[via KevinAllman]

Click on that image. Get a good look.

Yes, it’s what you think it is.

I don’t really know what to say, except that mommy and daddy should probably renew their subscription to Prachachat newspaper now.

And start saving for therapy sessions.

P.S. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal will probably take  out a similar ad very soon — maybe with President Obama manhandling poor, defenseless Antonin Scalia in the Situation Room. With The Situation watching. Which doesn’t sound quite as bad as I’d expected.

Live in New Orleans or nearabouts? Looking for a party — something to get you out among the living after being cooped up for several days thanks to Alex’s rain-athon? I’d suggest heading up to Tip’s for tonight’s Gulf Coast benefit, which is just one of dozens taking place around the world today.

At just $15, the price is very right, and you can give cleanup volunteers a hand by bringing along a bag of supplies from your utility closet (full details below). Coco, Ivan, and I will see y’all there.

And just to be perfectly clear: no, I will not be performing. You’re welcome.

Supplies for Dirty Birds Collection at Tipitina’s during tonight’s Gulf Coast Benefit

Date: Tonight, Thursday, July 1, 2010

Time: 7:30pm – 11:30pm

Location: Tipitina’s Uptown, 501 Napoleon at Tchoupitoulas

Description: In support of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuaries Program, Tipitina’s is pleased to announce a collection point this Thursday July 1st for the supplies most needed by the Gulf Response Involvement Team (the wildlife cleaners).

BTNEP is currently looking for:

Clorox Wipes
Plastic Measuring Tapes (like ones used for measuring fabrics/sewing)
Knee-high Rubber Boots
Duct Tape
Large CLEAR Plastic Storage Bins with LATCHABLE lids
Solid Foam Camping Mats (for cutting to line turtle cages)
Yellow Kitchen Cleaning Gloves
Safety goggles/glasses
Bug Spray
Aveeno face sunscreen
Coppertone spray sunscreen
Zip Ties/Cable Ties
Heavy Mil Lawn Trash Bags
Hand Saws
Blue Tarps
Ratchet Straps
Bungee Cords
Nets (all shapes and sizes for catching wildlife)
Ziploc Bags (gallon and quart-double zipper seal for preserving samples, NOT THE KIND WITH THE SLIDE CLOSURE)
GPS Units
Baby wipes
Orange soap hand cleaner soap
Binoculars
Dry Bags (Dufflebag Style)
Grease Pens
Mechanical Pencils
Clickable Sharpies
Waterproof Paper
All-in-one Printer & Copiers
1” & 2” 3-ring Binders
Printer mailing labels
Scissors
Large Ice Chests
DC to AC Power Inverters
Bolt Cutters
Box Cutters
3 gallon Lawn Sprayers
Plastic Folding Tables
Heavy Mil Visqueen Plastic Roles
Rope
Large Rubber Trash Cans with Lids
Garden hoses
Leatherman Multi-tools
Waterproof Digital Cameras
2 GB SD memory cards
Digital Video cameras
Pliers
Mustang Lifejackets
Rain gear
Chest Waders
Nitrile gloves
Gauze pads
Forceps
Mini hand-held propane torches
8” x 10” dry erase boards and markers
Disposable sterilized scalpels
Clipboards with internal storage
Letter Sized File folders
Large Backpacks for making field kits
Pelican Cases
Aluminum foil
Small ice chests
Small hard-plastic swimming pools
300 gal Rubbermaid Tanks
Electrical Tape
Hand Soap (soft soap)
Bleach
48” wooden stakes (1” x 2”)
¼” Yellow twisted nylon rope (minimum 100’ lengths)
Solar power units
Plastic sheet protectors (8.5” x 11”)
White copier paper (8.5” x 11”)

Ransack the house, empty the closets, go borrow something from your neighbor (kidding) or stop by a store on the way to the show. There will be a collection point by the Tip’s Walk of Fame. Come donate something to help clean these dirty birds then go shake a tail feather to Galactic, Ivan Neville, Coco Robicheaux and more.

There’s more info at VOLUNTEER.BTNEP.ORG. See ya tonight!

A video outtake — from the tie, I’m guessing early 70s —  submitted to one of the automotive sites I write for.

FYI, the actor is the late Robert Ridgely, a Hollywood fixture known for his work on camera (in Boogie Nights, for example) and as a voiceover artist (he performed Thundarr in Thundarr the Barbarian AND the Purple Pieman from Strawberry Shortcake). He could’ve also made callbacks for Boys in the Band:

Nope, still terrible.

