Elevator pitch: broadcast your toilet breaks. Optionally, podcast the splashing noise. Think Twitter meets your toilet.
Our verdict: next year we’ll all be doing a number 2.0 and subscribing on our iPood.
RichardQuest.tv
Elevator pitch: follow CNN’s Richard Quest live on your laptop or cellphone as he wanders round Central Park with pockets full of methamphetamine and a noose attached to his testicles. Think Robert Scoble crossed with your very worst nightmares.
Our verdict: ask us when we’ve stopped shuddering.
Getahitman.com
Elevator pitch: post a job, hitmen bid against each other in the only way they know how. A Google Maps mashup allows you to find contract kills near you; get paid with Google Checkout when your contract checks out. Think oDesk meets Grosse Pointe Blank.
Our verdict: this should kill the market.
Dictatr
Elevator pitch: long on psychotic sociological ideas but short on manpower? Crowdsourcing a fascist government regime is as easy as tagging your enemies. Think flashmobs meet Anschluss.
Our verdict: sure to take over by 2010.
AmIABetterDirectorThanUweBollOrNot
Elevator pitch: Uwe Boll movies are shown alongside homemade videos of overweight, bearded men making tortuous political rants, fluffy kittens making biscuits and babies laughing uncontrollably. The public votes on which is the more engaging, and one lucky winner gets to take the German film director on in hand to hand combat. Think YouTube meets prime time reality TV meets movies made for tax reasons.
Our verdict: evil awakens.
PrivacyInvasionSupersite
Elevator pitch: enter invasive details about your own life and the lives of your friends and family, ignoring the fact that some of the site’s early investors have connections with the CIA, and that your data is both being mined and sold individually to commercial organisations. Think … oh, wait.
Our verdict: hey, it’s a revenue model that works. Kiss your right to a private life goodbye. Poke!
I mean, not specifically you, sitting at your computer playing on the Internet when you ought to be doing something far more important. You’re a harmless procrastinator, inching closer and closer to death without being totally cognisant of the fact that one day you’ll be gone and nothing you’ve done in your whole entire life will have mattered. You’re harmless. No, I mean you, each and every one of you, the bolus collective audience as a group. You suck.
I’m going to cut straight to the chase. Each and every one of you has potential. You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake, to paraphrase an over-paraphrased, overrated, verging-on-fascist style-over-substance pseudfest of a movie, but you could become one. Make the right decisions, fail to succumb to apathy, follow your heart and try and avoid the bad luck that dogs anything with a pulse, and there’s every chance you could turn humanity on its head and make a permanent, indelible mark on civilisation. I’m not joking. You could change everything.
Thing is, you don’t. Never have, never will. You can’t, you won’t. You’re an apathetic, skill-deprived, underperforming son-of-a-schmuck who might as well just shit out the rest of your days phoning in your lines in a 9 to 5 trainwreck of a life, squirming through relationships you don’t really want to be in and going through the motions of being a happy, well-to-do human being when really you want someone to switch off your charade of a life and change the channel to something interesting. You and psoriasis are on an equal footing. You’re a flake. Except you’ve willingly seen at least one episode of America’s Next Top Model, and psoriasis isn’t sentient and doesn’t have eyeballs, so in at least one important respect you’re losing.
Even versus Karl Rove - accepted by many to be the walking, heaving human being equivalent of psoriasis - you lose. I’m not going to explain why. You just do.
Here’s where, in normal circumstances, we might think about publishing a top ten list. We’re a site on the Internet, after all, and the idea is that you post ten articles a day and get paid roughly a gonad hair every ten words for the privilege, so actual textual content with paragraphs and things isn’t normally the order of the day. We did an article called "What would Jesus do?" which was just a list of things we thought it would be funny for Jesus to have sex with, for Christ’s sake. Paragraphs don’t really belong on the Internet. They seem wrong, like thoroughly researched investigative journalism, or linking to Goatse or Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up now that they’re both so totally over.
But you deserve a little more punishment than a bullet list can provide. You see, your apathy isn’t just affecting you. It’s not just affecting your family or the people you know. At best estimate there are well over six billion people on this tiny, choking crapsicle we call a planet, and you’re affecting them all. I’m not saying you directly control the fate of the universe, but every time you don’t give a shit, a baby dies. So care, asshole.
