TurkeyMonkey

Ever since commanding Burger King’s Subservient Chicken to “riverdance” — and then watching the bird go all Flatley around its low-rent apartment — I’ve been enamored of this kind of viral brand marketing (pioneered by Miami’s Crispin Porter + Bogusky). I don’t care if we’re talking about Livesearch’s flirty Ms. Dewey or Volkswagon’s “____ like a Rabbit” banner ads, just as long as long as I can plug in a term like “multiply” and watch compact German cars procreating, I’m a very happy boy.

However, I must confess, the newest entry into the list of buzzed about microsites, ElfYourself.com (brought to you by the good folks at OfficeMax), may have proven too fun for my own good. In case you haven’t visited it yet, the site allows you to cut and paste a head from one of your photos onto a dancing elf. Sounds dopey, I know, but take a look at my mom’s Elfamorphosis and tell me that’s not friggin hilarious.

So, getting back to the downside: After testing the site out with my mom’s noggin on Friday, I got extremely carried away. I elfed just about everyone I know — or at least, everyone whose picture I had on my work computer. After giggling at baby Austin’s dancing elf, I made a dancing cousin Jay elf, then a Winifred elf, then a brother-in-law Rui elf. Then I set about emailing all of them the links. Only problem: every new picture overwrote the last one. I got a kick out of all of them in the test screen, but all of the links I sent pointed to an identical location. so all any of these people saw when they clicked on the link was an inexplicable animation of Alex Bradley’s elf dancing — the last of my creations.

Thus ensued a flurry of re-elfing, clearing my cookies diligently with each second attempt. Eventually, after two or three “lemme try that again” emails, everyone got the elf head that was originally intended for them. Though at my wife’s request, I’m need to go cold turkey with ElfYourself and stop sending these bizarre, random emails.

It’ll be hard to quit, but maybe I’ll dull the pain by moving on to OfficeMax’s 20 other holiday microsites, including:

After I posted that New York Post cover, featuring Jim Baker and Lee Baker of the Iraq Study Group as “Surrender Monkeys,” I couldn’t get the catchy phrase out of my head. I could have sworn I’d heard it before.

Turns out, according to NPR’s On The Media, via FishbowlNY, that the term comes from The Simpsons. It first appeared in a 1995 episode where Groundskeeper Willie calls the French “cheese-eatin’ surrender monkeys.” Then, a few years later, it was “reinjected … into the mainstream media” by National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg and “gleefully repeated on Fox News and other apparently Francophobic news outlets” heading into the Iraq War.

So there you have it. From Groundskeeper Willie’s lips to the Post’s printers. Out-stand-ing.

My brother-in-law, Dan, never ceases to find the most random, brilliant cat-related things to blog about. This time it’s CatSleep.com, a website offering a 40-minute MP3 file of a cat purring on a loop. It’s supposed to be a kind of white noise to help you get the link. Oh, but that’s not all — it also gets rid of headaches! Here’s the site’s pitch:

The cats natural low frequency purring is known for it´s exceptional therapeutic calming and stress relief effects and has a natural steady lulling rhythm, during both inhalation and exhalation with a consistent pattern and frequency between 25 and 150 Hertz. The low frequency purr vibration is spread throughout the body. This makes you deeply relaxed and will help you or your child to fall asleep.

Curious how authentic the purring sound really is, I clicked on the play sample button on the website. It’s been playing for about five minutes now, as I write this, and both my cats are transfixed. Not really sure if it’s freaking them out, or whether I’ve approached the kind of monkey mind torture advocated by MTV’s The State, but it’s certainly entertaining and worth $2.

Well, not really. But my buddy, Dan Wheeless, did just get married to a girl with the same name. So ha! One less Kate Middleton for you, royal family.

Their secrets are revealed HERE.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. Especially if you’re named Snake Eyes or Cobra Commander.

GMA finished unveiling it’s “7 New Wonders of the World” today and, well, let’s just say that it was very consistent. Consistently bad.

Picking up where I left off in my last post, the sixth wonder is the Mayan Pyramids. Now, to be fair, this is just about the closest thing to a Wonder (capital W) that the numskulls at GMA and USA Today have named so far, but still, the Mayans built pyramids in many countries. It’s kind of like saying that skyscrapers are a modern wonder. OK, I guess they’re a modern building trend, but why not pick one? The ancient wonder list went with the Great Pyramid at Giza, not all pyramids. Likewise, you wouldn’t say skyscrapers, you’d pick the Empire State building or Sears Tower or Petronis Towers. Gotta be specific.

