Boom goes the dynamite!

 NSFW alert: There's a reason the new anchor only lasted a day

If you haven't seen this viral video yet, crawl out from under your rock. The fresh air will do you good, as will taking a break from fighting off the grubs and the armadillo bugs that keep encroaching on your personal space.

That said, this is about as bad a first day on the job gets for a TV news guy, barring being sent to cover a fire at the local ammonium nitrate plant -- up close and personal.

On the upside, this poor guy is still alive. On the downside, when A.J. Clemente, now formerly of KFYR-TV in Bismarck, N.D., mixed the F-bomb with the S-word while forgetting that guns are always loaded and microphones are always "hot," he may have just blown his nascent career to smithereens.

Boom goes the dynamite!

Look, if you can't make it a day on local TV in Bismarck, where is there left to go? "F****** s***!" indeed.


HAT TIP: NPR's The Two Way blog.

Go (to) Big Red!

  
If your university is going to do a social-media campaign to create a little buzz and enhance the ol' profile, you just as well have a little fun with it. YOLO!

Wait a sec . . . I'm not sure I used "YOLO" (You Only Live Once) correctly. What University of Nebraska-Lincoln Chancellor Harvey Perlman is doing here isn't dumb at all. (See the YouTube video. Ol' Harv has a point on that particular catchphrase.)

What's a delightful surprise in these UN-L videos is this: The chancellor, 71, is a funny, funny guy. Not only in front of the camera, but as a writer, too. He rewrote everything that the ad agency and university marketing staff put before him, and if it says it in the Omaha World-Herald, it must be so.

Or good enough for newspaper work.

The “Perls of Knowledge” spots have been tweeted and re-tweeted and re-re-tweeted. The ad campaign has gotten a mountain of free publicity, courtesy of media outlets from Sioux City to San Francisco and from Columbus, Ind., all the way to China.

The jury is out on whether “Perls of Knowledge” will result in more students for UNL — Perlman, when he's not fighting zombies, has vowed to get UNL's current enrollment of 24,207 to a nice round 30,000 in the next four years.

But what seems clear is this: For $40,000, a tiny fraction of the university's marketing budget, UNL has gotten the kind of publicity that most wannabe Carly Raes — and most universities — would kill a whole zombie army for.

“It worked because of (Perlman's) really bitey sarcasm,” says Dan Kohler, UNL's senior assistant director for digital marketing and the aforementioned 27-year-old. “The tone actually speaks well to a younger generation ... and it's packaged in a way that takes a traditional brand and throws it into this very nontraditional environment.”

I figured I would pull back the curtain on “Perls of Knowledge” and learn that the chancellor was just a glorified prop in this digital marketing strategy, a willing and able participant in an experiment hatched and run by people younger than I am.

But the real story is stranger: Perlman himself came up with the general idea. He enlisted allies, including Amber Hunter, UNL's admissions director, and Kohler.

“He had been paying more attention to pop culture, spending more time with the admissions office — we're one of the youngest offices on campus — and asking a lot of questions,” Hunter says. “A lot of this comes from him just trying to understand how we could share something all over the country.”

They brought in Archrival, a Lincoln marketing firm that cultivates an edgy reputation.

Archrival employees and UNL's five-person digital marketing staff together wrote the video's scripts. And then Perlman took those scripts with him on a long, long flight to China. When he came home, he had rewritten every last one.

On taping day, Perlman nailed most of the scripts with one or two takes.

“He's a pretty funny guy,” admits Clint! Runge, Archrival's creative marketing director and a man with a “!” purposefully embedded in his first name.

 THE CHANCELLOR, as I said, is a funny guy. Dryly hilarious, even.

Almost as funny as putting an exclamation point behind your first name. YOLO!

Top that, KITT!

Behold pure awesomeness in action.

Obviously, your average fast-food worker hasn't ever heard of this:

Putting the 'NS' in NSFW

There's a new Ed Wood movie out . . . 34 years after the schlockmeister's demise -- Revenge of the White-Trash Half-Wits.

What appears to be an angry YouTube outburst by knuckle-draggers is really the unexpected piéce de résistance of the bad-movie universe. Unless, of course, it actually is the real deal.

Unfortunately, this probably is more likely than it being an Ed Wood anti-masterpiece or some sort of bizarro performance art. Disturbing performance art, but still. . . .

Here's the story thus far, which has gone viral on YouTube, Boing Boing, Tosh.0,  Gawker and the rest: Trashy-ass gal named Ashli Hall-Gay, apparently one of the biggest losers in life's genetic sweepstakes, likes to make rambling, profane and patently obscene smackdown videos with her hapless sidekick, Cindy, otherwise known as Mom. (And please note that hapless is a relative term here; this is because "haplesser" is not a real word.)

