Take that free press

This well-done commercial calls attention to censor-mad Australia, whose government has apparently decided to wage war on free speech. Living in America, whose founding mission statement was freedom of speech, it’s hard to get a handle on such a similar nation taking such a dissimilar attitude to what we frequently proclaim to be the most sacred of all human rights.

Australia is fast on track to rival such nations as Iran and China for their stance on government censorship on the Internet. We’re sorry about goatse guys, really sorry, please come back from the brink.

Grapefruit.

This commercial for flu awareness, brought to you by the Southern Australia Council for Flu and Fast Food Regulation could not have hit the Internet at a better time.

Swine flu hysteria is all over the media, and this sticky commercial is spewing icing on the cake. Just watching this commercial will make an active hypochondriac ill for weeks.

This commercial is effective so I have little to add, except that, statistically speaking, we have much bigger fish to fry on the preventable disease front. But flu is just so damn sexy, it gets all the groupies.

Not sure how someone was offended by this, but ok.

NBC Miami reports here that Mexico was so offended by this Burger King ad for the Texican Whopper that they ran and told on them to their ambassador to Spain. I am supposing this is the international diplomacy version of running and telling on someone to your parents.

Though the article mentions ‘unfair stereotyping of Mexicans’ (I am supposing the pun about a little bit of Mexican being in the burger was lost in translation) the real issue appear to be the misuse of the Mexican flag.

The real news is that there is a country that apparently takes its flag more seriously than America. I mean we let Evel Knievel run around for years dressed like an American flag.

Welcome to flavor country

If you watch this ad for Estonian meat without sound, it’s a lot like the scenes in the movie Event Horizon where everyone has space madness. Watching it with the sound on, it’s more like a Bjork video (just as disturbing).

This commercial from Soviet-era Estonia conjures images of grotesque and surreal Polish movie posters for American movies, Salvador Dali’s short shock film Un chien andalou, and the boat ride from the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The strangest thing about this bizarre commercial is that after a lifetime of being fed so much processed food, the image of fresh ground chuck coming out of a grinder is strangely appetizing to me. This commercial breaks all the rules and comes out with a paradoxical visual product you cannot look away from, like MSNBC’s morning show coverage in St. Paul. You cannot put a microphone on a guest while the camera is on them! Can you? Oh my god they are doing it.

Your partner is a wise-cracking Sunni

I certainly don’t want to make fun of people who sign up for what has to be one of the most dangerous jobs on earth, but this commercial seems to want to. This sixty-second spot for the Iraqi Police Services (IP) is apparently targeted towards changing children’s minds about what it means to serve in the force. But it also seems to have been made by children. It features a crime-fighting duo taking down terrorists with just karate chops, and a single bullet ricocheting through four or five hostiles, killing them all.

I guess if the intended audience is only children they don’t want to scare them, but the result is unintentionally hilarious.