Awesome Video Of The Day

Girl Dances, Dog Humps

It doesn’t get much funnier than a dorky preteen dancing provocatively on her webcam while her parents are away, but if you really wanted to make it funnier how would you do it? You’ve only got a few options:

Come to think of it, you could throw a humping dog into the background of pretty much any video and it would become instantly funnier. The lunar landing, the Zapruder film, the Berlin Wall falling - it’d be like whitewashing history… with hilarity.

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If you’re a fan of The CW (and statistics prove that you’re almost certainly not), then you were likely on pins and needle last night waiting for the Heroes debut of Veronica Mars star Kirsten Bell. And if that’s all you were looking for, then you didn’t go to bed disappointed, as indeed Heroes was on TV last night, and a character played by Kirsten Bell did appear on it. Everything else about the show would likely have let you down greatly. And disappointing fans of The CW is no small feat.

Despite my eloquent protests last week, this episode continued to spend an inordinate amount of time on the development of a new Hero with uninteresting powers. I consider it a personal slap in the face that the show’s creators were unwilling to scrap a multimillion dollar episode and then rewrite and re-film it within a week. Come on guys. Someone learning how to jump rope is not very gripping television. That should have been taught to you on the first day of television school.

Other things we learned:

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Star Wars fans everywhere are all aflutter because the lightsaber belonging to Luke Sykwalker (the character portrayed brilliantly by Mark Hamill who, incidentally, went on to a successful career in film, stage, and voice work as the DIGG audience will tell you…) will be aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery when it launches on October 23, 2007:

The Jedi lightsaber has been carefully stowed aboard Discovery and will fly into space with the seven STS-120 astronauts to the International Space Station before returning to Earth 14 days later to mark [Star Wars'] 30th anniversary.

Wow. That’s really exciting news. I guess.

I mean, it’s not like they’ve actually invented a light saber. Or retrofitted the Space Shuttle with dilithium crystals. It’s just a tiny mixture of science fiction and reality.

Still, I guess folks were all excited about Scotty’s ashes being dumped in space so I’m sure the trend will continue. Personally, I’m looking forward to these headlines from future issues of Starlog:

* Marie Curie’s Corpse Fitted With 7 of 9’s Undies

* Optimus Prime Gets His Oil Changed by NASA

* Stephen Hawking Uses Michael York’s Styling Gel From Logan’s Run

* John Glenn Buys Rare Pornographic Star Wars Coloring Book!

Awesome Video Of The Day

Snapping Turtle Climbs A Fence

I know it’s Monday and you’re tired and bummed out and missing the weekend and all that, but I think I may have found something that can make you feel better: A video of a turtle falling off a fence.

Why will that help? I don’t know. There’s definitely something satisfying about it, though. Maybe it’s like an inspirational message about giving your all. Maybe we could learn a lesson from this little persistent guy.

Or maybe it’s just funny to watch animals fall off of stuff.

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The wordsmiths over at Entertainment Weekly just published this glittering narrative description of a recent J.K. Rowling reading and Q and A session. The article joyously depicts the breadth of the evening and the bustle and merriment of the crowd of scrub-faced youth, all sweepstakes winners, who turned out to applaud the author and ask probing questions about their favorite members of the wizarding world. Fortunately, you don’t have to read any of that shit, because the important information is in the article’s headline: DUMBLEDORE IS GAY.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Just because the elderly wizard who shepherded young waif Harry Potter from tender boyhood into manhood is a homosexual doesn’t mean he was necessarily molesting him. It just gives a million slashfic writers justification for assuming so. It also opens the door for a staggering array of inappropriate uses of the word “wand.”

But when all is said and done, does it really change anything if Dumbledore’s beard is white for a reason? YES, J.K. Rowling, it does! Now I’m probably not qualified to tell a billion-copy selling author how to do her job, but here I go: Dumbledore is in the Harry Potter stories for one purpose and one purpose only. Namely, to be the elderly wizard/father figure. He’s a goddamned ARCHETYPE.

He’s not a person; he’s a character, and there’s a big difference between the two. It was bad enough he got a back-story; making us imagine him in any kind of sexual situation is like writing in a scene where Voldemort goes to a magical burrito place (it’s called El Wizardito’s) and has diarrhea all night. Sure, it could happen, but it completely undermines his image.

Although to be fair, at least Rowling set us up for this revelation. If you reread some of those early books, the clues abound:

Of course I thought nothing of any of this at first, but now that Rowling’s confirmed the wizard’s sexual orientation, it’s hard not to see the signs, subtle though they may be.

Have you heard of the movie Fido?

It’s kind of fucking awesome.

And I don’t just say that because the studio behind Fido is pouring its advertising dollars into Cracked.com with that custom header treatment above. I say it because the studio behind Fido is pouring a ton of its advertising dollars into Cracked.com. Seriously — we’re thinking of ordering pizzas tonight. With extra cheese.

Fido even commissioned a completely unbiased, Halloween-and-Fido-themed piece from us.

Frankly, though, if Cracked is going to sell out to corporate advertisers, it’s pretty sweet that it’s starting with a movie that can be described as follows:

Timmy Robinson’s best friend in the whole wide world is a six-foot tall rotting zombie named Fido. But when FIDO eats the next-door neighbor, Mom and Dad hit the roof…

Hell yeah.

After spending the past eight years developing his own unique ass-groove in the director’s chair of the Spider-Man series, Sam Raimi has decided to give another ass a shot:

Raimi directed the first three movies and wrote 2007’s Spider-Man 3—but the filmmaker is stepping back to let someone else create their own vision for the web-slinging adventure.

Since Raimi didn’t mention any potential candidates, I decided to gaze into my crystal ball of smartass conjecture and envision how the next Spider-Man adventure might look under the helm of seven fine directors, and compile that information in a handy chart, suitable for framing. (You’re welcome, Sam.)

Awesome Video Of The Day

The Infamous “Charles Johnson” Video

What a week, huh? In just five short days, I’ve managed to find something bad to say about college students who play beer pong, women with long fingernails, game show contestants and pretty much everyone who lives in Germany. I’m spent.

For that reason, I refuse to say a single negative word about “The Infamous ‘Charles Johnson’ Video.” How could I? It’s just kids being kids, right? Children doing what we’ve all done at some point in our lives: having fun with a video camera. Uttering nonsensical words, screaming like idiots and making explosion sounds while jumping on their beds. It’s beautiful in a way. Like watching a young fawn take its first steps on shaky little legs.

One day these fawns’ legs will be less shaky, though. These two boys will grow more and more confident until one day, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not the day after that, but one day they will no longer be boys at all.

They will be all grown up and completely, 100% retarded.

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Once a month the NPD group releases sales figures for the preceding month of video game sales in North America. Every month fanboys and industry watchers pore over these numbers, looking for surprises, trends, and evidence that proves their favorite system is beating the fuck out of yours.

If there’s one thing that Cracked’s known for, it’s providing thoughtful analysis of the video game industry. Well, that, and our hate filled xenophobic slander of other cultures. It’s in that spirit that I present below my thoughts on the September NPD numbers. This will hopefully become a new monthly tradition here on Cracked, or at least it will until our next relaunch in May 2008, when we plan to become an unsuccessful webmail client.

September Video Game Sales (from the NPD Group)

Hardware Sales (lifetime in brackets)

Xbox 360 527.8K (6.8 million)
Wii 501K (4.5 million)
Nintendo DS 495.8K (13.2 million)
PlayStation Portable 284.5K (8.6 million)
PlayStation 2 215K (39.3 million)
PlayStation 3 119.4K (1.87 million)
Game Boy Advance 75K

Software Sales

360 Halo 3 3.3 million
WII Wii Play (w. Remote) 282K
NDS Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass 224K
PS2 Madden NFL 08 205K
360 Skate 175K
360 Madden NFL 08 173K
WII Metroid Prime 3: Corruption 167K
360 Bioshock 150K
NDS Brain Age 2: More Training In Minutes 141K
PS3 Heavenly Sword 139K

Analysis after the break…

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I’ll bet you think those Army ads that show young cadets zooming over impoverished nations in choppers and earning a degree at the same time are aggressive propaganda. And you probably think that game the Army made is just a cheap way for the military to suck in the bottom ten percent of High School graduates. Well, let me ask you this: If the armed forces weren’t so adept at roping in our youth, where the hell would we get our troop surges from? Huh, smart guy?!

Why do I bring this up? Well, turns out the British analogue to our CIA is now posting recruitment ads in the virtual world. Yes, the GCHQ, a government intelligence “organisation” (fucking Brits) has begun to advertise on digital billboards inside of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent.

Admittedly, ads recruiting web-savvy grad students to play spy is a far cry from the Army, but it’s only a matter of time before we’re seeing ads like these in…well, Far Cry. And from there, I’m expecting WoW servers to be overwhelmed with virtual recruiters within a few weeks.

Aside from the broad implications of in-game advertising—Master Chief chews Bubblicious? Who knew?!—I am sad to say I find one fundamental flaw in the logic behind this strategy, at least from the point of view of the armed forces. Namely, it assumes that gamers are the type of people who should be running long distances carrying live weapons.

Just because S3nator_B33r can consistently snipe people in the head at a hundred yards in Call of Duty 2, that doesn’t mean he can do the same in real life. In fact, all it really means is he is a spawn-camping dick. I also can’t shake the image of an Army recruit, after his first kill in Iraq, running over to a dead insurgent to squat repeatedly above his head. Your shields won’t withstand their rockets, frat boy.

The lesson here? The next time someone in a video game asks you to “undertake a valiant quest to safeguard the liberty of all peoples in this land,” just make sure you don’t sign anything. In the meantime, let us all rejoice at the thought that yet another sphere of our existence is about to be invaded by product placement and obnoxious ads.

I’m just hoping the industry’s got enough juice in it to resist succumbing completely. If not, look forward to rooting through your WWII-era pack to pull out a ration of delicious Chicken McNuggets or equipping your Red Mage with a staff of ReMax.