Hasta La Ideas

Big Boi feat. Phantogram and Sade: CPU 2.0 2014 may well be the year of OutKast. The “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik”-bumping duo is set to headline over 40 music festivals throughout the year, including Coachella and Governor’s Ball, plus both Big Boi and André 3000 are…

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Images via Sony

Most of you (or at least the blue-blooded Americans among you) know that the so-called Mass Transit Super Bowl is just around the corner. Sane New Yorkers such as myself will also be forgoing the trip across the Hudson, where attendees—who are paying at least a G for the privilege—will brave the ebbing but still formidable polar vortex for 3–6 hours, give or take, and will instead be enjoying the spectacle from the comfort and convenience of their homes or local watering holes. Which is a very long way of introducing the topic at hand: television commercials, as much a draw of the big game as the showdown in the Meadowlands itself. Last Friday, of course, marked the 30th anniversary of the Macintosh, its impact foreshadowed by arguably the greatest commercial of all time, Super Bowl or otherwise; 30 years later and Cupertino is quoting an 18th-century poem via a 25-year-old film (Orwell’s book, by the way, dates back to 1949).

Meanwhile, the folks at Wieden + Kennedy have recently unveiled their latest work for Sony, including an ad that has attracted a bit of attention on our discussion boards. The “Be Moved” campaign—the de rigueur interactive microsite is the source of the screengrabs at top—is anchored by a 90-second spot called “Join Together,” which was met with a mixed response from forumites:

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Image via Apple

This past weekend saw the debut of Apple’s latest TV ad, “Your Verse Anthem,” a kind of creative use-case montage set to a Robin Williams voiceover from Dead Poets Society. Specifically, it’s his measured delivery of an abridged version of Walt Whitman’s “O Me! O Life!“:

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1. The Culture of Counterfeit Shanzhai refers to the massive counterfeit market in China, encompassing everything from imitation smartphones and sneakers to bootleg shampoo and Coca-Cola. With the sustained rise in consumer culture in China, along with the confluence of globalization and the…

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This method might end up contaminating your champagne with glass shards, but it sure does look cool.

New Year’s Eve is synonymous with “popping bottles.” Now what you have in that bottle is up to you (sometimes sparkling grape juice is all you need to celebrate), but the frantic realization that you’re sans opener is never a good thing. Even the best attempts of opening beer bottles on the edge of tables (cue cringing) or haphazardly with keys (cue sliced finger) usually don’t end up well.

Give Dave Hax some string and he’ll have that wine bottle opened in a jiffy.

But Dave Haxworth—whose DIY videos we’ve covered before—has the perfect life hack for you—if you’ve got a sharp knife, piece of ribbon or an English ten pound note on you. Instead of the old tried-and-true method of yanking the rounded end of the cork out of your bottle of bubbly, Hax (as he calls himself on Youtube) shows us how to chop off the top with a knife (seriously). We all know how it feels to lose a wine cork to the inside of the bottle—take back your vino with a piece of ribbon. We’d be willing to bet a tenner that Hax’s £10 note method would work with a greenback too. Check out this video completely breaking down the delicate process of popping three different bottles sans openers:

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