The big headlines on the top of Yahoo!’s news page today: Hello Kitty marketing being retargeted at young males! Japanese people are crazy for pen spinning! Hilary or Oprah: which woman do Americans respect most?

Glad to see that the internet is on top of the hard-hitting news, when there’s a country with nuclear weapons that’s seeing its democracy threatened by crazed religious fundamentalists. I hear there was an assassination in Pakistan, too.

Thank you, thank you! That is the kind of biting political satire you only get from a professional comedy writer. Who’s suffering crippling writer’s block at the moment.

Happy Holidays, everyone! I can tell it’s Christmas Eve, because I sincerely hope that everybody’s having a happy holiday, even the people that annoy me.

(Speaking of people that annoy me: I think I finally made one of my shallow epiphanies towards understanding the ongoing War on Tolerance that takes place around this time of year. When non-pundit people get agitated at the sight of a Christmas tree or Santa Claus with the wish “Happy Holidays” attached, their discomfort is a lot like when non-southerners are baffled by the proper use of “y’all.” They assume the worst and fail to give others credit for understanding the concept of inclusion — when a southerner says “y’all,” he’s making the charitable assumption that you’ve got someone else in your life who’s also invited; and when a person says “Happy Holidays,” he’s not excluding Christmas, but inviting those who don’t celebrate that particular holiday to enjoy the festive excess of the season. Even heathens.)

Via Jackson Publick’s blog, there’s word of the next Venture Brothers season, and a contest that’s already been won. But the crew has given everyone a version of The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” as performed by The Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend. (I haven’t listened to it yet, so I can’t vouch for its work-or-family-party-appropriateness).

It didn’t take long back east for me to get whipped back up into the Christmas spirit, and I didn’t have to do any shopping, which is the best gift of all. I hope everybody’s enjoying the best time of the year, and looking forward to next year!

There’s a guy at Carnegie Mellon named Johnny Chung Lee, who’s been doing experiments with the Wii remote, then putting his results up on YouTube.

The ones I’ve seen take advantage of the fact that the Wii remote is an IR camera, not just a standard IR-output remote, which flips the whole method of interactivity with the Wii on its head. As a result, he’s turned it into a low-cost interactive whiteboard, a Minority Report-style multi-touch finger-tracking system, and coolest of all, a VR head-tracking system:

The last one I definitely want to try sometime (he’s included all the necessary software with his demos), and would make for some awesome games if developers could get clued in and start taking advantage of this. When “Wii as lightsaber” is the coolest idea anybody’s proposed for the system, it’s clear that they need input from clever guys like this. (And Nintendo desperately needs to hire this guy as soon as he’s available).

Last year when I was stationed at Epcot, I wrote about the promotional video that runs in a constant loop on the TVs in all the Disney hotels. It’s hosted by the annoying and yet inexplicably alluring Stacey, who guides you, talking incessantly, through all the theme parks, water parks, golf courses, and stores of Walt Disney World.

Sure, they let you turn to other channels on the Disney TVs, but I’d be lying if I tried to pretend that this loop isn’t kept running non-stop every second I’m in a hotel room at Disney World. It’s not because it’s changing or giving out any new information; after just a day in the hotel, you can pretty much recite the whole thing from memory. I really watch it just for the same reason you scream when you see the Matterhorn from the freeway, or why my brother and I would scream at our parents to turn on the radio when we were driving down to Disney World and passed a sign that said “Disney Info 1540 AM.” It’s a constant broadcast reminder that you really are at Disney World!

But now, we can all cheat. A friend at Imagineering sent a link to the whole video on Google Video. The internet finally pays off!

Enjoy, won’t you? Some of my favorites:

• 03:20: Stacey is, for some reason,being interviewed about her golf game. These David Lynch-style breaks in continuity are frequent and nonsesnsical; do not be alarmed.
• 04:29: Please don’t say “waterslides out the wazoo” again.
• 04:50: “Summit Plummet,” “Let’s get it on!” and “waterpark wedgies”.
• 05:38: “Look at all these lazy people in the lazy river.”
• 10:30: The infamous Triple Mountain Whammy.
• 15:50: “Love roller coasters. Love Aerosmith. Hello!”
• 19:00: Stacey embarrasses white people everywhere by talking about the tribal rhythm in her blood.
• 20:30: Stacey confirms most Disney World visitors’ suspicion that Africa is a disease-ridden hellhole.
• 26:40: Cougar Stacey makes inappropriate advances on the Gelato guy.
• 27:00: Stacey has “pretzels und bier” and drags out 12 other cultural sterotypes in 30 seconds. Note that she has nothing of interest to say about Canada other than acknowledging that she’s in Canada.

