[via Neatorama]

Alexis gets her quarterly does of Botox from Dr. Wexler:

Lasik on a purported celebrity, yuck:

[NYT]

[UPDATE: And don't forget Mary Rambin already did a video for Restylane!]

Ice T slams Soulja Boy:

Soulja Boy mocks Ice T:

Ice T hits back:

This isn't about the music any more. Ice T is right; Soulja Boy is the Nickelback of hip-hop. "Crank That" (or at least the remix) is catchy, but his other work is either awful or forgettable. For example, his second hit "Yaah" is a belligerent, childish celebration of being rude.

But the quality of Soulja Boy's music doesn't matter. Ice T has revealed his age and his irrelevance. "Watch the YouTubes," he says, sounding as out of touch as Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens. Now the argument isn't over the Soulja Boy's talent but over his relevance. Ice T says, "you can't hurt my career 'cause I'm caked out." But all that means is that Soulja Boy can't hurt Ice T's career because it's over anyway.

By escalating the fight, Ice T just helped Soulja Boy keep his young career going. He gave Soulja Boy a chance to talk about Ice T's age (listing things that are younger than Ice T — like Wal-Mart — is a nice touch) and announce that "the game has changed, there's new n—-—s out, and nobody wants to hear that old shit no more." Soulja also earned the support of Kanye West, who blogged:

Soulja boy is fresh ass hell and is actually the true meaning of what hip hop is sposed to be. He came from the hood, made his own beats, made up a new saying, new sound and a new dance with one song. He had all of America rapping this summer. If that ain't Hip Hop then what is? A bunch of wannabe keep it real rappers that ain't even relevant, recycling samples trying to act like it's 96 again and all they do is hate on new shit?

[via OhNoTheyDidn't]

*Uh, extreme-violence-and-language-disclaimer-here.

[via LAT]

The Shreddies spots:

The detective!:

For each time you did the following in the last thirty days:

1 point

• Asked for a digg
• Added someone on Facebook the day you met them
• Visited MySpace
• IMed someone asking who they are
• Messaged someone on a site like Facebook when you could have called or e-mailed
• Used a "Sent from my Blackberry/iPhone/etc." e-mail signature
• Discussed an Apple rumor
• Made a joke about fonts

2 points

• Commented on a blog just to say you liked or hated something
• Posted a Craigslist missed connection
• Used MySpace
• Submitted your own blog post to Digg
• Asked someone to blog you
• Added to a Wikipedia talk page
• Bought a Threadless T-shirt

3 points

• Told a personal story in a Yelp review
• Used Tumblr
• Gave a bad review on Amazon to a book written over thirty years ago
• Added a celebrity on Facebook
• Made a YouTube response video
• Twittered about your blog
• Got fake-married on Facebook
• Friended someone on MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, or Yahoo 360
• Asked anyone to tag anything

4 points

• Invited someone to add their photo to a Flickr group
• Invited someone to a Facebook app
• Vlogged
• Made a Facebook event that wasn't really an event
• Blogged about dealing with someone in the service industry
• E-mailed a press release
• Wrote "why do I care" in a blog comment

Death Round: 20 points

• Sent an unneeded "reply to all"
• Sold someone's contact info
• Played Second Life
• Rickrolled someone
• Reviewed your own book on Amazon
• Complained that someone reblogged a third party's content without crediting you for finding it first
• Said the word "microcelebrity"
• Invited your whole address book to something
• Talked like a LOLcat in real life

Results
0-10: Get the hell off my blog. But first digg my story.
11-15: You must feel great about yourself. Add twenty points for taking the quiz.
16-25: Very mediocre. Why are you reading this on your Playstation? Go play GTA IV.
26-40: All your Tumblr posts are stolen from other people's blogs. Your Twitters are about Twitter. But somehow all the YouTube clips you IM me are two years old.
41+: All my base are belong to you. Oh god, you probably laughed at that. You can haz the finger, jackass.

Picture: A very funny College Humor article. Before you go, I was serious about the digg.

[via Agenda Inc.]

[Times]

After the first guy jumped into his jeans, I realized what the whole video would be: a shot-for-shot rehash of a viral ad for Ray-Ban. The two ads are so similar that the creators (unless they're phenomenally short-sighted) clearly wanted to be discovered. First, let's look at the two ads:

Levi's, 5 May 2008: Guys do backflips, swinging jumps, and other stunts and land in their pants.

Ray-Ban, 6 May 2007: A guy catches sunglasses on his face in increasingly impossible maneuvers: Off a house, off a bridge, in a moving car.

