Mike Industries

Several months ago, I wrote a post longing for the unending tastiness that is the now discontinued Pine Bros cough drop. Then, my girlfriend found me an auction on eBay for a box of them (that I proceeded to win triumphantly), but they were from the 1950s. So I asked Mike Industries readers if it was ok to eat them, despite a mysterious white film that coated them.

As luck would have it, Mike Industries reader Steve L. (a fellow Pine Bros fanatic) volunteered to eat one on camera if I shipped a couple to him in Georgia. Here is the video footage of the incident:

Way to go Steve. Thousands of Pine Bros. fans around the world bow down to your greatness.

I can now die peacefully knowing that my imbecilic sense of humor is not lost on Jon Stewart nor the studio audience of The Daily Show. I’m sorry, but this is just fucking cool:

Full details of the John McCain MySpace enhancement are available at Newsvine. The whole story and additional video should make its way around CNN and other stations on Friday.

Since the Newsvine server farm is getting pounded into submission today (still!), I’ll post a link to this here. The Seattle NBC affiliate, KING 5, dropped by Newsvine global headquarters today to find out more about the MySpace/John McCain prank. The video of the segment — just aired on the 10pm and 11pm news — is available at the following KING 5 link:

Kudos to the McCain camp for playing this cool. Being a good sport goes a long way. Daily Show, Colbert Report, Countdown? Where are you?

About 20 minutes ago, I singlehandedly changed John McCain’s opinion on gay marriage… at least as far as his MySpace page goes. Full details over at Newsvine. It’s also the top story on TechCrunch right now.

I don’t use Flickr a lot and every single message I’ve ever received through it has been something along the lines of:

“Person-You-Sort-Of-Know has added you as a contact!”

This morning, however, I received this message from susan1975 inquiring about a photo I (or Scrivs) took of Valleywag Chief Snarkology Officer Nick Douglas at SXSW:

“Hi there. Could you please add your photo called “CIMG0170.jpg” to my Male Butt-Crack Group? Thanks, Susan.”

Man, I totally would, but that would require me to actually join the Male Butt-Crack Group.

This is clearly another situation that Flickr is ill-equipped to handle. I would like to add my photo but am unwilling to join said butt-crack enthusiast group. Until this situation is resolved, the Male Butt-Crack Group shall be without my esteemed submission.

Are there any other unusual Flickr groups out there I should be aware of?

This is probably the funniest product introduction site I’ve ever seen. It’s very well done and whatever agency created it for Philips Norelco should take a bow. Philips Norelco should also take a bow for having the guts to actually run it.

Warning: If you work within earshot of easily offended people, you might want to put on headphones.

It’s the perfect type of campaign for a potentially awkward product like this, and it’s pretty much by definition not offensive to a single person in their target audience.

Anyway, I’m just doing my part to keep this viral. It’s pretty hilarious. Make sure to hit up all the options in the main menu when the intro is over.

Are there many other recent examples of well-done, agency-created viral Flash campaigns? I feel like the memorable ones don’t come around often enough.

What on earth is going on here? I don’t know, but I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to create another Brit Pack Vanity Fair cover.

Click for a larger image… suitable for wallpaper in size. Questionable, however, in content.

So let’s say you were just sent one of those “meme” things by a friend of yours (or two, or ten) and you feel obligated to post the meme to your blog, out of respect to the sender, but you don’t particularly see the point in further perpetuating the world’s collection of Meme Lint.

What do you do?

Easy. Carry out your duty, and then pass your meme off to Mike Industries. Here, we will see to it that the meme is disposed of in a humane way, without the use of pesticides, chloro-flourocarbons, or any other environmentally hazardous materials. The patent-pending Mike Industries Meme Euthanasia process ensures that all memes are given proper burial (along with last rites) and no RSS feeds are contaminated in the process.

Pass your meme off today. Representatives are standing by.

… who approved this?

What’s with the synchronized leaning? What year is it again?

Ok, I like Jason Fried just as much as the next guy, but this page on Meetup.com is a little ridiculous, no?

“Meet with local fans of Jason Fried to discuss signals, noise, better things, EK, ML, SU, JF, and 37signals’ New Album!“

Whoa! What’s going on here!? Can we look forward to a compilation of Jason’s best dive-bar karaoke in the coming weeks or did Meetup.com make that all up?

What’s happening here is something I like to call “pseudomation”. A web site, in an effort to expand their offerings and encourage participation, scours the internet, scrapes data from popular web sites, and attempts to use that data to personalize their own pages. It can be done automatically, by an intern, or automatically with a human “check” performed afterwards to make sure it makes sense.

What’s weird about this one though is that I can’t really tell which method they used. It seems pretty automatic, with the initials “EK”, “ML”, “SU”, and “JF” just plastered on there fairly nonsensically, but the main “theme” of the page appears to be Jason. Furthermore, the url is “37.meetup.com” and not “jasonfried.meetup.com” which is just even weirder to me.

Anyway, just a random Friday morning finding. Anybody know of any other examples of pseudomation gone bad?