Educate and excite, inform and infuriate.

Why didn’t the recent DirecTV commercial, featuring Sigourney Weaver as “Ellen Ripley” in James Cameron’s 1986 movie, Aliens, get more amore?

You’ve seen the original: At the film’s geekalicious climax, Ripley takes on the villainous Alien Queen with an “anthropomorphic exoskeletal” Caterpillar P-5000 Powered Work Loader. (Weaver got a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her performance.)

DirecTV, as they’d done with well-known flicks from the ‘80s and ‘90s (Star Trek: Generations, Major League, Back to the Future), remixed the scene into an ad pitching the virtues of satellite over cable. Their digital fx hoo-haa even lip-synced Ripley’s 22-year-old footage to new script. (Hey: If we all yell and stamp our feet loud enough, maybe they’ll sign Pacino to remake the climactic “Sigh ay-low to mah lee’l frah!” bloodbath from Scarface.)

Yet, if you’re even a tiny bit like me, even a quarter-century in, there’s still no such thing as too much Aliens. If so, wrap your head around this: Hot Toys‘ 1/6-scale, 21″ high, fully articulated Power Loader model kit.

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You know the “My Talking Stain” commercial for Tide-to-Go that ran during the Super Bowl, and has been widely circulated since?

In it, a guy is interviewing for a job, but while answering questions, a stain on his shirt—it looks like java—sprouts a mouth and starts talking gibberish. It does this so incessantly that it overwhelms the prospective employer’s attention and completely drowns out the interviewee.

This funny ad urges consumers to buy Tide’s portable stain removing pen and not let the messes on their clothes send an unintended message. In fact, the spot’s so good, I only noticed on, maybe, the third viewing, a little bit of disclaimer text, right at the end:

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If you convinced about two hundred people to make the background noise of an excited TV studio audience, then yelled this set of otherwise unassociated nouns at one of your closest friends…

Farmers Markets!

Standing Still at Concerts!

Japan!

Arrested Development!

Awareness!

Hating their parents!

Marathons

Mos Def!

…passing Plutonians could be forgiven for thinking they’d tuned into the latest edition of the new and recapitalized $1,000,000 Pyramid.

But they wouldn’t have. They’d just be hearing someone reading from Christian Lander’s hilarious new blog, StuffWhitePeopleLike (SWPL). (Thanks to writer Robert Morales for sending the link.)

Each of its (thus far) seventy-six entries, starting with “Coffee,” and going, apparently in no particular order, to “Bottles of Water,” captures some aspect of the dominant culture’s fascinating peccadilloes, lightly narrating the reasons why white people can’t get enough of living by the water (#51), snowboarding (#31), Michel Gondry (#68), or, sigh, difficult breakups (#70):

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It’s redundant for Michael Bay to send up his image, as he does in this Verizon FiOS commercial. It’s even superfluous to make the observation.

Two things I love about this piece, though:

1) The framed picture of a fiery explosion on the living room wall behind him.

2) That, on the detonation right after he says, “Awesome barbecue!”, hardened Michael Bay, director of Armageddon, Bad Boys 1 & 2, Pearl Harbor, The Rock, and Transformers—the Prince of Powder Kegs, who brushes his teeth with gunpowder, and uses lit dynamite for romantic candles—Michael Bay, on that detonation, succumbs to the fireball’s startling, concussive force, can’t help it, and blinks.

The WineRack™ stuffs a polyurethane bladder, holding 25 oz. of your preferred liquid refreshment, underneath a black, sports bra-shaped harness. By covertly sucking from a connected tube, as shown at right, users can replenish dry gullets at sporting events, on subways, or even during long walks on the beach. It comes in small (32A thru 36A) and medium (34D thru 38B).

If you’re a woman, your kindest thought upon hearing about something like this might be, “That really doesn’t sound very comfortable,” especially for toting iced tea, though I’m only guessing here. Most males, on the other hand, would probably be awestruck by the sheer genius of reuniting breasts, liquid nourishment, and sporting events in one easy access, otherwise undetectable, over-the-shoulder-Bordeaux-holder.

