Patrick Kennedy

Welcome back to Ads Sarah Has Seen 81,459 Times Thanks To Live Sports And The Contempt Their Familiarity Hath Bred Theater.

Today's installment concerns a selection from the "sing the State Farm jingle, get rescued via teleportation by your SF agent" campaign -- a successful and not-per-se-irritating set of ads, in fact. We've been seeing these guys for a couple of years now, I believe, with the occasional new entry (the one with the agent appearing in the back seat, then pulling a "YIKES let's go to my office [bink!]"), and it's a cute, well-executed idea that wears fairly well, at least relative to the GEICO "everybody knows that" collection.

But this one annoyed me from the very first time I saw it. It doesn't always air with the "you're not helping" part -- sometimes Jimmy "merely" rolls his eyes at his mom -- but let's review, which you and I really don't need to do but apparently the State Farm creatives do, why Jimmy's whole attitude towards his mom is obnoxious.

• Based on the "I'm sorry" in the very first frames of the spot, the fender-bender, while not serious, is Jimmy's fault.
• Kevin, the other driver, has State Farm, and by singing the jingle can produce the friendly Melinda to deal with his claim. Presumably, in this universe, State Farm employees expect to blink in and out of various venues with their clipboards and this doesn't impinge on their daily lives in any way. Jimmy does not have State Farm, so whomever he summons with his tuneless singing is probably NOT expecting to wind up in the desert without so much as a by-your-leave. While Jimmy's mom doesn't seem to mind -- if this is how he talks to her here, she's probably used to providing clerical support to her adult son and getting zero thanks for it -- it's still an objective inconvenience. Jimmy doesn't apologize.
• Not only does he not apologize; he's openly irritated/embarrassed by her! "You're not helping," he selfishly cringes when she reports that there are "six callers ahead of us." Bro: she is WAITING ON HOLD FOR YOUR ASS. In, did I mention, the desert. Where you teleported her. Jimmy Jr. at least has the grace to act excited to see his grandmother; Jimmy's all, "Yeah, I...see who it is." Do you? Because what I see is a lady who's doing you a solid with some telephone bureaucracy when she could be dusting her doll collection.

And yes, that's the point of the ad, to an extent, but for whatever reason, it's off-putting here in a way that it isn't when, say, that lady is shopping with her friend and doesn't get a payout, and is grabbing pathetically at the dollar the creepy fisherman attached to a hook. Poor Jimmy's mom is just trying to help, and he can do the bare minimum politeness-wise, or she can hand him the receiver and play paddleball on the shoulder with Jimmy Jr. until the tow truck arrives while Jimmy waits on hold his own damn self.

Free Jimmy's Mother appeared first on Previously.TV.

Listen up, team: When Cards Against Humanity says it is selling you bullshit, take that at face value.

On Black Friday, the party game deviants swapped out their online storefront with a promotion offering "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy some new bullshit." That meant actual bovine crap, as tumblr user veggiebit quickly discovered.

Here's his email to Cards Against Humanity. Polygon reached out to CAH which, untrustworthy as they are, swore this email exchange is 100 percent legitimate.

Here's CAH's reply:

CAH is curating a greatest-hits of buyer's remorse, you can read loads more here. Look, they warned you. Here is the FAQ from the Black Friday prank:

Are you selling any of your normal products today? No.

Is...

Continue reading…

Fried stuffing bites? Turkey ramen? Let our exclusive infographic guide you through getting creative with your excess holiday foodstuffs.

The aftermath of any decent Thanksgiving meal is replete with more than enough uneaten food for a second (or third, or fourth) meal. This year, get a little more innovative with your Thanksgiving leftovers than open-faced turkey sandwiches. Snap yourself out of your post-feast foodie haze and check out some of the more ambitious culinary projects you could be undertaking with that half-eaten poultry leg and the huge bowl of mashed potatoes in the fridge. A big bowl of turkey ramen, maybe? Some potato gnocchi? Fried stuffing bites? Pie fries? Your Turkey Day weekend will never be the same. —Shaunacy Ferro

Read Full Story

Lauren Ipsum is a book about computer science for kids (age 10 and up) published by No Starch Press.

