Video: Golf Pro Bruce Brian Billings

I'm super proud to have produced a series of how-to videos for golf pro Bruce Brian Billings!! Here's the first and keep an eye out for 4 more!

Somebody trademarked this

My brother just told me that Pat Riley trademarked the term "three-peat" and wondered if Randy Jackson had trademarked "in it to win it", which apparently Randy's been saying ad nauseum on that singing gameshow this season. I think the phrase has been used by the NY lotto for decades, but just for kicks I did a trademark search on "in it to win it". Apparently lots of people have put a trademark claim on "in it to win it" ( / in it 2 win it / init2winit / in it two win it ), but more impressively, somebody got trademark claim #78041153 for this:

THE IMPACT PLAYER. BECOME AN IMPACT PLAYER. BECOME AN IMPACT PLAYER TODAY! THE HAPPY ART OF BUSINESS & LIFE ACHIEVEMENT. AMERICA'S FUNNIEST BUSINESSMAN FOOTPRINTS OR BUTTPRINTS? FIND YOUR GREENEST PASTURE. STREAMLINE SUCCESS. MAKE A COMMITMENT TO EXCELLENCE. BUILD EQUITY IN YOURSELF. EARN THE RIGHT. EARN THE RIGHT TO SUCCEED. EARN THE RIGHT TO FAIL. THRIVERS, SURVIVORS & CHEVROLET DRIVERS. WE ALL TAKE TURNS IN THE BARREL. THE WORRY CIRCLE. MANAGING THE WORRY CIRCLE. YOUR DAILY DOZEN. CREATE YOUR DAILY DOZEN. CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK, CHANGE YOUR BEHAVIOR, CHANGE YOUR LIFE. CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK, CHANGE YOUR LIFE. FIND YOUR GREENEST PASTURE. FIX YOUR LIFE. FIX YOUR LIFE IN LESS THAN AN HOUR. WIN THE ONES YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO WIN AND SOME OF THE ONES YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO LOSE. ARTFUL SIMPLICITY. BRILLIANT SIMPLICITY. THE ARTFUL SIMPLICITY OF THE COMPLEX. ACCESSIBLE LIFE LESSONS. LAUGH YOUR WAY TO A RICHER, HAPPIER AND MORE SUCCESSFUL WAY OF LIFE. MY FRIENDS & CO-CONSPIRATORS. SHINE YOUR MIRROR. BE BETTER, NOT PERFECT. NEVER LOOK IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR. LIFE'S WHAT YOU DO BETWEEN SHAVES. LIFE'S WHAT HAPPENS BETWEEN SHAVES. SHARE THE LAUGHTER. YOUR WORK IS YOUR AUTOGRAPH -- SIGN WITH A FLOURISH! WORK IS 24% OF YOUR LIFE -- TREAT IT THAT WAY. ONE NEW THING I CAN DO INSTANTLY TO CHANGE MY LIFE AND WORK. TEDSEZ. EARN THE RIGHT. EARN THE RIGHT TO SUCCEED. AND EARN THE RIGHT TO FAIL. SEE THE END AND WORK BACKWARD. NO STINKIN' THINKIN'! DO MORE & WANT LESS. ROLE MODELS -- FOLLOW ONE, BECOME ONE. IT'S OK TO BE A WILD DUCK. BUSINESS & TALENT DEVELOPMENT. THE EFFECTIVE USE OF HUMOR IN BUSINESS. HUMOR & LAUGHTER WORKS IN BUSINESS. WHAT YOU SAY AND HOW YOU SAY IT -- WORD ENGINEERING. THE POWER OF PERSONALITY TYPES. HAPPINESS, CONTENTMENT AND INNER PEACE ARE FAR STRONGER AND MORE POWERFUL THAN FRUSTRATION AND ANGER. WHAT IS YOUR LIFE A UNIQUE LABORATORY FOR? WHAT HAS YOUR LIFE BEEN A UNIQUELY POWERFUL LABORATORY FOR? KNOW WHAT YOU WANT, LOOK FOR WHAT YOU WANT, AND FIND WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR -- IT'S OUT THERE. DON'T GET PICKED OFF SECOND. NEVER LET A COMPETITOR SURPRISE YOU.

So, yeah! You can do whatever you want with that. Maybe laugh your way to a richer, happier and more successful way of life? Shoot, I don't know! Life's what you do between shaves. It's ok to be a wild duck.

I think The Strokes have discovered hope

Have you guys heard the new Strokes album? It's really good. I hear everything from The Cars and Queen to Men At Work, Red Hot Chili Peppers and the odd touch of Zeppelin (specifically, Robert Plant's wrecked vocals on "Custard Pie"). They even drag out some '80s gated-reverb drums to make you feel icky/awesome. It all sounds warmly familiar, and yet totally fresh and new with the signature Strokes sound. In '80s drag or something.

