Monday, November 07, 2005

Snark of the Week: Red light, green light... 1-2-3

OR,

How Homeland Security developed His-Ass

Three days en retard but here nonetheless; last week's entry came from Ze Frank; humorist, film maker, web designer and all around snark; by way of his short film "Red Alert".Click Ze to view film
One of the first challenges we had as a design team was to come up with a Homeland Security Advisory System, or HSAS (His-Ass). Uh, Karl, John and Tom really wanted some kind of a system that would let the general public know how close they were to dying.
Read more...
And I think it was Ann Coulter, in sort of an informal meeting, that first came up the idea of a colour coded system, uhm, so I can't take all the credit for it. But in her system it was actually the colours corresponded to, ah, the skin colour that the terrorist would most likely be on a given day. And I remember an intern, at the time, that said, "Wouldn't it be a problem if you printed it out on a white piece of paper and it was a white terrorist?" *chuckles* A white terrorist. *more chuckles*

But you know; Ann had really stumbled on something - uhm - whether she knew it or not ... so we just picked up the ball and ran with it ... But one day I walked into the office and said, "Hey what are some colours that people look forward to in life?" And that was really the inspiration for the rainbow. Right from the start there were a lot of adjustments that had to be made. John Ashcroft said that the gay Teletubby Pinky Winky issue was a little too hot to handle and we had to remove the colour purple. And Tom Ridge pulled me aside and said, "Hey my favourite colour is green, can you move it to the bottom?" I said sure. And that's where we came up with what I like to call the "Turf, surf and the tequilla sunrise Theme".
Click the pick of Ze to watch the entire short.



5 Ninjas, 1 Kitten and a Fifth of Vodka!