DeadRooster.com

They are finally running the 2009 Honda Pilot commercial I worked on and mentioned in a previous post. I saw it myself this morning on–you guessed it–CNN (do they love me over there or what?). The commercial involves a Good Samaritan (driving a 2009 Honda Pilot) who encounters a recently-landed hot-air balloon blocking the road. The occupants of the balloon are in need of a lift and the Good Samaritan offers them a ride but is surprised to discover they are a group of elderly nudists.

You can’t see me on camera, but I am actually hiding behind the balloon basket with an inflation fan which I am using to fill the envelope with air just before they start to roll the camera. Given the short length of the commercial you wouldn’t guess I had probably filled that thing at least 50 times!

Side note: For those of you looking for my review of Cluck, I’m still reading it. I know it’s taking me forever to get finished, but it’s because I keep getting bombarded with actual paid-work which I can’t ignore. Anyway, I’m hoping to finish reading the book tonight and hopefully I’ll have a review up tomorrow.

Today on CNN’s American Morning, Veronica De La Cruz did a segment featuring Bloggers Unite for Human Rights, a joint-effort between BlogCatalog, Bloggers Unite and Amnesty International which encourages bloggers all over the world to observe May 15th as a day to blog about human rights. Dead Rooster participated in this effort and was featured, along with PointlessBanter.net, in the CNN story.

A special thanks to Richard Becker of Copywrite, Ink for bringing things together on BlogCatalog.

Note: if for some reason you can’t view the following video, you can also view the story at CNN’s video page. Thanks to Amy Oops! for alerting me to the CNN link.

For those of you that have never had the pleasure of getting “Rick Rolled,” I will briefly explain. In the original version, you would read a forum post, email, or article on a social network which had a link to something of extreme interest to you such as an adult-oriented video featuring Brittney Spears and Paris Hilton spanking each other with fully-marinated barbeque brushes.

However, when you clicked the link, you were fed a script which hijacked your browser, reduced it to YouTube Size, and had it jump around your screen playing this 1980’s video of Rick Astley performing “Never Gonna Give You Up” at full volume.

At one point the video would stop jumping around but you still couldn’t close it because when you tried it would launch a series of never-ending message boxes. Every time you closed one, a new one would open—and remember, to add to the frustration, the whole time all this is going on THE BLASTED SONG KEEPS PLAYING!

So, anyway, this morning I got Rick Rolled again (but no nasty script involved). Why it happened though requires a little bit of explanation: Earlier this month my brother Raymond and I took a week’s vacation in Orlando Florida. We visited Walt Disney World, Universal Theme Parks and a few other minor attractions. We took several gigabytes of photos and downloaded them all on to his notebook computer’s hard-drive.

When we returned to California and back to his apartment, I asked if he could quickly burn them onto a DVD so I could take them home with me and utilize them in some blog posts. Unfortunately, he was out of blank DVD’s so he promised to mail me one in a few days. So far, I haven’t seen it (which is why I haven’t written about our trip yet).

Back to this morning: I get up at about 5:00 a. m., put on coffee and check my email. Lo and behold there is an email from Raymond with a link to “all our Florida photos.”

The link led to this YouTube video:

Good one Raymond! Now send me the photos!