Let’s start this week’s Best of the Week with Football in Kabul, because it’s
amazing, and I encourage you to read it.
In other news, it’s been a slightly weird week here in
DC. On the mostly awesome and not so
weird front, the Washington Monument is now aglow. It would have been amazing if it was lit in
time for July 4, but, alas, it wasn’t to be.
But, I must say that driving into DC at night is a lot cooler now.
 |
| Not so bad! |
On the mostly weird and not at all awesome side of things,
someone car-jacked
an ice cream truck this week. Yes,
you read that correctly. An ice cream
truck. Like an ice cream truck that
sells cold, delicious treats. Someone
car-jacked one of those. You’re better
than this, DC.
 |
| Oh, hey, let me just car-jack this ICE CREAM TRUCK. |
Also, this
guy’s back in jail, and not a moment too soon. I guess that whole let me take video of
myself possessing a loaded gun in Freedom Plaza and post it to the interwebs thing didn’t
work out for him. Oh, and turns out the
drugs didn’t help his case at all.
Regular readers know that since I’ve taken over the Best of
the Week while Mollie’s off adventuring, I’ve used it as a platform to
encourage folks to bike DC. We live in a
city that is pretty bike accessible, and we might as well take advantage of it! But I’m also aware that biking can seem
scary. I got my start on the streets of
Boston, so I’m probably not as sensitive to the “I don’t want to get hit by a
car” factor as I should be. That’s why this
map is amazing! It’s filled with reader-contributed
helpful hints that make biking around DC easier (read: more convenient and less sweaty).
 |
| This could be you! |
Changing gears (bike metaphor, get it?), I, for one, love shameless corporate sponsorships and
product placement (my shameless promotion of bikes (see above) probably clued
you in to this long ago). Will Smith’s sunglasses from Men in
Black? Fantastic. James Bond reaching for a Heineken
instead of a vodka martini, shaken, not stirred? Even better.
This scene
from Talledega Nights: The Ballad of
Ricky Bobby? The pinnacle of cinematic
achievement. Well, there many things
that make this scene amazing, but the shameless product placement is one of
them.
And so I was interested to read this week that health
insurance companies might be next up in the product placement
bandwagon.
"Their product is essentially
the same," he said. "You cannot really differentiate one insurance
company from another. But you can differentiate who has the wackiest mascot, or
scenarios that are fun to watch." Essentially, Percelay says, we may soon
see health insurance versions of the Geico gecko.
In particular, health insurers will
have to craft a message to attract healthy, young customers. "There could
be product placement of Oxford [Health Plans] within a Jackass movie,"
Percelay says. "So subliminally, when Steve-O is bungee jumping with a
rubber band off the roof of a building, perhaps that rubber band has an Oxford
logo on it." (Yes, we know it's whether there will be another Jackass
movie. This is a hypothetical.)
Speaking of health (kind of), the human body is a beautiful thing. The professional athlete’s human body? An even more beautiful thing. And that’s why The
Body Issue, in which professional athletes show off their naked professional athlete bodies, is, without question, your BEST OF THE WEEK!
 |
| Decent view... |
Happy weekend, folks!