Meet Lauren, an adventurer who knows all about solving problems. But she's lost in the fantastical world of Userland, where mail is delivered by daemons and packs of wild jargon roam.

Lauren sets out for home, traveling through a journey of puzzles, from the Push and Pop Cafe to the Garden of the Forking Paths. As she discovers the secrets of Userland, Lauren learns about computer science without even realizing it-and so do you!

Sounds intriguing. And 1000 bonus points for making the protagonist a girl. There's an older self-published version of the book that's been out for a couple of years. I like the older description slightly better:

Laurie is lost in Userland. She knows where she is, or where she's going, but maybe not at the same time. The only way out is through Jargon-infested swamps, gates guarded by perfect logic, and the perils of breakfast time at the Philosopher's Diner. With just her wits and the help of a lizard who thinks he's a dinosaur, Laurie has to find her own way home.

Lauren Ipsum is a children's story about computer science. In 20 chapters she encounters dozens of ideas from timing attacks to algorithm design, the subtle power of names, and how to get a fair flip out of even the most unfair coin.

Has anyone read it?

At Reddit, a user called Cabbagetroll posted a very short summary of the Bible.

GENESIS
God: All right, you two, don't do the one thing. Other than that, have fun.
Adam & Eve: Okay.
Satan: You should do the thing.
Adam & Eve: Okay.
God: What happened!?
Adam & Eve: We did the thing.
God: Guys

THE REST OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
God: You are my people, and you should not do the things.
People: We won't do the things.
God: Good.
People: We did the things.
God: Guys

(via @mkonnikova)

A Candle Based on Gestapo Agent Toht’s Gory Face-Melting Scene From ‘Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark’

Mesut Ozil’s season suffered a huge setback before it had even really begun, suffering knee ligament damage just a few games into the season.

After the initial diagnosis of that injury had ruled him out until the New Year, it was then considerably reduced by several weeks, with hopes he’d be back for mid-December.

It’s changed again, however, as Ozil confirmed it’ll be another seven weeks before he’s back in action, which pretty much takes him through to New Years’ Day, give or take a day or two.

Speaking at the Laureus Award event, Ozil said:

”I have already been out for five weeks and will be out for another seven weeks.

“That is a really long time but that is the way it is in football sometimes. My head is held high and we look forward

(Via Mirror)

Thanks to some incredible timing with the graphics, Jogi Low looked like he had binoculars on during Germany’s 1-0 win over Spain on Tuesday night.

Real Madrid star Toni Kroos earned the World Cup winners victory with an 89th minute strike against La Roja.

Click here to see highlights of Spain 0 – Germany 1.

Skateboarders Perform High Speed Street Tricks Inside New York City Subway Stations and Cars

At Serious Eats, Kenji López-Alt sets the record straight about some misconceptions people have about cast iron pans.

The Theory: Seasoning is a thin layer of oil that coats the inside of your skillet. Soap is designed to remove oil, therefore soap will damage your seasoning.

The Reality: Seasoning is actually not a thin layer of oil, it's a thin layer of polymerized oil, a key distinction. In a properly seasoned cast iron pan, one that has been rubbed with oil and heated repeatedly, the oil has already broken down into a plastic-like substance that has bonded to the surface of the metal. This is what gives well-seasoned cast iron its non-stick properties, and as the material is no longer actually an oil, the surfactants in dish soap should not affect it. Go ahead and soap it up and scrub it out.

I have two cast iron pans, including this skillet I use almost exclusively for making the world's best pancakes. Although, after hearing from Kenji that vintage cast iron pans can be slight better than modern pans, I might seek a replacement on Etsy. See also how to season a cast iron pan.

