Mission Insta-Possible: Rejuvenated, Polaroid Makes Retro Totally Nowtro

Polaroid is not dead. Anymore.

It was a sad day when, in December of last year, Polaroid snapped its last instant photograph and faded into a backdrop of bankruptcy filings. It was one of those things that doesn’t necessarily affect your life (if people were using Polaroids so much, this wouldn’t have happened), but represents the irrevocable dissolution of a classic — like when they remade Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Enter the team members of the Impossible Project, endeavoring to resurrect the doomed icon:

Production of analog Instant Film stopped in June 2008, closing the factories in Mexico (Instant Packfilm production) and the Netherlands (Instant Integral production).

Therefore Impossible b.v. has acquired the complete film production equipment in Enschede (NL) from Polaroid, has signed a 10-year lease agreement on the factory building; and has engaged the most experienced team of Integral Film experts worldwide.

Impossible b.v. has been founded with the concrete aim to re-invent and re-start production of analog INTEGRAL FILM for vintage Polaroid cameras.

Their fervor for film inspired the group that acquired the Polaroid brand to relaunch some of the most famous instant cameras in 2010. I am excited about this. That said, I will probably not buy one. Then, when they stop making them again in a year, I am totally going to wish I had.

Google Game: I am

I started today’s Google Game with “Am I…” but the results were too sad even for me. Am I fat, am I bipolar, am I an alcoholic. The Suggest results for “I am” were less depressing. Or so it at first seemed.

I’ll wait while you do a digital double take.

I am extremely terrified of Chinese people comes from this story on ChristWire.com. When I checked out the article, I, like many others,  couldn’t determine with certainty whether the article and the site were serious or satiric. Cracked.com describes ChristWire as their biggest internet rival, “in terms of producing articles that make you laugh and shit your pants in fear at the same time,” but if you look at the comments following CW’s posts, plenty of people don’t realize they’re supposed to be laughing. This could be because ChristWire’s stories maintain a level of ambiguity that confuses as much as it amuses (or because some of the articles really aren’t that funny). It’s also because the Christian Right in this country is terrifying — practically a parody of itself. Take, for example, the beginning of Conservapedia’s entry on Barack Obama:

Barack Hussein Obama II aka Barry Soetoro[1] (allegedly[2][3][4][5][6] born in Honolulu Aug. 4, 1961) is the 44th President of the United States

Sometimes it’s dangerously hard to distinguish between the brilliant and the crazy. You want to assume that the posts on ChristWire are all jokes, but there’s so much ignorant hate out there that it’s not always so easy to tell. (Well, except when it is.)

Domo, Come Again

Media-and-fast food cross promotions, like the ubiquitous movie-themed Happy Meal toys at McDonald’s, are typically pedestrian, pointless, and rarely warrant much attention — notwithstanding my curmudgeonly paranoid perception that the pairings represent a sinister alliance between the megaconglomerates that control the crap we eat and the crap we watch. This new one, however, is an exception. If you’ve yet to be introduced, meet Domo-kun, a furry, four-cornered mascot of Japan’s NHK broadcasting company.

In a six week promo stretching into the middle of November, Domo will be gracing coffee cups, hot dog boxes and Slurpee Big Gulps at 7-Eleven.

photos: eat me daily

photos: eat me daily

I plan to steal a sleeve of them coffee cups. They slay me. Also on tap, furry Domo straw buddies in what appear to be rocker, raver, rapper and Mexican wrestler varieties:

domo-straws

I’m freakin kvelling over here. In the nearly 5 years since they restarted the chain in Manhattan I’ve never entered a 7-Eleven store. Time to find the nearest one. You win this time, convenience chain. I am powerless against your hug-ably iconic marketing scheme. Or, as Slurpee marketing manager Evan Brody put it to Brand Week, I guess I’m just a sucker for “crazy Japanese shit.”

Gag Me Files: Stitch N’ Bitch

You can take the retro-flanneled hipster out of Brooklyn...

You can take the hipster out of Brooklyn... but not out of her awesome shirt.

Ellen Page, everyone’s favorite post-Dawson’s-era sesquipedalian teen brought to you by everyone’s favorite post-pole stripper scribe, is writing and producing a new show for HBO called “Stitch N’ Bitch,” (seriously) which “follows two painfully cool hipster girls as they relocate from Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood to Los Angeles’ Silver Lake enclave in hopes of becoming artists — of any kind,” (seriously) according to the Hollywood Reporter. Of any kind – whatever the fuck that means.

