Click here to view the embedded video.

A newly released ad from Carly Fiorina features a red-eyed “Demon Sheep” which is a guy dressed up as a sheep. Most of the ad sucks, so if you don’t want to watch all 3 minutes of it, skip ahead to 2:25. [WP]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We didn’t really know or care why the other guy thought the minimum wage bill was such a big deal for American Samoa. But then recently this came up [Reuters]:

Chicken of the Sea, the tuna company, announced this month that it will close its canning plant in American Samoa in September. The culprit is 2007 legislation in Washington that gradually increased the islands’ minimum wage until it reaches $7.25 an hour in July 2009, almost double the 2007 levels.

In 2007, the hourly minimum wage in American Samoa for fish canning and processing was $3.76 and the minimum wage for government employees was $3.41. Shipping had the highest minimum wage, at $4.59. Garment manufacturers got the lowest, at $3.18 an hour. A $7.25 wage is a substantial increase for most residents.

Chicken of the Sea will lay off 2,041 employees—12 percent of total employment, almost half of all cannery workers. And the 2,700 workers at StarKist, the other American Samoa tuna canning company and Chicken of the Sea’s rival, are probably concerned that their jobs are the next to go.

YouTube apparently keeps track of which segments of their videos are watched by people. [TechCrunch]

No wonder why the White House and the rest of the Federal government has started setting up official YouTube channels left and right. Nancy Pelosi can know exactly how many people were actually kitten rickrolled instead of getting bored in the first 30 seconds and quitting.

This is just like dynamic in-game advertising that sends back information on who was seeing how much of which ad from what angle. [National Cheese Emporium (WTF?)]

The Google-YouTube-Facebook-Military-Industrial-Gaming Complex is watching you.

But Hugo isn’t the first Latin American leader to sing in public to promote his goals.  The region has a long history of cheap populists, socialists, and occasional right-wingers who stage these shows to gain popular support.  The most famous politician who did this in the 1990s was Abdala Bucaram, former President of Ecuador.  Called the “madman,” the Ecuadorian Congress eventually declared him mentally unfit to rule and removed him from office less than a year after his election.  He danced, sang, and released his own music CD as capital fled the country and inflation began to wipe out the middle class.  Here he is onstage with the Irancudos, an Uruguayan band:

Not to be outdone, Alberto Fujimori, former President of Peru, also released a song.  This is a real advertisement from his 2000 campaign:

Note that the commercial calls him the “Chino” (Chinese) even though he is ethnically Japanese.  He was popular in the early 1990s in part because he wasn’t perceived as a member of the small, white oligarchy.  Fujimori later fled the country to avoid charges of corruption and human rights abuses during his presidency.  He became involved in Japanese politics at one point to avoid extradition.

Bucaram and Fujimori met in the mid-1990s to negotiate a peace process between Ecuador and Peru.  What people saw on TV that day was an ethnic Japanese and an ethnic Lebanese dressed up in indigenous garbs, complete with alpaca hoods and native ponchos, eating roasted guinea pigs and other local delicacies.  This is what Gabriel Garcia Marquez must have envisioned when wrote about magical realism in Latin America.

So Chavez isn’t the first and probably won’t be the last political figure in Latin America to lend his voice and image for the cause, whatever the cause may be at the moment.  He has practically been doing it for years on his seven-hour long Sunday talk show. The only noteworthy part is that the PSUV finally put up an mp3 of Chavez singing on their website, which makes us wonder why it took them so long to capitalize socialize on this.

The real question is:  when will he sing about Obama?  [CNN]

If only Bob Dole tried this in 1996. But then again… [CNN]

In fact, it seems that his angry comment on our fake WALL-E video understated his angst: the title to the first part of Hancock was “HANCOCK Full Movie (No rick roll, this is the real) part 1.” It’s “Rick Roll,” willzling. But it seems that he didn’t get that much of a chance to masturbate watching his view count go up, because both of them have been swiftly removed by YouTube; so we’re going to call this yet another victory for the Internets.

So, ladies and gentlemen, Kitsch/Posh presents: YouTube – WALL-E FULL MOVIE PART 1/9

We had hoped to attract some nasty comments, and after some hours we finally got a good one, from willzling:

fucking gay ass faggot im gonna come to ur house and fucking shove my foot up your fucking ass fucking homo im gonna kill you and ur family then im gonna fucking rape ur mom

So naturally we are curious to know who this guy is. Turns out this noob uploaded all of “Indiana Jones 4″ on YouTube.

We had a look at one of the videos to see if it was real, and indeed it does seem to be. And the video description states: “ok everyone once i get 50 subscriptions I’ll upload hancock so start subscribing!!!” It sounds like the more likely thing to happen is that once he has 50 subscriptions, he’ll have a hand-cock party by himself on his bunk in grandma’s basement. He has 24 subscribers as of right now. Chances are, the party will go on regardless of subscription numbers.

A quick look at the comments section reveals a recent, violent dispute with BloodyBay, a self-described YouTube spam-fighter. He would like to point out that some of of the subscribers to willzling’s channel are named “willzling1″ or “willzling2.” Good observation, BloodyBay; we didn’t even notice when we scanned his subscribers list.

Internet 1, Earl 0. Win. Let’s take a minute to bask in the glory of the possibility that we had something to do with this (the video was left online for a while before we posted about it yesterday).

-M.

As far as we can tell, this is actually the whole film and not a hoax. It’s been up there for a whole week now. Some people are commenting “thank you” but we think this guy is stupid. This was clearly done simply in a cheap attempt to generate more traffic for his real Youtube channel, earlpwns8, which only has some really loser-sounding videos like “How to make a real virus” and “Make your computer faster.” We would watch the videos to make fun of them but doing so would give him such a huge boost in views count that we can’t in good conscience.

According to his profile, “Earl” is 106 years old and unemployed. We almost believed this because, we thought, only a 106 year-old coot would fail so badly at Internet and Life. But we were forgetting about teenage boys; Earl is actually some high-school outcast who probably thinks that if he could only get 1000 views on his YouTube channel he would be important enough that the girl he’s been unsuccessfully wooing for the past ten years might notice that he exists. Here’s news for Earl: that girl has an anonymous YouTube account with just this one video of her stripping in front of a webcam, and it has a hundred times more views than “Make your computer faster.” So your grand master plan 2.0rc1 to get her to notice you by becoming “famous” on YouTube was never going to fly. Go watch some kiddie porn while wallowing in your shame and loneliness.

If Earl thinks he is so good with computers, maybe he somehow managed to get a digital copy of the film to post on YouTube? But actually doing so would require skills and manhood which he obviously lacks, and a quick look in the comments section of his Iron Man videos indicates he taped it with a videocamera. He says he’s busily “downloading” “You Don’t mass [sic] with the Zohan.” Well, good luck with that, Earl. We hope that when the YouTube police finds your Iron Man videos, they’ll ban all six of your accounts that you made to reference each other so that you can pretend you have friends on YouTube.

We’re gonna go flag/report the Iron Man videos and help get this kid off the Internet, for all our sakes.