Comcast: Stinky Tactics

I got an e-mail with a video link from Tim Carr, campaign director at savetheinternet.com this morning.

We just caught Comcast Corp. stacking an FCC hearing with paid (and apparently sleepy) seat-fillers.

The hearing was set up to investigate Comcast’s recent blocking of the Internet. But Comcast packed the room so that the public couldn’t get in to voice their support for Net Neutrality.

We took pictures and recorded an interview that proves Comcast was taking seats from concerned citizens. Now, we need you to make sure that the company doesn’t get away with this ever again.

Busted: Psycho Dog People

Dog-filth suspects were investigated last year

The women accused of serially trashing rental homes by packing them with unsupervised pets received a visit from BSO and DCF after neighbors complained of smelling dog feces last year.

A year before Broward sheriff’s deputies arrested a mother and her daughter on charges they wrecked rental homes with more than five dozen unwalked, unkempt dogs, authorities got a whiff of their scent.

On Feb. 8, 2007, a BSO deputy accompanied a Department of Children & Families investigator to the Oakland Park residence of Ann Centofanti and Ann Hesse-Centofanti for an elderly abuse investigation.

Neighbors of the Centofantis had expressed concern for the well-being of Lucy Centofanti, the family matriarch. Neighbors had not seen her in months.

Those neighbors also complained of a strong smell of dog feces coming from the home at 3475 NW 17th Ter., according to a police report.

Investigators found four dogs, some foul odor, a frail grandmother — but no sign of foul play.

In the next 12 months, the family went through at least three other homes, two of which needed to be completely gutted, and their pooch collection topped out at 63 before they called it quits, according to neighbors, landlords and the Broward Sheriff’s Office.

Earlier this week, they abandoned 46 dogs and three cats at an Oakland Park rental home that was so filled with waste deputies needed to wear hazmat suits to enter, BSO said.

Read the entire article, watch video, etc.

Smells like Avril® Lavigne

Between an Avril® line of personal care products and Leslie Feist’s lucrative fornication with Apple®, Inc., Canada is going to get a reputation for producing money-grubbing popsters.

Eau de Avril in the works?

From Canoe-Jam

….Documents filed last month with the United States Patent and Trademark Office say the singer wants exclusive rights to her own name when it comes to products including fragrances, aftershave, bath soap, body lotion and talc

The move has got blogs and fan sites wondering about a possible product line….

Ass Effects

I just saw an advertisement for this particular prescription medication on TV. I wasn’t watching television at the time, but I kept hearing the words “Ass Effects” being repeated by this masculine, basso-profundo voice in the family room.

Aciphex: an example of the funny things
that can happen in corporate committees?

FYI, this is another in the class of “proton-pump inhibitors,” used for treating persistent heartburn, acid reflux, etc. Others are Prevacid, Protonix, Nexium, etc.

With a name like that, it could almost be an anti-flatulence medicine.

Charmed, I’m Sure

Having watched a few episodes of Adult Swim’s Metalocalypse, I find the following quite amusing, in a lowbrow sort of way.

Oh – and I think it stinks, too. Putrid. Almost entirely without redeeming artistic or social merit. But, then, I’m a product of my generation, having been born at the tail-end of the baby boomers. I can’t quite get my head around the concept of “the worse it is, the better.” I’m just not “progressive” enough, I guess.

Mind you, grim things can be artistic. And there’s no questioning that the following is art. It’s just not good art. It has no nuance, no subtlety. It’s garish, gratuitous, and sophomoric. And that’s what makes it “good.” That’s the standard to which it aspires.

And to think that my parents thought that Alice Cooper was the Devil.

SPLATTERED MERMAIDS, the Swedish death/grind band featuring members of DERANGED and VISCERAL BLEEDING, has issued the following update:

“The new SPLATTERED MERMAIDS album, ‘Stench of Flesh’, is complete! Listen to one new song and view cover artwork exclusively on MySpace.

“The album was recorded in early January 2008 and has 10 songs (including one instrumental track and a re-recorded version of ‘By My Blade’). To be released via Czech label Bizarre Leprous Productions [on] March 15, 2008.”

