Texting While Driving PSA

Texting While Driving PSA

The new public service announcement warning teens of the perils of texting while driving is violent, bloody and graphic. Even in a world with increasingly tough and graphic public service announcements on TV about the dangers of such activities as smoking, a recent PSA originating out of Gwent, Wales, breaks new boundaries in the explicit level of its bloody details.

Two teen girls giggle over a text message they are sending while driving along a country road. Distracted, the driver smashes head-on into another car, and while the bloodied girls exchange dazed glances, a third car careens into the passenger side. The driver finds her friend lying dead next to her. Then the camera switches to another smashed vehicle and shows a young child inside, asking why her parents are not waking up.

Produced by the Gwent Police Department, the PSA sends out a horrible visual to illustrate the dangers of texting while driving. But it currently isn’t being aired on U.S. television. For Americans to even view the ad on YouTube, they must assert they are at least 18.

Warning from Wales

A South Wales community of 550,000 that many Americans have never even heard of seems an unlikely place for discussion of the dangers of texting-and-driving to be raised, but a visionary Gwent police department was up to the task. Police locked arms with filmmaker Peter Watkins-Hughes to produce the PSA, titled “COW — The Film That Will Stop You Texting and Driving,” named after the character Cassie Cowan, who unleashes the lethal chain of events by texting behind the wheel.

Avi Ben Stella Car Crash

Avi Ben Stella Car Crash

Avi Ben Stella HoaxAvi Ben StellaAvi Ben Stella SnopesAvi Ben Stella Accident-We know that man on moon is the America’s one of the most iconic images.Though, it sparked a heated debate over whether the moon landing was staged or not, and all it happened by 40 years ago. An astronaut in a giant white suit stands next to an American flag on the moon’s surface: one of America’s — and MTV’s — most iconic images. Photos and footage of Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the moon 40 years ago changed the way people all around the world looked at space.

Part of that disbelief was of course fueled by a general feeling that something as amazing as a man walking on the moon was the stuff of science fiction. There were also rumors that the whole thing was filmed on a Hollywood set. These factors led to a memorable scene in the James Bond film “Diamonds Are Forever” in which Agent 007 drives a moon buggy off a model set where something that looks suspiciously like the moon landing is being filmed. Though brief and in many ways informed by pre-existing suspicions, it is believed that this scene contributed to the Apollo moon hoax theory that continued to flourish. The conspiracy inspired the 1978 release of “Capricorn One,” a Peter Hyams film about a hoax Mars landing segment that ends with the lie being publicly exposed.

In the past decade, the moon conspiracy theory has made a marked comeback in American pop culture. The Robin Williams comedy “RV” claimed the title vehicle was parked in the camp where NASA faked the moon landing. In “National Treasure: The Book of Secrets,” the answer to the Apollo hoax was allegedly answered inside the Book of Secrets (now only Nicholas Cage knows the truth). Even “Looney Tunes: Back in Action,” that long lost Brendan Fraser comedy from 2003, got in on the action when Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck find a tape labeled “Moon Landing Dress Rehearsal” in Area 51.

Danyl Johnson Video

Danyl Johnson Video

The video of Danyl Johnson performing the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friend" on the British talent show "The X Factor" has gone viral. On Monday, the official clip on YouTube had registered about 600,000 views since the weekend. Twenty-four hours later, the count had doubled to almost 1.2 million. On Saturday night's airing, judge Simon Cowell called Johnson's soulful cover "the best first audition I have ever heard." Johnson quickly shot to frontrunner status, raising questions about whether he'd become the next incarnation of Scottish chanteuse Susan Boyle, albeit one in cargo shorts who prefers classic rock to "Les Misérables."

In the days since his performance, the British press has been reporting exhaustively on Johnson's personal history, just as it did following Boyle's appearance on "Britain's Got Talent" in April. The 27-year-old is a schoolteacher from Reading, England, who has fallen short in other attempts to make it big as a singer. According to The Daily Mirror, he has been in two boy bands, Upfrunt and Streetlevel, but neither of them ever caught on. The paper also reported that Johnson performed on television with a rock band called Empty Spaces and has auditioned for "X Factor" three times.

The Daily Mail landed an interview with Johnson's estranged father, who said he had not spoken with his son for a year after a falling-out. Following the "X Factor" performance, though, Johnson's father sent Danyl a text message and received a response back. "I was so proud when I saw Danyl on the television," he told the paper. "I did shed a tear as he was singing." The audience and the judges were nearly as taken with his performance. "When we see a performance like that, it's the absolute perfect audition," judge Dannii Minogue said. "So exciting to be sitting here on this panel."