I was checking out The Tyee, a BC-based online mag, and noticed an ad in the sidebar for "Hammer Drop. One Product. One Deal. Every Day." It turns out that Hammer Drop is a product of Home Depot, but is virtually identical to the offbeat one-deal-a-day site and (I think) the originator of the idea, Woot.com. Woot.com has more interactivity -- for instance, a comment board for each product, where insta-reviews and commentary on the product, previous products, your dog, etc. are posted.
I also recently found Jellyfish, which offers a Smack of the Day, a pretty slick Flash-based variant of the deal-a-day concept, modelled on a game show concept. I know, I know, it's Flash. But it's one of the first examples of useful flash I've seen in a while. The interactivity is cool. Their idea is that the price of the item keeps dropping until enough people have purchased to exhaust the supply. It's mostly gamer-focused, but cool nonetheless.

We're all in Thunder Bay at the moment, and participating in the semi-annual Cambrian Presbytery meetings, which includes the (10th year!) youth event at the meetings. We've had a ton of fun with the teens this time, looking at media, marketing and self-image, along with some of the stuff from the United Church of Canada's "Emerging Spirit" campaign, part of which is the discussion forum, Wondercafe.ca.
On Wondercafe, they've got a commercial that was produced as part of the campaign, titled "EZ Answer Squirrel." This weekend, the teens came up with their own parody versions of the ad.
Here's the original:

Here's the first one:

Here's the second one:

Here's the third one:

George Takei (Mr. Sulu to some, more recently Hiro Nakamura's father to others) recorded a video response to Tim Hardaway's recent "I hate gay people" public statement, on Jimmy Kimmel:







Brilliant.

I've not spent a lot of effort doing any movie reviews on here, despite the fact that I am a massive movie nut -- and a bit of a movie whore. I'll honestly watch anything -- hell, with the magic of Zip.ca, combined with the The Pirate Bay, I really can. *Earth to movie distributors: As soon as you un-DRM these movies, and sell them for less than the physical copy costs -- and make them in a format that isn't just for iPod -- I'm sooooo your bitch.

Anyways, I finally got around to watching "Borat" on DVD, and was prepared to be overwhelmed by the biting social commentary of today's USA.

I didn't find it.

Bluntly, "Borat" sucks. It's "Jackass" for those who were too movie-snooty to watch "Jackass."

How in God's green earth did this "scripted" film get nominated for best screenplay? I enjoyed watching JA far more than than this mediocre assimilation, with perhaps two or three commentaries on American society. Whoopty-doo -- I could have gotten those kind of sentiments from crossing the border into International Falls, MN, with little effort. The rest is silly.

Don't get me wrong, I'm okay with silly. Heck, I just watched Beerfest (which was pretty funny, BTW). However, this was not the high-handed, biting social commentary that I thought I was going to see. I felt like the disappointment I felt when seeing "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," as well.

(Again, BTW, in that vein, "Fearless" was excellent -- Jet Li was fantastic, compared to the disaster that was CTHD.)