Clever Parrot Does an Impression of Matthew McConaughey’s Signature ‘Alright, Alright, Alright’ Line

Who wouldn't want Jaromir Jagr to live on for eternity in the form of a "confection consisting primarily of sugar or honey and almond meal, sometimes augmented with almond oil or extract."

That is the Wikipedia entry on marzipan, which is the subject to of the latest tribute to our favorite formerly mulleted active hockey legend. The photo below is a statue of Jagr based in Tabor, Czech Republic. 

In Tabor, Czech Rep., there is a statue of Jaromir Jagr made of marzipan #Legend @NHLDevils pic.twitter.com/B7FTH9XsK7

— Tereza Novotná (@TerezaNovotna) November 12, 2014

What comes to mind when one sees this besides, sweetness? Maybe yummy? If the maker of this statue wanted the New Jersey Devils forward to last for forever, maybe he would have made it with something other than candy?

Either way, wax or bronze are too boring. This is much better. 

MORE NHL COVERAGE ON YAHOO SPORTS

“Weird Al” Yankovic only starred in one film, a box-office flop that became a cult hit. In conjunction with the 25th-anniversary Blu-ray release, key players talk about the film’s odd path to cult-classic status.

CNN always puts extra effort into its coverage for Election Day, but last night the network eschewed technological wizardry such as holograms and went with a relatively sedate visual: a wall of 24 correspondents reporting from cities and candidate headquarters around the country.

Luckily for us, that still worked perfectly as fodder for the internet parody machine. CollegeHumor's Dan Hopper turned CNN's video board into a character select screen straight out of a Mortal Kombat game, complete with three spaces for unlockable fighters. Our money's on Soledad O'Brien, who's now covering topics such as eSports for HBO's Real Sports.

Wow. CNN really going all-out: pic.twitter.com/Gvr3HaccmH

— Dan Hopper (@DanHopp) November 4, 2014

...

Continue reading…

Yeah. We tried to stick to physical bars here, with one notable exception; overall, this experience was way less contentious staff-wise than that whole superheroes thing. RIP Bar None. This supersedes any previous rankings . Thank you for your time.

Read more...

John Reed thinks his grandma poisoned a number of her relatives over many years. Maybe.

But here's the thing: You don't want to believe your grandmother is poisoning you. You know that she loves you -- there's no doubt of that -- and she's so marvelously grandmotherly and charming. And you know that she would never want to poison you. So despite your better judgment, you eat the food until you've passed out so many times that you can't keep doubting yourself. Eventually, we would arrive for holidays at Grandma's with groceries and takeout, and she'd seem relieved that we wouldn't let her touch our plates. By then, her eyesight was starting to go, so she wouldn't notice the layer of crystalline powder atop that fancy lox she was giving you.

So the question became: How did we explain to guests, outsiders, that they shouldn't eat grandma's food? One time, maybe on Passover, my brother brought his new girlfriend, an actress. Grandma had promised not to prepare anything, and it seemed she'd kept her word, so we didn't mention the poisoning thing to the girlfriend, but after we'd eaten lunch, Grandma came out of the kitchen with these oatmeal raisin cookies that looked terrible. They were bulbous, like the baking soda had gone haywire. My brother's girlfriend ate two of them, maybe out of politeness. We looked on, aghast. She had a rehearsal in the city, but she passed out on the couch and missed it.

Adults Act Out the Audio of Two Kids Trick-or-Treating

Each week, the ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ industry observes a sacred ritual: Together, but not quite in sync, dozens of websites embed and then post the longest segment from John Oliver's HBO show, Last Week Tonight. This video is made available by HBO shortly after the show airs—this week's, about the sugar industry, is timestamped October 26th.

That John Oliver's weekly video(s) will go viral is, at this time, a given. Whether or not the posts that embed those videos will go viral is another matter altogether. Each time around there are winners, losers, and mere participants. Here's what happened this week.

