Todd Stadler's blog

Site update

Some of you clever folk have already noticed some changes 'round these parts, but I figured I'd go ahead and make an official pronouncement for the slower kids.

In order to deal with an increasing amount of comment spam, I've installed a test for you humans that want to say something on my blog — you have to solve an equation. Or as Jason said, "Hahaha you make people do math to comment." Just so.

I'm under no pretenses that this will stop all comment spam, because within hours of my writing this new safeguard, I was massively spammed by a rather rude spambot from Poland or Russia or so (who was then blacklisted — oh, what a power rush that was!). But it'll probably cut back on some of the dumber spambots, and at the very least it will contribute to an increase in arithmetic literacy. So I'm doing my part for math.

That means those of you who are younger than six or haven't mastered basic addition (yes, you must learn to carry the one!) will just have to write me an e-mail if you have something to say.

And I know you young'ns have something to say, because you said it all over this entry. I have no idea why so many Raven-Symone fans possess the lethal twin attributes of rabidity and severe inattention to detail, but nonetheless they do, and I decided I'd had enough of their blathering all over that post in an attempt to find said ex-moppet's phone number or e-mail address. Which, by the way, is raven.symone@whitehouse.gov.

Anyhow, I realized that my home-brew blogging system needed a way to disable comments for particular entries. I'm normally not one to squelch the people's expression — let them eat cake and talk endlessly! — but it was a bit disheartening to see that so many of my recent comments were not so much from people who liked my blog or wanted to make some point as rather from Disney Channel zombies rising from their couch/grave to seek the phone number/brains of the ... uh ... hmm, that metaphor needs a little work.

And of course I have no doubt that I'll have to turn off comments on this very entry some day soon, as it contains such hot! hot! hot! keywords as "Raven Symone" and "phone number" and "e-mail address" (by the way, Raven's double-secret e-mail address is raven@wiretapping.fbi.gov, but she asked me not to tell too many people where she's working now).

Finally, in response to many people's requests (both of them!), plus my own accumulated guilt, I have finally added a feed for the Cockahoop blog. You might be tempted to call it an RSS feed, but technically, it's an Atom 1.0 feed. I can feel your eyes glazing over. It should work with whatever feed-reader you use, but if it doesn't, please let me know in the comments.

What's nice about this is that you no longer have to wait days and days and days for your favorite Cockahoop content. Well, actually you do, but you no longer have to spend those days or weeks on end continually hitting the refresh button on your browser while looking at this here blog. You know you were doing that.

Now, through the miracle of push technology, Cockahoop content can be delivered fresh to your computer whenever I finally get around to making some. And now it can be read while piping-hot new, instead of the annoyingly room-temperature way you used to read it. Truly, the future is now!

Now I just need to give this blog an actual design, allow for tagging, perhaps change the canonical URL, bring old entries up to the current formats, finish all those entries I've started, and finish all the non-blog content for Cockahoop that I have lying around in various partially-completed states, and I'll be done. Pardon our dust!

Today I made a car commercial

So Chevrolet* decided it would be a good idea to let people make their own commercials for their truck, the Tahoe*.

They give you a series of clips of the truck driving this way and that, powering up sand dunes and mountains, perched on impossibly tall peaks (is it really manly if you have to get there by helicopter?), seats folding (man, there are a lot of clips of seats folding!), and various other bits of car porn. You can overlay text on these clips or on one of three colored screens.

And, of course, you're allowed to pick one instrumental soundtrack from among the following: "I M Hip N Urban" by Not Britney Spears, "Loco Mexicano" by Not Herb Alpert (for those light 'n' zany spots), "Rokkin' My Testosterone" by Not Linkin Park, "Rokkin' My Testosterone (Mixed Demographic Funk Mix)" by Not Linkin Park, "Maudlin, Yet Wealthy" by Not Portishead, and several lame songs whose genre can only be defined as "only found in car commercials you didn't pay attention to anyway". For those of you visiting the commercial-making site, those would be tracks 01, 04, 05, 07, and 06, respectively.