Ashli

These videos -- to which I won't link because the one above is by far the least offensive, and even it's Not Safe for Work in giant neon letters above the entrance of the trailer park -- are directed toward people who have somehow disrespected Dumb and Dumber on the Internet. They've apparently directed the one above at a couple of teen-agers -- young teen-agers -- who posted a YouTube video making fun of Ashli's videos.

THAT'S RIGHT. That profane, whack tirade above (and stay with it past the 2:51 mark to see how bizarre and inappropriate it can get) seemingly is directed at a couple of little girls.

What the f***?

No, who the f***?

Indeed.

(By the way . . . where were those girls' parents? Kids were watching enough of this garbage that they could pimp on it?)

Again, if this is some sort of warped performance art, it's disturbing. If it's real, it's disturbing and tragic. Tragic that, yes, there are people who dove headfirst into the shallow end of the gene pool.

Then there's the much larger tragedy -- using one's limited resources for evil and not for good. Giving oneself over to a toxic wave of anger and spite rolling across an endless sea of futility. Abandoning any pretense of human dignity and grace . . . but there's more still.

Cindy

The worst thing about Ashli Gay and her mom, Cindy Hall, is that they not only reject the notion that God has created each one of us in His image and bestowed upon us great dignity just because we are, but that they make us all question the premise. I look at these pathetic wretches in the wilds of Mount Vernon, Ill., and I think that maybe somebody lied.

That maybe I'm lying to myself when I say apparently ludicrous things -- Well, look at the damn video! -- like "God has created each one of us in His image and bestowed upon us great dignity just because we are." Really?

Look at 'em! What kind of a dumbass could believe that?

Exactly.

LOOKING at the wide array of humanity and asserting that each human is made in God's image and charged with the dignity of heaven is nothing if not a supreme act of faith. Sorry specimens like Ashli Gay and mom Cindy -- and it doesn't really matter whether they're real or a giant Internet ruse -- make that leap of faith a longer one than it was yesterday.

Sometimes, the World Wide Web is an amazing thing. Here, though, it's just a networking tool for the devil. Ain't that right, Cindy?

"Yeah!"

Dear LSU: Never fire this man

How f***in' easy it was for me to largely stay away from the Internets on Sunday.

How f***in' easy it would have been for me to miss the most f***in' epic of all Les Miles' f***in' epic press conferences as LSU's head football coach.

Excuse my language.

But, WOW! What a press conference!

I don't give a flying expletive deleted what stupid-ass Tiger fans think about Les. Don't care how badly they want him fired for losing two games this season, or for shooting craps on the sideline and sometimes rolling snake eyes. I know a little about LSU fans, being one, and I know that if brains were dynamite, 48.92 percent of them wouldn't have enough to blow their nose.

And I know that a lot of them get even stupider -- not to mention meaner -- after they've been drinking Bud Light all day and night. So any noise they make about removing this great man as the Tigers' coach should be regarded as the drunken ravings of a bunch of dumbasses.

FOR ONE THING, if LSU ever fired Les -- particularly so long as he keeps winning more games than he loses -- it never would find any decent coach insane enough to take that job. Only one decent coach today is insane enough to put up with such a dumbass fan base . . . and his name is Les Miles.

Like, you did watch the video, right?

And for another thing, Les is one of the few coaches out there just as certifiable as Louisiana itself. The Mad Hatter is the personification of the Gret Stet when it's at its bat-s*** crazy best, yet he somehow manages to avoid being like Louisiana when it's at its bat-s*** crazy worst.

LSU -- and Louisiana -- cannot lose this singular individual who, in fact, is the only person in the state to have successfully pulled that off. Les Miles not only should never be fired, but the Ole War Skule instead needs -- and I'm talking right now -- to commence an all-out research program dedicated to cloning the coach and disseminating his gene pool widely throughout the state.

And if there's a university geneticist who can do this great service for Louisiana, you need to grab him and give him a big kiss on the mouth. If you're a girl.

OR A GUY, but only if she's a girl. Because on this here blog, "heteronormative" is not a dirty word.

Have a great day.

Viral video of the century

This needs no explanation. At all.

We feel your pain, kid. We all feel your pain.

TV's 'la cucaracha' test

Pass.


  Fail.

Obama the appeaser: Soft on seagulls

What you see here is the global seagull menace, caught in shocking detail in videos shot by ordinary folk . . . and in a couple of instances by the winged terrorists themselves.

Above, we see how a participant in a brazen San Francisco radical-seagull theft ring swipes a GoPro video camera from a French tourist as she photographs the setting sun behind the Golden Gate Bridge. Note how the felonious fowl, unmolested by the law under the Obama Administration, has no fear whatsoever of apprehension or of legal repercussions.