Similarities
The stories are the same: A simple trick to establish what we're watching. Then increasingly elaborate iterations, culminating in a stunt so dramatic that it requires a slow-motion replay.

The music is the same: A cool innocuous background beat loosely timed to the action.

The editing is the same: Quick pacing. Slick with dramatic angles, but calculatedly rugged with lingering shots on the guys congratulating each other.

The packaging is the same: Ray-Ban's ad was posted by "neverhidefilms," a YouTube user with no previous videos. The new Levi's ad comes from "unbuttonedfilms," another first-time user. The new ad is one day shy of coming a year after the old ad. The titles are analagous: "Guy catches glasses with face" versus "Guys backflip into jeans." No product is mentioned.

Background
While Ray-Ban's ad was launched anonymously, the creative team behind it soon came forward. Josh Warner, president of The Feed Company, explained how he promoted this viral video to Adweek. The team posted more videos, now more obviously advertising Ray-Ban though still without using a traditional ad format, to the YouTube account that hosted the original viral ad.

Extra evidence
Note the line at 0:36 of the Levi's ad: "At least there's no zipper." That's what clinched it for me: Levi's is the only jeans brand to actively advertise its zipperless buttoned jeans. The user name "unbuttonedfilms" corroborates this.

How well it's worked
Blogs like Laughing Squid and Neatorama posted the video with no guess about the creators (though political blog Hot Air guessed this might be a Levi's ad). Even G4TV's Attack Of The Show discussed the ad, crediting it to an unnamed group of gymnasts and making no mention of Levi's.

And of course even this debunking is giving them publicity. (Not that I mind as long as I'm getting some too.)

My Theory
Obviously the new ad has the same goals as the old: to market a product without actually naming it, by appealing to the public's love of Internet stunt videos. Most likely, The Feed Company made the new Levi's ad. If any other agency was ripping them off, they wouldn't release the ad a year later with the exact same techniques. And in a few days, The Feed Company will come out, because who can really deny themselves another round of publicity?

Better quality version here. [via EmpireOnline]

[via Hollywood-Elsewhere]

One of YouTube's selling points is the ability to embed its videos on other pages. This allows free discussion of those videos, just like excerpting an image or text. But the Church turned off embedding in their clips. In fact, you can't link to just one video by clicking from the Church's official channel. You have to search for their videos.

Then you can find this creepy clip of a ceremony celebrating the Church's "International Way To Happiness Foundation." A South African dignitary thanks the Church (or more precisely, a supposedly secular wing of the Church) for starting a program in his country's prisons. An Israeli publisher thanks the Church for healing the Middle East, as does a Palestinian education official.

In another video, a narrator explains how you are a thetan, not a body or mind. Another clip introduces the auditing process. In that clip, it sounds weirdly like the therapeutic process in the psychiatric field that Scientologists like Tom Cruise have publicly denounced.

But most of the clips are innocent slideshows with a narrator gently listing beliefs that would fit with mainstream Christianity. Every clip has a cheesy grocery-store soundtrack. The net effect is to make the Church look like another dull religion or self-help class and not, as some critics label it, a murderous cult.

Either way, because the Church disabled the option to embed their videos, I can't show you the clips here but can only link to them. I've downloaded some copies, but uploading them here might violate copyright law as long as there's another copy on the Church's channel.

The Church paid for its special channel. Anyone can disable embeds, but a specially formatted user page doesn't come free. YouTube helped the Church integrate its custom menu into the channel, though of course it didn't create any of the content. Nor did YouTube endorse the Church or give it control over other users' videos, and all such accusations I saw provided no evidence.

But I'm baffled why the Church, after putting together such a friendly little propaganda channel, not only disabled all comments (a reasonable way to avoid actually diving into two-way conversation) but disabled embedding and turned its channel into a tidy menu. That guarantees that hardly anyone will stumble onto the videos. I guess the rest of the world should be glad that the Church doesn't get the Internet.

What may piss off some viewers is that the Church is advertising their channel all over YouTube. This might explain the no-embed rule; the Church is specifically targeting YouTube users, not the Internet at large, though I see no reason to specifically hide from everyone outside of the video site. But one user was creeped out by Church ads appearing on popular channels like Smosh, Awkward Pictures, and Playboy, even though any creator can ask YouTube to keep certain advertisers off its page. Guess everyone just needed the money. At least I can still show you the anti-Church videos.

