Bruise Control

When Dude-y Calls

Dude. This One's For You.

When my son refers to me as "dude," I admit it's a bit jarring. That being said, I do appreciate that almost everything in our culture can be reduced to its "dude" essence.

Personally, I'm a beer snob (only imports for me). I am a follower of pop culture, however, and always enjoyed the Anheuser-Busch commercials, especially the old "Bud Bowl."

Their latest beer commercial series, Dude, will live on in cyberspace thanks to places like YouTube, My Space and facebook. According to The New York Times, during the N.C.A.A. men's basketball championship tournament, "Check Your Dudeness" was the most downloaded application at facebook.

From Gamers to Drifters - Gen X & Gen Y Compete

Drift Racing

Popularized by The Fast and the Furious movies and a dedicated fan base of gamers, drift racing, or drifting, is a growing motor sport for the 18- to 34-year-old demographic.

These Gen X-ers and Y-ers exhibit extreme-sports sensibilities unlike earlier generations. But I suspect that it's the Baby Boomers who figured out a way to capitalize on this growing, action-packed sport.

Forumula Drift measured crowd growth increases of 15-20% at each of its seven events last year. It's also a marketing Paradise for those ever-important 18-34 young male eyeballs.

Drifitng is a motor sport, founded on the mountain roads of Japan 20 years ago, in which drivers control 200- to 600-horsepower cars while sliding sideways at high speed through a marked course. Judging is based on execution and style rather than who crosses the finish line first.

"It's everything exciting about traditional motor sports condensed," says Vaughn Gittin Jr., the highest-ranked American in the world last year who defeated the world's best Japanese drivers in an event three years ago. "There's screaming tires, smoking engines and cars totally out of shape."

Who needs video games when you can experience the real deal?

Swollen Heads - Kim Jong-Il

First There Was Vibe, Now There's Vice

Vibe was the hip, urban music magazine of the 90s, and MTV virtually owned the television youth culture a decade ago. Today we have Vice Magazine, a Brooklyn-based project that writes about the underground music scene, extreme sports, and all things counterculture.

There television counterpart is VBS.tv-Rescuing You From TV's Deathlike Grip.

Late last year, the Viacom-owned MTV Networks Music and Logo Group made a deal to start VBS, with financing from MTV and content from Vice.

According to The New York Times, "In return for its investment — which is not mentioned on the VBS site — MTV gets a low-cost laboratory in which to experiment with Internet video programming as it struggles to adjust to a world where online content is chipping away at television’s dominance....

"They gave me a pitch of '60 Minutes'-meets-'Jackass,'" said Jeff Yapp, the executive vice president for program enterprises for the MTV Networks music group.

Who knew that the likes of Foreign Policy could turn me on to a documentary mashup about North Korea with a decided subversive edge?