[via Mashable]

Need a little motivation? Maybe some tunes to help you plow through that design project for the client who wants her display ad to look “edgy but traditional, with a hip hop frame of reference”? Or perhaps you just want something to drown out the pitter-patter of little account executives as they scurry through the cubicle warren? I suggest my sister’s kickin’ new podcast for Brooklyn Radio. Apart from ditties by Funkadelic and Jack White, she also spins something called Rootboy Slim & The Sex Change Band. To which I think we can all say: yowza.

The podcast — which you can stream or download — is on Tiff’s page for Brooklynradio.net. Look for the one called “Goodbye Frank Sidebottom & Gary Shider”.

Also: if Tiff’s Facebook status updates are accurate, I think we can expect to hear her some of her own new music very, very soon. Stay tuned!

99 times out of 100, erotic art is an oxymoron — the kind of thing done by amateurs (like me) who think that by grayscaling a pic and rotating it 15 degrees, they’ve turned a lurid, poorly lid snapshot into something suitable for framing. Not that erotic art doesn’t exist — it does — but it requires a certain je ne sais quoi.

What I find interesting about much “real” erotic art is the artists themselves — namely, their obsession with a particular physical act or body type. Think of all those Vargas girls, one after the other, thin and buxom, in lingerie, innocent and caught unawares. Clearly, Alberto had a pretty specific fantasy repertoire.

And so it is with one of my fave recent Tumblr finds: the London artist who goes simply by the name of “simon” at his website, BRUTE by simon. I’ll warn Mr. Huckabee and anyone else prone to ickiness that the image above is one of the tamer on the site. That’s a plus in my book, but you know: different strokes.

I’ll warn the twink-lovers, too: you’re going to be sorely disappointed. The model for most of simon’s work is a very beefy amalgamation of Bob Hoskins and Ed Asner. Which is also a plus in my book, but I can respect those who prefer Zac Efron over Zach Galifianakis. I don’t understand you, but I respect you.

Over the weekend, an anonymous email landed in my inbox. That’s not especially unusual: I subscribe to several community newsletters, and most emails arrive without the addy of the original sender.

Anyway, this one was talking about the deadly toxicity of the oil from the BP leak and about the fact that the U.S. military is preparing for massive evacuation of the Gulf Coast. He (or she) concluded the email by saying something to the effect of, “I know this sounds crazy, but my source on this is really, really good.”

Now, I may be crazy myself, but I’m not so completely out to lunch that I can’t spot a rumor born of mass hysteria. It often happens in the face of major disasters — we saw it after Katrina, with reports of carjackings and muggings and breakins amid the normally peaceful suburbs of Baton Rouge and Lafayette and the other places New Orleanians fled to. But as stressed out as we were then, we could see that such rumors were utter fabrications.

Still, just because I can spot them doesn’t mean I can shrug them off so easily. Things are tense here now, and they’re getting more so, and honestly, the last thing we need is a bunch of Cassandras running around, screaming in our ears. I can overlook the message, but shouting and mob mentality makes me want to cut a bitch.

Thankfully, Glenn had the good sense to share a link to American Zombie, which shed a little more light on the situation. Apparently, the whole thing started with a poorly researched, dodgily sourced, sloppily written article in the Washington Post (yes, that’s redundant). The author, Joel Achenbach, set the ball rolling by reveling in extreme case scenarios:

Week by week, the truth of this disaster has drifted toward the stamping ground of the alarmists.

The most disturbing of the worst-case scenarios, one that is unsubstantiated but is driving much of the blog discussion, is that the Deepwater Horizon well has been so badly damaged that it has spawned multiple leaks from the seafloor, making containment impossible and a long-term solution much more complicated.

Video from a robotic submersible, which is making the rounds online, shows something puffing from the seafloor. Some think it’s oil. Or maybe — look again — it’s just the silt blowing in response to the forward motion of the submersible.

More trouble: A tropical wave has formed in the Caribbean and could conceivably blow through the gulf.

“We’re going to have to evacuate the gulf states,” said Matt Simmons*, founder of Simmons and Co., an oil investment firm and, since the April 20 blowout, the unflagging source of end-of-the-world predictions. “Can you imagine evacuating 20 million people? . . . This story is 80 times worse than I thought.”

To which I say: FUCKTARDS.

American Zombie’s response is a little more nuanced:

And how is that a financial trader who is known for promoting the highly contended notion of “Peak Oil” (basically states the planet’s oil needs have now surpassed it’s capacity) knows what the emergency preparedness plan is for the entire Gulf Coast?  If the story is “80 times worse” than he thought, I’d like to know who wrote that story for him and informed him of DHS’s game plan.  If the WaPo is breaking this news via a financial oil trader, buried seven paragraphs into the story, I’m not only questioning their integrity I’m questioning their business acumen.  If this claim is true, it should be a headline on every news resource on the planet and the WaPo may have just landed the scoop of the century.

