Well now, Shell's getting it, too.

An "Arctic Ready" site of "Shell" is currently making the rounds on the Internet. It looks like it's by Shell, it's written in corporate rhetoric, and it has all of the features of a corporate attempt at social media (like a 'make your own postcard' section, and a game for kids).

Except, a closer look reveals something else: In the "game" for kids, you defend an oil rig from icebergs. On a page where "Shell" touts an arctic drilling platform, they explain:

On the slight chance that something does go wrong, Shell's spill cleanup plan is second to none. No one has yet fully determined how to clean up an oil spill in pack ice or broken ice—but that too is exactly the sort of challenge we love.

But best of all are the social media "postcards" that they created and that people are spreading around the web.

For example:

Or:

Or:

On a first look, they appear like something Shell put out, but an actual read would make you question if a company like Shell would have the gall to actually put out something like that.

Which gets you clicking. And so goes a canny awareness campaign like this. If successful activism takes more than just a message, now, these activists appear to most certainly have whatever that "extra something" is (which in this case, looks like astute and brilliant impersonation skills).

Check out what Shell's actual homepage looks like:

And the Arctic Ready homepage:

The real Shell site "help" page:

And the Arctic Ready "Shell" help page:

The entire thing is immaculately executed, and fairly hilarious, too. It's clearly some environmental group doing this, though the web registry only points to a privacy-proxy for a domain:

c/o ARCTICREADY.COM
P.O. Box 821650
Vancouver, WA 98682
US

Whoever it is, they're already fooling more than a few people, and are bound to upset the corporate PR brass at Shell. Something like this is bound to spread quickly, and fuel a little (misinformed) populist outrage along the way. So far, Shell's only issued this terse statement, hidden on their Alaska page:

Last week groups that oppose Shell’s plans in offshore Alaska posted a video that purports to show Shell employees at an event at the Seattle Space Needle. Shell did not host, nor participate in an event at the Space Needle and the video does not involve Shell or any of its employees. A fake press release claiming that Shell is considering legal action following the launch of the video was also distributed to the media. Most recently the group sponsored a contest on a website asking people to create fake advertisements which appear to be from Shell. The ads, and a contest to create more of the ads, are not associated with Shell. We continue to focus on a safe exploration season in 2012.

New York City has entire armies of so-called social media are marketing consultancies that likely can't yield results like this after years of trying everything in their playbooks. Maybe they could take a page from these guys', whoever they are.

UPDATE: It looks like it's the work of Greenpeace, in conjunction with activist group The Yes Men.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

McKay. (Mike Lawrie/Getty Images)

I probably haven’t seen the worst cabaret act of all time, but after Nellie McKay at Feinstein’s, I have certainly seen the dopiest. Part naive, lyric-driven song parade and part ecology lecture on the rape of the environment, this curiosity is called Silent Spring—It’s Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature and it features the cute, sincere and woefully misguided actress-singer in the role of late environmentalist author Rachel Carson, who devoted her career to saving the planet from arrogant self-destruction. Ms. McKay is a gentle activist who loves dogs and flowers and everything green, attaching a few songs about nature to a rambling discourse about the dangers of pesticides, insecticides and other acrimonious environmental assaults. (It’s not a show you want to see on Valentine’s Day.) The musical interludes do little to alleviate the academic tedium generated by the disorganized patter wedged between them. One or two critics I respect have high regard for this girl, but all I can see is a vast need for improvement. Her heart may be in the right place, but frankly, this corny little act, which she has constructed from crêpe paper and good intentions, is something of a mess.

