Adventures in high-fiving notwithstanding, I've never been as entertained, delighted or otherwise be-giggled by viral-video depot Funny or Die as most everyone else has. After a clip or two, the whole OMG-it's-a-celebrity-playing-against-type-and-providing-conclusive-evidence-that- he/she-is-in-on-the-joke! thing gets really tired. "Oh, look, it's Bieber trying to transition out of teen-idoldom! How fantastically, impossibly droll!" Etc. That's just one guy's opinion; you might feel differently. The freedom to disagree on the Internet is what makes America both great and rhetorically perverse.

My work-from-home/Internet-shut-in equivalent of a cigarette break is Puddin', a minute-long "live action single panel comic" (their description, not mine) that appears every schoolday around noon ET. Set in a depressing Anyplace, USA lunchroom and featuring a revolving cast of comics, including the quite possibly insane Eddie Pepitone, it's as low-fi as it is awesomely, hilariously foul. Its non sequitur-laden diatribes never fail to brighten my mood.

As someone whose past professional sins have damned him to watching an inordinate amount of web video, I've started to compile the definitive, more-authoritative-than-anything-Walter-Cronkite-or-Morpheus-have-ever-done list as to what works and what doesn't. What works can be boiled down to either "says/shows what has to be said/shown, succinctly and without artifice, and gets the hell out of the way" or "makes lots of fart jokes." What doesn't work is a little trickier, because there are any number of shoot-self-in-foot tactics, most related to prioritizing entertainment over information: Wearing one's viral aspirations on one's sleeve, hiring a cinematic auteur to do a …

I've lived my entire life in blue states, generally thinking, voting and brow-furrowing-while-reading The New York Times the way that blue-state people do. I've long regarded the Mason-Dixon Line as a psychological barrier separating monocle-wearing erudition and pratfalling mopery. I'd sooner host a bedbug convention in my chest hair than distill moonshine, evade officious lawmakers in the General Lee or otherwise fall in line with behaviors particular to the South.

I'm not sure whether to be flattered or creeped out that Pepsi's sponsored messages pop up in my... is "tweetline" the right word for it?... far more than those from other marketers. I'm flattered in that the Twitter algorithm can tell from my follows (Kathy Bates, Buick) and tweets ("Noticeable draft coming from garage window. Gonna grab the caulking gun and go to school on that bad boy!") that I am the human embodiment of youthful vibrancy, the longtime hallmark of the Pepsi brand. I'm creeped out in that Pepsi always manages to embed itself in my consciousness at the …

I had an elaborate, "funny" introduction written about the handful of Siemens videos that we'll be discussing in today's exercise. In it, I spun a whimsical tale about how I happened upon the clips after clicking on a typo-laden banner ad that lined the right side of the Doonesbury home page. You may well have LOLOMG'd! at the part where I likened the failure to hyphenate "100-year-old factory" to leaving the scene of a hit-and-run accident that mortally injured a small child and his puppy. There is no humor like grammar humor. But frankly, after rewatching the videos, I'm too …

Today, in "Things That Are Awesome And Make Me Want To Do Wheelies On My Dirt Bike While Rocking Out To Def Leppard," I present to you the latest marketing coup from the Activision folks, makers of Call of Duty and other wildly entertaining and socially reprehensible gamestuffs for impressionable teenagers. It's a teaser for the trailer to the upcoming Call Of Duty: Black Ops II, and it's as bizarre and darkly funny as anything of its ilk. It's awesome, too. Have I mentioned that it's awesome?

If I were called upon to update a fusty brand for these wackadoodle modern times of ours, I wouldn't know where to begin. Sears, Cream of Wheat, Town & Country - these are proud, venerable brands and, as such, somewhat out of place in the whittled-down world of 140 characters. There are exceptions - Levi Strauss, founded in 1873, still feels contemporary - but for the most part, old companies have a tough time working with and around the reality of their oldness.

The other day, for about the 27th time, UPS sent me an email that commenced with a reminder of how irresponsible and thoughtless a human being I've become: "Our records indicate that you have not taken advantage of My UPS recently." Upon further investigation, I learned that I haven't tracked a package in a number of weeks, which I can only assume has rattled the company to the core of its being. Understandably, then, UPS called on me to reaffirm my commitment to the cause - indeed, to reaffirm my commitment to America. Heaven forbid it should just stash my …

So I was doing my morning reading the other day when I came across the headline "Millionaire Mom Creates .COM Sensation in Dorm Room." Sucker for odd intra-headline capitalization that I am, I made the pivotal life decision to click on it. I expected to be wowed, touched and inspired, in that precise order. At the very least, I expected to come upon a story with "advertisement" in negative-point invisible font atop the screen, detailing the ready availability of $4,600/week work-at-home jobs.