by Andrew Krucoff

Marc Andreessen

Christina Applegate

Erykah Badu

Sacha Baron Cohen

Michael Ian Black

Mary J. Blige

Billy Bush

Sofia Coppola

Rob Corddry

Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O’Malley Armstrong

Damon Dash

Taye Diggs

Cory Doctorow

Shannen Doherty

Missy Elliott

Stephen Elliott

Corey Feldman

Charlotte Gainsbourg

Rebecca Gayheart

Jeff Gordon

Lizzie Grubman

Corey Haim*

Jon Hamm

John Hodgman

Bobby Jindal

Kid Rock

Jared Leto

Emmanuel Lewis

Lara Logan

Joel McHale

Ewan McGregor

MC Lyte

Method Man

Markos Moulitsas

Lachlan Murdoch

Gheorghe MureÅŸan

Jada Pinkett Smith

Amy Poehler

Questlove

Anthony Rapp

Denise Richards

Winona Ryder

Pete Sampras

Tupac Shakur*

Selena*

Snoop Dogg

Joel Stein

Picabo Street

Tristan Taormino

Touré

Mark Wahlberg

Luke Wilson

Andrew Krucoff is turning 40 next year.

Oh my God, someone read the 2300-page financial regulatory bill, and provides some highlights! Which is good, because it passed the Senate, 60 to 38. (Yes, that’s three Republicans, one Democrat naysayer, one non-voter and one dead Senator.) What’s in it? I have made my peace with the fact that I will never know. Will you? Let me know!

Behind the scenes of The Beaver: “I mean, if only there was some way we could have known he was an alcoholic abusive racist we could have avoided this entire thing.”

If you plan to be a victim of a fatal stabbing, might we suggest that you do so in Britain? Not only are the natives well known for their dexterity with the blade, but a recent study has also designated Knifecrime Island as the best place in the world to die.

by Joe Berkowitz

People have been wondering for a long time what comes after anti-marketing marketing. When commercials began to target the people who hated commercials-these attempts were almost indistinguishable from SNL spoofs-it seemed like we’d reached the final frontier. Then there were stealth viral vids and customized social media ads straight out of Minority Report. But it wasn’t until this week that somebody finally put it all together. I won’t insult the effectiveness of this campaign by pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about.

It all started with a Super Bowl commercial, one that has since gone on to rack up, on Youtube alone, over 13 million views. Old Spice used sharp humor, a snappy pace and a post-modern self-awareness designed for maximum appeal to… pretty much everybody. While the chiseled, shirtless Old Spice Guy is ostensibly addressing female viewers, the tagline of the ad campaign is “Smell like a man, man.” (It’s the perfect mixed address: as with many other Procter & Gamble products, the marketers know that a significant portion of “men’s products” are chosen and physically purchased by women.) More commercials soon followed, including the completely bananas “Flex” spot, which goes full meta when the commercial itself is (briefly) not allowed to end.

After that, Old Spice’s Twitter feed began responding to random people who mentioned these commercials. Although these responses could be funny at times, this level of engagement was not particularly remarkable in 2010, a time when TurboTax and Jet Blue and Chase bank do the same. But then, at around clock-in time this Tuesday morning, a couple of teasing dispatches went out. “Today could be just like the other 364 days you log onto Twitter. Or maybe the Old Spice man shows up @OldSpice,” read the first one. Then: “The Old Spice man/guy on a horse is everywhere today, and he’s just getting started.” That’s when the videos started showing up: brief 15- to 45-second ads featuring the OSG, shirtless as ever, standing in his bathroom-only now he was addressing specific individuals.

At first, the personalized replies were directed at people like Kevin Pereira, host of channel G4’s Attack of the Show, who had said kind things about the most recent Old Spice spot, and who’d had the pitchman himself, Isaiah Mustafa, on the show as a guest.

It started getting weird when a second video, made for Olympic athlete Apolo Anton Ohno, emerged; it thanked the athlete for thanking the OSG for the morning’s first video.

