Monday, February 14, 2011

Posted By on Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 1:45 PM

Your call...the adorable TV Squad recap of television's famous kisses and kissers:

or FilmDrunk's collection of the most disturbing filmed kisses of all time:

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Posted By on Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 11:07 AM

Truly, nothing is more romantic than Ralph Wiggum discussing a valentine he received, in French. It has a picture of a train, after all:

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Friday, February 11, 2011

Posted By on Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 3:01 PM

My favorite thing about the internet is that if you wait around long enough, someone will spend an extensive amount of time researching the answer to a question that you're too lazy to do the work to answer yourself. Today, that work has been done by Slate, as they dug through an archive of episodes of Jeopardy to find out what the most common categories, answers (well, questions), and Daily Double locations are.

Knowing what categories show up most frequently might be helpful in preparing for an appearance on the show. But let's get down to the clue level: What's the most common answer on Jeopardy? That would be "What is Australia?" That response appears in J-Archive 208 times, out of 197,736 total answers—to clues as diverse as "In terms of rainfall, it's the driest continent after Antarctica" and "The overarm 'crawl' swimming stroke was introduced to England in 1902 from this country." (For technical reasons, I'm only counting the first two rounds of Jeopardy in this analysis. Also note that while Google Refine helped group answers like "Burma (Myanmar)" and "Myanmar (or Burma)," idiosyncrasies among transcribers means that the answer-counts are inevitably imprecise.) In fact, thanks to the prominence of geography-related categories, the Top 23 answers are all places. (Click here for a list.) At No. 24: George Washington.

Of course, unless you plan on blurting out "What is Australia?" every time you hit the buzzer, it's more useful to know the top answers for the top categories. Eight of the 536 "Before & After" answers have cropped up twice, including "What is Beauty and the Beast of Burden?" "Who is Peppermint Patty Hearst?" and "Who is Babe Ruth Ginsburg?" (In 1998, the clue to this last one was "The Sultan of Swat makes it to the Supreme Court." In 2004: "Portly Yankee slugger who became a more svelte Supreme Court Justice.") In "Science," your best bet is "What is gravity?" (eight of 486 answers), followed by "What is hydrogen?" (seven) and "What are chromosomes?" (four). In "Literature," it's "What/who is Don Quixote?" (eight of 463). For "Sports," "What is golf?" (six of 344) is the most likely answer. If you're stumped on a "Bodies of Water" clue, it's most likely "What is Lake Victoria?" (seven of 316).

While we're discussing strategy, where's the best place on the board to find a Daily Double? Far from being randomly distributed, Daily Doubles are heavily concentrated at the bottom of the board. Of the roughly 10,000 such clues logged on J-Archive, 92 percent were in the bottom three (of five) rows. In fact, only two Daily Doubles in the archive ever appeared in the top-left corner, once in 1999 and then in 2003. The cell densest with Daily Doubles? Fourth from the top, far left—home to 834 of them, or 8 percent of the total.

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Thursday, February 10, 2011

Posted By on Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 4:31 PM

Five years ago today, Fox aired the last four episodes of Arrested Development on a Friday night. Against the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics. An shameful last rites for one of the greatest television comedies of all time.

Feel free to share your memories of the show in the comment section, but here's mine:

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Posted By on Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 4:00 PM

It's a cliche at this point to talk about TV shows that didn't the attention that it deserved, some mistakenly canceled work of genius that slipped under the popular radar. Arrested Development is the usual subject of these long-winded apologetics, but there's new moment for Party Down, a show that made it two seasons on Starz, a pay network you might not realize that you have.

Anyhow, the entire series starring Adam Scott (now of Parks & Recreation) and Jane Lynch (now of Glee) is available on Netflix Instant, so there's no excuse for you to skip it. Then, you should read the oral history presented by Details Magazine, and then you can complain to your friends about how unappreciated the show was too.

[Details]

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Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Posted By on Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 1:39 PM

I had 36 in the "Tucson Weekly 'How Many Times Will Bill O'Reilly Interrupt President Obama?' Office Pool". Honestly, I'm not sure what I was thinking, but 48? Bill O'Reilly, you've outdone yourself.

[Wonkette]

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Posted By on Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 11:45 AM

While I could not care less about Luke and Laura from General Hospital or Mrs. Chancellor from Young and the Restless, getting together all of Erica Kane's husbands on one stage might qualify as one of the television events of the year.

For your reference, here's Wikipedia's list of Erica Kane's marriages from All My Children, both valid and invalid (because her divorce to Adam Chandler hadn't actually been finalized at the time, obviously):

Jeffrey "Jeff" Martin (divorced) [1971-1974]
Phillip Brent (divorced) [1975-1976]
Thomas "Tom" Cudahy (annulled) [1978-1981]
Adam Chandler Sr. (invalid divorce) [1984-1992]
Michael "Mike" Roy (invalid) [1985]
Travis Montgomery (invalid; first time) [1987-1989]
Travis Montgomery (invalid; second time) [1990]
Adam Chandler Sr. (valid divorce) [1991-1992]
Dimitri Marick (divorced; first time) [1993-1994]
Dimitri Marick (divorced; second time) [1994-1996]
Jackson Montgomery (divorced) [2005-2007]

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Monday, February 7, 2011

Posted By on Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 4:30 PM

From Groupon's blog:

When we think about commercials that offend us, we think of those that glorify antisocial behavior — like the scores of Super Bowl ads that are built around the crass objectification of women. Unlike those ads, no one walks away from our commercials taking the causes we highlighted less seriously. Not a single person watched our ad and concluded that it’s cool to kill whales. In fact — and this is part of the reason we ran them — they have the opposite effect.

The firm that conceived the ad, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, strives to draw attention to the cultural tensions created by brands. When they created this Hulu ad, they highlighted the idea that TV rots your brain, making fun of Hulu. Our ads highlight the often trivial nature of stuff on Groupon when juxtaposed against bigger world issues, making fun of Groupon. Why make fun of ourselves? Because it’s different — ads are traditionally about shameless self promotion, and we’ve always strived to have a more honest and respectful conversation with our customers. We would never have run these ads if we thought they trivialized the causes — even if we didn’t take them as seriously as we do, what type of company would go out of their way to be so antagonistic?

We took this approach knowing that, if anything, they would bring more funding and support to the highlighted causes. That’s why organizations like Greenpeace, BuildOn, the Tibet Fund, and the Rainforest Action Network all decided to throw their support behind the campaign (read Greenpeace’s blog post here). In fact, the feedback led us to make changes to the end of our ads that further encourage our fundraising. To that point, if the ads affected you, we hope you’ll head over to SaveTheMoney.org and make a donation (which we’ll match) — we’re hoping to raise a lot of money.

The last thing we wanted was to offend our customers — it’s bad business and it’s not where our hearts are.

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Posted By on Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 3:55 PM

Barack Obama went on Fox News for an interview with Bill O'Reilly and this was the response from the network's official fan page:

no_tie.jpg

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Posted By on Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 11:31 AM

While there were a number of Super Bowl ads that were mystifying in a marketing sense, it was difficult to understand what the people at Groupon were thinking, connecting their brand to some sort of indifference to global issues in exchange for a passion for bargains. While that might be a largely accurate assessment of Americana, no one wants to be confronted by that during the Super Bowl, right?

It turns out Groupon isn't entirely indifferently evil, just terrible with their messaging, since they're connecting the ads to an attempt to raise money for the causes they mocked in their nationwide advertising on a website that wasn't referenced in the ad itself. Maybe should have just went with a cute ad with a kid and references to pop culture, Groupon, instead of spending a lot of money and making people mad. Live and learn.

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