In this clip from QI, the talk/quiz/comedy-show that Stephen Fry hosts, Fry asks the participants “where one percent of Americans can be found.” The correct answer is prison, and the contests proceed to make a series of horrified remarks and jokes about this startling fact.
(via Sociological Images)
from Boing Boing
In this sweet, melancholy, raucous video, several of Jim Henson’s Muppeteers perform Henson’s favorite songs at his 1990 memorial service.
(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
from Boing Boing
[Video Link] Richard Metzger says:
American Juggalo, a new short film by Brooklyn-based director, Sean Dunne explores (without judgement or editorializing) the distinctive youth culture of the Juggalos, adoring fans of Christian horrorcore metal rappers, The Insane Clown Posse. It is funny, fascinating and disturbing in turns.
Each year approximately 20,000 juggalos and juggettes, meet up (usually in campgrounds far from civilization) for the four-day musical festival known as “The Gathering of the Juggalos.”
from Boing Boing
Mark recently posted the magnificent time-lapse video taken from the International Space Station orbiting the Earth. Here is that same video with its magnificence further amplified by an appropriately epic and glistening soundtrack by the Imaginary Foundation.
from Boing Boing
[Video Link] “Music video for the Berlin-based band Rats Live On No Evil Star [a palindrome]. This music video has been made entirely of images from old comics found on the internet and animated in AE, especially with the puppet tool.” (Via Potrzebie)
from Boing Boing
The Bad Lip Reading series of YouTube video synch up alternative dialog for speeches and other footage, using words that match the lip movements. The effect is hilarious — witness this alternative material for a Rick Perry campaign speech.
(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
from Boing Boing
[Video Link] “The first of a four-part investigation into a world of greed and recklessness that brought down the financial world.”
From Open Culture:
Doc Zone, a documentary series produced by CBC Television, is now airing a four part investigation into the great financial meltdown of 2008. Along the way, the CBC’s Terence McKenna takes viewers “behind the headlines and into the backrooms at the highest levels of world governments and banking institutions, revealing the astonishing level of backstabbing and tension behind the scenes as the world came dangerously close to another Great Depression.”
Above, we have posted the first episode called “The Men Who Crashed the World.” The remaining programs can be watched by clicking here and scrolling down the page. Or by heading to Al Jazeera’s English site, which also hosts the four-part series.
Meltdown: The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse
from Boing Boing
A talking condom dispenses sex-ed wisdom in a PSA by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.
Screengrab: Wired.com
Professor Peter McGraw and writer Joel Warner have teamed up to explore the science of humor on a global expedition. The Humor Code chronicles their adventures, scientific experiments and unintentional comedy along the way. Learn more about McGraw, Warner and their escapades at HumorCode.com.
WASHINGTON — The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy has a problem: Seven out of 10 pregnancies among unmarried 18-to-29-year-olds in this country are unplanned.
The organization also has an unusual potential solution: comedy.
Unlike the organization’s work with teens, the goal is not to get the individuals in the young-adult demographic to abstain from sex. It’s about helping them understand and use birth control. Whereas 18-to-29-year-old women receive various messages in this regard, men in this age group remain largely ignored.
How should the nonprofit reach this jaded and media-saturated male population? Could funny online public service announcements do the trick, or do birth-control messages mixed with dick jokes do more harm than good? To find out, the National Campaign invited us to Washington, D.C. to investigate the interplay between comedy and condoms.
“We’re trying to do sex-ed for people having sex,” said Lawrence Swiader, the National Campaign’s director of digital media, when we arrived. “Part of the problem is these people think they know it all, but when we probe, we find that they don’t.”
It’s why Swiader and the National Campaign have been pushing the envelope with their digital media campaigns, from YouTube videos of talking condoms to Andy Samberg-inspired hip-hop songs and cartoons of Coca-Cola douches.
One of the latest spots, “Sex PSA Gets Real” (above), features a spokesman who completely loses it in the middle of spouting somber statistics about birth control use among young adults. Such spots, which promote educational websites like Bedsider, SexReally and HaveSexStandingUp.com, are a refreshing departure from those cringe-worthy sex-ed videos from high school and have received more than a total million views. But are they getting the job done?
After all, while research has shown humorous ads can make products and concepts more attention-getting and memorable, using humor brings risks. Even if you find something funny, that doesn’t mean you feel good about the subject of the joke or the person telling it.
Take an experiment that Peter McGraw (co-author of this post) and Caleb Warren ran in The Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Participants viewed an actual lime-cola advertisement featuring an anthropomorphized lime peeing into a glass of soda. While participants found the ad pretty hilarious, they also experienced disgust and subsequently preferred tea, juice or water to a tasty glass of cola.
The takeaway: Although toilet humor is funny, it is not a good way to market a food or beverage.
Not all funny is created equal, though. Psychologists are now divvying up comedy into different humor styles, and each style has different outcomes. For example, there is aggressive humor — sarcastic and disparaging put-downs and bullying that tends to assert the joke-teller’s dominance over his listeners.
