Top Phrases of 2006

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Here are the top phrases – some ironic, some funny, and some just great in the way that your grandfather is great. Not because he’s cool, just because he is.

  1. A tie with “Double-True” and “I’m dropping Hamiltons like my name is Aaron Burr” from the best video of 2006, SNL’s Lazy Sunday. Which just goes to show that the internet is where it’s at. Remember these guys began on the internet doing funny stuff on thelonelyIsland.com, then got hired by SNL and made a kickass video which showed on TV where nobody watched it and then it only became famous when it want BACK on the internet. They came full-circle.
  2. “It was very hot, I think that was the only explanation for the water. Or maybe it was because the beer I had last night.” -Floyd Landis in Cycling News which reminds me of another great quote: “Son, when you participate in sporting events, it’s not whether you win or lose: It’s how drunk you get.” – Homer Simpson
  3. “Keep in mind Brian McBride is playing with titanium plates in his face.” John Harkes discussing McBride’s condition while the states were playing World Cup champion Italy.  McBride broke his face in the first game when the US lost a shocker to Poland and then with a lot of grit and heart they tied the eventual champs 1-1.
  4. “Join Bode” from a huge marketing campaign from Nike for the 2006 Olympics. It fell flat on its face when Bode fell flat on his ass and didn’t win any metals.
  5. “I think it’s better to buy real estate than say, a yellow and purple Corvette or an elephant that can speak sign language. My parents help me out a lot with that stuff. They don’t want to see me when I’m 30, dead broke, selling bootleg tapes of my snowboard movies on the side of the freeway.” — Olympic gold medalist Shaun White on how he spends his endorsement money. Unlike Bode, he won a few. My take on Snowboarding in the Olympics is here although this is helping me possibly change my mind.
  6. “I enjoy Cocaine because it’s a fun thing to do.” – Representative Robert Wexler. Said on the Colbert Report in mid-July by the Boca Raton representative, who was running unopposed for reelection. He played along with Colbert’s “Say Anything, You Can’t Lose” game and jokingly expressed his fondness for cocaine, and it was genuinely hilarious. Colbert then came under attack from the morning shows and responds in typical Colbert fashion
    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbhLKgzep1w]
  7. “I’m sick and tired of these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane” said by Samuel L in Snakes on a Plane one of the most anticipated and ironic movies to come out in a long, long time.
  8. “Little 8 lb 6 oz baby jesus, i’d like to thank you for….” – Ricky Bobby saying grace before dinner.
  9. “I had one margarita (and) was starving because I had not eaten all day. Maybe I was speeding a little bit and I got pulled over. I was just really hungry and I wanted to have an In-N-Out Burger.” – Paris Hilton, establishing herself as a professional name-dropper.

Which Superhero Are You?

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I am Flash. Not because i want to be, but because i am most similar to him. See, here are the results of my superhero quiz. You should try one (click here to do so)

You are The Flash

The Flash
85%
Superman
85%
Wonder Woman
82%
Iron Man
80%
Green Lantern
75%
Supergirl
72%
Spider-Man
70%
Catwoman
65%
Robin
57%
Hulk
50%
Batman
40%
Fast, athletic and flirtatious.

Best Trailers of the Year

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I love going to the movies, especially during the holidays when there are so many good ones to see. I also love gettign to the theater beforehand so i can watch the trailers of movies coming out in the future. Personally, i hate trailers that tell too much about a movie and basically summarize the entire movie in 2 and 1/2 minutes. Those trailers suck. What i want to list here are the trailers that don’t suck, the trailers that make you upset that you aren’t watching that movie instead of teh one you paid to see, the trailers that get to you make you research that movie later on the internet. Here are the trailers of 2006 that did that for me:

300 – By far the best trailer of the year. Can’t wait for the actual movie.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=qjD8A7h2Z9g]

The Departed – not so much of the trailer but because the anticipation of a kickass Scorcese flick (although the trailer rocks too)

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=VqKZ8ARPgC4]

The rest are available after the jump…..

