More commercials I’m enjoying

I haven’t actually seen these commercials, which are for Skittles, on TV yet. My cousin showed them to me on youtube recently. They’re weird, vaguely creepy, and mostly hilarious. Enjoy:

So weird. So, so weird.

we don’t need no stinking badgers

Okay, so the other day I went looking on youtube for what I’m sure you will all agree with me are probably the best commercials ever.

I know you’ve seen them. A badger of a car salesman — literally and figuratively — browbeats poor customers in the most hilarious fashion possible. It’s also cool that they are semi-local, since they advertise Johnson Automotive, a Raleigh-based dealership chain.

But this blog is about something else. So when I started my search, I began with the word badger (what else?) and the first hit I got brought me back about seven or eight years, to a time when I was sitting with a college co-worker and our boss at his apartment in Greenville, watching a discovery channel special about the African honey badger.

The honey badger, in that lone hour, became my favorite denizen of the Animal Kingdom. He’d go head-first into a log full of bees, the danger of the bees’ stingers being of negligible importance, just for a taste of honey. He’d climb up a tree just to take on a kantankerous and agitated cobra head on. He’d roll around on his back in the dirt like a dog immediately following his cobra feast. It was awesome, and as far as Discovery Channel special watching with my co-workers experiences, it rates at least in my all-time top five.

But so anyway, in my search for the Johnson Automotive commercials, I discovered that some soul who it is now incumbent upon me to sing the praises of and thank endlessly took the time to edit together some footage from the very special I watched in Greenville all those years ago. Whoever this genius is made two hilarious videos that I could watch all day if I had to.

I’ll warn you now, it gets a little gory when the badger dispatches the cobra, so you might want to finish your noodles before hitting play. Otherwise, enjoy:

My return

Haven’t had much chance to blog lately, but in the interest of keeping this site updated, I’m going to take a page from a few of my fellow Herald bloggers and clue you in on some things you should be aware of.

Television:

The Shield. You probably already knew this one. I’ve been aware of this cop show since its inception, but had never watched in until about a month ago, when my cousin let me borrow the DVD collection of the first season. I went through it in like three days, and I’ve been netflix-ing the rest of the series like a maniac ever since.

I enjoy it so much because you end up liking a bunch of characters who aren’t very likeable, and for different reasons. I also like it because you literally never get a chance to breathe. You constantly wonder how the characters are going to resolve a seeminly un-resolvable situation, and when they do, something else comes up. It’s great.

I just finished season 4, and the first disc of season 5 is set to arrive in my mailbox tomorrow. I need to get up to speed (through season 6, which isn’t available yet) before the final season starts in early 2008. Highly recommended.

Movies:

Well, there’s Superbad, which I love love love but has been blogged about already by my boss, so I’ll just say that I loved it enough to see it three times and that if you’re squeamish about language you might not want to go to this one. Otherwise, it’s a great way to look at what it’s like to be a dorky, girl-obsessed-but-completely-unsavvy teenage boy.

In other news, I’m waiting with what I’d call mid-level-to-severe anxiety for the November 21 release of No Country For Old Men. It’s directed by the Coen brothers (Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, Fargo) who are my absolute favorites. This movie is based off the 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy, which follows an antelope hunter from Texas who finds a whole bunch of money left over from a drug deal gone wrong. Of course, the drug people want their money and send a really terrible man to find it. In the middle is a small-town sheriff who is just trying to keep mayhem from breaking out. It’s going to be great, great, great. Even though the Coen brothers lean toward comedy, their true strength as filmmakers is in dialogue, which is I think going to be a huge part of this movie. Can’t wait.