The prize-winning books and essays by Carson, like Silent Spring and The Sea Around Us, are talismans to savor with results that resound today. (Among other accomplishments, the author was responsible for the government’s banning DDT from farm crops.) To her credit, Ms. McKay eschews preachiness for a more subtle, singable approach to life’s lessons. After an offstage chorus of “Every Little Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own,” she enters with her musicians, stomping among the tables to the tune of Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin’s “Make Way for Tomorrow” with teenage abandon, draped in graduation caps and gowns like alumni of Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge, replete with the idiocy of singer Ish Kabibble. The act eases its way down from there into a pool of ultimate silliness. Four tone-deaf musicians in straw hats shout comments like “Next stop  is Union Station!” while Ms. McKay dances with a biology lab microscope. Sometimes she answers the phone and in exasperation tries to deal with publishers, scientists and the annoying press longing for one of her pithy quotes. (“Hi, Rachel, this is William Shawn of the New Yorker calling!”) In keeping with the Carson conservationist theme, she gazes through a pair of oversize binoculars like Harold Lloyd. Then she pecks away on a portable typewriter while the audience waits for something to happen. A disastrous portion of her act is a pathetic, misguided attempt to milk sophomoric humor out of a literary phenomenon, with songs chosen to illustrate what the world has done to pollute the ozone. Well-intentioned and fearless, she’s a brave and bonnie little morsel attempting to inject something new and fresh into the calcified cabaret scene. Most of the time, her ideas backfire.

The full spectrum of Carson’s passion and its impact on future generations is merely a wedge issue used to string together a series of disconnected tunes. Some of them are wonderful. There’s a jazz instrumental by Charles Mingus, a touch of Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do” and a raspy socked-out bellow of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It.” How any of this enhances Carson’s work is anybody’s guess. Ms. McKay’s own compositions, like “Gonna Be a Bureaucrat,” are senseless curios with no defining musical characteristics. A horror called “Food” endlessly repeats the line “We’re gonna get some food in the house tonight—gonna get some food on the table!” while the four musicians feign falling asleep and snoring loudly. Something called “Old Love” plants lyrics in the air that fall with bewilderment on the baffled listeners: “I want an old love … don’t want a new love … a crimson and cold love … just like you!” Say what? “All this needs,” whispered a man at the next table, “is a banjo.” And then there they were—two of them, to be exact. Not to mention a dreaded ukulele, which should never be seen or heard this side of a Harvard-Princeton game. The show is called Silent Spring, so why doesn’t she sing the great Harold Arlen song of the same title, which says so much more about the darkness of the earth at noon than everything in this entire enterprise put together? The phone rings again. “Well,” she says in Carson’s voice, “I’ve been hearing a lot about these pesticides since the war!” You don’t know whether to laugh or wince. She often talks to people named Dorothy and Roger without identifying them. Were they people in Carson’s life? Does anybody care? A great portion of the time, she seems to be talking to herself, and when she gives an alarming report on the terminal lumps in her breast, it would be better if she didn’t talk at all. On the way out, an irate woman said, “You have to be on crystal meth to get through something this bad.”

Songs thrown together in a Cuisinart, splashing all over the stage, convey the beauty of natural wonder before it was abated by politicians, wrecking crews and petroleum tanks: “Early Autumn,” “Midnight Sun,” etc. They are wonderful selections, but her Little Lulu voice from the Stacey Kent-Maude Maggart School of Vocal Diminishment serves them badly. On Dave Frishberg’s soft anthem “Listen Here,” she sings the wrong notes. After “It’s So Peaceful in the Country,” I have finally heard Alec Wilder’s masterpiece performed like Spike Jones and the City Slickers. And what, I ask humbly, without rancor, is the meaning of an acceptance speech for the Albert Schweitzer Award for the Advancement of Animal Welfare, followed by “The Gentleman Is a Dope”? The whole thing is so confused you don’t know what’s going on half the time. Don’t even ask how “Ten Cents a Dance” fits in. She promises the audience to give out free condoms at the end of the show that are “tender” and “biodegradable.” I heard one shriek and a few gasps, but no laughs. Sophomoric patter only dilutes the impact of the points she aims to get across in the song lyrics. Faulty intonation, an errant sense of rhythm and occasionally singing out of tune don’t help. Everything seems to exist for the sake of a gimmick. It remains to be proved if she can anchor a quirky style to so much corn and make it work over a prolonged period of time.

