Thankfully, we have world class athletes in our country breaking barriers outside the strong arm of the Beijing Olympic judging committee. Case in point, “buddysteve”, the first ever Men’s Uneven Bar World Champion who risks life, limb, and package in this video to prove to the world that the uneven bars is not just a women’s event. Go Steve:

As luck would have it, Mike Industries reader Steve L. (a fellow Pine Bros fanatic) volunteered to eat one on camera if I shipped a couple to him in Georgia. Here is the video footage of the incident:

Way to go Steve. Thousands of Pine Bros. fans around the world bow down to your greatness.

Full details of the John McCain MySpace enhancement are available at Newsvine. The whole story and additional video should make its way around CNN and other stations on Friday.

Kudos to the McCain camp for playing this cool. Being a good sport goes a long way. Daily Show, Colbert Report, Countdown? Where are you?

“Person-You-Sort-Of-Know has added you as a contact!”

This morning, however, I received this message from susan1975 inquiring about a photo I (or Scrivs) took of Valleywag Chief Snarkology Officer Nick Douglas at SXSW:

“Hi there. Could you please add your photo called “CIMG0170.jpg” to my Male Butt-Crack Group? Thanks, Susan.”

Man, I totally would, but that would require me to actually join the Male Butt-Crack Group.

This is clearly another situation that Flickr is ill-equipped to handle. I would like to add my photo but am unwilling to join said butt-crack enthusiast group. Until this situation is resolved, the Male Butt-Crack Group shall be without my esteemed submission.

Are there any other unusual Flickr groups out there I should be aware of?

Warning: If you work within earshot of easily offended people, you might want to put on headphones.

It’s the perfect type of campaign for a potentially awkward product like this, and it’s pretty much by definition not offensive to a single person in their target audience.

Anyway, I’m just doing my part to keep this viral. It’s pretty hilarious. Make sure to hit up all the options in the main menu when the intro is over.

Are there many other recent examples of well-done, agency-created viral Flash campaigns? I feel like the memorable ones don’t come around often enough.

What on earth is going on here? I don’t know, but I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to create another Brit Pack Vanity Fair cover.

Click for a larger image… suitable for wallpaper in size. Questionable, however, in content.

What do you do?

Easy. Carry out your duty, and then pass your meme off to Mike Industries. Here, we will see to it that the meme is disposed of in a humane way, without the use of pesticides, chloro-flourocarbons, or any other environmentally hazardous materials. The patent-pending Mike Industries Meme Euthanasia process ensures that all memes are given proper burial (along with last rites) and no RSS feeds are contaminated in the process.

Pass your meme off today. Representatives are standing by.

What’s with the synchronized leaning? What year is it again?

“Meet with local fans of Jason Fried to discuss signals, noise, better things, EK, ML, SU, JF, and 37signals’ New Album!“

Whoa! What’s going on here!? Can we look forward to a compilation of Jason’s best dive-bar karaoke in the coming weeks or did Meetup.com make that all up?

What’s happening here is something I like to call “pseudomation”. A web site, in an effort to expand their offerings and encourage participation, scours the internet, scrapes data from popular web sites, and attempts to use that data to personalize their own pages. It can be done automatically, by an intern, or automatically with a human “check” performed afterwards to make sure it makes sense.

What’s weird about this one though is that I can’t really tell which method they used. It seems pretty automatic, with the initials “EK”, “ML”, “SU”, and “JF” just plastered on there fairly nonsensically, but the main “theme” of the page appears to be Jason. Furthermore, the url is “37.meetup.com” and not “jasonfried.meetup.com” which is just even weirder to me.

Anyway, just a random Friday morning finding. Anybody know of any other examples of pseudomation gone bad?

The Milk Challenge has been around for a long time and is, in my opinion, much tougher than the Saltine Challenge. The idea is to consume an entire gallon of the white stuff in less than an hour without throwing up. I’m not even sure I could do that with water, but with milk? Certainly not. Too much lactose makes the stomach very, very angry.

So you’d think that if someone could actually defeat the Milk Challenge, he’d be showered in glory and valuable prizes, right? Well, not in baseball. Brad Penny, former pitcher for the Florida Marlins (now with the Dodgers), challenged a batboy to complete the challenge with $500 in cash as an incentive. The poor kid ended up drinking the gallon, held it down, but didn’t come in under the one hour mark so he never got the payout. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Marlins then suspended him for six games! 10 games for steroid abuse and 6 games for milk abuse. Good times.

I only hope Penny ended up giving the kid his $500.

You blur out two phone numbers that are already fake (415.XXX.XXXX) and then don’t even blur out your own e-mail address enough to keep people from guessing exactly what it is? I mean c’mon… it ends in macromedia.com, doesn’t it?

Anyway, sorry Scott… I’m sure someone else is the guilty blurrer here. I just felt like bringing it up. UPDATE: Guilty! :)

And hey, great job with Dreamweaver 8! I can’t wait to try it out.

“We have learned from the Internet that you are interested in tents.”

Rather than write an unsolicited eulogy or anything like that, I’ll just say that Mitch was and is my favorite comedian ever, and I’ll leave you with these two clips from his two albums:

From “Strategic Grill Locations”

From “Mitch Alltogether”