But also interesting to me is that Julian Casablancas seems to have added a dimension to his standard bored/disappointed/blasé songwriting. I can't think of a Strokes song that you could characterize as "caring" or even "interested", and I've listened the hell out of the first album and perhaps as much of the second album (trying to figure out why it just doesn't sing like the first). But hearing him sing, "Don't go that way / I'll wait for you" on "Under Cover Of Darkness", makes me think it's the first time a Strokes song has used a voice that says "I actually care about something" as opposed to the perpetual detachment/disinterest that they've championed since "Is This It". Compared to the last album, when he sings, "I hate them all / I hate myself", I'd say it's a significant departure.

It's no wonder this thing is the single off the album. It's a banger, and it's bright, and it's filled with hope. I hope it gets lots of play. I'm always tempted to write in the hyperbolic superlative and dub this moment the Great Hipster Awakening or something equally as bold and unverifiable, but I won't. I'll just say that Angles is probably their best album since their first, and I like it a lot. Because this post started as a status update on Facebook and I just had too much to say.

PVT: LIght Up Bright Fires lyrics

Aside from the Social Network soundtrack, which justly just won an Oscar, I think the album I listened to most last year was PVT's Church With No Magic. So I was a little surprised when I went looking for lyrics to it recently and came up with nothing. Just listen to this song. It's like if Radiohead had INXS's Michael Hutchence for a lead singer:

Even searching for partial lines of these lyrics found nothing, so I transcribed them myself. Can any PVT fans help me out here? Here's what I have:

Never in my whole life / nor in fantasy

Would I end up here / dancing with the enemy

Friends are all married / jobs in the city

No one wants to be there / no one wants to meet

At night we rise / Light up bright fires

Too much of a good thing / coming from a bad place

How did I get here / Beaten in my own race

And all along good night / Garbage in the main street

All God's mysteries / Left up on the back seat

At night we rise / Light up bright fires

At night we rise / Light up bright fires

At night we rise / Light up bright fires

At night we rise / Light up bright fires

Light up bright fires

Change something

Mantra:

UCB Comedy trailers

Not a lot of people get over to the Upright Citizens Brigade video site ucbcomedy.com, but there's some good stuff over there. Here are three mock trailers I like. I edited the second, which my UCB Beta team, Pantsuit, produced.

Overly Ambitious Ensemble Drama	UCBcomedy.com
Watch more comedy videos from the twisted minds of the UCB Theatre at UCBcomedy.com

Why Are You Still Filming This?	UCBcomedy.com
Watch more comedy videos from the twisted minds of the UCB Theatre at UCBcomedy.com

Crying	UCBcomedy.com
Watch more comedy videos from the twisted minds of the UCB Theatre at UCBcomedy.com

Insane Clown Posse vs. Carl Sagan

I love that this video:

Was trying to say this:

It's high time for an Insane Clown Posse edition of "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" Seriously:

Stop and look around, it's all astounding
Water, fire, air and dirt
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don't wanna talk to a scientist
Y'all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed

...to say nothing of rhyming "Mars" with "stars". A+ ICP!!!!!!!!!

Teh rapture is comming!!!!1

I can't get over this article about a guy promising that the rapture is finally at hand come May 21, 2011. Oh, did you think it was 2012, according to misinterpretations of Mayan lore?

Harold Camping lets out a hearty chuckle when he considers the people who believe the world will end in 2012. "That date has not one stitch of biblical authority," Camping says.

Ahahaha, so funny, the people who believe it will be in 2012. Especially considering that "On Sept. 6, 1994, dozens of Camping's believers gathered inside Alameda's Veterans Memorial Building to await the return of Christ, an event Camping had promised for two years."

Ahahaha, so funny, the people who believed it would be in 1994. But Camping allowed that he "may" have made a mistake. So this time around, he's got a foolproof method to make sure that his calculations are correct:

Christ hung on the cross April 1, 33 A.D.," he began. "Now go to April 1 of 2011 A.D., and that's 1,978 years."

Camping then multiplied 1,978 by 365.2422 days - the number of days in each solar year, not to be confused with a calendar year.

Next, Camping noted that April 1 to May 21 encompasses 51 days. Add 51 to the sum of previous multiplication total, and it equals 722,500.

Camping realized that (5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17) = 722,500.

Or put into words: (Atonement x Completeness x Heaven), squared.

One word: Phew. I like my science airtight, and this guy's got airtight down to a science. As President Bush said, "Fool me twice... we can't get fooled again!"