Then videos began hitting random commenters on Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook. They went to bloggers, celebrities, people that social media marketers would classify as “social media mavens.” The speed was impressive. For example, Twitter user @CaitieKendall made a comment at 12:06 p.m. on Tuesday asking the OSG to say her name, and her ad showed up online at 12:57 p.m. The planning must have been terrific: when you personalize videos to Guy Kawasaki, Digg founder Kevin Rose (twice), and the co-creator of Twitter, then you’re clearly not messing around. The fact that Old Spice bothered to purchase a Promoted Tweet spot on the Trending Topics, as an insurance plan, no doubt, was completely redundant; advertising like this was publicity unto the advertising itself.

On the celebrity front, the OSG shouted out Ashton Kutcher, Ryan Seacrest and Geroge Stephanopoulos. He also hit on Christina Applegate and Alyssa Milano, and whacked a piñata with a fish for Demi Moore. He actually seemed to have a special thing for Alysa Milano, sending her the most videos of anyone during the whole ordeal (four), and even sending her actual, non-virtual flowers. Any reasonable person would be right to ask whether these celebrities were in on the campaign and played along. Maybe that did happen, but it’s just as easy to picture Christina Applegate genuinely being a fan of funny TV ads, and sending out a tweet hoping for a response. When brand meets brand!

Rewarding people for spreading your message is the new name of the marketing game. It’s so easy to make a commercial pitchman “famous” now that even the actually famous, who are presumably less easy to impress than mere mortals, what with all the Hollywood coke orgies-well, to have them also want to be rewarded in the same way as “regular people” is unprecedented. And the ads were absolutely about “rewards.” After one Youtube commenter suggested that these ads should win an award, the OSG suggested that the commenter himself should win an award for “the Best Man on the Internet Who Likes My Old Spice Spots On the Internet”. (Then he pulled out a trophy and promised to engrave it.) In a video addressed to actor David Blue on Twitter, Isaiah thanks David for spreading the word about Old Spice commercials on Twitter. It can’t get more self-aware and post-anti-marketing than that. (Or can it?)

I watched all 180 of the Old Spice commercials that were made. Here are some highlights:

• One dude asked his girlfriend to marry him via the OSG, a move which will likely prove hilariously short-sighted, but is still more original than a Yankee game jumbo-tron.

• Someone on Twitter promised to name his first-born child after the OSG in exchange for a personalized video, and he got exactly that: a video addressed to his future son.

• In one of the stranger moments, the OSG held up a random crown and a jewel-encrusted scepter, while intoning just the words “random crown” and “jewel-encrusted scepter”, in a video addressed to “anonymous,” which has so far been viewed 400,000 times.

• Some guy who posted the grammatically questionable Youtube comment “Best thing I’ve ever seen since long time,” got his name written in “the book of enchanting, successful people who are winning in life.”

• A YouTube commenter was mocked for how many letters he used to spell “ha ha.”

• In one nicely played move, in response to random Twitter user @part_number, who pointed out that these video responses are even crazier than Burger King’s Subservient Chicken ads, the OSG responds that he does remember that chicken, and it was delicious. You got served, etc., BK.

• A response to a tweet from Gillette makes a point of preemptively denying that there is any cross-promotion between Old Spice and Gillette, thus beating the cynic to the punch.

The fact that this all culminated in a video addressed to the OSG actor Isaiah Mustafa himself is perfect. Gabe Delahaye at Videogum, who also received a personalized video earlier in the day, accurately summed it up as the moment when the internet exploded. Old Spice then took this meta-angle just a little too far in the direction of cheesy when OSG responded to Hayley Mustafa, Isaiah’s daughter, who wrote on Twitter to ask why Isaiah looks like her dad (ugh.)

But the absolute last we heard from OSG, at least until he makes the inevitable talk show rounds through next week and we all get as sick of him as I am at this moment (you have no idea), came at 3 a.m., with an amusing sign off. In it, Isaiah is seen wearing a plethora of ribbons and medals and holding a chainsaw, talking about riding his “jet ski lion” into the sunset.

