News Mashup is a periodical feature, wherein two REAL LIFE headlines are synthesized to create one super-headline, and then artistically interpreted and delivered to YOU, the viewer.
Man Accused Of Manufacturing THC-Laced Gumballs vs. Beached whale freed

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Following the ilikenicethings.com policy of mandatory self-review:

I believe this one will certainly need some explaining in order to understand, and I actually feel like the effect can only be added upon by further musing about production stories and ideologies.

This whale-oriented film came out of an idea Jeff and I had to do a mash-up of CNN's website news. It has always been disturbing, to say the least, to see their use of so-called 'serious news' (war, Congress being stupid) on only some portions of the site, with almost equal space going to bullshit news.

Thanks to the advent of the 24/7 cable news cycle, bullshit news now reigns supreme. Prior to CNN and Fox News and MSNBC, this used to be called "local news"--the stupid short segments on adorable kittens, or the 96-year-old man who's still spry enough that goshdarnit he's going to enter this year's county dance competition. Stupid things to make you think maybe the world isn't going straight to hell in a handbasket. Which is fine, because local news is for morons.

But CNN has introduced video clips to their website, and these seem to harvest the same awkward collection of bullshit and tragedy that the actual channel has been reduced to. Surprise, surprise, all the clips come from local news channels. For example, the #1 video today is "WOMAN SAVES DOG FROM OTTER" (I am not shitting you), while #2 is "FRIES WITH THAT?" and #3 is "IDF: HEZBELLAH KIDNAPPER CAUGHT." Just when you think we may be getting serious, the list of top videos round out with #4: "METH-LACED GREETING CARDS." Wow.

I'm afraid I got slightly sidetracked, which always seems to happen when talking about cable news. It's like going into a rage blackout that I keep hearing about on "The O.C.," but I had no idea it could actually happen to me!
The idea that Jeff and I had, which then became this short film, was to combine two of these awful CNN stories in some type of ideological matchup. Choose two, let their crazy worlds bounce off each other and make the end product into a film. With "Whale Balls," we found the news for the day sorely lacking, except for one or two promising items.

The first was about the hot new rage in schools--marijuana gum balls! Teachers can't tell the difference between gumballs with weed and gumballs indeed, so communities are up in arms over this great new threat. I remember when the threat used to be oral sex parties; that sure beats lame-o "the kids aren't alright" concepts like this. So we ran with the marijuana gumballs, and added that to another top story of the day: a beached whale in Jersey. This made me recall that time CNN and Fox News used to the puppies-as-drug-smugglers angle as an excuse to run lots and lots of pictures of puppies. What if whales were actually drug smuggling tools to get marijuana gumballs across the Atlantic, where they then beach themselves, have the drugs pulled out of their stomachs, and are "set free" by drug cartels like Greenpeace?

So there you have it. Forty-five minutes of improv fashioned into something resembling a plot. Since the video is culled from all across the map time-wise, I continue to slip and refer to the marijuana gumballs as all sorts of things, drawing on the spirit of adult hysteria mixed with bad "COPS"-style confessionals and the sheer lack of knowledge exhibited by most journalists/police on the WHALE TASK FORCE. Boil all that together, add in the somewhat ambiguous question of "does this guy even work for the police... or have a job at all?", and you get "Whale Balls."

Note that the fact that I giggle at mentioning sperm whales but didn't even realize "whale balls" could be misconstrued as testicles until 20 minutes in pretty much bars me creatively from any writing work on television. You need a full range of balls jokes to get ahead in this business.