And note well what we've heard from the administration concerning such organized crime against unarmed, innocent individuals on American soil -- nothing. It is difficult to understand such indifference from the president or any of his Washington "comrades" in the face of this wave of terror taking flight across the homeland.

One supposes right-thinking Americans might be grateful that Barack Obama at least hasn't issued politically correct statements expressing sympathy with the "oppressed" gull community, caught no doubt in the maw of "parasitic" humanity. Yes, me must count our blessings, no matter how meager . . . assuming, of course, that the Obama Administration isn't at this very moment preparing to extend sympathy toward avian extremists.


BUT THE REACH of organized terror so fowl extends far beyond American shores. Europe is in seagull crosshairs, also.

Watch this from Cannes, France (above).

Not only does the gull extremist openly strike against the video camera of yet another hapless victim, it uses its purloined prize to record some sort of manifesto for fundamentalist seagullism. AAWWWWK, indeed.

And the response from the appeaser-in-chief to this seagull attack upon a close, still-capitalist European ally -- note that this happened last year, when the pinkos had yet to seize the reins of French power -- was again nonexistent. Birds of an ideological feather, perhaps?

We report. You decide.


IT IS AMERICA, though, that is the epicenter of terror attacks by fundamentalist seagullism. And it is here that the Obama indifference (or worse) most enables the destruction of American property . . . and American values.

Listen to these young Americans (above) -- brainwashed by this Obamanation against our fair land -- laugh at the terrible sight of criminal seagull anarchy. Words fail. Tolerance of airborne terror, corruption of America's youth . . . when, pray tell, will enough be enough?


AND WHERE is the ultraliberal Humane Society of the United States when even house pets are victimized by global gull terrorism? And for the record, at least dogs tied to the roofs of family station wagons are able to eat unhindered by the criminal plague of avian extremism.


IS WHAT we're saying.


WHEN will the madness stop?

It will stop when Americans stop it. But the necessary War on Seagulls cannot commence until we first achieve a different sort of victory.

Our first blow against this extremist enemy so fowl will be to give Barack Hussein Obama, appeaser of fundamentalist seagulls, a one-way Greyhound ticket back to Chicago. But not a plane ticket -- that would be the height of budgetary imprudence.

Freedom from seagulls: It's fundamental, and Mitt Romney will not rest until Americans, from sea to shining sea, once again can look to the sky without fear.

May Our Heavenly Father continue to bless the United States of America.

Awesomest forecast ever. . . .

Unfortunately, it'll be one of the last we ever get.

Still, a final, apocalyptic tip o' the tinfoil hat to former Richmond, Va., TV weather guesser Aaron Justus for this joke weathercast he did last year before leaving WTVR for a more satisfying career as a brewer in San Diego.

But here's what you need to know about this viral video. Almost everyone reported it wrong.

The Huffington Post got the story wrong, reporting Monday afternoon that Justus was still at Channel 6, and that Richmond viewers actually saw the spoof before it became a YouTube sensation.

THEN, among others, The Boston Globe came upon the reportile dysfunction and ran with it online the next morning, and then Mediaite, and then Fox 4 in Kansas City, and then WMAR television in Baltimore, and on and on it went.

All this despite The Richmond Times having gotten the story straight Monday, as did The Hollywood Reporter, and then TV Spy the next day.

As newspapers die left and right of natural causes -- or expeditiously at the hand of newly-minted grads from the Kevorkian School of Business -- this is the media landscape we're going to be left with, as ink-stained wretches get replaced by 20-somethings with a daily web-post quota to fill.

New Orleans must be feeling so very optimistic about its future right now. And Louisiana's famously scumilicious politicians must be pissing themselves with the excitement of possibility.

Madea for bus monitor!

You know who we need to be a junior-high bus monitor? Madea.

Surely, there must be some real-life approximations of Mabel "Madea" Simmons who can be tasked with straightening out America's feral youth. Give the newly minted monitors a school-bus version of a 007 license so the po-po will leave them the hell alone to do what needs to be done.

Can I get a witness, y'all?

The feral youth of Bus 784

Here's what I think of this Not Safe for Work video that's gone viral around the world, thanks to YouTube.

Here's what I think of little smart-ass, bullying seventh-grade s***s who pick on a 68-year-old grandma, who also happens to be the monitor on Bus 784 in Greece, N.Y.

Here's what I think. Here goes.

Do you remember those little bitty baseball bats common back in the day?

In my youth in the segregated South, they had a common name (common in every sense of the word) I shall not repeat, but I suspect sons and daughters of the Deep South know exactly what I'm talking about.

ANYWAY, this is why God invented those. (And your old man's thin leather belt.) I suspect just nearly connecting with one of the little darlings with a billy club-size Louisville Slugger would have been sufficient to put the fear -- if not of God -- of serious bodily harm into their profoundly undeveloped little brains.

