Observer » Humor

A Guide to Your RNC Emergency Pack

Drew Grant — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 14:05:09 -0400

So you're at the Republican convention in Tampa, and between the oppressive heat, terrible food and lack of indoor smoking areas (What is this, Canada?!) you're thinking of just ending it all by throwing yourself between Artur Davis and a superlative.

But don't worry, we here at The Observer have prepared an emergency kit for just this kind of dire situation. Contents inside, but be frugal: sharing with others will be identified as a form of Communism and will cause you to be ejected from the premises.

Shell Oil Currently Under Assault by Social Media Pranksterism, Gone Viral

Foster Kamer — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 17:07:37 -0400

In the summer of 2010, besides yielding enough oil to effectively kill off part of the Gulf ecosystem permanently, B.P.'s oil spill also yielded some decent satire. This manifested most famously in the form of the BP Global PR feed on Twitter, which ended up in the oil company's aggravated sight-lines. Especially upsetting to the company was the fact that people were mistaking the satirical feed for an actual B.P. feed from their communications department.

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:

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

Thought Catalog Finally Gets The Parody Twitter It Deserves: Thinking Catalog

Foster Kamer — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:06:56 -0400

Thought Catalog is a self-important blog that ostensibly allows young writers to indulge themselves but is actually the inadvertent and hilarious "slut-shaming" of forthcoming MFA aspirants' bad writing that they'll no doubt want erased from the internet by the time they decide they need to get rejected from Iowa to move on with their lives. But, as demonstrated, irrational hatred of a website can only take one so far. The true sign of a becoming a success—insofar as Thought Catalog's can be considered such—is a parody Twitter. Which they now have.

Please familiarize yourself with @ThinkingCatalog, the blog's first parody, which is—surprisingly—quite funny. A telling sign: You don't even need to be a Thought Catalog "reader" to "get" the humor of it, a series of imagined headlines concerning unbearably stupid naval-gazing ideas, an extreme variant of the Salon For 9th Graders ethos of Thought Catalog.

A sample of recent Thought Catalog headlines:

I Wish I Knew How To Quit You, Facebook
My Top 5 Favorite Reality Stars
On Banality And Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere”
You Are Kissing The Wrong Mouth
In Love, We Are All Teenage Girls (No Offense To Teenage Girls)
Everything That I Know About Jupiter

A sample of recent Think Catalog headlines:

I'm Not Self-Absorbed, I'm Self-Aware
What is a "Real Job", Exactly?
This American Apparel Life
The Next Great American Blog Post
Barely Friends With Drunk Benefits
Facebook in the Age of Facebook

For the record, ThinkingCatalog has been around for two days, and already has almost 700 followers. Granted, it's nothing on Thought Catalog's 90,000 someodd masochists, but there's always room to grow. It may not last long, however, seeing as how they've already gone through the looking glass of meta-humor, so enjoy it while it's still here.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Heartsick: Why Valentine’s Day Must Die

Emily Atkin — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 22:06:00 -0400

Here it comes: Feb. 14, 2011.

As the dreaded day approaches, I can feel the skin on my forehead gradually tighten, bridging the gap between my eyebrows. Great--togetherness. And now I look even less covetable. Good job, squishy-face. Always setting yourself up for a win!

I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. Valentine's Day sucks, and you know it does. You've always known it--from that time you didn't get as many candygrams as the blonde girl next to you in Mrs. Wadzuk's fifth grade class to that time your college boyfriend got you a blowpop to this year when you're single, and the only planned date you have is with Netflix and a bottle of Pepe Lopez. Actually, this year doesn't sound too bad.

Here's an idea: How about we scrap the whole thing?

Admittedly, abolishing Valentine's Day isn't a new idea--it's actually a pretty popular search item on Google--but here it comes again to ruin our lives. Why? Why not just pretend it doesn't exist? It's not like we get the day off from work, so already it's not a real holiday. Indeed, the case for wiping Valentine's Day from the calendar is so compelling, I actually had to leave out a few lesser reasons for time's sake (like the fact that the day is clearly a fire hazard).