Continue reading “Best Trailers of the Year” →

Dead Men (and Horses) in DC Parks

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Living in DC, we get our fair share of circles to drive around. On many of them there are statues of war heros. I rarely check out who they are and what they did, but ever since i read this little fact i’ve been much more interested:

If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

The two guys near me are George McClellan on Connecticut Ave (photo to the left) who was a badass. He was a general in the Civil War and the Democratic presidential candidate opposite Lincoln (in 1864). He was injured in battle. I know because i see that the leg is up.

The other one near me on Mass Ave is Philip Sheridan. He took 5 years to graduate West Point (George McC finished 2nd in his class). His’s first combat command led him to win the critical Battle of Chattanooga in 1863. Grant put him in charge of cavalry for the Army of the Potomac in 1864 and he led the raid on Richmond that ended in the death of Confederate general Jeb Stuart. He became commander of the Army of the Potomac in 1864. In this capacity he led the army to battle at Appomattox and, with Grant, compelled Gen. Robert E. Lee to surrender, ending the Civil War. In 1884, he succeeded Sherman as commander in chief of the Army. Not too shabby.

The statue was designed by the guy who did Mt. Rushmore and the horse (named Rienzi) is famous too and on display at American History Museum.

There is a site (here) that will tell you who is who on the horses in and round DC. If you have a home in DC, it’s worth checking out.

Michel Gondry is More Man Than All of Us

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I loved the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I thought it was one of the more underrated films of the past 5 years. Michel Gondry, the director and co-writer (with Charlie Kaufman) has also done some fantastic music videos. Basically, i think he’s awesome. However, that did not prepare me for this video (below) where he solves a rubix cube. Oh, he doesn’t just solve it. Oh no, that would be too simple. He solves it with his feet! That’s right, check it:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiQXgmVVGNA&eurl=]

If you haven’t seen any of Michel’s other stuff, even his shorter stuff, you should head over to YouTube and check it out. Even his commercials are pretty cool. Here’s a Smirnoff ad:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1UeNGELFSc]

Lots of People in the Air

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I was just travelling throughout the US and Europe over the past two weeks.  I’ve been to the following airports in the past 3 weeks: Washignton DC, Boston, Chicago, Minnesota, London, Paris, Milan, Bucarest, and Cluj (Romania).  Each time i hit a new airport, i’m amazed at the type of people and kids that are milling about.  The airport is a perfect display of globalization.  You have all different cultures and languages mashed-up and forced into one system.  In a way it’s beautiful that we can all find this common ground.

The average number of people airborne over the U.S. in any given hour is 61,000, i have no idea how many are over Europe or Asia, but one thing is for sure – the world just keeps getting smaller and smaller

Le Web 3: Day 1

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After visiting Romania, i attended the Le Web 3 conference in Paris. While i won’t get into what went on the second day (kinda lame), i wanted to post my notes on the first day of speakers. Here goes:

10-10:30: Real World and why it matters: Hans Rosling
This was a fantastic presentation of describing why we need to change our perspective from being Us vs. Them when describing the global social/economic nations to being a low-middle-high income view as almost all countries have exactly the same birth rate and life expectancy. Hans is a great speaker and his company gapminder.com is worth checking out. I wish i took more notes on this one. He did have a great visual view of how the countries of the world have progressed so that almost all of them today are 2 children homes with a life expectancy of 70 years. That’s right almost every country is there. There are no more large family, short life expectancy countries – the world will stabalize at 9 billion people.

11-11:40: Giants Outlook on Web 2.0 (Yahoo, Orange, Nokia, Windows Live)
While the first was amazing, this was quite the opposite. It was too generic of a presentation. Questions were posed like “does size matter?” and they all said, “well ‘yes’ and ‘no'” and expain why size might be good and the negatives of being big which the generalities were just useless. This was more a pitch of why these companies are awesome and less about what they’re working on. They all said that user-generated content is the key to their success. The questions were all soft-balls, like “do communities matter?” to which they all responded an obvious “yes” – the Nokia presenter was the worst. He would say blanket statements like “communities aren’t about technologies,” to which the moderater would ask, “what are they about?” and he would answer blankly, “they’re about people.” Worthless. I saw much more innovation and better presentations as the Startup place.