Is it weird to go over a promotional video in such detail? Definitely. But like I said, I’ve watched this thing more times than Oliver Stone watched the Zapruder film. Having it on the internet is a dream come true.

And if you’re old-school like me, you’ll probably make similar noises of excitement when you see they’ve got older versions as well. Most of the times I’ve gone to the park, they were running this paper-cutout version — if you’ve ever wondered how long it takes “Zip a Dee Doo Dah” to get out of your head after hearing it incessantly for 5 days straight, the answer is: never.

Even more rare is the version from 2004, which was evidently the test run for the Staceyfied version. It’s hosted by a primitive, more realistic, less abrasive but somewhat less inspiring proto-Stacey named “Chrissa.” When I went in 2005, I was surprised and disappointed that Chrissa had been replaced. I like to imagine that Disney holds a battle to the death each year to determine the host of the in-hotel promotional video.

You may be at the top of the Triple Mountain Whammy for now, Stacey, but can you defend the title? You’re safe… but for how long?!?

Considering how memorable the stories are, it’s obvious Stephen King and the fearmeisters responsible for The Car were tapping into something primal and universal with the idea of an evil car.

I just think that by having the car totally flip out and kill people, they missed out on a prime opportunity for dread and true horror. A murderous demon car jumping through windows to run over girlfriends? That’s just a quick, cheap cat-jumping-out-of-the-cupboard scare. How come nobody’s captured the true long-term dread and despair? The kind you only get from owning a no-less evil, but passive-aggressive car?

Like, for instance, a POS Jetta that’s so boring and practical it latches onto your soul like a deer tick, slowly sucking the life out of you over eight long years. And lets every convenience feature break in the first year or two, but refuses to die. And goes dead in the middle of 70mph freeway traffic. And then its alternator goes out and kills the battery, stranding you in a ditch on the side of 101 north where you have to get towed to pay over 800 bucks for a repair on a car you don’t even want anymore.

It’s not just soul-draining and money-draining, but it does weird things to you, psychologically: I’m so fed up with it now that I’m ready to take a Bullitt. I’ve never seen the movie, and I’ve never been into muscle cars, but damn that’s a nice-looking car.

At this point, I’m ready to just get a big, stupid, impractical and irresponsible car. So what if the planet’s running out of oil? Haven’t I offset my carbon footprint enough over the past eight years, driving a car that gets 28 mpg? What’s the harm in going back into debt to get an overpriced car that’s bad for the environment? Or a convertible that’s completely impractical for the San Francisco bay area?

Last week, Nintendo released Pokemon Snap for the virtual console. (Still no word if they’ll be releasing its obscure sequel, Pikachu, Oh No You Di’nt!)

The original game was a brilliant concept — a Pokemon photo safari — and it was presented really well. I’ll never understand why it didn’t go on to become a huge best-seller, since it got everything right: it’s got the obsessive/compulsive collecting aspect of Pokemon, in a completely non-violent setting that doesn’t come across as cloyingly or smugly non-violent.

And since it puts you in a little car on rails, where you can look around and see cool stuff happening around you, it feels more like what a Disney game should be than any game Disney’s actually put out.

The Virtual Console release is still pretty fun to play; I managed to get a few minutes in today, before the cold took me over and my head collapsed in on itself.

More than anything, though, it seems like releasing it on the Wii may have backfired on Nintendo. The Virtual Console and the Wii remote are really two separate marketing concepts (and in fact, you need a GameCube controller or their “classic” controller to play Pokemon Snap at all), but playing it on this console just reminds you how much better it would be as a Wii-native game. Moving the camera around with a joystick feels clumsy after you’ve just used a pointing-and-shooting device to start the game.

It’s highly unlikely, but I’m hoping that they’ll see a ton of downloads of the VC version of Pokemon Snap (since it’s had years to build up kind of a reputation as an underrated classic of the N64), and that’ll encourage them to make a sequel tailored for the Wii.

Fatal Frame, Dark Cloud, and Dead Rising all borrowed the photo-safari concept to one degree or another, but put them as an afterthought to a traditional (and combat-heavy) game. They don’t get the same basic appeal of Pokemon Snap, which flips the interactivity on its head, pushing you through a cool “ride” and letting you interact with that.

There’s a new update for GarageBand that adds a “Send to Ringtones” item to the “Share” menu.

That’s kind of cool, just because it means I can finally start using “Apache” by the Sugarhill Gang as my ringtone again.

But what’s more cool is that it’s a sign there’s still remnants of a soul left somewhere in Apple. Charging users a buck to make their own ringtones is pretty standard in the cell phone business, but it was a downer seeing it put into place by a company that was claiming to “think different.”