This has been a political broadcast on behalf of caring. Your heart endorses this message. And I’m going to lay off the goddamn whisky and go to bed.
Okay, so this is a catalogue mention on the website of Little, Brown and Company. But we thought the irony was too good to pass up; Little, Brown & Co publish Hug Time, and are owned by Hachette Book Group USA. In turn, their purse strings are controlled by Lagardere, a French group that sells over $13 billion worth of military aircraft, satellites and missiles a year. Other properties owned by the weapons manufacturer include Virgin Megastores and French Elle.
In contrast to arms dealers, who any terrorist or warmongering government will tell you are a laugh a minute at the very least, weapons manufacturers are not normally associated with yucks a plenty. They’re serious people who look after their bottom line, involved in the serious business of manufacturing machines to kill people.
These are some websites they would probably rather you didn’t know about. Too bad. This is the first part of an ongoing series.
As well as landmines, General Electric also makes American Gladiators, a fact that perhaps deadlock seals its reputation. It has an 80% stake in NBC Universal, the company behind the NBC television station, and movies like Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, an upcoming Martin Lawrence vehicle. And in turn, NBC owns HornyManatee.com, a site that urges members to sent in “amateur horny manatee pictures or stories”. The copyright principle of fair use dictates that we’re allowed to include a screenshot of the aforementioned; good taste dictates that we will not.
Okay, this isn’t anywhere near as funny as horny manatees, but there’s something darkly comic about Solae. Really darkly. The company produces isolated soya protein, an ingredient in many processed food products. However, as well as the corn dogs and chocolate bars that are helping America spread its influence without leaving its comfy armchair, Solae’s ingredients find themselves in all kinds of vegetarian and vegan products by partner companies: SoLean, Linda McCartney, Gardenburger, El Burrito and Mori-Nu are some of the brands that use it, according to the company website. We think you’ll agree that the customers of these brands try and buy ethically, care about the environment, avoid products whose production would involve killing animals, and so on. Lovely.
But Solae is a joint effort between DuPont and Bunge Ltd. While the latter has nothing to do with weapons, the former has historically had a number of fingers in the weapons pie, and was originally founded to make gunpowder. Historians disagree over whether or not it produced Zyklon B, but as well as revenue-makers like Kevlar, it got into a little hot water in 2002 for supplying Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme (as well as other well-known firms like HP, Eastman Kodak, NEC and Saab).
Enjoy that meat-free soya protein burger product!
Do you know about a website or otherwise innocuous product that’s owned by a weapons manufacturer? Let us know! It’s fun for all the family, ha ha!
Its eyes are USB 5.1 ports; its ears pump music directly from the bowels of the Earth. It follows you wherever you go, just floating, always facing you, occasionally pausing to open its mouth in mock surprise. Swim, and it glides just above the surface of the water, waiting for you to emerge. Go to sleep and it follows you to your bedroom, gently whispering sleep throughout the night as it glows faintly in the dark. Wake up and it’s there, hovering above your bed, the technological waking terror ready to follow you around for another day. It’s an Apple fan’s dream come true.
The Devil Head comes in three variants: a vanilla Devil Head, which has all of the basic functionality, a Devil Head Air, which looks two dimensional when it faces you dead on, a bit like a halibut, and the Devil Head Pro, which is a little faster, can wiggle its eyebrows in time to The Immigrant Song, and shoots lasers at the weak and people foolish enough not to do its bidding. A tactile, multi-touch Devil Head is apparently in the works; insiders tell us that it responds to stroking and a playful tussle in productive, motivating ways, including repetitively chanting Satan over and over again. Form, function and design - Apple have done it again! Pricing starts at a reasonable $1,499,999.99.
Excerpted from TechCrunch’s direct brain transmission feed, between an article by Duncan Riley about geopolitical current affairs and the impending launch of a rumored Twitter clone
January 2023
With the introduction of the global new world order comes a new product line from Apple. Perhaps out of respect for our new masters, or perhaps because Jonathan Ive has been poached by Imperial Overlord 1 to develop his personal Helmet of Good and Just Destruction, these have returned to the style first made famous by Jobs and Wozniak in the early 1980s. The beige coloring of the iDestructoCube is a nostalgic nod to the original Mac Classic. The bomb that appears on-screen to alert you to the fact that a member of the Imperial Overlord Council has marked you for deletion is straight from System 7, and even the kiloton explosion that will subsequently rip apart your home and family has been digitally tuned to sound like Sosumi. As always, the magic is in the little touches.
