Last week, I posted a video of “Sam,” whose first dating video was chosen by Esquire as the worst on the Internet. “Sam” had been nice enough to give Correntewire a shoutout in one of his recent follow-up videos.

We’re in the inconvenient-truth biz around here, so I must ’fess up to a convenient sin of omission.

You heard it here first, folks: Sam’s a fake.

Well, he didn’t start out as a fake. Remember the Thermians in Galaxy Quest, and how they thought the small-screen actors were real? It’s kind of like that.

Except this time, instead of an adorable alien, the guileless one was Esquire.com writer Daniel Murphy, who unwittingly pilloried a fictitious character he found on a movie-promo MySpace page.

I’d feel a little empathy for the self-buffaloed writer, but I’m not sure empathy is his thing. Per Murphy, the kind of woman Sam might meet is “probably fat.” And another of his failed-flirt five is, he says, “doing a rather serviceable impression of a man with a traumatic head injury.”

So how did this misunderstanding-turned-hoax come about? How did a promo clip for a little-known movie become an internet phenomenon viewed over 75,000 times?

Here’s how it happened:  Read more 

Esquire.com did a piece highlighting the “The Five Worst Online Dating Video Profiles.”

#1 on their list was a video by “Sam,” whose myspace page features a response to Esquire.

In his latest video, it seems he’s, um, prospecting in our neighborhood.

He ventured out among the ’faithful’ at last week’s Values Voters conference, sponsored by the vicious child-abuser James Dobson’s Focus On The Family franchise, and actually got into the grill, a lit  Read more 

Very, very atypical and interesting post at Juan Cole’s place today:

The Arab singer Shams shows her disdain of George W. Bush in an MTV-style video clip that is popular in the Arab world these days. She says, “Hi! How are you?” as a cardboard Bush smiles and raises his shoulders idiotically. “No one is like you,” she adds, “and there certainly aren’t two of you.” She shakes her head in front of a White House stage prop. [snip]

What is most striking of all is the tone of familiarity and intimacy along with the contempt. Bush has become an Arab leader, like Mubarak or Asad, and is subject to all the same parodying and jokes that they are in the Arab street.  Read more 

[UPDATE Too big for YouTube. Working on that. Anyone know of some FREE video editing software on Mac OS X that will work on *.wmv files?]

[UPDATE 2 Thanks to Sean Paul, who hosted the video that YouTube wouldn’t.]

[UDPATE 3 IFE has responded to the video. See the comments below.]

Hold it! Smile!

Click on the picture to see the video:

Watch for “Blue Shirt Guy” at 1:10. Here’s what he looks like:

 Read more