Reid and Biz tweet their best business advice

Here's another video I produced with LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman and Twitter's Biz Stone. Tweet your best business advice today with #in — read more about that here.

I'll be darned if they don't have a Tim and Eric thing going. On the Silicon Valley tip.

Michael Jackson street art: corrected for reality

Since I saw this rogue tribute to MJ in NYC, I had to amend it to better match reality:

Sam Simkoff on Le Loup's "Family"

Wrote up an album review for Le Loup's new album Family here and cut a new video from their show at the Echoplex last Wednesday night:

Snapshot of Christmases past: N64 vs Xbox

Call this disparity a nice social commentary: I saw this video today and couldn't help but think of the second one - watch the first kid "get" an Xbox for Christmas, then watch the second kid get a Nintendo 64 for Christmas. I don't think I've ever seen a sadder YouTube video than this:

Somebody buy that kid an Xbox stat, so he can have the Christmas he deserved, like this:

"Have you even read my online Internet blog?"

Here's a YouTube video that hits it right on the money. And let me be the first to enshrine this phrase into Google's cache, since nothing comes up yet: "Have you even read my online Internet blog?"

Though I've spoken at social media events for PR Newswire, LA Town Hall and the Havard Business School Assoc. of Southern California, I've conscientiously avoided the title of "social media guy". Here's why (warning — explicit language):

lolz, "Make your check out to TwitBookBlogGuru.com"

UPDATE: it's meme time.

LinkedIn's new Profile Organizer

If you've ever needed to compile a unique list of candidates, prospects, or professional contacts, LinkedIn just launched a bookmarking feature called Profile Organizer — check out the video I produced for the product below, and read more about it on LinkedIn's Blog, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, or WebProNews.

I'm concerned that conspiracy is becoming a political movement

In 2001 sometime, I experienced a guy on the uptown 4,5,6 platform in Manhattan shouting, "Do you understand that if you have a square R with a 5-R configuration, flickering back and forth, you will be shot dead by federal agents. You understand that, right?" (I mentioned this here too.) Right! It was kind of an amusing moment in subway-nut conspiracy think. And I kept an eye out for that 5-R configuration for years, to no avail.

Then a few weeks ago I came across this Xerox of a Wall Street Journal article, scotch-taped to a lamppost in Santa Monica:

This little clipping of colored-pen conspiracy scratch rivals the subway caveat above, in that none of it makes a shred of sense. The underlined text makes no sense; the circled words around it make no sense; and the thread of logic from "Catholic Church" to "Roman Monster" to "chess" to "Berlin Nazi" also, makes no sense. Though I must give this conspiracist props for his flags: they're quite compelling.

I'd typically write this off as another bit of isolated lunacy, but there's a disturbing context for this disjointed bit of crazy. Thomas Friedman might've put it best in an editorial today, in which he opines the "poisonous political environment" being created by conservatives, who seek to delegitimize the president by any means possible. The wanton Hitler comparisons, the interchangeable cries of fascist/communist/socialist, the shouting of "you lie" by a congressman during a presidential address — it was just this kind of environment that emboldened a right-wing Jewish nationalist to assassinate Yitzhak Rabin.

For RNC chairman Michael Steel to call Friedman a "nut job" reveals that conservative leadership is in denial of the toxic stew they're fomenting. "[They're] saying, because you disagree with the president on policy," Steel said, "that all of the sudden we're going to make this leap into, you know, assassinations and all this other stuff." No, Mr. Steel — what Friedman is saying that your rhetoric is whipping up an uninformed fringe to take that action. And the facts point to that possibility.

A credible white supremacist assassination plot was already foiled last year; death threats against the president are up 400% this year; Fox-inspired protesters proudly carry signs saying, "We came unarmed — this time." Just yesterday, a conservative editor wrote an article outlining the possibility of a military coup to dethrone the president, suggesting it was better than letting the president achieve his goals: "A coup is not an ideal option," the editor wrote, "but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable."

If these aren't signs that the heated rhetoric is having a dangerous influence, I don't know what would be. It's well time the conservative movement — Fox and all — dissociated itself from this lunatic fringe. If they want to lead this democracy in a different direction, they need to assume a responsible leadership role that doesn't score points by slurs, smears, and disinformation. Until then, they are stoking the indiscriminate anger of a volatile minority, and their base will continue to evolve into something like this guy:

And yikes! — who knows what he's capable of?

Is Ralph Nader the anti-Ayn Rand?