According to a press release, the CD “[is] brutal as hell” featuring “straight-forward deathgrind combined with groovy breakdowns and guttural vocals… the band’s most brutal album to date!!” Other songtitles set to appear on the CD include “Gruesome”, “Circular Holes in the Cranial Structure”, “Corporal Manifestation”, “Spliced Spleen Spices”, “Throat Unsafe from a Pair of Scissors” and “Stench of Flesh”. (source)

Adding to my amusement is the hosting website’s administrative statement, immediately following the above: “to report any abusive, obscene, defamatory, racist, homophobic or threatening comments, or anything that may violate any applicable laws, please send an e-mail to…”

Smells like hurl: Cloverfield

Monster movies aren’t really my shtick, unless they happen to be cheesy “B” monster movies that make me laugh, or something like Jurassic Park, which at least has a sort of scientific edge to it, if an implausible one. So, the Cloverfield trailers that appeared on TV a while back did not move me.

Something about the storyline turned me off: a group of trendy young people from New York flee an impossible, gargantuan lizard. Too deep for me.

Worse yet (or “better yet” in the view of many), much of the production was filmed with a camcorder (“reality” cinema, you know), generating lots of deliberately herky-jerky, topsy-turvy footage. Think: The Blair Witch Project Meets Godzilla. Or maybe Godzilla meets the Tilt-a-Whirl.

I can feel that larcenous, piss-injected popcorn coming up, just thinking about it.

In all fairness, maybe it’s a great movie.* If you like that sort of thing. However, it seems that Cloverfield has been inducing genuine nausea in some people – a result of the “dynamic” nature of the “cinematography.” So, if you should go to see the big lizard chasing the hipsters and generally making a mess of New York, despite the proliferation across this nation of high performance military jet-aircraft with tactical weapons capable of leveling buildings of steel-reinforced concrete…AND, should you catch a whiff of street pizza in the theater (or maybe those banana-scented crystals like the janitor in grade school used to deoderize kid-barf loci), you’ll know just what happened.

Let’s hope it doesn’t happen to you. If you like disorienting carnival rides that possibly stink of vomit, you’ll probably be fine going to see Cloverfield.

Some viewers finding ‘Cloverfield’ nauseating to watch

Thousands of moviegoers were no doubt clutching their seats while watching Cloverfield, last weekend’s No. 1 film at the box office. A few of them were clutching their stomachs as well.

Since the movie opened Jan. 18, some patrons say they felt nausea and dizziness while watching the horror flick, much of which was filmed in a jerky motion with a hand-held camera.

Erika Hasegawa, 32, was watching Cloverfield at a theater in Los Angeles on Tuesday night but had to leave in the middle of the film.

“I’m really nauseous right now — just hold on for a second,” she said, before walking down the hall and retching in a trash can….

Read the entire article

“Hey, it’s a big freaky monster – where’s yer camcorder?”

*Probably not

Starbucks corporate analysts: sausage on a roll stinks like a dead dog

I like coffee, a lot. I drink it every day, all day. But as it is with so many other things here in post-millenium America, a lot of people can’t be satisfied just enjoying a cup of good coffee. They have to turn it into a culture and yammer on about “bouquet” or “citrus overtones,” shell out tips equivalent to the price of their beverage, and tap their foot in 4/4 time to the 5/4 time signature coming out of the sound system.

And what a bunch of smelly, nouveau-rich, pop-culture mock-elitist bullshit the article below is. You’d think that a breakfast sandwich was on par with ass, to warrant a position as shallow as this.

As for “atmosphere” – well, Starbucks, Inc., I like your coffee, but I find it virtually impossible to either read or chat with free-form jazz blaring out of the speaker over my head. I know another writer who routinely goes to McDonald’s for his personal “coffee/idea sessions,” specifically to avoid the distracting nature of the Starbucks “atmosphere.”

Irony of ironies, that worldly philosophers, painters, and writers of a bygone day, if brought to the present, might choose somewhere other than Starbucks to hatch their world-shattering ideas (there’s a short story in that – go ahead and use it). Possibly even because they couldn’t get sausage on a roll, there.

Starbucks: Ooh, That Smell

What’s that smell!?

If that is what you were thinking when you walked into a Starbucks recently you are not alone. Analysts agreed on Thursday that the smell of warm breakfast sandwiches is causing a major brand crisis for the coffee giant.

“The warming breakfast aroma is its biggest problem, overwhelming the coffee aroma that Starbucks views as critical to its experience,” said Bear Stearns analyst Joseph Buckley.

Added JPMorgan analsyt John Ivankoe: “We will welcome the removal of this food … because in certain cases the stores did in fact smell like cooked processed food, and not at all like coffee….”

Read the complete story