Then there’s affiliative humor, the non-hostile brand of joking that builds bonds and goodwill. If a brand wants to make nice with its potential customers, it should be cautious when making fun of its customers, not to mention making fun of its own product. Hence the success of Apple’s “Mac versus PC” ads. The PC poindexter is always the butt of the joke, and everybody wants to hang with the cool-guy Mac.
In that regard, the angry-announcer PSA shown above might actually be turning away the audience it’s designed to reach, since it makes people who don’t use birth control the butt of the joke.
To figure out what humor style, if any, the National Campaign should be using for sex-ed web ads like this, we worked with John Roberts of Third Floor Productions and stand-up comedian Danny Rouhier to produce three new versions of that same PSA: A serious one that’s not funny at all (the “control” version) and two that employ affiliative humor, involving a gentler form of teasing focused on a crew member or the audience itself.
The Humor Research Lab is currently testing viewer responses to the ads and will have results in a few weeks. In the meantime, you can check out the new videos below. Did the National Campaign get it right the first time, or will one of these new approaches be more successful at getting people to rock a love glove? Watch the videos, vote in the poll and share your insights in the comments section below.
from Underwire
Emotional Bag Check turns music into mental medicine.
Screengrab: Wired.com
Life sucks, right? But music makes it better. That’s the worldview behind Emotional Bag Check — a site that lets you suggest songs to cheer people up.
It’s simple. Go to Emotional Bag Check, and choose whether you want to offload a problem or help out with someone else’s.
If you want to get something off your chest, all you need to do is type what the problem is, provide an e-mail address, and someone will read it and return a song they think is relevant along with (optionally) a message of support.
If everything’s going pretty well for you, and you just want to help other people out, then you’ll be confronted with someone’s problem and asked to pick a song that’ll make them feel better. Here, a sense of duty suddenly kicks in — you’ve got a direct line to someone’s heart, and you don’t want to waste it. You’ll find yourself taking a substantial amount of time to choose a song that’s just right for the situation, as if this person were a close friend.
We were confronted with a girl whose boyfriend was in Mexico and she was thinking about dropping out of university because she missed him so much. That proved problematic — not enough bands have written a song about how important a good education is to your career prospects (sort it out, bands). In the end, we settled on Hello Saferide’s “25 Days” — which is about missing someone, but sticking it out, along with a message about how if he’s that great, then he’s worth waiting for.
Once you’ve shared a song with someone, you get access to the stats, which show that among the most popular songs to be recommended are Jimmy Eat World, Coldplay, James Blunt, and Maroon 5. The idea that someone might read through your deepest, darkest problems and think that “You’re Beautiful” will be just the ticket to cheer you up is a little depressing.
Nonetheless, the Grooveshark-powered site is strangely compulsive. By mashing up Post Secret with music, it’s likely that whoever’s behind the site (there’s no information provided) might well have a hit on their hands.
Update 17:02 21/09/2011: We’ve managed to track down the person behind the site — Emotional Bag Check was built by Robyn Overstreet, a web developer and teacher from New York. Here’s a quick Q&A with Overstreet about the service.
Wired.co.uk: What gave you the idea for Emotional Bag Check?
Robyn Overstreet: The inspiration to build the site came when I thought “emotional bag(gage) check” would be a great domain name. I was sure it was taken. When I found that it was available, I decided I needed to make something with it.
Wired.co.uk: What are some of the most interesting things you’ve seen submitted to the site?
Overstreet: One thing that kind of surprises me is that as the site began getting visitors, most of the posts I saw seemed to be from teens. I’m not sure how it got to that community, but they’ve been really active. Also, I’m heartened by how personal people are willing to be, and how detailed. Even with a few sentences, many people are able to convey a story about what’s going on for them.
Wired.co.uk: Have you ever submitted anything to the site? What kind of response did you get?
Overstreet: Yes, of course! I submitted more when I was just getting the site off the ground, though. I got several songs I’d never heard before, which was great. I also got some kind words.
Wired.co.uk: The site is very compulsive — you feel a strong connection to the person you’re advising, or who advises you. To what extent do you think this is down to the use of music, rather than straight advice?
Overstreet: Hmm. I think maybe having to think of a song gives a context, a jumping-off point for giving someone advice or support. You’re not required to write anything along with the song you send, but trying to think of the perfect song gives you a chance to reflect on the person’s situation.
Wired.co.uk: Why did you pick Grooveshark to power it over, say, YouTube?
Overstreet: I picked Grooveshark largely because of their TinySong API — it is simple and has great search functionality. Also, Grooveshark gives songs a URL, which is something like Pandora doesn’t do. I did consider YouTube but that seemed like it would dilute the experience a little. I wanted the focus to be on songs. To keep it simple.
from Underwire
Nicholas Rougeux is building an approximation of a Menger sponge, a 3-D fractal shape with no volume and infinite surface area, out of Post-It notes.
It looks about 90% complete…but as a Menger sponge, can you ever really call it finished? (thx, zach)
Tags: fractals mathematics Menger sponge Nicholas Rougeux Post-It notes
from kottke.org