11. YouTube

At risk: Daredevils, fictional characters
Case 1: While trying to perform a stunt for YouTube, four teens crashed their Ford Explorer, injuring three and killing one. No details on how awesome the clip would have been, but hopefully it'd be more exciting than "ghost riding," the 2005-07 fad of rolling an idling car down the street while dancing beside it. The result of that fad, besides a few lame videos, was two deaths. Other stupid deadly stunts include subway surfing and fake stunts that end up in banner ads.
Case 2: A man who explained on YouTube how to tie a hangman's noose has been accused of inciting suicide. A few days after the news reported it, someone else posted instructions (though this user has posted plenty of other knot-tying videos, and who could hang themselves with the festive purple and yellow rope he uses?).
Case 3: Of course fictional characters die often and violently: Lonelygirl15, Harry Potter, and the radio star.


10. Myspace

At risk: The lonely
Case 1: Remarkably, no charges were filed in the case of the family who carried on a hoax relationship with 13-year-old depression sufferer Megan Meier over MySpace, then "broke up" with her and thus driving her to suicide. But this is only our first glimpse at two themes of Internet-caused deaths: Tragic romance and preying on the lonely.
Case 2: In this case, MySpace technically saved lives. Cops investigated a 12-year-old boy's MySpace death list, warned everyone who was on it, and searched his home. They didn't find weapons and he said he was just fooling around, so he was just charged with juvenile delinquency. Other death threat cases include a dog and another empty threat against high school students. But just to be safe I make my little sister keep a Google alert on her name, cause she''d be the first to go if some trenchcoated freak started shooting up the cool kids in her school.
Case 3: Of course while stupid people may reveal their murder plans on MySpace, they may be inspired by the site too. Heather Kane saw another girl on her boyfriend's profile and hired a hitman to kill her. Good thing she bumped into an undercover cop instead.


9. Facebook

At risk: Anyone who pisses off a muslim
Case 1: A Saudi Arabian father beat and shot his daughter earlier this year for chatting on Facebook. A preacher in the Islamic country called the site a "door to lust;" many Saudi women use aliases on the site and post drawings instead of photos. But there are still plenty of photos of hookups in the Facebook group "Single and Looking in Saudi Arabia."
Case 2: After a Jewish woman in Melbourne rejected a friend offer from one Ibrahim Dirani, he allegedly wrote to her, "I am Hezbollah and I am going to kill you and all of your family — promise you."
Aw,


8. Pornography

At risk: Viewers of extreme or illegal porn and the people who know them
Case 1: It's hard to feel too sorry for those who kill themselves after they're implicated in child porn rings, like these four suicides in 1998 and these six in 2004.
Case 2: Porn doesn't only kill the depraved. The story of Jane Longhurst, an English woman killed by "a man obsessed with violent sexual pornography," was tragic enough to encourage many UK lawmakers to ban extreme porn.


7. Spam

At risk: The terribly gullible
Case 1: Spammers and scammers can easily take your money if you're dumb enough to give them your passwords and financial info. But some Nigerian scams go far beyond online fraud; many scammers lure their victims to Nigeria to continue paying money in person; fifteen victims were killed after they got suspicious.


6. Blogging

At risk: Those already at risk of dying
Case 1: There's a trick to making listicles like this: Put the weakest item in the middle. Unfortunately the New York Times spent an entire trend piece on the bogus idea of "death by blogging." But Gizmodo editor Brian Lam tells me, "Only bogus to lazy bloggers. I did 75 hours this week and anyone over fifty would die doing that."


5. Ebay

At risk: The already dead
Case 1: Seung-Hui Cho bought empty clips and holsters on Ebay before his Virginia Tech rampage. He got his guns and ammo elsewhere, though Ebay notes that the sale of ammunition on Ebay is legal.
Case 2: Ebay's death profits tend to come from the memorabilia. Celebrity deaths bring predictable results, like sales of Pope tchotchkes and autographed Heath Ledger posters. But Ebay has also hosted auctions for supposed Columbia shuttle pieces, video of insurgents shooting down planes in Iraq, the car used in a murder, and O.J. Simpson's book.


4. Drugs

At risk: Druggies
Case 1: Internet drug sales are ridiculously easy (see "spam" above), so easy that every decent men's magazine did an "I ordered Viagra off the Internet" story by 2005. But that means irresponsible doctors can prescribe dangerous drugs, such as this 2002 case of deadly drugs sold online, or this case of a doctor whose patients sometimes became addicted or were hospitalized, or a 2007 case where a 57-year-old Canadian woman died after taking an illegal sedative she ordered online.


