mathewingram.com/work » Funny

Sarah Palin gets pranked by Montreal duo

Mathew — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 16:44:38 +0000

In case you haven’t already heard about it, I’ve embedded the audio of a prank call involving two Montreal comedians and radio hosts — Sebastien Trudel and Marc-Antoine Audette, who go by the name The Masked Avengers — and the Republican candidate for U.S. vice-president, Sarah Palin. Despite the fact that this prank apparently took four days to put together, and the fact that most political candidates have an elaborate, multi-stage approval process that phone calls and other contacts have to go through, the comedians were able to have a long talk with Palin while doing a bad Parisian accent and pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Even assuming that Palin’s command of French is not that great, this is a pretty embarrassing phone conversation. You can also hear some of the interview here, where there are more than 200 comments.

Twine wants to collect your sh*t

Mathew — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 03:44:08 +0000

Twine just launched a new version of its personal bookmark-sharing, data aggregation service, and it has some cool features — but I think instead of explaining all of them, and trying to get across what the service is designed to do (hint: it has something to do with the “semantic Web”), the company should have just posted the video I’ve embedded here. A Twine staffer created it as a gag and played it for CEO and founder Nova Spivack as a joke (this is the real video). Here’s a couple of excerpts:

“Look, I know you like a lot of sh*t. So we created this new tool so you could collect that sh*t, and connect with people who like that same sh*t. Twine ties it all together by topic, so you can have all that sh*t in one place and it’s easy to find it, you know what I’m sayin’? When you bookmark an item, our sh*t is so dope, it automatically extracts the title, description and tags from the page — you don’t have to do a damn thing. It’s pretty awesome.”

“Each Twine has a unique email address, so dude, you get some crazy email, you like it so much, you can send that sh*t to Twine directly from your email. You can invite people to Twine who like the same sh*t you do. One more time I’m gonna tell you: We like to help you collect it, we help you share it, and we help you find other sh*t that you like. Get started and use this goddamn thing today. Holla! (Sound of a gunshot).”

Spivack and the employee who created the video — Candice Nobles — both commented on TechCrunch’s post about it, along with a number of humorless people who said it was “in bad taste,” which is ridiculous. Not only is it hilarious, but it actually describes the service pretty well.

Friday video fun: Triumph and David Blaine

Mathew — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 18:04:45 +0000

Came across this while reading my NewTeeVee feed: Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, whose reports on Late Night with Conan O’Brien are always hilarious (his past gems include skewering Star Wars fans waiting in line for the release of Attack of the Clones, and doing the same to a bunch of fans at Bon Jovi concert), showed up at the site of illusionist performer David Blaine’s latest publicity stunt. Triumph interviews a few scattered fans — a crowd that includes Liz Gannes, writer/editor at GigaOm’s NewTeeVee blog — and can barely keep himself from cracking up as Blaine takes a 15-minute coffee break in the middle of the stunt. Stay tuned right to the end for the Spiderman-style finish.

watch the video

LOLcatz on Canada and net neutrality

Mathew — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:06:03 +0000

I just had to point to this (hat tip goes to Dave Fleet, who posted the link on Twitter). It’s a blog post at the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s site, with some photos from a demonstration about net neutrality and “bandwidth shaping” by carriers like Bell Canada. As the post says, the office “is currently looking into a complaint about deep packet inspection – no decision has been made, and this post is not meant to endorse one side or another. Itâ€™s simply funny.” Photo is by Jason Walton.

Kanye West to reviewer: Kill yourself

Mathew — Sat, 03 May 2008 02:00:30 +0000

Don’t ask me why, but I like to read Kanye West’s blog. I don’t really like his music all that much (note to Kanye: please don’t hate me) but his blog is hilarious — a totally idiosyncratic mix of thoughts about pretty much anything, from high-tech gadgets and cars to clothing and architecture. I don’t know how much of what he calls KanyeUniverseCity.com is actually produced by him, but the overall effect is a little like Boing Boing, but with a crazy hip-hop mogul running the show.

We all know that Kanye can get a little… well, hot under the collar sometimes. But he totally lost it in one recent post, after an Entertainment Weekly reviewer gave the opening show of his new Glow in the Dark tour a B+. Now, you might think that a B+ is pretty good. It’s almost an A, right? Well that, my friends, is why you are not Kanye West. Here’s what Kanye had to say (I’ve cleaned it up a little):

“Ya’ll rated my album sh***y and now ya’ll come to the show and give it a B+. What’s a B+ mean? I’m an extremist. It’s either pass or fail! A+ or F-! You know what, f*** you and the whole f***ing staff!!!

You don’t know sh** about passion and art. You’ll never gain credibility at this rate. You’re f***ing trash! I make art. You can’t rate this. I’m a real person. I’m not a pop star. I don’t care about anything but making great art. Never come 2 one of my shows ever again.”

Never let it be said that Kanye doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. After all, he isn’t a pop star — he’s a real person! And he doesn’t care about anything but making great art. And in the RSS feed version of the above post, he had an additional thought for the Entertainment Weekly writer that I guess he decided to leave out of the final version: “Chris Willman, kill yourself!” the pop star said. Now that’s great art.