The first thing that occurred to me upon seeing this collection of truck clips, tunes, and text was, "Hey, I bet this is the same tool that they use to make the real truck commercials on TV!"

I mean, really, have you seen an interesting truck commercial lately? (Full disclosure: I haven't had a TV in my house for over half a year, so maybe the ads have gotten really interesting lately — maybe.) It's always just a bunch of clips of trucks doing manly things, with a few video "bones" thrown to non-manly people by way of showing the truck holding lots of people or not running over old ladies or something. Plus, of course, a demographic-appropriate musical soundtrack.

The second thing that occurred to me upon seeing this commercial-making toolkit — and this occurred to every other blogger on the planet as well, whether or not they admit or remember it — was, "How can I use this for my own entertainment, to make the funny, and possibly to mock Chevrolet* in the process?"

I mean, it wouldn't be the internet if that didn't happen.

As such, I present to you below the commercials I made. I have no idea how long my particular movies will remain saved on their servers, given that they're not serious entries in Chevrolet's* commercial-making contest. So I'll show stills from my ads below — you can get the idea from them — but you really should follow the links to see the ads while you can. Because, really, it's all about the bumpin' soundtrack.

Ad #1: "Obligatory SUV Joke"

View "Obligatory SUV Joke" on ChevyApprentice.com.

Oh, like you didn't see that one coming. What's odd is I have the sneaking suspicion that a real truck commercial has already played off these Sound of Music lyrics, ironically juxtaposing something so girly-girl with something so imposingly manly. Oh, the manliness!

Ad #2: "Head Like a Tahoe"

View "Head Like a Tahoe" on ChevyApprentice.com.

I'm not a Nine Inch Nails fanatic or anything, and I certainly don't agree with the lyrics of "Head Like a Hole" as a prescription for good attitude, but I think the nihilistic words do make for an interesting juxtaposition with car commercial schlock. What I particularly like is how the lyrics seem entirely wrong for the setting, and yet, the more you think about it, the more aptly they describe the truck-buying subtext of many commercials. I also like how there were lots of clips of seats "bowing down" to choose from.

Ad #3: "Rock My Interior"

View "Rock My Interior" on ChevyApprentice.com.

This one was probably my favorite. It's the un-commercial. Not once do you see the car's exterior. Just seats, seats, seats! And yet, the soundtrack tells you that these are the most gutsy, mountain-climbing, "I will tear this bicycle to pieces using my bare hands and then eat it all!!" seats you will ever be priveleged to experience. Lots of 'em. Oh, and you get a radio, too.

*Fine, yes, I'm shilling for Chevrolet. Oh, I did my best to make commercials that didn't put Chevrolet in a good light, that wouldn't sell the car, but in this day of irony, double-irony, and double-dog-irony with a cherry on top, there's no denying that I'm still doing Chevrolet's bidding by talking about them and linking to their site and creating interest in their products. No such thing as bad publicity and all that. And as insidious as marketers are these days, I'd even believe that the folks behind the make-a-commercial Web site imagined that people like me would do this. I mean, think about it — who gets excited about making a car commercial like the ones on TV? Ah, but who gets excited about "subverting the system" to make ads to send to their friends who normally hate car commercials? Cynical? Paranoid? Probably. But such are the thoughts one has when having too much fun wasting too much time on a corporate Web site, and then telling his friends all about said site. It's the guilt talking. Also, yes, I'm committed to calling them Chevrolet, and not this Chevy nonsense. I'm well aware that they'd rather not have you red-white-and-blue-blooded Americans think of them as having a fancy French name. Ooh, I'm so cantankerous!

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Sometimes I feel like a bad webmaster. In fact, sometimes I barely feel like I merit the title of webmaster. Webapprentice, maybe. Webjourneyman, tops.

I mean, look at this place! It doesn't look so much designed as thrown together in a disjoint series of late-night hack sessions driven more by a desire to try out this or that technology than present a well-crafted Web site. I mean, I'm not saying that's what happened in this case, but that's the impression one gets from looking at the site, right? Okay fine, that's what happened in this case. So sue me.