(For links to each of these posts, the raw spreadsheet data is available here. You can try some of the links yourself with these free tools)

This data was collected on Thursday evening, October 30th. The video and its many instantiations are still not done collecting traffic, but the rankings are now unlikely to change in any meaningful way. We may update this list next week to reflect Facebook shares gathered by The Awl as the result of this post, which is ultimately an elaborate excuse to embed a John Oliver video on our website.

At the time of measurement, this video had produced at least 102,638 Facebook interactions. 25,151 of those interactions were claimed by links to the YouTube video itself (which was also by far the most Tweeted instance of the video—its competitors were not tweeted much at all).

This left 77,487 surplus Facebook interactions to be claimed by a pool of 65 sites. If these shares were rationed equally, that would work out to about 1,200 free shares apiece. But that is not the world we live in! So congratulations are in order to our top three video posters, as determined by Facebook shares, as measured by SharedCount: Upworthy, The Huffington Post, and, in first place, Time, which harvested 21598 Facebook interactions.

Some notes:

—This is not a full picture of John Oliver video sharing, but it's close. We undoubtedly missed a few sites; others posted the video directly to their Facebook brand pages, without an external embed. The video was also tweeted and pinned and plussed and all that, but the numbers were comparatively small; the resultant traffic likely even smaller. Facebook also tells publishers about a thing called "reach," which is not represented here, but which is widely suspected to be a modern variant of an ancient calming spell popular among village healers and hedge witches.

—This ritual's practitioners have given it a name:

I won the Oliver-off! Give me my Pulitzer! RT @HayesBrown: Congrats, @bendreyfuss! pic.twitter.com/ZozsmZvv5B

— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) September 22, 2014

The tool you're seeing there is a piece of software called "Spike," which allows social media manager types to see the spread of viral news stories in real time. (Dreyfuss performed respectably this week: 4263 shares.)

—This was, in the grand scheme of John Oliver video embedding, an off week. The video is hovering between two and three million views right now. Here are the top videos from the show:

What a bummer! When John Oliver destroyed/vaporized/murdered/owned/surprise-smooched/ripped/KILLED the FCC, Upworthy, with a post titled "John Oliver Goes Off On An Epic, Fact-Checked, Mic-Dropping Rant For 13 Minutes That You Need To See," gathered 356,369 Facebook interactions.

Upworthy also posts transcripts of videos like this, which is a nice service. And an interesting critique, by accident, of comedy explainerism:

Sugar activates our brains like cocaine. I've got to say, Scarface would have been a very different movie if it ended with Al Pacino sitting in a chair, sugared out of his mind on baked goods, saying, "Say hello to my Little Debbie. Say hello." With sugar being so viscerally appealing to us, it's frankly no wonder that food manufacturers put it in everything, and I do mean everything.

Delivery counts.

—The distribution, even this week, was fairly brutal:

What makes the difference between a viral post and a literal zero? Not clear. Good headlining, big Facebook audiences. Timing, probably, but lots of sites don't put timestamps on their stories anymore, because I guess metadata is just another world for liability (Monday afternoon seems to be way too late, for what it's worth). Do "brands" matter? Haha, sure, why not, but I can't tell you how.

Overall, it's tough out there: You either catch the wave or you don't, and a lot of people don't. Some notable entries: AddictingInfo, a homespun viral site that nearly broke through; Yahoo, which had two failed submissions that were both syndications of posts from other sites; Boy Genius Report and CNET, which are tech and gadget sites; and the Candy Industry Blog, which was actually more of a writeup than a video aggregation, and which offered the… other side of the story? Sort of? "So the good news about the John Oliver segment on sugar is that it doesn’t really focus on candy." There are also quite a few notable abstainers. Overall, this is just a really weird list of websites, connected by a Youtube embed and nothing else (except a general sense of disquiet about the future).

Anyway: Losers, stay strong. Winners, don't get too complacent. Who will win? Who will lose? Who will rise? Who will fall? UNTIL NEXT WEEK.

The ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ ᴡᴀʀs is an occasional column intended to keep a majority of ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ coverage in one easily avoidable place.

The post The John Oliver Video Sweepstakes appeared first on The Awl.