Top Ten Videos of 2012: 9. “A Dramatic Surprise On a Quiet Square”

9Moving right along to number nine on my list of favorite 2012 web videos, we come upon amusing bit of whimsy. My only slight reservation about this video is that it is, technically, an advertisement. However, the operative word there is “slight.” It seems clearly produced for the web with the hope of going viral — usually a recipe for utter mediocrity. In this case, though, the producers of the video have more resources than the average YouTube channel, because they are the television network TNT. Specifically, TNT HD Benelux.

TNT’s current slogan may be “We know drama,” but based on this I’d say they appear quite familiar with comedy as well.

Yeah, I know it’s multiple takes, but I just love the whole idea. It’s so over-the-top and elaborate, not only in the conception but in the sheer stage management of it. The stretcher rolling out the back of the ambulance is straight from the famous “Homer Simpson jumps the Springfield gorge” sequence, but hey — borrow from the best, right? Not to mention that the guy in this video doesn’t have the advantage of being a cartoon. The lingerie model on the motorcycle and the football players top it all off with a dash of Benny Hill-like zaniness. Bravo, I say!

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Top Ten Videos of 2012: 10. “Apple Scotland – iPhone Commercial for Siri”

10It’s that time of year again! Time to recover from the holidays, sheepishly consider how little I’ve been posting to this blog, and most of all time to judge the previous year not by the color of its skin, but by the content of its web videos. You can’t stop progress, and 2012 did indeed boast more candidates for the list than any previous year. Then again this is only the fourth year I’ve been doing this, but you get the point.

Speaking of the perpetually accelerating rate of technology, the iPhone’s voice-activated virtual assistant, Siri, is by now pretty old news. Back on January 31 of last year, however, untold bazillions of Siri-inhabited iPhones had been unwrapped by thrilled consumers a mere month earlier.

Apple’s iPhone commercials played up the futuristic coolness of Siri to great effect. They also served up a fat pitch down the middle to one Gavin McInnis, a Canadian wit of of Scottish extraction. Despite the incongruity of a Scots-Canadian in a baseball metaphor, I think you’ll agree that he crushed it like Prince Fielder.1
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Obama Re-elected: The Twitter Symphony

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High Society Wedding Hathos

Talk is cheap, and snark is the cheapest kind — which is why the internet is swamped with it. Fortunately there are exceptions to the rule, those relatively few writers on the web whose skills raise them well above the garden variety haters.

One such iconoclastic wit goes by the online alias of Mobutu Sese Seko. His Twitter profile says, “Former Notorious African Dictator. Politics blogger at @Gawker and @GQMagazine.com. Guest at @Deadspin, The @Classical and @Vice. Registered sexhaver.” His blog Et tu, Mr. Destructo? is a longtime resident of my sidebar, and can be found at http://www.mrdestructo.com.

just married limoMobutu isn’t the first to take aim at the New York Times’s Weddings section. These weekly matrimonial hagiographies are like a carefully preserved relic from the gilded age: fawning reports of joyous unions between necessarily well-bred, well-educated, well-off young paragons of virtue. Perhaps, like me, Mobutu hadn’t bothered to look at any of these tulle-wrapped flauntings in a while. In any case, yesterday he did, and was moved to embark upon a most entertaining flurry of tweeted hathos.

The New York Times, “Sage Mehta and Michael Robinson”:

Alexandra Sage Mehta and Michael Robinson do not seem to belong to the Facebook generation that expresses itself in sentence fragments. In conversation, their sentences are grammatical and lovely and often sound as if previously written, if not rewritten.

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Since You Asked, Mr. Trump…

Sometimes they just tee it right up for you, don’t they. Well, off the top of my head I’d say a full body waxing, re-taking Algebra II, babysitting an autistic badger in a studio apartment, getting audited, hiking across Libya in a snowsuit, and passing a gallstone all qualify. But don’t take it from me (or not just from me) — check out this curated sample of replies from the rest of Twitter:
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