As offbeat as she is, I can only wonder about the future of Nellie McKay. I think she will get better. She is smart. She is also sloppy and self-indulgent. The death of the Oak Room leaves the Café Carlyle and Feinstein’s at Loew’s Regency as the only two major hotel rooms in town. You now have to earn the right to play both. Ms. McKay isn’t there yet. The crowds punishing the parquet and the Parkay at prices equivalent to a Park Avenue mortgage payment demand more than just another precocious girl who stands center stage in a swanky club singing Hoagy Carmichael’s charming “Lazy Bones,” followed by a discussion of breast cancer. Some of the songs are first-rate, but she sings them all wrong.

rreed@observer.com

Ms. Hines was walking the carpet at an Upper East Side screening of The Last Mountain, a new documentary prominently featuring Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as he helps fight mountaintop removal in West Virginia coal country. "I had no idea! It's just shocking," said Ms. Hines, who'd previously seen the film at Sundance.

Ms. Hines is a friend of the Kennedy family through the Riverkeeper Foundation-and we wanted to check on rumors that she was squiring Mr. Kennedy's daughter Kick around Hollywood in an effort to make her a screen star. "I read that in the paper. I am encouraging her. I'm a big fan of hers-and I want to do what I can."

Mr. Kennedy wore a narrow red tie printed with fish-appropriately, as mountaintop removal, the film alleges, spreads poisons into the waters. He'd had a meeting with the film's director, Bill Haney, in Hyannisport-one brokered by National Resources Defense Council head John Adams-at which they agreed to expose the troubles in West Virginia. As a participant in the documentary, though, he didn't try to seize control: "I didn't even see the movie until it was made."

"Documentary is the last refuge for investigative journalism," Mr. Kennedy told The Observer, a theme he'd reiterate in his speech before the film began. "The only way people found out about global warming was An Inconvenient Truth."

As for his own film, "I have been litigating in the state for 25 years," Mr. Kennedy told us. "My family's been involved in West Virginia since 1960." As for other family involvements, we had to ask Mr. Kennedy about his daughter's purported Hollywood involvement. "I'm just happy if any of my kids have a job," he said, laughing, "and they're off my payroll."

Mr. Kennedy left the red carpet to pick up his complimentary buckets of popcorn and soda, part of the screening planned by nightlife impresario Peggy Siegal. At the popcorn bar, journalist and Last Mountain producer Clara Bingham, resplendent in red, chatted with The New Yorker's Philip Gourevitch, who was impressed by all of the environmentally friendly hybrid limousines outside. "They all even have 'Green' in their license plates," said Mr. Gourevitch, noting the disconcerting presence of an SUV among the green cars. Said Ms. Bingham, "I think that's Peggy's."

The screening-with guests munching the theater's buttery popcorn-began, but not before Mr. Kennedy gave a speech in which he lambasted the public's attention to Charlie Sheen (which he pronounced the Irish way, like "Sheehan"). Mr. Haney presented Mr. Kennedy, his creative muse, an engraved moose antler, a massive party favor Mr. Kennedy held a bit awkwardly.

We didn't see Mr. Kennedy toting it at the after-party at the locavore-haven restaurant Rouge Tomate, where the waiters served seafood curry (responsibly harvested seafood, we must assume), but we did catch the West Virginia-raised Ms. Bingham, who'd reported in West Virginia for Vanity Fair. "I was down there to go after the Bush administration for Graydon Carter, and people asked, 'Are you kiiiin?'" she told us-her family having for decades owned the Louisville Courier-Journal. "It was a homecoming for me." She decided to involve herself in The Last Mountain, she said, because "the only way to communicate the vast degree of devastation was visually. Writing wouldn't change what I wanted to change."

Had she read Freedom-the Jonathan Franzen novel that conveyed the devastation of mountaintop removal? "I invited Jonathan Franzen-I sent him a fan letter." Mr. Franzen might have enjoyed the film, which attacks industrialists and polluters with the single-minded fervor of Freedom's protagonist, Walter Berglund.

Petite 19-year-old Skins star James Newman was there holding a flute of Champagne and accompanied by his father. "I didn't see it tonight. I will see it, though." Was Mr. Newman interested in politics? "I'm not that interested, per se, but the director's a friend of ours." He planned to spend the summer waiting for the news as to whether Skins would be renewed. But enough about that-where did he stand politically? "Leftish!" Given what the crowd had come to see tonight, he was surely not alone.

ddaddario@observer.com