Big Brother Gets Sabotaged

Every summer I say I won’t watch it, but every summer, I end up getting sucked into CBS’s Big Brother.  For those who do not get sucked in, the show’s motto is “Expect the Unexpected”, and this year was no different.  This year though,  ‘Big Brother 12′ got sabotaged because their twist, having one of the “Houseguests” be a Saboteur working to cause chaos in the house, completely backfired.  Their “Saboteur” got evicted in week one

in a perfect storm of bad luck for CBS, that’s just what happened when Annie was evicted about 10 minutes after she was first revealed to be the Saboteur.

So now the show’s producers need to figure out another twist or catchy scenario to keep things fresh.  I say they put Julie Chen in the house for a few weeks.  That would be an interesting twist!

I’m Writing A Post

The Old Spice Man videos that are taking the internet by storm are a result of a marathon 3 day production from the brand’s agency and the actor Isiah Mustafa

A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They dared to touch the wild beasts of 4chan and they lived to tell the tale. Even 4chan loved it. Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made so far today have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. The team worked for 11 hours yesterday to make 87 short videos, that’s just over 7 minutes per video, not accounting for any breaks taken.

Marshall Kirkpatrick over at RWW has a nice write up on the shoot, and calls out what I think is the most important element of this campaign: that the brand team at Old Spice had the courage to trust the Weiden + Kennedy team and give them the freedom they needed to crush it.

Let The Force Guide You

TomTom, the company that makes in car GPS systems, has Star Wars voices available for their devices. So now you can have C-3PO, Yoda, Han Solo or Darth Vader guide you to your destination. They have some pretty amusing video clips on their site of the “recording sessions” with Darth Vader and Yoda. Only issue I see is that GPS navigation systems are now getting baked into smart phones, so how long will it be before Google Navigation develops an API to enable anyone to create voices to download to your smartphone?

Now Batting, Batting, Batting

A tip of my Red Sox cap to the Yankees as the legendary announcer of the team Bob Sheppard passed on today at the age of 99.  I have never been a fan of going to Yankee Stadium (for obvious reasons) however Sheppard’s voice was always “familiar”.  He had that distinctive deep voice that announced Yankee games since 1951 and, as Reggie Jackson described, sounded like “The Voice of God”.  

The Yankees’ lineup for Sheppard’s first game on April 17, 1951, included DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Johnny Mize, Yogi Berra, and Phil Rizzuto. And the opponents that day, the Boston Red Sox, were led by Ted Williams.

Over his full career, he announced over 70 Hall of Famers.

Tweets of the Week

Give Me Broadband or Give Me Death

Finland today enacted a law that will make it the first country to make it a legal right of its citizens to have broadband.

Speaking to the BBC, Finland’s communication minister Suvi Linden explained the thinking behind the legislation: “We considered the role of the internet in Finns everyday life. Internet services are no longer just for entertainment.”

That’s it…I’m moving!

The Science Behind Beer Goggles

Scientific proof that the more you drink, the more attractive everyone looks.

First, a study in 2002 took two sets of people, one more tipsy than the other. When they put the same photographs of people of the opposite sex in front of both groups, the tipsy people rated the pictures 25% more attractive than the sober ones. This effect can be rooted to the following:

The effect can reportedly be traced to the nucleus accumbens. When you’re looking at another human being, the nucleus accumbens is the area of the brain that decides how attractive that human being’s face is….As it turns out, alcohol, all by itself, stimulates the nucleus accumbens. So when you’ve have a few drinks, and you look at a face you may have judged as unattractive when you were sober, your brain, under the influence of alcohol, tells you that this face is in fact somewhat attractive. And the increase in perceived attractive seems to be directly proportional to the amount of alcohol consumed.

But this is my favorite. The article above goes on to say that n 2005, a study was conducted where scientists actually came up with a mathematical formula to calculate the state of “goggliness” that people are in, factoring in how brightly lit the area is, the eye sight quality, the amount of smoke in the air, and the distance between the two people, with the end result being your “beer goggle score”.

I’m thinking the next generation of Mobile Simplicity’s application needs to include a widget that incorporates this formula. There has to be a drinking game here.

Spys Like Us

A ring of 10-12 Russian spies was broken up yesterday by the FBI after a seven year investigation. They were Cold War “moles” that had infiltrated normal neighborhoods like Montclair, NJ, Cambridge, MA and other towns across the USA. It also appears that the way the spies went about their business was right out of the movies.

Criminal complaints filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Monday read like an old-fashioned cold war thriller: Spies swapping identical orange bags as they brushed past each other in a train station stairway. An identity borrowed from a dead Canadian, forged passports, messages sent by shortwave burst transmission or in invisible ink. A money cache buried for years in a field in upstate New York.

They even had the sexy redheaded siren.

Stories like this just fascinate me. The way the covert operations from CIA and FBI go about identifying these rings and understanding the signals that the spies use to communicate is just so cool. Makes you want to channel your inner Austin Millbarge and Emmit Fitz-Hume