Let's start with the obvious. Valentine's Day is a set-up, and the outcome is repeated dissatisfaction. There is no freaking way anyone, not even your best friend-slash-lover of God-knows-how-many-years, could, in this one particular 24-hour time period, demonstrate his or her appreciation in just precisely the way you want to be appreciated. Can't happen.

Why can't it happen? Because, frankly, you expect too much. You fantasize about rose petals and multiple candles. You anticipate a well-lit restaurant and a really handsome but unobtrusive waiter. You build up expectations and don't vocalize them until they haven't been met, which leaves one party feeling inadequate and the other unloved. This leads into that inevitable day-after Valentine's relationship hangover in which you contemplate every life decision you've ever made. All because of Feb. 14.

And come on, even if you do manage to have a decent time, it will make your friends all the more miserable, which will kill your romantic buzz like a bee in a blender. Your boyfriend could be as romantic and dreamy as Ryan Gosling in The Notebook, and your best friend would still call you and cry about how her boyfriend left a suggestive comment on another girl's Facebook page--something about "banana cream pie." And maybe it would have been fine on any other day but why'd he have to do it today? It's Valentine's Day, for chrisssakes.

Now her sadness is yours, and you can't even tell her about how your boo knelt down and recited e.e. cummings' "I Carry Your Heart with Me" with flawless intonation because you'd just feel guilty.

To add insult to injury, Valentine's Day is exclusionary. And I'm not saying this because I'm single--it excludes most average couples too. Valentine's Day is only for people who have just met. They have just met, and are so completely head-over-heels, balls-deep drowning in blissful infatuation that there is literally nothing the other person could do to upset them. He could take her to see a Nets game at the Prudential Center in New Jersey and she'd think, How cute! How gritty and unconventional!

Surely all this has you wondering just who concocted this illegitimate mess of a holiday. Well guess what--no one knows. There are a few theories, however. Some think the day began as an ancient Greek festival celebrating the matrimony of Zeus and Hera. Aah, Zeus! The portrait of fidelity! Others are quite positive the love-fest didn't originate until Feb. 14, 1400, when a court was established in Paris specifically to deal with trials of the heart--divorce, adultery, domestic violence, etc. How romantic! And History dot com thinks the whole thing had to do with a Roman priest named Valentine who secretly performed marriage ceremonies for soldiers who were not allowed to be married. So, you know, there's that.

But hey, at least we have St. Valentine, the patron saint of...what again? Yeah, no one really knows about that either. Doesn't matter though. Everyone's pretty sure the holiday is pagan in origin, anyway. The B.C. Romans, according to many sources, celebrated fertility on the 15th of February. They did this by killing goats, using their skin to make whips and then running around spanking the bums of young women in order to improve the likelihood that they'd conceive. If that doesn't scream "Edible Arrangements" to you then I don't know what would.

Since then, Valentine's Day has been packaged and corporatized (so, in fact, has complaining about it), but that's fine by me. I love commercialized holidays. Christmas? Awesome. The fact that Christmas is so commercialized means that I, as a Jew, can celebrate it just because it's fun. I love it--there are gifts and good food and warm fireplaces, chocolate and champagne, and lots of drunk-hugging.

The problem here is not that Valentine's Day is a commercial. No--the problem is that it's cheap. At least on Christmas, we get iPads and leather boots. But because it's all about loooove, the general consensus is that V-day's not about the money. Excuse me, but how does it make any sense to have a wholesale holiday based on the idea that "love don't cost a thing"? Honey, my love costs more than a stuffed puppy and a vanilla bean candle. Oh God, wait, maybe this is why I'm single.

Whatever. Forlorn or fused, I think we can all agree that this holiday is just a pain. A surging, piercing, this-is-definitely-infected kind of pain. So let's at least entertain the idea of abolishing it--maybe this Monday? Over a bottle of Pepe?