Unfortunately, if the poor woman had done what most any adult would have done when I was a kid, she would have been arrested, and then she would have been sued into pauperism by the wolves who obviously have been "raising" these little monsters. That's because brats like that don't come from nowhere.

There is almost no reason sufficient to administer a serious ass-whipping to a child. Almost. But this is a damn good one.

This kind of behavior toward a senior citizen by a child used to be unthinkable, especially in the South of my youth, unless you were talking about a serious juvenile delinquent who'd be penitentiary bound soon enough. There were reasons for that.

Someone needs to exercise "the nuclear option" against the whole lot of these feral youth on that bus. Now.

A message from the It Had to Be Said department

Are we going to have to require people to get a permit -- with mandatory video-safety certification as a prerequisite -- before they can legally purchase or use a cell-phone camera or digital SLR? Probably.

Where's Michael Bloomberg when we really need him?

The Onion: Tomorrow's news today

Brain-dead teen, only capable of rolling eyes and texting, to be euthanized

This is a joke, right?

Is this a joke?

It has to be a joke, right?

Right?

Right?

I'm pretty sure it's a joke.

Damn, it's hard living in a satire-resistant culture.

My name is Suh. How do you do? Now you're gonna die. . . .

The National Football League has its standards to uphold. It's not lawless, you know.

Commissioner Roger Goodell had to sit Detroit's Ndamukong Suh for two games just on account of the flying body parts.

By the way, the Taiwanese are deeply, deeply weird people. Entertaining, granted, but deeply, deeply strange.

You know what? I cannot wait for the guy who taught the Motor City Mauler everything he knows about being out of control -- that's FOXSports.com writer Jen Floyd Engel's reasonable-enough assessment of Nebraska Coach Bo Pelini, at least -- to do something worthy of the Taiwanese-animator treatment himself.

I'm just sick that way.

Muffy hearts Fiddy

I have never been prouder to be a GDI than I am right now.

We LSU students always knew them Bammer women were a little . . . well, you know. I mean . . . "go Greek"?

Velma and Billy Sol in Decatur just might be correct in askin' what the hell kind of Sodom and Gomorrah they's a-runnin' down yonder in Tuscaloosa.


HAT TIP: @LisaHorne via Twitter.

Experience a city fighting back

Sorry, Newsweek.

A city that can produce a lipdub deemed "the greatest music video ever made" by Roger Ebert can't be one of "America's dying cities." A dying city isn't just a matter of population losses; a dying city is one that has lost its spirit.

A dying city is one in which the civic culture has unraveled and no one is his brother's keeper.

A dying city has no answer to the question "Why try harder?"


IF THIS LIPDUB is any indication of Grand Rapids' mettle as a metropolis -- albeit a small metropolis -- it's a lot healthier city than Newsweek is a magazine. Is what I am submitting for your approval, as Rod Serling might have said.

Now, I'm not qualified to judge whether Ebert is correct in Grand Rapids having produced the best music video ever, but I'd say this one is at least in the ballpark.

Experience Grand Rapids, indeed!


HAT TIP: The non-profit media conglomerate formerly known as National Public Radio.

It's oy veh, oy veh. . . .

Kill me now. No . . . wait. No need to. Just let this here video play out, and that should do the trick.

Is it just me, or did Christianity start to lose its savor (if not its Savior) when it stopped leading the culture -- embracing and creating art for beauty's sake, because beauty itself is a manifestation of the divine in this world -- and started following a false gospel of crass utilitarianism?

I wonder what went first, the church's mind or its heart?

You remember how, in "American Pie," Don McLean sang "the Father, Son and Holy Ghost caught the last train for the coast"? I now know why the Holy Trinity might have done that.

Sorry, guys, there's no escaping sanctified diarrhea like "Sunday," which merely rebrands the secular diarrhea of Rebecca Black's "Friday." And sadly, the fact remains that crap like this is about the best American Christianity can muster anymore.


I'D CALL crap-evangetastic mush such as this liturgical lounge lizardry if the mere association weren't totally unfair to Nick the Lounge Singer.

It ain't rocket science, brothers and sisters.

If you spend four or five decades bombarding the wretched masses with superficial garbage and calling it Christian, don't be shocked that the world isn't beating a path to the church house door. Even heathens (well, some of them, at least) have standards.

And eventually, they come to think that God is as full of crap as His people.

You knew this was coming

This had to happen eventually, and Jimmy Fallon made it so with a little help from Stephen Colbert and. . . .

Every 1's a winner

Duh, WINNING!

It's a bird! It's a plane!

It's a frog!

A frog?

Not plane, nor bird, nor even frog . . . it's just little old her . . .


The Alaska publicity hog.

I guess I could write 500 words on tea-party morons and idolatry, but I think I'll just go with "homina homina homina homina," instead.

Good grief.