Merchandising! Bodega Food Pyramid Shirts

We’re now selling a Bodega Food Pyramid t-shirt based on the original. Also available as a jersey, hoodie or baby onesie.

You can also still pay what you want for our DVD.

Both the DVD and the t-shirt come as part of the Internets Celebrities Gift Basket via Kickstarter.

The next IC video: Stadium Status

We’re going to try and get to the bottom of a billion dollar question in our next video. In this hellish economy, should the public be spending billions of dollar to make new sports stadiums, geared to a wealthier audience and benefiting private sports teams? It seems like the only socially acceptable form of welfare is corporate welfare. What part of the game is that?

Here in New York City, two new baseball stadiums launched this year at a cost to the public of over 2 billion dollars. Next year there’ll be a new Giants stadium. The New Jersey Nets may be moving to Brooklyn a few years after that.

With all this development going on and all this money disappearing, who better than us to investigate what these sports teams have been doing. No one else seems to be talking about it. And besides we know a thing or two about getting over and getting free shit.

We’re using a new service called Kickstarter to raise the money to make this project a reality. Check our Kickstarter page out to learn more about it, including how you can help this video get made while at the same time getting cool and unique rewards for your contribution.

Thanks for your support.

Stadium Status @ Kickstarter

Get Your Big Fat Wall Street Bonus

Vend Diagram Bonus Clips.

Golden Calf

Bonus to the Bonus: Emergency Exit is a piece by Chinese artist Chen Wenling, depicting the Wall Street Bull ass-ramming a horned Bernie Madoff and pinning him up against a wall. Some really weird shit going on in this one. Literally.

Internets Celebrities Secret Handshake

Bonus to the Bonus: In the old days, some rappers were accused of freebasin’. Now they’re accused of being freemasons. This Youtube video claims to have found some secret in the grips of rap royalty.

At the Vendy’s

We jumped at the chance to attend New York’s annual celebration of street vendor food – the Vendy Awards – this weekend. Thanks to Amy and the Street Vendor Project for the hookup. And the wafel truck in particular for rocking our world.

Presenting: THE VEND DIAGRAM

Dallas, Rafi and I just finished a new movie about street vendors and we would like very much for you to watch it.

It’s our longest movie to date (which I know isn’t a selling point on the internets) yet I still feel like it just barely scratches the surface of street vendor culture in New York City.

Take this fact omitted from the movie for instance:

The # of licensed street vendors ALLOWED in NYC = 853 (Merchandise) and 3000 (Food Vendors).

And it’s been like that for over 2 decades. I always thought anyone could get a license or permit to be a street vendor after passing a test or doing an interview. I assumed the number of vendors was based solely on the number of people who wanted to be vendors. Well, I assumed wrong.

Like a lot of our movies, we chose for our subject, something we three New Yorkers have taken for granted growing up in this city. I can’t speak for Dallas and Rafi but I’m fond of the knish, the pretzel, the hot dog and very occasionally the bootleg DVD. Before we made this movie I never really wondered who comprised the workforce that brought me these city delights. Sadly, I think it’s human nature to push a lot of stuff into the background. Hopefully, this movie shines a little light on a population that has had its business and its rights compromised by an effed the eff up economy, an overzealous police force and the lobbying efforts of Big Retail.

Enjoy the movie, let us know what you think, spread the word if you’re inclined and afterwards, if you feel worn out, Fux with naps!

(That last bit might make more sense after you watch the movie)

Been A Long Time, We Should’na Left You…

Has it really been over a year since the last i.C. feature presentation?

Sure, I do all kinds of Ricky Retardo shit on my site – DallasPenn.com and my corresponding YouTube page, and Casimir still makes films that are LOL funny and Rafi still dissects the egregious commercialization of Hip-Hop at the revamped OhWord.com, but as far as Internets Celebrities goodness there hasn’t been a flick in a minute.

We all enjoy a modicum of success in our own separate endeavors, but when we form the three-headed social justice Cerberus not even an army of Michael Vicks can drown out our barking. The great news is that in a short while you will all see our latest project. The three of us take to the streets of NYC to get a portrait from the frontlines of the U.S. economy. I wanted to say street level view but using the word ’street’ in the sentence twice looked like bad form.

