In what has to be one of the strangest pairing of television stars I’ve ever seen, Will Ferrell will be facing nature’s wrath alongside Bear Grylls on the season premier of Man Vs. Wild, taking the duo deep into the frozen tundra ‘far north’ of Sweden. It is set to coincide with the release of his upcoming motion picture Land of the Lost.

I wonder who’s idea it was (marketing or talents)?

Discovery Communications ad sales jockey Joe Abruzzese decided to step up and give the typical marketing pat-on-the-back by telling Variety Magazine just how this is a prime example of working closely with advertisers on “content integration.” At least Annah Zafrani, VP of media promotions for Universal Pictures, was put on record calling it the studio’s “most innovative project to date” with Discovery.

Should be fun to watch.

The Politico has just reported that New York Democratic Representative Charles Rangel has paid his son nearly $80,000 for two horrible looking campaign websites. While it is technically not illegal, if I was paying taxes in the state of New York I probably wouldn’t have appreciated paying for that.

Here’s the only one that they listed, www.nationalleadershippac.com , but judging from the design & execution, I can’t imagine the other being any better.
This is so bad that I think it might resemble those old MS Frontpage templates. Not only that but images are blurry, improperly cropped and there are spelling/grammatical errors throughout the site!

And to think that this is what a $40,000 website looks like! My favorite part is in the left sidebar, I’ve taken the liberty of taking a screen shot of it for you. What kind of professional would ever go live with the following still on the site:

$40,000 and he couldn’t even out-source it for $200 to any number of the cheap freelance sites that are available? Thats amazing!

According to The Politico,

“Steven Rangel’s firm was paid roughly $2,500 on a monthly basis—less than the firm that had previously managed Congressman Rangel’s Web and on-line operation (Network Politics)—and the firm’s fees included money for Web advertising designed to promote traffic to the Web site.”

Ouch!

Firefox 3 was released with much fan-fare last week, including a marketing campaign from Mozilla to set a new record for “most software downloads in 24 hours” in the Guinness Book of World Records. According to their “World Record FAQ,” they hoped to beat the number of downloads that version 2 of Firefox saw, which was 1.6 million. Well they’ve recently updated their “Download Day” site, indicating that in the 24-hour time period after publicly releasing the new version, the software was downloaded over 8 million times. Since then they’ve counted over 20 million downloads and that’s just from their official site (due to server lags, the release was quickly put up on private mirrors, so the real download number will never be known).

Want to celebrate your participation in this event? Why not (other than for the obvious reasons)? Mozilla now lets you print out your very own “personalized” Firefox 3 Download Day certificate by entering your name on their “Flaunt It” portion of the website. Click on the image posted above for an example of what it looks like (it will open in a new window). Now you can be the envy of your IT staff… this will surely show them you’re hip to the latest software releases and maybe they’ll show you how to install that cool screensaver you’ve been having trouble with!

Sooooo corny… but i couldn’t resist.

No april fools joke here, this was posted yesterday, march 29th in the UK. Mr. T pity’s a kid out of a deep coma while visiting hospital.

taken from http://uk.news.yahoo.com:

Former The A-Team star Mr. T once stunned a sick child’s family by bringing him out of a coma – after doctors begged the actor for help.

The poorly kid fell unconscious in Detroit, Michigan in the mid-1980s – and the only physical movement he made was in response to hearing Mr. T’s name.

And when the mohawked star was in town, he stopped by the hospital to visit the ill boy – with miraculous results.

He tells Empire magazine, “His family put toys around him and one of them was a Mr. T doll. And whenever my name came up, the boy moved his arm.

“Somebody told the doctors I was in town, so they called me down there. I closed the curtains and prayed. Then, as I was walking down the hall, the kid suddenly came out of the coma and hollered out.

“That was my supernatural moment.”

Mr. T can pity a sick child out of a coma – that’s almost as cool as if Chuck Norris were to round-house kick cancer out of a dying 5 year old….. only this actually happened… That’s one kid Mr. T doesn’t pity. Although I do feel sorry for the coma…. apparently Mr. T hates coma’s as much as he hates planes.

For those who are really confused, it’s an internet phenomenon similar to stuffonmycat.com, where users submit photos of literally just stuff placed on their cat. Here’s the definition (thanks to Wikipedia) of what constitutes as a lolcat (and yes, there’s also a Loldog version out there called ihasahotdog.com):

A Lolcat is an image combining a photograph of an animal, most frequently a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in (often) broken English referred to as Kitty Pidgin, or lolspeak.

Enjoy.

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