Does it make me less of a man, however, that my first ruminations, when seeing this, were on terrorism? Given the difficulties the American public has been having getting liquids onto planes since the alleged 2006 transatlantic airliner plot, does this device do an end run around those obstacles?

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There’s just something gloriously arch about a radiant Neal Patrick Harris on a unicorn, wouldn’t you agree?

Get it at my favorite poster shop, MoviePoster.com.

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is out April 28, 2008.

Is Gustavo Dudamel all that?

The Feb. 17 edition of 60 Minutes practically water-slided down the hunky, 27-year-old Venezuelan, and principal conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony in Sweden. (He takes over as music director for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in September 2009.)

But is he really as great as they say he is?

I have absolutely no idea. From the looks of all the smart white people whose eyes light up when his name is uttered, I’m sure, to quote Lorraine Baines from Back to the Future, he’s an absolute dream.

I was fascinated by the fact—and this seems to be the default mode when talking about hot-to-trot, European classical music conductors—that the way they conveyed how talented he is is by how wildly and hard he shakes and swings his baton when conducting.

Is that all there is to it? I mean, there was one part in the 60 Minutes piece where, Dudamel, trying to express the way a particular musician should play a part, used the idea of softly, gently kissing a woman’s neck to make correct technique clear.

But, for the most part, whenever these TV newsmagazines want to tell you that there’s a hot new conductor, or pianist, or violinist, that’s gonna change the world, the fast ball always seems to be that “They’re craaazzzyyy, man!! Craaaazzzyyy!!!“, followed by some footage of the artist doing something bordering illegal with their instrument, or that, at least, we all have a common understanding is inappropriate.

So what? I mean, is this the best that great European classical music can do?

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I’m not proud, because a) I take Proverbs 16:18’s counsel (“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall”) to be flawless, and b) I try not to cultivate feelings about abstractions.

This even though, according to my calculations, I’m exactly six weeks older than Michelle Obama. Because I’ve had an adult life just a bit longer than she has, you’d think I would have had time to develop some form of her pride by now.

Let’s do a week-in-review-style wrap-up on what she said last week in Madison WI, on Monday, February 18:

“What we have learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback. It is making a comeback. And let me tell you something — for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment. I’ve seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic common issues, and it’s made me proud.”

Now, she also spoke in Milwaukee, earlier that day. In that speech, she said:

“For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”

Note the absence of the word really, above, in the earlier speech: proud vs. really proud. (Some have made a point of her later inclusion of that adverb, during her second, Madison speech.)

Here’s a link to a clip comparing the two.

What to make of this?

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Thinking about the kind of power we might one day derive from the movement of open water has me amped. This is from an Associated Press article, “Oceans eyed as new energy source,” running Feb. 14:

Just 15 miles off Florida’s coast, the world’s most powerful sustained ocean current — the mighty Gulf Stream — rushes by at nearly 8.5 billion gallons per second. And it never stops.

To scientists, it represents a tantalizing possibility: a new, plentiful and uninterrupted source of clean energy.

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The Associated Press reports Clarence Thomas’s ongoing and unchallenged record of judicial mime. From that piece:

Two years and 142 cases have passed since Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas last spoke up at oral arguments. It is a period of unbroken silence that contrasts with the rest of the court’s unceasing inquiries.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas says he’d like to be known as the “listening justice.”

Hardly a case goes by without eight justices peppering lawyers with questions. Oral arguments offer justices the chance to resolve nagging doubts about a case, probe its weaknesses or make a point to their colleagues.

Left, right and center, the justices ask and they ask and they ask. Sometimes they debate each other, leaving the lawyer at the podium helpless to jump in. “I think you’re handling these questions very well,” Chief Justice John Roberts quipped to a lawyer recently in the midst of one such exchange.

Leaning back in his leather chair, often looking up at the ceiling, Thomas takes it all in, but he never joins in.

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