All Hail Zee Germans

I’m ready to accept the challenge.

I’m coming home.

– This is just absolutely delightful. I want to see a continuation of this commercial – cut to the boy and his dad in a tearful embrace.

“WE CAN FINALLY EAT AGAIN SON, AND YOU CAN GO TO SCHOOL!”
“I LOVE YOU DAD!”

Gambling: bringing families together, one bet at a time. This certainly serves the Singapore National Council of Problem Gambling right for gambling against the second best soccer team in the world coming into the World Cup. Maybe if they were better gamblers then this message would have been more effective at preventing gambling. Kind of how like the better Batman gets at breaking the law (and the arms of criminals) the more effective he is at preventing other people from breaking the law.

– You know what looks hilarious? Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings , which kind of looks like Gladiator filled with Thor movie cosplayers. But then you see Joel Edgerton’s take on the Egyptian king Ramses, which just reminds me of Conan with too much makeup on. It doesn’t matter how good this movie will be, I cannot get past that.

– Also good, check out Aubrey Plaza and The Amazing Harry Osborn in Life After Beth, which kind of looks like Warm Bodies in reverse. I’m thinking that the parent coupling of John C Reilly and Molly Shannon is going to steal a few scenes.

– I love logo design, and when that collides with fictional properties and my fetish for sport uniforms, even better. So really I have no choice but to post about these Game of Thrones soccer jerseys when I found them. Not nearly in depth in concept or write-up as these MLB soccer jersey concepts I had previously found, but still a fun snack. And while I understand the analogies for the various houses are more accurately represented as countries versus league teams, it would have still been cool to see more details in there, including sponsorships…which makes this a fun time to revisit those old logos of Game of Thrones houses as modern brands .

– I am a fan of David So, and I often enjoy his videos. Ball Handles is one such video. I think it’s because it starts with a clever way that really does capture the tone of a lot of today’s sports commercials. So there is some nice hints of subtly at the start there. And then it immediately gets to the low brow dick slapping stuff that you signed up for when you first saw the name of the video. Rich, almost overpowering, undertones of slapstick. It’s a whole oeuvre of comedy. Plus it is a video in which people get hit in the groin a lot.

– Here is Stephen Merchant in a beer commercial. It is funny because he is English!

– IBM supercomputer and Jeopardy overlord Watson is apparently now making a barbeque sauce or something. Apparently the recipe of Bengali Butternut BBQ Sauce is sourced from crunching a whole bunch of existing recipes off the internet, building a database of ingredient rankings that rate how tasty ingredients are as well as how well they complement other ingredients. So on one hand you could say that it’s pure machine creativity, a possible first step towards the dawn of true artificial sentience and intelligence. Or you can say that we just have a real fancy internet page scrubber and search engine result aggregator. Regardless, it’s still pretty weird to create a butternut squash based barbeque sauce. Even weirder is how the writer of the article taste tested this barbeque sauce…

I pour a bit of the bottle onto a plate of roasted tofu and broccoli–even a pork lover has gotta watch his cholesterol–and tentatively took a bite.

…roasted tofu? Broccoli? Are these big barbeque staples now in 2014? God, I am so out of touch with the barbeque game.

– Last night (or two months ago, whatever…I may have written this a while ago) Oakland A’s outfielder Josh Reddick decided to make Careless Whisper his walk-up music for his at-bats. Why? Doesn’t matter, as he immediately went on to go 2 for 3 with a walk and a game tying triple in a 5-4 win. And then he cranked a home run in the next game, an 11-0 blowout. Suffice to say, it was a popular move.

I hear “The Tears of a Clown”
I hate that song