Breaking News

How sad is it that this is called “breaking”?:

Shatner Does Palin

Palin’s resignation speech recited by William Shatner as a [terribly ambiguous and nonsensical] poem on Conan (read: brilliant!):

Update: The YouTube link is down, but here is one at Hulu. You just have to endure 30 seconds of ads first.

HTC Sponsorship

Growing up during the incredible acceleration of the Information Age and quickly getting used to being bombarded by advertisements everywhere, I’m become quite good at ignoring sponsors, plugs, etc. I think it took me three years before I discovered that that old French team Jean Delatour was actually a jeweler. For a while, I just figured it was some John’s touring company or something (Jean de la Tour…which would make sense if only le Tour were feminine). Anyway, the point is, I normally don’t pay attention to sponsors and often wonder if big ones in soccer, cycling, or F1 really do get their 10-50 million Euro per year back in sales.

Well, there’s no confusion on Team Columbia’s new cosponsor HTC. Cavendish won Stage 3 of this year’s Tour de France and made the somewhat dorky gesture to the addition to the jersey, along with answering the telephone (HTC makes high-end cell phones). But something that could be dismissed as just “eh, cute” was backed up by the personality of the team. Bob Stapleton, the owner, who took over after being a T-Mobile exec for a while and whom we all know as being a pretty relaxed, straight-shooter in the cycling world, also came out in recent days and said HTC “is going to kick iPhone’s ass.”

Of course, I’m not sure this is true…at least from a total sales point-of-view. But, hearing this from Stapleton, plus getting reminded not at all subtly of the fact by Cav, really made me want to check out this site just because I know these two weren’t really B.S.-ing.

Two things I discovered on the site:
1) Maybe HTC will actually kick iPhone’s ass, at least from a customizability standpoint. They’ve got some killer smartphones on there, including ones with browsers that will read Flash (another extraordinary iPhone fail). They’re just even more expensive (so this doesn’t really apply to me).
2) It’s nice to see HTC is, likewise, obviously proud of their sponsor-team relationship. They’ve got Cav plastered on the front today. Plus, they’ve got the “Meet the Team” bit in the bottom corner. (You’re definitely not seeing something like this from Astana.)

What’s my point? I guess it’s just that there are ways in which you can break my general desensitization of advertising/sponsors/plugging. And, more specifically, Stapleton and Cav did it quite well this week.

Walsh on Velocity Nation

I love the candid interviews on this site. I read the latest (and perhaps greatest, besides the Michael Ashenden one) this afternoon with David Walsh. Particularly intriguing were the bits on speculating why Lance won’t let cases go to court anymore, thoughts on investigative journalism integrity (and the power of it!), and how commercial interests quell journalistic ones (duh, I know, but the specifics of this are good). Click here to read the interview.

Thank you, Velocity Nation, for giving me something to blog about…again! ;)

Bugle Seventy-Six

This is simply the beat podcast out there, and today’s episode rivaled the ones in the 30s mocking both the democratic and republican national conventions last year. About eight minutes in today’s posted podcast, Zaltzman goes for the world record of most consecutive North Korean puns. Absolutely brilliant!