The High-Five Guys hit Hollywood and published a video featuring Robert Downey Jr., Tim Meadows, Mary Steenburgen, Ryan Seacrest, Milo Ventimiglia, Will Ferrell, and others.
Great job, guys. You really deserve a . . . pat on the back, or some other form of congratulations.
Google is giving away $10 Million through Project 10100 (pronounced as "Project 10 to the 100th"). The money will go to fund between one and five ideas that will help humanity in a great way.
The guidelines are extremely loose for this project: They would prefer submissions in one of the following eight categories: Community, Opportunity, Energy, Environment, Health, Education, Shelter, and "Everything Else" . . . So even if your idea doesn't fit into the seven extremely vague categories, they are still willing to accept it.
Sure, those very basic guidelines are great and leave it open to your own creativity, but what sort of idea are they really looking for? The example Google offers to us is the Hippo Water Roller, which essentially looks like one of those heavy rollers used to even out landscaping, but filled with healthy drinking water. This allows people who have to transport their water supply to easily roll 24 gallons of water at a time, compared with a 5 gallon bucket of water on top of the head.
You can upload an ancillary video to YouTube to help you express or display your idea, but the meat of the presentation must be filled out via the web form. Google has put out a video presentation for their project:
How many people could your idea help?
All you need to do is submit your idea via the website before October 20, 2008. The submissions are reviewed and on January 27, 2008, 100 ideas will be voted on by the general public/Webosphere. The top 20 submissions will then pass to an advisory board, who will choose between one and five ideas, which will split the $10 Million prize equally.
For those looking to get rich from their ideas, you might want to look elsewhere. As the site's FAQ says:
Q: What do I get if my idea is chosen?
A: You get good karma and the satisfaction of knowing that your idea might truly help a lot of people.
The $10 Million is not going to the people who come up with these ideas. The money is going toward the development of these ideas to help make them a reality.
If coming up with a great idea to help the world just isn't your "thing", you can always try to win the $30 Million Lunar X Prize that Google has also posted. For that prize, you'll have to do a lot more than come up with ideas, though. $30 Million goes to the first team to send a robot to the moon, have that robot travel 500 meters along the moon's surface, and receive back video, image, and data transmissions here on Earth. You might want to hurry on that offer, though: 13 of the teams have been working on this since September 13, 2007, so you've got some catch-up to do!
On May 17, 1972, Don Gorske ate a Big Mac.
"No big deal," you might say, but Gorske never stopped. In that first month in 1972, he ate 265 Big Macs.
Due to his obsessive-compulsive disorder, Gorske continued eating Big Macs every day. In fact, Gorske has had less than 10 Big Mac-less days in those 36+ years since. According to the AP, Gorske recently hit the 23,000 Big Mac milestone. Currently, he generally eats two Big Macs a day.
What, you don't believe Gorske? Lucky for you, he has also saved all of his Big Mac receipts for all those Big Macs!
Gorske wrote a book about his experiences titled 22,477 Big Macs
Watch this video to get an idea of what the man is like . . . and no, he's not obese!
Here's to you, Mr. Obsessive Compulsive Big Mac Eater.
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!
Billy Reid of Very Tasteful puts out consistently catchy songs on his website. One of his latest tracks, and True Story is no exception.
The video for this song is one of those "photograph" videos. It's missing the "photograph-turned-to-video" element, but still worth watching.
He also released a video of Swim Now, a song based on the Christopher Guest's SNL sketch "Men's Synchronized Swimmers" featuring Martin Short and Harry Shearer.
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.