The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Eduard Khil, better known to the internet at large as “The Trololo Guy”, is said to have suffered a stroke and irreversible brain damage and is now in a coma. The video of a performance from decades ago, performed in a vocal-less style called vocaliz took the ‘net by storm and inspired a number of homages and parodies, including this one from Family Guy:

as well as this one by Christophe Waltz, done around the time he took the Oscar for Inglourious Basterds:

He enjoyed the parodies…

…and he even invited people to come up with actual lyrics for the “Trololo” song, whose actual name translates to I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home:

Here’s a recent performance of the song that made him an internet sensation:

Remember this great moment from the 1992 Presidential campaign with Dan Quayle?

Naturally, Quayle’s memoirs say that he was relying on cards provided by the school for the spelling of the word “potato”. They purportedly misspelled the word as “potatoe”, and while he had an inkling that something was amiss, he decided to trust the school’s incorrect written materials. (If this is true, it explains a helluva lot about the invasion of Iraq to capture those WMDs.)

The Romney campaign is dealing with a similar gaffe. The With Mitt app, which is still available in its uncorrected form as of this writing, lets you use your iPhone to take pictures with overlays bearing pro-Mitt Romney slogans such as “Day One, Job One”, “I’m with Mitt”, “Obama isn’t working” and so on. Normally, it would get buzz from Republican-leaning voters and the usual pro-Republican sites and the sorts of people who think FOX News is real, but thanks to a traitorous typo, it’s getting a lot of buzz in places where you’d normally see Mitt mocked (this blog included).

The problem is that one of the overlays — meant to say “A Better America” — actually says “A Better Amercia“. Here’s a self portrait I took with said overlay:

That’s right, Mitt’s app has the word America — quite possibly the most important word after “God” in any God-fearing American’s lexicon — misspelled. Had the Obama campaign done this with an app, you’d be hearing calls on FOX News right now for execution for treason.

Let this be a reminder to app developers: have someone double-check the spelling on the text and graphics of your apps! The developers behind the With Mitt app have their work cut out for them to fix their rep.

As Vanity Fair reports, the app is actually quite fun in spite of its association with Mitt Romney. The slogans are so easily subverted and will provide me tons of photographic fun, which I’ll share from time to time here on the Accordion Guy blog:

The accordion: Day one, job one!

The “I’m with Mitt” word bubble offers endless comic opportunities that would make the Romney campaign soil their special Mormon underwear. I’m thinking Mexican donkey show.

Yup, those are my feet in the foreground, and that’s Clearwater Beach in the background. I took this photo yesterday, when most of you were at work.

I’m taking a break from work to relax, recharge, recalibrate and even retool, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t already have a couple of irons in the fire. I’m taking a few calls from interested employers and partners or their representatives, I’m still actively blogging (especially on Global Nerdy, my tech blog), and starting today, I’m teaching myself iOS programming. I realize that not everyone can pick up and run off to Florida, crash at a pretty blonde’s house, tour about, hit the beach, use her swimming pool and self-train on a valuable skill — but I can, and I’d be a fool not to pass up the opportunity.

My last job was at Shopify, a very design-oriented company. Naturally, they had a very well-designed business card template. Here’s what my Shopify business card looked like:

Only the title and email address on the card are invalid, but I still need to create new non-company ones just for me. Seeing as I’m coasting on savings, advertising revenue from the blogs and what I like to call “ill-gotten gains” (Microsoft stock), I think I’m going to opt for the inexpensive route. Still, it doesn’t hurt to look to others’ business cards for inspiration, especially the really creative ones featured on Bored Panda, some of which I’ve posted below.

The ones above are for Levin Tahmaz, personal trainer. His business is quite cleverly summarized in his business card.

The business cards for the Surrey, BC deli restaurant La Charcuterie look like their products.

Gangavan is a secondhand shop, so why shouldn’t they have secondhand business cards?

Heh heh heh. Oops — I meant to say: I completely and categorically do not get the joke in this business card.

The clever design in this designer’s business card ensures that you’ll be holding it up in front of you, where you can read his name, many, many times.

For more imaginatively-designed business cards, see Bored Panda’s articles:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

 

It’s a pretty impressive catalogue of every overused line from major motion pictures and tv shows with even a slight bent towards science fiction. He even manages to slip in a joke about Tampa, Florida near the end.

Here’s one way to handle a negative review on Yelp.

Found via Happyplace.com.