Steve gave a dynamic performance as always, even despite Engadget’s snipers continually taking out Imperial Officers in the auditorium with high-powered rifles (they’ve since been banned from returning), and Admiral Huckabee’s guest appearance was a fun addition to a rewarding hour.
Taken from CNet News For The Benefit Of The Goodly Imperial Emperor
January 2028
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Huckabee was one of three GOP candidates who raised their hand during Thursday’s debate when asked if they don’t believe in evolution the development of organisms and species from a primitive state [sic].
[..] Huckabee said if given a chance to elaborate on the question from MSNBC moderator Chris Matthews, he would have responded: “If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, I’ll accept that….I believe there was a creative process.”
LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas — In a desperate and cynical attempt to get some attention for his utterly forgotten campaign for the GOP nomination, former Governor Mike Huckabee pulled a Jim Webb on his own son and sent young David Huckabee through airport security with a LOADED HANDGUN.
The Glock .40-caliber was “loaded with eight rounds” and concealed in David Huckabee’s briefcase, which he cunningly put through the X-Ray machine.
[…] One of his sons was involved in the hanging of a stray dog at a Boy Scout camp in 1998. The incident led to the dismissal of David Huckabee, then 17, from his job as a counselor at Camp Pioneer in Hatfield, Ark. It also prompted the local prosecuting attorney— bombarded with complaints generated by a national animal-rights group—to write a letter to the Arkansas state police seeking help investigating whether David and another teenager had violated state animal-cruelty laws. The state police never granted the request, and no charges were ever filed. But John Bailey, then the director of Arkansas’s state police, tells NEWSWEEK that Governor Huckabee’s chief of staff and personal lawyer both leaned on him to write a letter officially denying the local prosecutor’s request.
On Friday Union Advisory Board President David Huckabee paid $62.50 in city fees for two companies he owns and operates in Jonesboro. […] Huckabee, a senior political science and speech communications major of Little Rock, paid the $62.50 fine after receiving a notice from the Jonesboro City Collector’s office. Huckabee paid the fine using 6,250 pennies, which took more than 45 minutes to process.
As far as I can tell, it’s mostly secular liberals swooning over Huckabee. Liberals adore Huckabee because he fits their image of what an evangelical should be: stupid and easily led.
Flying cars Vehicle of the future! Never mind the obvious problems associated with three dimensional traffic jams, not to mention drunk driving. Just picture rising above the urban sprawl in your very own flying machine, and consider the possibilities! Gas stations in the sky! McDonald’s Drive Thrus in the sky! People forced to live on the poverty line due to our unequal economic system, soullessly wiping windows in order to make a meager buck so they can afford to stay at the homeless shelter tonight, in the sky! Idiots flicking out still-burning cigarette ends while their subwoofer causes visible vibrations in the air around them, in the sky! Why, that’s a veritable world of tomorrow right there.
Scuba bears Global warming is irrevocably melting the natural habitat of the friendly polar bear. The solution is simple: get the companies responsible to kit out each individual animal with scuba gear. Problem solved. Alternatively, install giant refrigerators at both poles: sure, they’ll pump out massively ozone-depleting levels of CFCs, but it won’t matter! No matter how much poison we spew out, the planet will stay frosty cool at both ends.
Mecha-Britney Britney Spears’ mortal body has been virtually destroyed, and it must be rebuilt. This year, expect her to be kitted out with a RoboCop-like exoskeleton that allows her to belt out catchy Swedish-penned power pop while becoming unsusceptible to the vices that have blighted her existence as a mortal human. Dealing out harsh justice is an optional extra; doing the robot for anyone who asks is free.
Instant learning Pretty soon, you’ll be able to take any piece of knowledge and have it beamed directly into your brain, like Keanu Reeves learns kung fu in The Matrix. Simultaneously, the Internet will become humanity’s premier source of information. Through the medium of self-aggrandizing blogs, 140-character Twitter messages, snarky Digg comments, Facebook applications and lolcats, we will collectively reach the next stage of human evolution. Don’t be afraid.