If Ayn Rand's life thesis is Atlas Shrugged, I think I just found its antithesis in this week's New Yorker. Raffi Khatchadourian writes that Ralph Nader "has been secretly working on his first novel":

...The book, called "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!," is seven hundred and thirty-six pages long, and it contains dozens of characters, many of them real people... who act out Nader's political fantasies. By the last page, most of the reforms that Nader has been arguing for all these years end up being enacted. Corporations are neutered. Third parties win. America is reborn."

So where Rand argued that only the super-rich can save us by following selfish aims, championing the dollar and driving the bloodsucking government into the ground, Nader will argue that only the super-rich can save us by thinking of the greater good, enacting wise regulation and driving corporate greed into the ground. How's that for a philosophical grudge match?

It sounds like Nader's even aiming for a Rand-sized tome, though he's got a few hundred pages to go if he wants to match Atlas Shrugged. That shouldn't be too hard if he follows Rand's formula: just have his protagonist outline his philosophical worldview in a climactic courtroom scene or rogue takeover of the nation's media. No problem! Rand's digressions are always cut and paste; they could be in any book, anywhere. Maybe Nader could just make his final chapter be In Pursuit of Justice — just drop that puppy right in there, and he'd satisfy the perfect Ayn Rand template. What a masterstroke of poli-sci-fi agit-prop that could be.

I'm intrigued to read Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!, if only to see it go eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth with Atlas Shrugged. That pairing of fictional ambitions is definitely unsafe at any speed.

Daniel Libeskind: Van Halen homage?

Check out this new development south of the Staples Center in LA: apparently it was designed by Daniel Libeskind, best known for his World Trade Center redux. One might describe the architecture as "early Van Halen," with a fretboard and headstock rising gracefully from a laser-striped solid-body. I'd call it homage. Or is it infringement? I believe Eddie copyrighted the mad laser-striping look, if his action against Nike is any indication.

Either way, I'm sure they'll call it something preposterous like The Residencies at LA Live, but considering China's CCTV building is known as "big pants," I'm gonna say Libeskind's latest will be more affectionately known as the "Hot for Teacher" building.

The perils of frames: hey, toolbar

Earlier today, I experienced my first toolbar-upon-toolbar, when LinkedIn's ActionBar doubled down on Alltop's toolbar. So I did the only logical thing and submitted it to StumbleUpon to see if I could get three times my toolbar pleasure. Su.pr! It worked. Then I got all ahead of myself and submitted it to Digg, to see if I could get the Digg Toolbar all up ins for a four-plex of barspam, but every time it went to load, it looked like StumbleUpon's toolbar canceled out Digg's toolbar. Which seems uncool, considering.

Finally I tried to see if I could get Facebook's frame to party down, but I discovered that Facebook's frame doesn't seem to pop up anymore. I checked a bunch of my friends' links to see if any prompted the Facebook frame, and it still wouldn't come out to play. Which got me wondering: has Facebook become the moral leader in the toolbar frame space?

I challenge the Internets to a reach a non-Photoshopped toolbar sextacular (no, as in, six toolbars): game the system to throw on a Digg toolbar, maybe a Twig AdBar, and any other third-party framers on top of the three above. I got you halfway there; the emotional investment is too much for me to take it to the next level. The second half of the challenge would be X'ing out all the frames and successfully navigating back to the original article, which, ironically, is about good social media design.

RockMelt logo looks like evil dotMac

There's only so much you can do with drawing lines around a globe to represent how the Internet connects us. Marc Andreessen's new RockMelt project takes that logo meme to the hyperbolic superlative: apparently, this browser will liquefy the earth with its blazing innovation. Literally making the world a smaller place.

I guess I can get on board with that, though I still have this nagging feeling that RockMelt's designers just looked at Apple's old .Mac logo and said, "Let's corrupt that." Like they took the .Mac sphere, with it's hopeful points of light, and said, "Let's turn those into lacerations, where evil spirits are escaping the bowels of hell." You can actually count about four exact paths they've ripped off from the .Mac logo, all to build the hype that RockMelt will destroy the geophysics we rely on to hold the planet together.

Fair enough. If once we complained about an Internet Explorer monopoly, we've now got Firefox, Safari, Flock, Opera, Chrome and others. Segmentation seems to be the theme for advanced commercial civilization, and we all know competition is good for a rational marketplace. So if IE is still Rome, maybe RockMelt will destroy the empire in a way we can all get behind.

But we'll know their designers were probably using Safari.

Read more: Mashable | New York Times | TechCrunch

O; snap! Tron Legacy Trailer

Good lord, there's something about indiglo that makes me whole. How awesome that Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner are part of this — let's hope Disney takes care of the details. We've only waited 25 years for a sequel. Srsly, the Tron franchise makes Star Trek look like Small Wonder.

And if you really want the scoop on this premiere, you'll need to watch this too: