At first I thought TomTom’s decision to add downloadable “voice skins” to their GPS system was kind of silly, but I’ve got to admit, after trying some of them out for myself, I’m totally sold. Download yours today, and start letting celebrities tell you what to do directly, rather than just imitating them in hopes of attracting a mate!

When not blogging for Cracked, Michael makes consumer review videos as head writer and co-founder of Those Aren’t Muskets!

Hillary Clinton - Making Our Dreams Come True

Here’s a surefire formula for completely alienating anyone who might be on the fence about your candidate: make a YouTube account, rewrite the theme song from a sitcom three decades past its prime, then sing it like it’s opening night at the opera in Sturgis, South Dakota and you’re the only fat lady in town.

Could this have really been created by a genuine fan, or is this some sort of nefarious right-wing plot designed to shame the lefties into submission? I can’t say I’d be particularly surprised either way, to be honest. All I know for sure is that this video totally fucking sucks, and even though it’s obviously not an officially sanctioned advertisement, it still kind of makes me hate Hillary Clinton.

If I’d been the brains behind this video, I would’ve done things a little differently. First of all, I probably would’ve used the theme song from Three’s Company:

Come and stop the Iraq war…
America’s waiting for you…
Because this country is hers and hers and his
Clinton for President, woo!

Second of all, I’d make it totally “extreme” and in-your-face. There’d be eagles swooping down and eating field mice (which would be dressed up like terrorists) and sepia-toned Nazis exploding and Stars ‘N Bars and all kinds of other shit crammed into every singe frame, but there’d still somehow be time for one of those crazy slow motion shots of a samurai sword cutting through a soda can or an apple or whatever… FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER. I’d probably throw in one of those “bullet time” shots, too, only the “bullets” would be barbs from political opponents and the “dodging” would be clever rhetoric and a sane tax plan.

Oh - and last but not least, I would’ve made it for Barack Obama. Minor detail there.

Like a frat boy after a long night of boasts and Jager Bombs, the HD-DVD format has been on pretty wobbly legs for the last little while, and experts predict that it’s only a matter of time before it finally gives up the ghost and collapses in a pool of it’s own vomit. Following the recent collapse in studio support for the format and Wal-Mart’s announcement last week that they’d no longer be stocking HD-DVD players, there’s little reason for HD-DVD enthusiasts to hope for a “puke and rally.”

Way back in 2006, one of my very first articles for Cracked actually examined the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray war. This article was notable in that it came out a solid year before anyone anywhere actually cared about said war, and also because it was really stupid. Using absolutely no sensible reasoning at all, I declared that HD-DVD would win the war. I believe my line of reasoning could be summer up simply as: HD-DVD would win because Blu-Ray had a stupid name.

The admission that I’m an idiot shouldn’t come as a big surprise for any regular reader of this blog. I have as much business analyzing technology trends as an otter does maintaining aircraft engines. The only comfort I have in all of this is that if anyone is using my writings as a basis for their investments they’re even stupider than I am.

Anyways, to pad this post out a bit more, here’s a list of things you can do with the now-useless HD-DVD players I forced you to buy:

Prop up a table that has one leg about 2.5 inches shorter than the others.

Elevate anything by about 2.5 inches.

Keep it by your front door, to wipe your soiled shoes on.

As ballast for your clipper ship, or hot air balloon.

As a booster seat for a young child or elderly relative.

Set your drinks down on it so as not to leave condensation rings on something else.

Elevate one end of it with a brick, then jump a BMX off of it.

While making love, try placing it underneath your ladies hips for an exciting new variation on the missionary position.

Slide it in the front of your shirt to use as a makeshift bulletproof vest.

Put a wig on it, and use it to practice kissing.

Film yourself humping it and become the next big YouTube sensation.

___

Chris Bucholz is a writer and a robot. His personal blog, robotmantheblog.com contains a great deal of other humor articles, all of dubious quality and taste.

• Top two hands in poker: Right; Left #

So the WGA strike is over and with the Oscars almost upon us the writers have been scribbling away furiously for 13 hours a day to put together the kind of quality we’ve come to expect from the Academy Awards. Frankly, I find that hard to believe — That is, I did find it hard to believe until I saw this video of one such dedicated scribe, hard at work, delivering Oscar-quality comedy.

Machine y la Pequena Adriana Barrientos

I’ve been looking at the internet for a long time now, and I’ve seen plenty of weird trends come and go. There was the whole Dancing Baby thing, then there was Hampster Dance and All Your Base and Goatse and a whole bunch of other crap I can barely remember.

It’s been a long internet.

Now that everyone is losing interest in Lolcats, I guess the new thing is videos of cross-dressing dwarf Latinas dancing. I’m not going to say this is the weirdest video I’ve ever seen (that honor probably still goes to a certain Japanese guy in a horse mask), but we’ve certainly come a long way from Hampster Dance, haven’t we?

The only thing that worries me about this trend is that it’s only a matter of time before cross-dressing dwarves and naked Japanese men in horse masks are simply a matter of course. Where do we go from there? Can things really get that much weirder, or will the pendulum swing back the other way, and we’ll go back to enjoying such simple pleasures as poorly-animated dancing babies and pictures of men ripping their own sphincters open?

Oh - and was the guy in the bondage mask ALREADY friends with the cross-dressing dwarf, or did he have to put an ad up on Craigslist to make this video? So many questions, so few answers.

One of the many onerous burdens placed upon the Cracked blogger is that of wading through countless vapid, hastily-written web articles dissecting the minutiae of celebrities’ lives to the point that one wonders if there wouldn’t be profit in the attainment and sale of Lindsay Lohan’s solid waste.

But of all the terrible places on the web dedicated to destroying the lives of our former idols for the sheer lulz of it, I’ve gotta hand it to the reporters at TMZ.com: at least they try to dress up their dreck by pretending they’re fast-talkin’ journalists from the forties. Aside from my daily ether rag, it’s the only thing that makes my job bearable.

Take this article about Britney Spears’ latest run-in with the law (something involving an industrial combine and that nice man with the big eyebrows from The OC, I believe).

In three paragraphs, the reporter manages to insert the phrases “will the judge be buyin’ what he’s sellin’,” “all things Britney,” “the whole magilla,” “take a hike,” and my personal favorite “smells like it.”

In light of this, I have a personal request for the reporters over at TMZ: as someone who relies on your “news” on a daily basis, it would really mean a lot to me if you’d go even further in dressing up these stories. Reporting on Britney as Jennifer Leigh in The Hudsucker Proxy is a good start, but the possibilities are truly endless.

Here, I’ll toss out some sample sentences from possible future TMZ stories, and I think you’ll get a better idea of what I’m talking about.

I expect all future TMZ articles to be written in a format at least as colorful as those above. Please see that this is done.

When not blogging for Cracked, Michael makes period videos as head writer and co-founder of Those Aren’t Muskets!

• Top #1 Thing About 3-Day Weekends: Everything #

• Cracked’s 40 Most Inappropriate Children’s Book Covers: http://tinyurl.com/2rvyff #
• Top Blind People In Entertainment History: Stevie Wonder. Ray Charles. Blind Melon. Christina Aguilera’s personal shopper. #

HealthDay News reports that, according to a recent study, 82 children have died from playing “the choking game” since 1995. If you don’t know how to play the game, then you probably just don’t understand what the word “choking” means. You may have heard of The Choking Game by one of its other names, “blackout game,” “pass out game,” “scarf game,” or “space monkey,” (seriously).

In an effort to achieve a euphoric state, a bunch of kids sit around choking each other all day, just like a bunch of space monkeys, evidently, and some of them, for some reason, die.

You know, I was once a kid and I, miraculously, managed to entertain myself and not choke to death at the same time, and I didn’t even have some of the new-fangled toys the kids are playing with these days, (tamagatchis?). Do I think our children are getting dumber? Short answer, yes. Long answer, yes I do, very much so.

The article goes on to say that 93% of the victims’ parents had no idea this game was being played. First of all, what the fuck, Other-Seven-Percent? Second of all, maybe the problem is just that no one is aware of this Space Monkey phenomenon and, as a respected journalist, it is my duty to spread the word about this very serious, totally retarded problem.

Moving on to what I’m sure will be a recurring feature, I bring you:

This Week in Hating Hannah Montana:

Watchdog and buzz killer Consumer Reports are chastising that bitch who plays Hannah Montana for setting a bad example by failing to wear a seatbelt in her new, freedom-hating, orphan-punching movie, Hannah Montana and the Six Ways to Drown a Puppy. Consumer Reports stated that
“It seems to us that Miley, her father, and Disney had a perfect opportunity to help influence teens and counteract-rather than encourage-this trend.”
You know who else didn’t wear seatbelts? It was the Nazis. The Nazis didn’t wear seatbelts. Everyone knows that; it was one of the few holes in their otherwise airtight military strategy. We, (the Cracked audience and someday, God willing, the world,) are watching you, Montana.

PS Did you guys hear Hannah Montana invented Space Monkey? True story.