They’re surreal, delicate, but gruff. They’re slivers of art direct to your tube. They’re beer commercials.

Great, perhaps the greatest of the great, Documentarian Errol Morris of semi-recent “Fog of War” fame made a massive series of Miller High Life commercials(!!!!) The vignettes are arranged around the American manhood theme.

One of my favorites shows an old man peddling a bike through a snowstorm with a six-pack of Miller clinking in his front basket. The narrator declares, “We don’t need your OPECs.”

Watch the series here.

Controversy froths around the presence of a Starbucks in China’s Forbidden City reports the Financial Times.

“Many of China’s 123m internet users are sensitive to any perceived insult to their nation, and Starbucks’ current troubles follow a tide of support from such ‘netizens’ for anchorman Rui Chenggang’s denunciation of its Forbidden City branch.”

This newfound anger reeks of self-promotion and extreme hypocrisy as someone who’s recently seen the offending coffee shop in action.

It’s actually quite symbolic of the China’s capitalist changes. The Forbidden City sits at one end of Tiananmen Square and stares towards Chairman Mao’s body housed in a marble memorial building. Immediately after you gaze at the preserved corpse, the next eight steps will bring you to a chaotic gift shop. China itself destroys the sanctity of its past one state-manufactured Mao keychain at time.

No matter the massive Pavilion of Moral Contemplation, the Forbidden City is not known for historical purity. You have to pay extra to enter the ledge where Mao delivered his speech declaring the People’s Republic. The rest of the sprawling complex brims with souvenir and snack stands. You can buy portraits of George Bush and Vladmir Putin. Hawkers try to sell you the emperor’s clothes and snapshots of you wearing them. I guarantee the bestpaid workers in the entire Forbidden City are the Starbucks employees.

And it’s the Chinese government that sold Starbucks the rights! They also auctioned off sponsorship of the Forbidden City to American Express whose logo is splayed across every explanatory sign. Note to Anchor Rui Chenggang: Direct your ire upwards. Oh wait, that would be bad for your career. And that is the real travesty going on. Not Starbucks defiling a historic treasure, but Chinese nationalism as a gag that only makes external targets safe for comment.

Don’t forget to vote in the 2006 Weblog Awards. You can vote once a until December 15. We know you probably want to vote for us, but we’re sorry to say that we’re not actually up for anything this year. Just like last year. And the Year before that. So since you can’t vote for us, we’re tell who you you should vote for. And you will listen, you mindless drone. Here comes the Dorkaton, after the jump

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As digital video cameras become less expensive and videos become easier to post and share, wonderful converges have developed. One of our favorite YouTube genres is time-lapse, or videos that have been filmed from long periods of time in the same place and then sped up.

Time-lapse Photography is not new; Georges Méliès used it in 1897 and it’s been in practically every nature film you’ve ever seen. But it’s fascinating to see what people come up with. The videos seem to mainly be in four categories: flowers, cityscapes, the moon, and hot-air balloons. Of course, there are many, many, variations but these groups seem to dominate.

We love the balloons. Who doesn’t love balloons? Terrorists, that’s who.

Admit it. You’ve used MySpace to play Spy Kid more than once. Can we blame you though? Inquiring minds want to know if any of the kids you hung out with in high school are doing any worse than you are right now. But if the 8, 4, 5, 6 and 10 o’clock news are right, then there are some creepy people using the News Corp.-owned site for…sex. Whodathunk?

Well, no more. The icky sexual predators are being blocked from stalking your little sister by MySpace’s new partnership with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp, says AP. Supposedly, the blessed union will help build a database with “names, physical descriptions and other identifiable details on sex offenders in the United States.” Not age though. So you can still pretend to be a 14-year-old or a septagarian.

The database, to be called Sentinel Safe, “will allow us to aggregate all publicly available sex offender databases into a real-time searchable form, making it easy to cross-reference and remove known registered sex offenders from the MySpace community,” Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace’s chief security officer, said in a statement.

Heads up, Maf54.

Featured Music:

33Hz - “Digital Lover”

(Yeah. We know it’s not necessarily appropriate for predatory stories, but we’re trying here.)