Winner: Peter and the Wolf
    My Pick: Madame Tutli-Putli
21. Short Film, Live Action
    Winner: Le Mozart des Pickpockets (The Mozart of Pickpockets)
    My Pick: Tanghi Argentini
22. Sound Editing
    Winner: The Bourne Ultimatum
    My Pick: Transformers
23. Sound Mixing
    Winner: The Bourne Ultimatum
    My Pick: Transformers
24. Visual Effects
    Winner: The Golden Compass
    My Pick: Transformers

Oh well. Better luck next year.

A car salesman congratulates a man on how much he already knew about the car. The man admits that he used cars.com's consumer reviews and dealer locator to help himself instead of using Plan B.

The car salesman asks what Plan B was, and the man explains that he was going to have a witch doctor shrink the salesman's head. He points out into the waiting room, where a witch doctor is sitting next to the other customers.

At that point, another worker, Jorge, comes into the office with a shrunken head and asks to have the rest of the day off because he has a tiny head. Sure enough, the witch doctor has started early. The customer admits that he should probably get the witch doctor out of the dealership.

Watch the video:

Easter egg: The salesman's name tag reads "Jason Karley." Jason Karley is a copywriter for DDB, Chicago, the agency responsible for this commercial.

Set to Habanera from Bizet's opera Carmen, a man arrives in his apartment, opens a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos, and puts a small corner of a Dorito on a mouse trap.

After placing the mousetrap in front of a small mouse hole, he pulls up a chair and waits.

As soon as the man puts his hand in the Doritos bag and pulls out some chips, a huge man-sized mouse breaks through the wall and tackles the man, throwing him backward in his chair. The mouse is clearly a man in a bad mouse suit, but it seems to be intended that we suspend our disbelief and think of him as an actual huge mouse.

After the Doritos logo flashes, we see the mouse straddling the man, punching him in the head.

Watch the video:

This commercial was created by Billy Federighi in Doritos' Snack Strong Productions contest.

A homely woman with a unibrow, large mole, big teeth, hair clips, and frumpy fashion sense is fawned over by countless men as Frankie Valli's Can't Take My Eyes off of You plays in the background.

A tall, handsome man in an elevator gives her a look. Another admirer walks through a glass door as he ogles her walking out of her building. A coffee shop employee is engulfed in smoke as he is entranced by the woman and forgets what he's doing. Every man on the bus sits as closely to her as they can while a bicyclist pedals alongside the bus until he crashes into the back of a taxi.

Finally, we see the woman freshening up: After she has made herself ready, she opens a can of Planters cashews and rubs a cashew on her neck, wrist, and chest instead of using a perfume.

Planters — the all-natural aphrodisiac.

Watch the video:

An unsuspecting man is pushed into a car containing sleeping badgers that, "if awakened, they'd gnaw his face off. "

The people who pushed him into the car begin to fire cannons off outside the car, but nothing can be heard inside the car: Lucky for him, that car is the Toyota Corolla, which keeps the interior silent from outside noise.

As the man breathes a sigh of relief, his cell phone goes off, awakening the badger. The badger growls in the man's face, and we then move to the car's exterior.

Watch the video:

Toyota's slogan? "Live the dream for less coin."