Here is some hard data on who these videos were made for:

Celebrities addressed: 16

Bloggers addressed: 28

Reddit users : 9

Youtube commenters: 26

Facebook users: 24

Twitter users: 61

Yahoo Answers: 4

Media gurus: 7

“The Internet”: 3

Isaiah Mustafa, himself: 1

Hayley Mustafa: 1

In an insipid, fawning interview Wednesday night, ABC’s John Berman asked Isaiah Mustafa questions as though this were all something he’d hatched in his spare time. “Explain to me this Old Spice Guy sensation, which you have created,” he asks. Mustafa is an actor and former NFL wide receiver, and, like previous Old Spice pitchman, Bruce Campbell, he is an excellent emblem of hiply embraced manliness. But much of the credit for the success of… whatever all this was might conceivably go to advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy. (Regarding which: ahem.)

The way we are advertised to shows what corporations think of us, and most corporations clearly don’t think too much of their audience. I saw a billboard for Nesquik the other day that showed a bottle of the product and the line: “Stop and Drink the Nesquik.” It had to be pointed out to me that this was a play on the phrase “stop and smell the roses.”

But the Old Spice advertising blitz this week was impeccably orchestrated. It was the first wave of something we’ve never seen before. Since people are opting out of advertising on TV and the Internet and across the media spectrum, it was clear that something was going to have to give. Now, for better or for worse, something has.

Joe Berkowitz is wondering if he smells the way he should.

Here is a FIVE MINUTE report on a dangerous trend taking hold of America’s teens that has serious legal consequences: Boys are being boys. If you have any teenage sons at home, please make sure they watch this clip and understand that while blowing shit up seems pretty cool, it is only cool if they don’t get caught.

Scientists in Poland have discovered that plants encode information they get from various types of light and use it to immunize themselves against seasonal blight. Professor Stanislaw Karpinski led a team of biologists at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences in shining colored lights on plants and then testing the plants’ resistance to disease. Plants have “a specific memory for the light which builds its immunity against pathogens, and it can adjust to varying light conditions,” he said to the BBC’s Victoria Gill. “So the plants perform a sort of biological light computation, using information contained in the light to immunise themselves against diseases that are prevalent during that season.” That’s amazing!

Less good news, though, for older women with large bottoms. Research conducted at Chicago’s Northwestern University indicates that in humans, fat stored around the hips is detrimental to cognitive functioning. “We need to find out if one kind of fat is more detrimental than the other, and how it affects brain function,” said Dr. Diana Kerwin, who led a study that weighed, measured and tested the mental faculties of 8,745 post-menopausal women aged 65 to 79. Woman with more fat collected around the hips and buttocks than in the belly and waist (often described as “the pear shape,” which has been found to be healthier than the “apple shaped” alternative when it comes to heart disease) scored markedly poorly on memory tests. “The fat may contribute to the formation of plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease or a restricted blood flow to the brain.” Bummer.

Local blog youth disturbed by world’s most important performance artist on Letterman, gets thoroughly roasted by commenters.

Was there a time when anyone took Mark Halperin seriously? I mean, there must have been, right? Perhaps someone with a memory longer than mine can recall a long-vanished era where mention of the man’s name did not inspire hearty guffaws or lip-curling disgust (or, for his unfortunate co-workers, sad and silent shaking of the head). So how did we get from there to here? Oh, right, things like this line from his ridiculous “Sarah Palin is TOTALLY the read deal” piece: “This week Johnston and Palin’s daughter Bristol reannounced their engagement after months of estrangement, removing — with apparent serendipity — a blemish from her wholesome narrative.” Yeah, that’s how it happened.

As the data has suggested for some time, we’re doing well with our plan to put a million people out of their homes this year. “One of every 78 U.S. housing units, or 1.28% of the total, was subject to at least one foreclosure filing in the first six months of the year. That’s a total of 1.65 million properties.” By the way, how correlated are unemployment and foreclosure rates? Math explains: quite.