I refer you to the comments thread of this week’s Dangerous Minds interview with Charles Johnson, of Little Green Footballs. This afternoon Charles linked to the interview from his popular blog and within a matter of minutes people were posting about the interview both there and here. Some pro, some con (I get compared to Sean Hannity for instance!), but some just nasty and fairly pointless, such as one item (since deleted by us and not at the request of Charles, either) which managed to slip in both a homophobic epithet and a not-so-veiled death threat!

Charming.

As Charles replied “Welcome to my world! These are exactly the people I was talking about in the interview.” I sent him the IP address and in a matter of minutes he tracked the guy down and found several instances of his email address posted online elsewhere.

Views were initially slow on this episode, but are trending upwards quickly. I’ll leave this up for another day before posting part 2.

Jon Reiss has been a pioneer of DIY film-making since the punk era and he shares what he’s learned in his new book, Think Outside the Box Office: The Ultimate Guide to Film Distribution and Marketing for the Digital Era.

 
As if the self-serving clod-isms of Limbaugh and Robertson weren’t offensive enough, now Ann Coulter‘s waxing wise on the Haitian tragedy:

Ann Coulter is jealous of the attention Rush Limbaugh has been getting since making his comment about the Obama administration wanting to exploit the Haitian tragedy to “burnish” his credentials with the black community.  So she’s making a conscious effort to out-controversy the controversial radio host, and on Fox News on Sunday, she didn’t make much effort to keep that a secret.

“Stop asking about Rush’s statement. I made some controversial statements this week too,” Coulter said on Geraldo at Large.  Then she went on to prove it. Discussing the bi-partisan humanitarian effort by former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Coulter said Clinton is a “national embarrassment” and Bush shouldn’t be “forced” to partner with him.

“To force poor ex-President Bush—like he hasn’t suffered enough—to be hanging around with Bill Clinton, who’s leaving his essence on Kleenex in the White House…”

 
Coulter Does Her Best To Out-Limbaugh Rush

As anybody who has ever worked as a graphic designer (or with graphic designers) knows, there are certain fonts that are not so much as forbidden to use but, rather, punishable by immediate death and professional blackballing upon use. They also tend to be the ones that first-time or amateur designers go for first, and so you see them pretty much everywhere. The penultimate font horror is, of course, Comic Sans.*

The font is so ubiquitous and corrosive to all good sense that ByDesign has dedicated a podcast to it:

In just 15 years, the casual typeface Comic Sans has become one of the world’s most ubiquitous fonts, popping up everywhere from street signs to porn sites. Now there’s an international campaign to ban it. We meet the type designer who started it all.

(ByDesign: Comic Sans, Font of Controversy)

(Check out this Anti-Comic Sans Font Hoodie)

* There is only one font which can trump the evil of Comic Sans. It is the indubitably wrong, though mercifully much less used “Sand” font.

Ralph Bakshi apparently loaded some sneaky images of Mighty Mouse snorting coke in the 1980s Saturday morning cartoon. Hey, look, how do you think those poor animators work all night? Oh, I’m sorry, unless they’re chained to a desk in Southeast Asia… and hey, even then. Probably especially then. How else are they going to think like 8-year-olds constantly?

Fans of edgy animation and cartoon vice rejoiced this week, as the infamous 1987-1988 Saturday morning series “Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures” finally hit DVD.  From the warped minds of Ralph Bakshi (“Fritz the Cat”) and John Kricfalusi (“Ren & Stimpy”), the show is often cited as a precursor to the era of wacky, subversive TV animation. So why the hold up on the DVD release? Well, it might have something to do with a controversial episode where the superhero mouse sniffed a very suspicious-looking white powder.

Premiering on CBS in November of 1987, “Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures” stood out in a field crowded with the mediocre likes of “Foofur” and “The Pound Puppies.” (This was a time when “The Smurfs” dominated two hours of prime Saturday morning real estate on NBC.) Bakshi—who began his animation career at Terrytoons, home of the original Mighty Mouse—assembled a team of future animation stars like Bruce Timm (“Batman: The Animated Series”) and “Wall-E” director Andrew Stanton, and granted them the creative freedom to poke fun at classic animation and superheroes (with characters like the Dark Knight stand-in Bat-Bat) in the guise of an innocuous Saturday morning ‘toon. As Kricfaulsi recently told Wired, the era of edgy, “creator-driven” animation that many credit “Ren & Stimpy” with starting actually kicked off two years earlier with “Mighty Mouse.”

But the show often veered into territory too risque for the Tiffany Network, including having characters shower together and hinting in a dream sequence that Mighty’s gal Pearl Pureheart had an illegitimate child with nemesis The Cow. The biggest controversy (and perhaps part of the reason why the show is remembered today) arose from the episode “The Littlest Tramp,” where Mighty Mouse is shown sniffing what appeared to be cocaine.

(ComicsAlliance: New Adventures of Mighty Mouse)

(Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi, The Force Behind Fritz the Cat, Mighty Mouse, Cool World, and The Lord of the Rings)

 
More mixed signals from the wild world of Danish advertising.  First came this highly questionable campaign to combat violence against women.  Now comes the video below.

“Karen” is an attractive young mother who’s looking for the father of her child, the product of a one-night stand.  She’s not obsessed, a bimbo, or looking to assign blame.  She simply wants to alert the baby daddy—whomever he may be—that their child “exists.”  But as Sociological Images points out:

The video was actually produced as part of a campaign by Visit Denmark, a Danish tourism agency.  The idea is, apparently, to market Denmark to male tourists with the implication that it?

 
Taking an ever-so-tasteful cue from the Nacho Libre playbook, here’s something from a new British campaign designed to encourage train-riding in its citizens.  Let’s see…he’s Mexican, he’s in England, and he’s equipped with no more than a cape and a kooky accent.  Oh, Loco, you so loco!

 
(via Sociological Images)

 
I have a love/hate relationship with CNN’s Rick Sanchez—I mostly like him, but his show can just as easily prove goofy rather than great. He’s CNN’s best showman right now, by far, but he can let off some real howlers from time to time, too (which, as I think about it, is probably why I find his show so watchable). Watch here as he really goes after scandal-chased—and conservative Christian, natch—Republican Senator John Ensign. The fun really starts at 1:32 in.

Senator?

Dear God, this makes me feel like I drank too much cough syrup.

(Via Swen’s Weblog)

 
What’s wrong with “bite the wax tadpole” as a slogan for Coca-Cola ?
 
via Coca-Cola Conversations :

When Coca-Cola was first sold in China in 1927, it was obvious to the Coke employees in China that the Coca-Cola trademark must be transliterated into Chinese characters. To find the nearest phonetic equivalent to ?