The show’s premise initially gave me the sense that we’d have some kind of reverse “Simple Life” Hipster Edition on our hands. Two girls in Urban Outfitters flannels over teal high-rise skinny jeans puff their asymmetrical bangs with incredulous exhalations as they deal with the myopia and artistic vapidity of the privileged Left Coast elite. But sources in the 415 tell me that Silver Lake is just “California’s version of Williamsburg,” which I guess means that conflicts of a cultural nature will be kept to a minimum. I’m trying to fathom what the point of moving the characters from NY to CA is, then. Maybe one of the girls has asthma.

Possible upside: HBO’s overexposure of hipster culture to the washed masses stirs a sea change in the ‘Burg, all ironic mustaches get shaved off, vests go back to being part two in a three piece suit, and the L train is safe to ride once more.

[Via laist]

Art of Recycled Media

I lament the demise of cassette tapes as an acceptable form of music-listening and the subsequent obsolescence of car tape decks. And while I don’t condone melting your tapes, if there’s a coolest way to do it, this guy Brian Dettmer has got it down. Not only is this awesome skull sculpted from old cassettes, it includes recordings from such hard rock luminaries as Motley Crüe and Judas Priest.

Dettmer also seems to appreciate encyclopedias and science reference books as much as I do, if much more creatively. How dope is this “altered book” piece entitled Science in the Twentieth Century:

Click the photo above for more tome-manipulations, and check out Designboom for more awesome cassette tape artifacts, including a ram skull and a full skeleton.

[via Apartment Therapy New York]

But throw in someone getting hit in the balls and I’m sold

I saw this Visa commercial recently and, watching blank-faced as a portly man danced goofily, but not remotely entertainingly in a hotel room, I wondered if people really still think that it’s inherently funny to see fat people dance.

Then, while I was on the YouTube enjoying the comedy stylings of my friend Joe Minolfi at Carolines — funny stuff — I got distracted by one of the “related” video suggestions on the right side of the page.

minolfi grab

This video, called My Humps, posted by user fatboygetdown, is clearly just two minutes and thirty-five seconds of a fat boy getting down (to the Black Eyed Peas). Why would I want to see this? Better question: Why have over one million one hundred and ninety thousand people watched it?

Oh, right, because people really still think that it’s inherently funny to see fat people dance. Sigh.

Google Game: Best & Worst

The World Wide Web is just brimming with useful information, neatly packaged in quickly digestible bite-sized morsels of information, tagged and labeled for easy finding with the superlatives we crave. In our fast-paced society you don’t just want a way to a trimmer tummy, you want the Fastest Way to Flatter Abs. Strapped for cash? What’s the cheapest way to get to Mexico? (Try deportation.) Sexiest celebrities. Most extreme car chases. Man versus Beast. (OK, I got carried away. I just wanted an excuse to link to this. And this. And this!) Moral of the story, we want the best and we want it now. We also want the worst.

Continue reading

It’s Mid-Morning, Grab a Straw


I’m a bit confused about this Diet Coke internet banner ad. Can we discus briefly? As far as I can tell it’s suggesting that:

a. You should eat some meal at 11:01. I have to assume that’s AM.

b. That meal should be smart and fresh, like a salad.

c. To accompany your post-breakfast, pre-noon salad you should down a Diet Coke.

I get the feeling that some time in the future people are going to look back at this the way we look back at Coke ads from the days when Coke actually contained coke.

Mead, M’Lady? Prithee, Mountain Dew.

At this weekend’s New York City Medieval Festival in Fort Tryon Park, even the most devotedly anachronistic lords and maidens couldn’t go a day without…

their cell phones…

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Mountain Dew and Budweiser…

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razor scooters…

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and ye olde internet.

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A Message from Nanja Eboko, Exchange Student from Cameroon

Apologies that I’m not savvy enough to post this video like a proper blogger would, but please believe me that this is worth a click. My roommate and I managed to catch this commercial for Cameroon last Wednesday night during Conan. Prime broadcast real estate on a major network — just keep that in mind while you watch. It’s the third video listed on the Come to Cameroon website. Here’s a teaser: The spot begins, “Strategically located within Africa, Cameroon … combines political stability with enormous reserves of natural resources…”

cameroon

As my viewing partner astutely noted, Cameroon seems to be giving Kazakhstan a run for its money.