If you’d like some amusing background noise to help you finish off the final hours of the Friday workday, you might want to play this 3.5 hour ad featuring Andy Daly reading all insults directed toward Laphroaig single malt whiskey from its #OpinionsWelcome campaign on Twitter. I’m amazed it even got green-lighted:
Laphroaig isn’t for everyone. If all your preference is for Glenlivet, Laphroaig is on the other end of the whisky flavor map, which is probably why a number of people liken it to tasting like “a burning hospital”:
“Trumpism stunned America with its exhibition of a substantial, revanchist slice of white working class voters who experience politics as a zero-sum game — a group that would rather burn the house down than witness the economic and cultural ascendancy of other identities.”
Of course, the practice of appropriating or big footing an identity slogan like “Black Lives Matter,” especially to trash it, is an automatic fuck you. What makes a phrase like this so scintillating to the haters, and so toxic to everyone else, however, has to do with every other meaning it dredges up. The first and most inflammatory one that comes up for me is the most literal one. That’s the reference to (or “the matter of”) guns out there in the hands of blacks. Along those lines, it incorporates the racist stereotype of violent black dudes and how the white man, with his family to protect, can’t just sit there idle. … As if “WHITE GUNS DON’T.”
…and covered to great effect in the opening sequence of Adam Sandler’s 1998 film, The Wedding Singer:
Dead or Alive tunes found their way onto many a mixtape that got played in the Deathmoble — my car of that era, a Volvo 245 DL station wagon, named after the car in Animal House — like the one pictured below:
This isn’t my car from the ’80s, but it could be its stunt double.
Again, not my car’s interior, but very, very close.
I’ll close this Pete Burns tribute with another favorite from Youthquake — In Too Deep.Requiescat in pace, Pete, and thanks for all the tunes.
Yours Truly, stopping to admire the West Virginia scenery while moving to Tampa
(and yes, I still own that jacket).
Click the photo to see all this America at full size.
In the midst of a bitter, divisive, and surreal election season, the Toronto-based creative agency The Garden Collective have come up with an idea that feels like a breath of fresh air: a campaign for Canadians to tell America how great it is.
The idea behind the Let’s Tell America It’s Great campaign is simple: America could use some cheering up right now, so why not rally Canadians, the people who make up America’s neighbour (note the Canadian spelling) and largest and most trustworthy trading partner, to send it some love?
They created this video and told their fellow Canucks to do the same:
In their campaign, they also us to to post tweets with the #tellamericaitsgreat hashtag. Here’s a sampling:
Your declaration of independence is one of the most beautiful documents ever written. #tellamericaitsgreat
Speaking as a Canadian who was born in the Philippines and now living in the U.S., here are the reasons why I think America’s great:
Star Wars and Star Trek!
Creating not just the industries in which I’ve worked — computers, telecommunications, software, the internet, e-commerce, RFID, the internet of things — but also the job that I do: technology evangelism. And let’s not forget giants, from the originals like IBM, Unisys, and Honeywell, to Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and Oracle, to the scrappy startup cultures of Route 128 and Silicon Valley.
Only in America could both the piano accordion (everywhere else, they used button accordions) and Weird Al rise to greatness.
The “can do” attitude that underlies America’s official philosophy — “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — as well as the unofficial one — “Hold my beer. I’ve got this.”
Let’s not forget this American ideal:
And finally, what I love most about America: Anitra.
