Last week on, The Internet…

It’s strange to watch this spot for AOL where the company appears to ‘get’ the Internet. They do a nice play-up of the Tase-Me-Bro bro and the Leave-Brittany-Alone ‘bro’.

Of course the downside to this is that by the time this commercial was made, all the things mentioned were beaten to death in parody and otherwise. (I believe the Brittany lover accidentally wandered into a saloon in Montana and was actually beaten to death). And the Miss South Carolina bit is, by Internet standards, ancient. Just like AOL. Hey why don’t I dial up to my local BBS service and play me some Tradewars!

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Full text feeds are now available instead of the wimpy wimpy summaries. We are still trouble shooting the ad display issues in Internet Explorer on aggregate post pages… (since Internet Explorer is too incompetent to be a good browser).

Please don’t tell Internet Explorer what I said, I’m drunk

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Via the Consumerist.com

The Consumerist writes that people are apparently watching commercials recorded on DVR devices more than no times. A lot more than no times. For some shows the numbers are estimated around 2 million extra commercial viewers, once thought Lost to advertisers.

The commenteers on their article probably rightly hit the nail on the head when they say its mostly a combination of people letting the program run while they leave the room, or simply forgetting they have the ability the fast forward. TV is both a passive and pacifying medium, eventually making the act of pausing and fast forwarding a chore unto itself.

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Did you know Thomas Edison invented popcorn?

Commercials before movies is worse than piracy, says The Movie Blog, which I found via digg.

Here is the writer-man’s all caps beef: ‘The theater industry is pulling in RECORD amounts of income from those commercials, and unlike TV (where we get a free show), WE GET NOTHING IN RETURN FOR OUR TIME SITTING THERE WHEN THE MOVIE IS SUPPOSED TO START.’

The Movie Blog goes on to shout: ‘I don’t mind theaters making money off me when I get a product, service or entertainment in return… but commercials playing at 7pm when you told me the movie would be starting is doing nothing but STEALING my time. You are taking from me without giving anything in return. HOW IS THIS DIFFERENT FROM ONLINE MOVIE PIRACY!?!?’

While ads before movies can be obnoxious, I don’t find them that obnoxious. While no one is really ’stealing’ your time, this could amount to false advertising when theaters claim a movie starts at one time, but delays the movie with ads. As long as the movie starts at the advertised time, the pre-game commercials would be no worse than the horrible slide show most theaters have running before hand.

I tend to sympathize with the theater chains, who don’t make a ton of money off the box office (that’s why they rape you at the concessions stand).

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Beef Hardslab, Crunch Smackfight, Burt Groinbig

Here’s a great promo for FX’s The X Show which is bound to be confusing if seen while drifting off to sleep in front of the TV.

I have nothing else to say about this so I’ll just list as many funny names as I can think of. Dirk Bigthrust. Knuckles Fightman. Curls Barbell. Wide Chokekill. Trip Headkick. Sprint Fencejump. Mitt Romney.

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