Anyhoo…

As the new movie is about to roll off the Final Cut Pro console we thought we could entertain you with a mini-clip from the virtual cutting room floor. Cas chopped up a nice little clip from one of the interviews we conducted while on the grind for this new project. The funny backstory for this clip is that the subject essentially volunteered to be interviewed since he saw us with our fancy camera out.

There are certainly eight million stories in the city when you consider the folks that are homeless as a lifestyle choice. This man has no overhead and free entertainment provided by the New York public library system. The bonus is that he gets high everyday. Homelessness for the win. Internets, meet Jean aka Scott, Homeless Celebrity.

Baseball Card Movie

I just finished a brand new documentary about buying baseball cards at my local card store and the sweetly tragic nature of collecting (at least I think it’s sweetly tragic):

The baseball card industry has radically changed. As one of the regulars at the store says: “The kids are out.”

Thanks very much for watching.

FTWhenderful

A few weeks back, around the weekend of Daylight Savings Time, I thought to myself: Wait, is Daylight Savings time this weekend? Is it Saturday? When the hell is it?

So I turned to google for help. Punched in the full question and as you can imagine, got back a shitload of links. I clicked on one of the top links – one that had a promising description – and went to the page. At the page, I had to scroll down, sift through some visual noise (ads, other time-related links, or way too much information) and only then, did I see that in fact Daylight Savings Time was that weekend – that Sunday morning to be precise.

The sad truth is that I was annoyed that I had to complete four steps to get an answer to that question. The search, the pick, the sift, the answer. And the pick took surprisingly long. I thought the clearest url would make my choice for me but they were all extensions of things like webexhibits.com, infoplease.com, aa.usno.navy, etc. The clearest one I could find was timeanddate.com but that led to a website dominated by an unnecessarily informative essay.

I didn’t want to learn a single thing about Daylight Savings Time. I just wanted to know the exact day when I should set my clock back.

I told this to fellow Internets Celebrity, Rafi Kam. Rafi told me we had the technology to not only make a site that counted down until Daylight Savings Time but we could automate it. I told Rafi, “that is fresh!”

Then, we leapt into action.

When Is Daylight Savings Time?

It means what it says and it says what it means.

I wanted the url for this site to be the most basic version of the question I wanted answered. I wanted to sidestep google even. If you took your question and plugged it in to your browswer, you’d get the answer you were looking for. In theory, we made it a one-step process. But that level of browser-faith might not be realistic. At the very least, I felt like we’d saved people valuable seconds.

Anyway, this got us thinking: what other notable dates took more than a one-step process to find out when they were happening. These are what we came up with:

When Is The Full Moon?
When Is Easter This Year?

And the slowest automated countdown ever:

When Is Leap Year?

Then, we took all those sites and grouped them together at:

Whenderful.com

where we welcome suggestions for other Whens.

As I admired these sites, I realized I’d learned some things during their creation.

1) Daylight Savings Times are not equidistant from each other. Someone told me that it was changed not too long ago so that now it’s like 230 days between Springing Forward and Falling Back and then like 135 days on the other end. I heard that the last change was on account of trick or treaters so that they could have more daylight on Halloween. Um. That’s weird.

2) The reason I don’t know when Daylight Savings Time is anymore, is because I don’t listen to the radio. I listen to podcasts but I don’t do a lot of real-time radio listening. And that’s where I used to just casually hear about falling back or springing forward. It’s not that big a revelation but there’s something lonely about not all hearing at once about mundane things like clock-setting.

Anyway, thanks for checking out the sites.

Empty Subway, Lots of Bottles

I love the subway late at night when no one’s on it

I always enjoy watching the lonely glass bottle that no one picks up roll around

And if I’m really lucky, late at night, I get the best of both worlds

Shouts to Dallas, Sydney, Will, Fried, Jessie and Ian for helping me roll 50 bottles around an empty subway car.

Tron Guy vs. The Internets Celebrities

Tron Guy was nice enough to answer some pressing questions regarding the new Tron movie, the fact that he owns a plane and what we have to do to save the economy.

Thank you Tron Guy!