2-2:20: State of the Blogosphere (David Sifry, CEO of Technorati)
Some stats he showed (which is pretty much all he did):
– The blogosphere doubles in size every 150-200 days
– 60 million blogs, 7 million update once a week or more
– I was surprised to see that while english is the largest in the blogosphere, it’s not over 50% (i’m a dumb american). The US is at 39% and i was surprised to see japanese blogs at 33% (france was at 2%)

2:40-3: Future of Business (Reid Hoffman – LinkedIn)
This was a short but interesting talk. He believes all people will eventually have a public facing web page. He comments that MySpace won the wars over Geocities and others b/c your home page is a social page and customizable. LinkedIn will do the same. He sees the technology of resumes as migrating from a list of assertions of where you’ve been and what you’ve done to being much more accurate and informative. Current resumes are “very 1.0, sometimes lack information, and they lack metadata.” They should be demonstration of expertise which they currently aren’t. LinkedIn is trying to become the next version of that resume. He also sees Business 2.0 right around the corner and what are the new set of business applications. So many professionals are online, there will be increased collaboration

3:20-3:30: Jamendo startup preso
Largest aggregator of indie music in Europe. Users can stream the music from the Jamendo site or download the entire album using bittorrent. Our service (Qloud) links into AmieStreet and i’d like to get Jamendo content in there too. Hopefully we can make that happen.

5:20-5:30: Viral Growth (Netvibes CEO)
This was one of my favorite talks. He spoke of when he first started with 4 guys and they had no idea what to do. Lukily they had Wiki and API’s which turned out to be a critical piece of their growth. They allowed others to translate the widgets and make useful plugins that the users wanted.

Continue reading “Le Web 3: Day 1” →

Why does Snoop Carry An Umbrella?

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Fo drizzle, yo

This is my annual Snoop post. Even since Dre’s The Chronic, i’ve been in love with Snoop’s rapping. I even wrote a paper in college for an English class where i translated The Scarlet Letter to the lyrics of Nuthin’ But A G-Thing, it was renamed Nuthin’ But an ‘A’ Thing. Luckily, i’m not the only one who loves The Dogg. Danielle (who has no internet identity) sent me the following two gems…

The first is a site called Gizoogle. This is a site that will translate the text of any other site into Snoop-speak. If you look at what it does to the post i put up a couple weeks ago (below), it’s fantastic. I don’t who has the time to make site’s like this. But god bless them.

Here’s what i originally wrote:

This is a good graph that was sent to me that can accurately diagram who the person next to you in bed is, or how they fit into your dating perspective. While some of my friends have set up camp in the Zone of Pain with their “go ugly early” strategy, others jump between the dreaded cycle of Friend – Awkwardness – F-Buddy – Awkwardness, while the rest meander around in the dating zone with occasional layovers in the Zone of Pain.

becomes this

This is a good grizzay tizzle was sent ta me thiznat can accurately diagram who tha person nizzy ta you in bed is, or how they fit into yo pimpin` perspective wit da big Bo$$ Dogg. While some of mah niggaz have set up camp in tha Zone of Pizzle wit they “go fugly early” strategy, otha jizzle between tha dreaded cycle of Friend – Awkwardness – F-Buddy – Awkwardness, while tha rizzay meanda around in tha pimpin` zone wit occasional pusha in tha Zone of Pizzy.

awesome.

The second is a free-style rap from a guy in LA. He’s able to perfectly imitate Snoop, Jay-Z and The Game. It’s an amazing video. I like how the DJ is at a complete loss for words at the end. All he can keep saying is “jesus christ!”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbivRkS9viE&mode=related]

Finally, my friend Adam sent in this clip of Snoop going into Rick Dees studio and hitting on Patricia, Adam’s girlfriend.  It’s not every day that my buddy’s woman is flirting it up with Snoop.  Pretty funny.

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