What's my point? This: that as lazy as I can get about designing/creating content for/redesigning/making feeds for my own Web site, at least I add titles to all my pages.

No really, what's my point? Simply that there are lots of people out there who don't add titles to their Web pages.

More specifically, as of this writing, Google found 2,380,000 pages that have "Welcome to Adobe GoLive" in the title (for you HTML fans out there, that's the <title> I'm talking about).

And that makes me giggle. It's the webmaster equivalent of accidentally leaving the tags on your clothes, perhaps, or trying to eat a tamale without taking off the corn husk first. All lovingly preserved in the Google amber, of course.

And just to show that Dreamweaver is the more popular Web development tool, Google also found 81,900,000 Web pages with "Untitled Document" — Dreamweaver's default — in the title. Never mind the mind-blowing logic loop created by having a document titled "Untitled Document".

I think this only goes to show how superior the Web is to, say, paper. I mean, 30 or 40 years ago, this entry wouldn't have been as funny, with me typing up an article on how some people who use IBM Selectrics forget to title their documents. Not funny, right? Score one for the Web.

Billy Grippo: a reponse

Driving home tonight with Beeman and Kirsten, we passed by a billboard that said in very large letters, "Billy Grippo".

Well, you don't just pass your eyes on by when you see a name like that in letters that big, plus we were waiting for the light to change, so we read the rest of the billboard. It contained the following phrases, in order: "Top Eastside Producer", "Multi-Million $ Services". And maybe a phone number or something.

I don't know who Billy Grippo is or what exactly it is that he does, but the three of us came up with this script for a commercial or something. He's free to use it, if he happens to come across this page. Or perhaps one of you Gripponauts could pass it on to him.

Man: Hey, I'd like some services.

Billy Grippo: I offer services.

Man: How much are your services?

Billy Grippo: Multi-million dollars.

Man: [Startled at the price] Oh, wow! But your services ... they're the best?

Billy Grippo: I'm the top producer! ...

Man: Really?

Billy Grippo: Okay, top Eastside producer.

Man: But all the way to the river, right?

Billy Grippo: Yes. I'm the top producer in that zone. Okay, maybe not around Mt. Tabor, but other than that ...

Man: Multi-million dollars?

Billy Grippo: Yes sir.

And that's when the jingle would play. It would be one of those strangely upbeat songs dense with harmony and synth horns, and it's lyrics would be a recapitulation of the billboard text: "Billy Grippo! / Top Eastside producer! / Multi-million dollar services!"

The glass of propaganda is half-full

First, I've really been trying not to write any political entries. There are more than enough political blogs out there to waste everyone's time, and I don't need to add to the opinion-spewing.

So why this entry? I'll tell you why: it was an opportunity for Photoshopped cheap shots. I mean, come on.

That said, the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, Iraq stood out amid the normal bad Iraq news as something rather ominous. Lots of people seem to think it could be the thing that incites a full-blown civil war.

So it was with some surprise that I saw that the Fox News coverage of the bombing included the caption "All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?", as well as the video still below.

To be fair, I don't know the context of that caption — all I have to go on are the video stills. On the one hand, it could be that Fox News is taking a pro-Bush position. But on the other hand, maybe they're simply taking an anti-Arab stand. Hard to say.

So I decided to look back at how Fox News covered other major tragedies of the past to see if it would help me understand where they're coming from. Luckily, I have a library of video stills from Fox News going way back.

Here's one from a few years ago:

And here's another one I found from the 70s:

And here's a still of one of the first Fox News broadcasts ever:

I jest, of course. But really, if imminent civil war in Iraq can make Fox dream up a caption like the one (way) above, causing me to Photoshop together whatever images I can Google for in a couple of hours, and thereby amusing you ... well don't we all have to admit that there is an upside to said civil war?

And I bet that, somewhere in Iraq, a lot of Iraqis are agreeing.