3. Webcams

At risk: Suicides
Case 1: Webcam suicide is one of the darkest modern phenomena, an example of loneliness and despair in a supposed age of connection and hope. Those who have fallen that far and recovered may want to forget it ever happened. Webcammer Stacy Pershall has long insisted that despite reports, she did not try to kill herself on camera in 2001 by overdosing on pills but merely took some Advil "to get a few hours sleep" — on her bathroom floor.
Case 2: While Pershall's viewers worried about her and called the cops to save her, those watching Brandon Vedas in 2003 egged him on. He OD'd on five drugs and died a room away from his unsuspecting mother.
Case 3: A father named Kevin Whitrick hanged himself after the apparent encouragement of people watching his webcam; viewers later said they thought it was a joke, and indeed they'd acted worried after seeing him die. After all, he was in an insult chat room, which brings us to another cause of death:


2. Chat rooms

At risk: Hopeless romantics
Case 1: A man rejected in real life by his chat room lover in 1999 cut his own head off with a chainsaw in her front yard. Enough said.
Case 2: Plenty of innocents have been killed by online predators like the man who killed an altar girl, the Texas A&M killer, and this guy in a rural North Carolina trailer.


1. World of Warcraft

At risk: 10 million players, particularly the already crazy ones
Case 1: World of Warcraft addiction may not necessarily be deadly for the player, but it can be hell on their family life. Of course, Kim Trenor was probably crazy long before she moved cross-country with her 2-year-old to see a guy she met on the game, and definitely before she and Royce Zeigler beat "Baby Grace" to death. But if it weren't for that damned game she never would have met the allegedly abusive Zeigler.
Case 2: WoW isn't the first game to drive addicts mad. At least one Everquest player allegedly shot herself after getting hooked on the game.
Case 3: And of course any time you put a beautiful bit of fantasy in the world, some kid will try to imitate it. Happened with Superman, happened with WoW when a Chinese boy jumped off a 24-story building. His parents sued game maker Blizzard saying he was imitating the game, in which some players like to platform-jump, an activity totally unrelated to actually playing. Again, totally not WoW's fault, but something had to convince that boy he could leap off a tower.

[via Cynical-c]

Oh please work!

[via Cynical-c]

The vast majority of YouTube partners haven't talked about what they're pulling in. Neither has the company. And there's really no incentive to; revealing the pay would only make users more agitated when they're not at the top of the list. So we're not sure how much Tay Zonday or Chris Crocker are making. But I can tell you this about the Internet stars that South Park killed off:

1. Tay Zonday, "Chocolate Rain": Unknown, but possibly a good amount. Probably made more from his Dr. Pepper commercial.
2. Tron Guy: Probably nothing; he was only part of other people's videos
3. Gary Brolsma, "Numa Numa": Maybe a little from his uncomfortably bad sequel that racked up nine million views, though this was before the partner program officially launched. But the original Numa Numa, which got eleven million views, was just someone else's copy; remember that Gary was the last huge video hit before YouTube, back when everyone had to download Windows Media and Quicktime files.
4. Star Wars Kid: Nothing. Settled a lawsuit against the kids who put his video online (again pre-YouTube though copies are up at the site), and some bloggers raised money for him out of sympathy.
5. Sneezing Panda: Nothing.
6. Dramatic Prairie Dog: Nothing. Apparently taken from CollegeHumor.com, where someone took a clip from a Japanese show and added the dramatic sound. One site claims it was an animated GIF long before it became a video.
7. Chris Crocker, "Leave Britney Alone": Probably nothing; he doesn't have ads on his channel so he must not be a partner. And I haven't heard anything new about the reality show he was supposed to star in.
8. Chinese Back Street Boys: Almost certainly nothing; the clips seem to have been uploaded by someone else, and no ads appear near them.
9. Laughing Baby: Nothing. No ads. A shame too, cause this video got over 45 million views.
10. Afroninja: Nothing. The clip wasn't his.

Top Gun:

Footloose:

Chinatown:

Mean Girls:

Grease:

Forrest Gump:

Zoolander:

So much for the computer market; now for phones.

Am I the only person in the world who keeps his phone in his pocket and doesn't stare at it while it rings? Or is everyone going to start not picking up the phone because they want to watch ten seconds of Top Gun instead? I'm guessing video ringtones will never take off like actual ringtones, but I just don't understand why anyone important at Paramount thinks they will.

"White Bird"

"Helicopter Opera"

Brandon Hardesty, Hollywood Noob (skip the minute-long intro):

The Big Lebowski:

There Will Be Blood:

Incidentally, "dickbutt" is 4chan's latest meme. That's all the meme is: writing "DICK BUTT." I hope it gets as popular as LOLcats and Rickrolls.