This is the teaser for Volkswagen’s Super Bowl commercial. Outside of the the beaver saving the motorist commercial, the best ad from 2011 was easily the “kid Vader” one Volkswagen put out. This might beat it:

I actually had a really cramazing Thirsty Thursday post lined up for today, but it’ll have to wait until next week — I have an exciting announcement to make (well, two actually):

First up: my Diver Riding Shark shirt was worn by Jimmy on FOX’s Raising Hope this week!

The full video won’t be up on Hulu until next week, but rest assured, it will be embedded ASAP (provided Congress doesn’t destroy the internet between now and then). There’s something vaguely satisfying about Jimmy passing his GED test while wearing one of my tees…

But even MORE exciting than this teeny-tiny step up the ladder of fame is the addition of ART PRINTS to the Ex-Boyfriend product line! While a limited selection to start, I hope to be able to add to the collection of available art prints in the future. Each 11″ x 17″ print is digitally reproduced on 100 lb. glossy cover stock, ships for FREE in sturdy cardboard shipping tubes, and is guaranteed to get you mad high-fives & fist-bumps at your next dinner party (if your dinner parties are typically held at the Jersey Shore. And if they are, the high-fives might be for your delicious rum-ham.)

In my first industry-related design job out of school, I designed t-shirts for a local commercial screen print shop. Most of the stuff I did was for local small businesses and churches and schools. You know, crappy, unimaginative one-color stuff featuring a lot of clip art, Comic Sans, and Bible verses — and almost always on white tees.

Occasionally though, I’d get a project with multiple colors and more complex designs, which I was then directed by salespeople to quickly replicate or mimic with fewer colors. I’d hear things like “reproduce this EXACTLY…but use two colors instead of four, and we need it to print and ship tomorrow, so I need a mock-up to send for the client’s approval in 30 minutes.” In the Art Room, this became shortened to “you know, use the Photoshop button.”

“The Photoshop button” was the magical, mythical, non-existent cure-all button that non-designers are convinced exists in reality — they just never see it action. As though we artists just hang out by the water cooler with unicorns and yetis discussing sports and politics until we hear salespeople down the hallway and everyone disappears and/or “fakes” working hard to avoid getting handed new projects.

This is only tangentially related to the video below, but any time I hear or see something advertising the wonders of Photoshop, I always pause for a split-second and ask myself, “I wonder if the version they’re using came with a Photoshop button?”

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

Via JesseRosten.com)

A couple weeks ago when I was researching vintage advertising imagery for reference material and inspiration to use for the re-design of my Now Accepting Girlfriend/Boyfriend Applications tees, I found some pretty amazing ads from women’s magazines of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.They weren’t exactly revelatory or surprising — right after we moved to Baltimore a few years ago, Meredith and I hit the kitsch jackpot while hitting up thrift & antique stores for stuff to decorate our house: tons of back issues of True Story magazine. Loaded with full-page ads trying to sell women on using Lysol to both disinfect their kitchen counters and their panty liners, and lots of other classics.

But when I found this over at PlanetOddity.com, it floored me:

There are a few things going on here that are cramazing:

• Directly equating a woman’s happiness with the volume of housework she engages in
• Calling what is essentially speed “vitamins”
• The fact that FREAKING KELLOGG’S, home of Tony the Tiger and Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies and Eggo waffles, and founded by consensus nut-job health-food masochist William Kellogg, was the company manufacturing and selling Pep Vitamins

The thing that’s so entertaining about this sort of advertising is how spectacularly this sort of cultural mindset crashed and burned at the turn of the 1960s and resulted in the dark underbelly of suburban swellness (see Men, Mad and Dolls, Valley of the. Or, if you’d rather laugh than cringe, John Waters’ Mom, Serial).

Spielberg wisely left this nugget on the cutting-room floor:

Add your captions in the comments section below! Winner gets the self-satisfaction of knowing that they made the best joke about Nazis presenting a kitten with a dandelion and a grenade EVER!

(Via Cracked.com)

Look familiar? Probably because that was your aisle-mate on the last time you flew on an airplane. Well, some countries’ airlines have finally realized that more than any other aspect of air travel, your seat-neighbors are the things that can make or break your experience.

Whether it’s a screaming or hyper-active child, a smelly unwashed person, a smelly heavily-perfumed person (did you know Brylcreem and Aqua Velva are still manufactured? And USED? By living, breathing humans in the 21st century? True story), or somebody that will just not shut the f@#k up while you’re trying to pound mini-bottles of booze to assist you in passing out and sleeping through harrowing turbulence (truly, the only way to fly), cramped seats, minimal legroom, shitty in-flight entertainment & food, or surly flight attendants have NOTHING on the annoying aisle-mate.

Fear not, though, my jet-setting friends! According to this article at Springwise.com, Malaysia Airlines and KLM Airlines are on the cutting-edge of using social media networks for something other than updates about what you’re watching on TV at any given moment (full disclosure: I fully enjoyed back-to-back viewings of Leprechaun V: Leprechaun In the ‘Hood and Leprechaun VI: Back 2 da ‘Hood on BET Friday night — and posted that shizz all over my Wall!)

Malaysia Air’s MHBuddy Facebook app allows passengers to see the profiles of friends (and likely friends of friends with public Wall’s) to coordinate travel dates with friends who are heading to the same destination within that time-frame, and to even elect to sit next to or near one another during the flight. KLM’s Meet & Seat service is even more interesting because it incorporates both Facebook and LinkedIn. This means that even if no direct friends are on that flight, you can still peruse the LinkedIn profiles of fellow passengers and choose seating based on those in similar industries or with similar interests. As Bob says, baby steps. There are still no guarantees that your seat-neighbor is a big fan of personal hygiene — but at least the conversation is interesting.

I try not to “re-blog” other peoples’ content too much — they work(ed) hard to be funny/crazy/stupid/embarrassing to themselves & their families, and I don’t want to develop a rep as a plagiarist.

If something is worthy, I like to take a pass at it too and contribute my own two cents to [insert witty blogger's name here]‘s scholarly analysis.

But Bobby Finger’s break-down of nouveau Christmas classic Love, Actually is pretty much perfect. You can check it out here at The Hairpin.

A few notes of my own, though:

— My wife isn’t a big rom-com fan. She’s OK with Love, Actually, and thought Crazy Stupid Love was good, but generally she likes to tease me about the fact that I will stop and watch any of the following whenever they pop up on the cable guide:
• When Harry Met Sally
• Four Weddings & A Funeral
• Sleepless In Seattle
• You’ve Got Mail

Essentially, anything with Meg Ryan and/or Tom Hanks circa me no longer thinking girls were icky.

— How weird is it to see Andrew Lincoln butchering zombies on The Walking Dead now after having his role as Mark in Love, Actually be the one that defined him for the rest of the 2000′s?

— Whatever happened to Kiera Knightley?

— Is Bill Nighy contractually-obligated to appear in every single big-budget, ensemble-casted movie out of the UK?

— Colin Firth was awesome in the BBC’s Pride & Prejudice and Bridget Jones’ Diary, but can we all agree that his entire career is built on two roles in which he played the same character (his last name in BJD is even Darcy, for f@#k’s sake!) and that he’s pretty much been coasting since the early 2000′s?

— Hugh Grant IS awesome in everything he’s in, but can we all agree that his entire career is built on playing the same character (himself) and that he’s pretty much been coasting since Four Weddings & A Funeral?

(Tip of the hat to Adj!)

Add your captions in the comments section below!

(Thanks for the tip, Adj! Photo courtesy of someone I don’t know by way of NYMag.com)