To make matters worse the very next paragraph quotes Coast Guard Admiral, and point man for the disaster, Thad Allen, talking about the integrity of the wellhead.  Achenbach just prints the entire Gulf Coast will have to be evacuated in the wake of a tropical event, then instead of confirming that claim with Allen, he shifts the story to the integrity of the wellhead and the efforts on drilling the relief well.

Bottom line: I can handle realism, I can even handle pessimism, but I swear on my my collection of science fiction first-editions, I’ve nearly had it with the alarmists.

*Naturally, survivalists and Unibomber-types just eat Simmons up with a spoon.

Bitches be hatin’:

Advertising Agency: AlmapBBDO, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Chief Creative Officer: Marcello Serpa
Executive Creative Director: Marcello Serpa
Creative Directors: Luiz Sanches, Dulcidio Caldeira
Art Directors: Marcos Medeiros, Danilo Boer
Copywriter: André Kassu
Illustrator: Marcos Kotlhar
Typographer: José Roberto Bezerra
Planner: Cintia Gonçalves
Advertiser’s Supervisor: Antonio Camarotti
Account Supervisors: Felipe Bartholomeu, Camila Figueiredo

The past few weeks, I’ve wondered what, if anything, other major oil companies are doing to address BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster. Have they been asked to help? Are they providing supplies or manpower to plug the leak or drill a relief well? Have they encouraged their employees to volunteer for cleanup efforts along the coast?

So far, it’s looked as if most were laying low, trying to fly under the radar and avoid the wave of distrust that’s been directed at the oil industry. But if we’ve learned anything from, say, Toyota’s recent recall troubles, we know that companies can profit from their competitors’ misfortunes — the trick, of course, is not looking like Mr. Schadenfreude while doing so.

Chevron has mostly avoided public comment, although the company’s CEO, John Watson, did manage to throw BP under the bus during last week’s congressional hearings when he said that the Deepwater Horizon disaster was “preventable”*. More to the point: “The expectation we share with the American people (that) the energy that we need will be produced safely and reliably … did not happen here.” That’s a little shady, but we’ve seen worse. And of course, testimony broadcast on C-SPAN isn’t quite the same as a national commercial.

Speaking of national commercials, this Royal Dutch/Shell ad jumped into rotation a couple of weeks ago. It doesn’t mention BP by name, but it certainly avoids mention of oil and focuses on clean energy:

Shell’s brand manager says that the campaign has been in the works for almost a year — and I have no reason to doubt her. I mean, it doesn’t exactly look like the sort of thing a major corporation could conceive, shoot, edit, plan, and distribute in the space of two months. However, I would like to know if any last-minute changes were made to the ad copy or the video editing to finesse the message. Hell, for all I know it could’ve started as a commercial about oil drilling in the Pacific.

ExxonMobil has taken a different approach: Ken Cohen, the company’s vice president of public and governmental affairs (i.e. the man behind ExxonMobil’s army of lobbyists), has launched a blog called ExxonMobil Perspectives. He’s gone to great lengths pointing out that ExxonMobil feels the pain of BP, its employees, and Gulf Coast residents, but in his first real post, Cohen also says that the disaster could’ve been prevented if BP hadn’t been so sloppy:

ExxonMobil and others have, over the course of many years, developed and implemented procedures and equipment that have proved very effective in safely managing our offshore wells. What we do know is that when you properly design wells for the range of risk anticipated; follow established procedures; build in layers of redundancy; properly inspect and maintain equipment; train operators; conduct tests and drills; and focus on safe operations and risk management, tragic incidents like the one in the Gulf of Mexico today should not occur.

And how, you ask, does ExxonMobil have the balls to talk about spills and cleanups when half the company is responsible for the second-biggest oil disaster in U.S. history? Simple: because they learned so much from the Valdez that it will never, ever happen again. Ever. Which is good, because the Valdez and the brand damage it caused was in some small part responsible for the ExxonMobil merger, and if ExxonMobil had another problem and had to merge with someone else, I don’t think the name would fit on business cards.

Oh, in case you’re wondering, ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva also bashed BP in front of Congress, but at least he had the guts to say that more regulation would be a good thing. Whether he believes that, however…

As for the 46 other oil giants, I couldn’t say. Maybe someone should place a call to Iran or Iraq or Venezuela or…oh, right. Nevermind.

*Presumably, Shell would’ve avoided BP’s problems by using its disaster response plan — you know, the carbon copy of the response plan that’s employed by every other major U.S. oil company, which seems to have been drafted by some secretary at the White House in 2004 and filed away in a vault until last week.