Steve Jobs got a ton of good PR for putting himself forward as the guy who was going to stick it to the record companies. And part of the whole design manifesto behind the iPhone is that they were making a cell phone that worked like phones should work, instead of whatever business practices the cartel of manufacturers and service providers had already established.

If they’re acknowledging that you should be able to use your own music as a ringtone — and quietly acknowledging, instead of drawing a lot of attention to how incredibly generous it is of them to let you copy files from one place to another — that’s an encouraging sign for the SDK. Maybe there’s still hope they’ll do the right thing.

Of course, I still won’t have any time to write anything for the damn phone, and I suspect by now I’ve forgotten how to program. But it’ll be useful for future occasions when I decide to start moralizing about a consumer electronics and software company.

The biggest problem with the internet is that you’ve got to wade through so much crap to get to the good stuff. With this whole “web-logging” fad, that means to see funny pictures of talking cats, or copyright-violating YouTube videos, you’ve first got to make it through reams of text with the blogger’s “personality.”

And of course, we’re talking about the “personality” of folks who have nothing better to do than write on the internet about cat pictures and YouTube videos. I had to give up Boing Boing because I got tired of hearing how DRM eviscerates babies. I can’t count how many videogame blogs I’ve had to give up. You’ll be reading along and then hit one post that just makes you say, “Aw man, why couldn’t you just have shut up and give me the links already?” Why can’t more blogs be like this one, without content or personality?

I’ve been reading Cartoon Brew for a while, digging through big, steaming mounds of self-satisfied attitude in order to see cool clips of animation I hadn’t seen before, or the occasional rare piece of concept art or model sheet for works I’d never even heard of. Sure, the tone is insufferably pompous, but hey, neat pictures!

What killed it was this post bitching about some admittedly lame-sounding (the description claims they’re looking for “the dopest animator in the business”) animation contest, which will be judged by Loren Bouchard. The problem isn’t the objection to the contest itself, but the obnoxious rant surrounding it.

Instead of just complaining about the nebulous ownership and rights issues involved with submitting original work to a website for a contest, the blogger instead decided to go off on an internet tirade against Bouchard and, by extension, Adult Swim. (Note that “Adult Swim” is surrounded by quotes of disdain; you can almost hear him sneering and spitting out the words as if it pains him to even admit such a thing exists). He says he’d never heard of Bouchard or of his latest show, “Lucy, Daughter of the Devil” — that’s reasonable enough for most folks, but not for anybody who claims to be an authority on animation. Along with claims that Bouchard’s work is an “embarrassment” to the art form, he puts up a still from “Home Movies” for true animation aficionados to shake their heads and go “tsk, tsk.”

Now, finding an arrogant douchebag on the internet is hardly a notable achievement, so why not just leave a nasty comment after the post and then move on? Why bother writing about it? Because it misses the point to such a colossal degree, and it’s a perfect example of the internet’s creepy underbelly. (Well, the other creepy underbelly; there’s not much we can do about the main one).

The blogger spent months using the blog to shill his book, which celebrates 1950s animation styles. The posts would have examples of stills along with sycophantic descriptions of the artists responsible. Now, a lot of this art (including the example used for the cover) stands out to me as a low point in animation history — the 80s were crass and soulless, sure, but at least the character designs, while bland, were usually appealing on some level. Most of the stuff included in this collection was cheaply-produced and just plain ugly.

But to each his own, right? Just because I don’t see the value in it doesn’t mean there’s no value in it. Isn’t that the whole point of animation, even? I never made it far in my classes in college, but I know that I saw more than a lifetime’s worth of sample films and short films, and by far the bulk of them sucked.

That wasn’t the point; the idea was to have an idea, and to make it come alive. The real beauty of animation isn’t the same beauty as other visual art; technically perfect stuff can come across as the most bland. The true soul of animation is this overriding idea that anything can happen, at any time. It’s the one art from that truly rewards experimentation and innovation more than anything else.

And what should be obvious to anybody who’s not dense, and who’ll take a second to get his head out of his ass and pay attention, is that Bouchard’s innovation is in recognizing how to pool together some of the funniest voice actors available, get spontaneous and naturalistic dialogue out of them, and apply that to animation. That’s huge, and nobody else is doing that.

To take a still frame from “Home Movies” and use that as an indicator of the entire work is so incredibly stupid, it’s hard to imagine a cogent thought process behind it. It’s not even a subjective “well that’s just your opinion, man!” Like it or not, failing to recognize the stylistic achievement of these series is just plain objectively wrong.

But the bigger question is: why does this always happen? Reading the posts on “Cartoon Brew” is like listening to a cross between the most obnoxious comic book store clerk and the most self-important indie rock fan — the artists are all sell-outs, and the “fans” are all fools who don’t appreciate what true art is. Why does obsessive fandom always breed such colossal arrogance and douchebaggery?