A little more rum, a little more monkey And perhaps a little bit more of the two combined.
I live in the suburbs. That’s nothing special. Just about everyone in Sydney lives in the suburbs, with the notable exception of homeless people, who live in the ‘streets’, and wannabe gangsta types who live in ‘the hood’. I imagine ‘the hood’ would be pretty crowded. I often wear a hoodie. There’s just enough room in the hood part of it for my head. Which is confusing in and of itself. Perhaps they only live in my head, which is itself in ‘the hood’. It would explain my many and carried mood swings.
Anyhow… I live in the suburbs. I’m surrounded by blocks of flats and smug pieces of shit who can afford actual houses. They constantly rub my nose in my inability to save enough money to buy my quarter-acre block by watering their gardens with giant Methuselahs of expensive imported French springwater (sparkling, of course), while laughing gaily as their wives back their shiny new Audis over their infant children in the driveway. I hate them. They remind me of Ann Coulter. Smug fucks who know that they’re doing the wrong thing, but don’t fucking care.
Anyhow… I live in a flat. In America, they’d call it an apartment. If I owned it, and I lived in America, they’d call it a condo. Somehow, ownership of an apartment magically transforms it into a condo. This, to me, makes no sense at all. It’s a flat. Or a unit. You’re a unit. Just for reading this, you’re a unit. Unit!
Anyhow… some smug Audi-driving fuck who lives in a stand-alone house near me has a big enough backyard to have a chicken coop. I’m assuming it’s a chicken coop, because at all hours of the day and night, I can hear a rooster. It crows incessantly, except when it stops. It sounds a bit like Robert Page, back when he used to swill vodka and scream a lot. It also sounds a bit like someone trying to start a small Japanese car with a crook starter motor. Or bad sparkplugs. I hate small Japanese cars. They remind me of small Japanese people, and I feel sad that so many Japanese people are so small. Honestly, they’re tiny. I had a friend with a Japanese girlfriend once. He met her online. She moved to Sydney, and lived in his room for a year. She was so small, she was invisible. But a steady diet of Australian food fattened her up. Even so, it was about four months before she was even visible to the naked eye.
Anyhow… I live in a unit in the suburbs near some houses where someone keeps a chicken coop with a sad-sounding rooster that is, at this point in time, utterly devoid of Japanese people. The unit, that is. I have no idea if the chicken has any Japanese people. It might, oyu know… they could live in the chicken eggs. You know… because they’re tiny. They’re like the Borrowers. In that they constantly steal things. And are small.
Anyhow… My unit is near a house with a rooster that crows at all hours. 1am – Cock-a-doodle-dooooooo, it goes. Over and over. Crying out into the darkness of the night. “I am a rooster, and this is my turf”, it screams. There are no other calls to be heard. It is the Alpha Rooster. And I hate it. But I have a plan. Oh yes… I have a plan. I live very close to a KFC outlet. The smell that KFC produces is maddening. It smells so good, but you know – you just know – that no matter how hungry that wafting scent of chicken fat and MSG makes you, if you put even a solitary morsel of the Colonel’s Secret Recipe in your mouth, you will instantly gain massive amounts of weight. They should feed it to Japanese people.
Anyhow… I’ve hatched this plan. Much like a chicken hatches an egg, I hatched a plan in my unit near a house with a chicken in the suburbs who cries through sheer loneliness, a mournful crowing. Like a bird with an aching beak. A bird unhappy that it’s doomed to go through life with beady eyes. Little, beady eyes and a cold, black heart. The plan is fiendishly simple. The plan is this: I will snatch the rooster. I will steal an Audi. I will drive the rooster to KFC, and deposit it – crowing mightily, through the drive-through window. I will proclaim loudly that I see no signs at all saying that KFC doesn’t accept BYO. I will be arrested. I will blame it on the odour of KFC. And I will walk away scott-free.
Because everyone lives in the suburbs. And everyone knows what it’s like to look at the greener grass and wish wistfully that those fucking idiots next door would realise that the suburbs are no place for a chicken.