The seventh wonder was quite possibly the most absurd of all: The Great Migration: Circle of Life. Ugh. We’re talking about the animal patterns of the Serengeti and the Masai Mara plains in the heart of East Africa. This is such an unbelievably dopey wonder — ah, what’s the point.

Frustrated by this utter disaster — a fundamentally good idea that was well promoted and well executed by the GMA team, but horribly conceived of by the expert panelists (if only they could shitcan those turkeys) — I bitched on the GMA message board. But then I decided to do something far more productive: vote on the “New 7 Wonders” project (note the inverted 7 and New), which actually gets it.


The vote totals won’t be revealed until 7/7/07, but at least the nominees are all drawn from the same rational, logical pool of man-made marvels. So at last, I have peace with the Wonders.

This whole “7 New Wonders of the World” project, a joint venture between Good Morning America and USA Today, seemed extremely promising at first. They had cutie Kate Snow moderating a panel of experts (Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Pico Iyer, Bruce Feiler), a ridonculous amount of pre-project hype (billboards, promos, and a sad, sad attempt at viral YouTube video), and most important, a genuinely good idea (I’m thinking of copying the whole 7 Wonders package for one of the magazines I edit). Then they actually started revealing the wonders last week, one day at a time.

1. Potala Palace (Lhasa, Tibet): OK, haven’t ever heard of this place and it’s not terribly pretty, but a giant architectural marvel at the top of the world — I’m feeling you.

2. Old City of Jerusalem (Jerusalem, Israel): Uh, isn’t it kind of cheating to pick a whole city? Why not Paris or New York? But that aside, yes, Jerusalem still passes the smell test — i.e. it’s a wonderous place I’d like to visit.

3. Polar Ice Caps (Iceland): Oh, come on! We’re opening this up to natural wonders? I’m starting to imagine the Wonders experts debating: “Why not the Earth’s core? No, what about the moon? We could do those new moon — I love RX230!”

4. Hawaiian National Marine Monument (Hawaii, USA): Ugh. Clearly the wheels have fallen off this project. This barrier reef is nothing compared to the one that’s actually “Great” in Australia, or the one off Belize. This is yet another natural wonder (which honestly should be a totally different list), and not even a very good one at that.

5. The Internet (Everywhere!): Retarded. Simply retarded.

OK, the Internet may have changed all our lives, but it’s not a capitalized Wonder of the World. Nor is the economy or television or Apple computer or the blogosphere or marijuana or monkey torture. Let’s make this clear: Wonder of the World means massive man-made structure that people from all over the world would be interested in seeing! It’s a simple conceit. These guys get it.

The ancient ones, now called the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World (which are all but gone, except for the Pyramid of Giza), were essentially a list of tourist destinations put together in the 2nd Century BC by a famous writer. Perhaps that’s what GMA and USA Today should have done here: pick one really good writer (that lady who penned “1000 Places to See Before You Die,” maybe) and asked them to come up with one solid list. Not this silly, stupid list that seems like it was put together by a committee of kindergarteners.

Go see Borat. That is all. Now stand for national anthem.

Kazakhstan greatest country in the world.
All other countries are run by little girls.
Kazakhstan number one exporter of potassium.
Other countries have inferior potassium.

Kazakhstan home of Tinshein swimming pool.
It’s length thirty meter and width six meter.
Filtration system a marvel to behold.
It remove 80 percent of human solid waste.

Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan you very nice place.
From Plains of Tarashek to Norther fence of Jewtown.
Kazakhstan friend of all except Uzbekistan.
They very nosey people with bone in their brain.
Kazakhstan industry best in the world.
We incented toffee and trouser belt.
Kazakhstan’s prostitutes cleanest in the region.
Except of course Turkmenistan’s

Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan you very nice place.
From Plains of Tarashek to Norther fence of Jewtown.

Come grasp the might phenis of our leader.
From junction with the testes to tip of its face!

(and because I just can’t get enough of this embedded video)

It was only a matter of time before someone stole my idea for the greatest magazine in history: Monkey Magazine. The fact that it’s the Brits only makes it worse. And the only reason that I’m not totally debressed and ready to give up on the whole magazine-publishing racket is this heaven-sent video, promoting the new lad mag.

“MONKEYUS INTERRUPTUS” [Gawker]