Hasta La Gadget!

Back in my day, we used to have to call a 1-800 number, wait 20 minutes on hold for an uninterested operator, and then demand to speak with a manager if we had any hope of getting free stuff in the mail.

These days, there’s a jovial marketing team of millennials behind your favorite brand on Twitter, just waiting for an opportunity to slide into your DMs and give you freebies.

But there’s a new Twitter trend that’s even more annoying than those folks who make it their business to complain until they get a free meal or suite or Uber ride.

Now people are sending direct messages to brands asking how many retweets they’d need to get a super expensive product for free, and brands are responding with ridiculous, unattainable numbers ― often demanding retweets in the millions; way more retweets than any one post has ever received.

Some of these campaigns are getting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of retweets, giving free advertising to brands while giving next to nothing ― except maybe 15 seconds on The Internet’s Grand Stage ― to the consumers.

The whole thing was real cute when it first went viral.

A guy named Carter Wilkerson asked Wendy’s how many retweets it would take to get free chicken nuggets for a year. Wendy’s responded a minute later with “18 million,” and the internet went crazy. To his credit, Wilkerson has 2.9 million retweets as of this writing, but he hasn’t even reached Ellen DeGeneres’ record of 3.3 million retweets, and he’d need about 5 percent of the entire Twitterverse on his side to reach the 18 million goal.

Wilkerson isn’t even drunk on his newfound power. He’s selling T-shirts emblazoned with the now infamous hashtag #NuggsForCarter, and says the proceeds will go toward adoption services in the U.S. 

It all goes downhill from there. The Twitter user embedded above gave Mercedes-Benz more than 248,000 retweets worth of free advertising. Then you’ve got smaller campaigns like this one, between a user looking for free wings and Hooter’s:

Brand analysts say there might be more behind-the-scenes work at play with this new advertising scheme. 

“It’s sort of a smarter story from the influencer’s side,” Melissa Gonzalez, a retail and market analyst based in New York, told HuffPost. “People are looking to get that virality, so they’re gonna post a picture of that direct message hoping that it gets picked up and makes people follow them more.”

Gonzalez also noted that it’s nigh impossible to tell whether some of these brands might be working with Twitter users or other influencers to sell a product. Regardless, it’s hard to establish the value of a retweet to a company, but you can’t imagine that Wendy’s spent many employee hours coming up with one tweet that said, “18 million.”

Asking brands for free stuff in exchange for retweets doesn’t often work out, but sometimes the attempts are just hilarious (the Smash Mouth example especially):

Even HuffPost’s own Igor Bobic fell victim to the trend, though we’ll give him a pass because the man just wants his salad back on the menu:

Everyone else, just stop. Your favorite brands are more savvy than ever before online, and they’re feeding off your followers.

But now that we’re here, hey United, how many retweets for a scorpion to drop down and sting me mid-flight? Oh, wait…

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Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” is one of those annoyingly catchy songs that just worms its way into your ears whether you like it or not. Therefore, it kind of makes sense to pair it up with a guy who physically wormed his way in and out of several ears… and by that I mean he bashed their brains in.

Read more…

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has apparently been ignoring Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) since moving to silence her on the Senate floor in February, Warren told The Boston Globe.

McConnell cut Warren off in February as she tried to read a letter from Coretta Scott King during a speech on the Senate floor, explaining her opposition to Jeff Session’s nomination to be attorney general. McConnell invoked a little-used rule that blocks senators “by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.”

Even though Sessions was eventually confirmed and two months have passed since the incident, the relationship between the two senators still remains frosty.

“I’ve spoken to him, but he has not spoken to me,” Warren told the Globe in an interview published Saturday. “I say hello to Mitch every chance I get, and he turns his head.”

McConnell’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.

After the February incident, McConnell said that Warren had been warned she could be cut off.

“Sen. Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation,” McConnell said. “Nevertheless, she persisted.” The latter phrase immediately took off on social media as a progressive rallying cry.

Warren’s interview with the Globe came as she promoted her new book, This Is Our Fight. In the book, Warren, frequently mentioned as a Democratic candidate for the White House, says she considered running for president in 2016, but decided not to after her husband told her that the campaign would be worse than her 2012 run for Senate.

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The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival got off to a rough start on Friday night, as Radiohead’s set was chock-full of technical issues that forced the band to walk off stage multiple times.

The Friday-night headliner got through a few songs from their newest album, “A Moon Shaped Pool,” to start the set before the main festival speakers cut out during “Ful Stop.” To make matters more awkward, the band’s in-ear monitors continued to work, so they played on unaware that no one could hear them. 

 Radiohead experiences technical difficulties during “Ful Stop”

After that, the band reportedly made it through “Airbag” from the “OK Computer” album. But the audio issues returned for most of “15 Step,” causing the band to eventually leave the stage.

Frustrated festival-goers, who paid hundreds of dollars for tickets, could only stand in silence and anger looking at a dark stage. When the band returned, so did the audio issues, and the band had to leave the stage for a second time, according to Variety. 

“Can you actually hear me now?” Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke had to ask at one point. “I’d love to tell you a joke, lighten the mood, something like that. But this is Radiohead, so f**k it.”

Luckily, the end of the set sounds like it went rather well. And hey, they even played “Creep” later on. So it’s not all bad. Let’s just hope the same thing doesn’t happen during Kendrick Lamar’s scheduled performance on Sunday night. 

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

The winners write the history books.

When the second Death Star explodes over Endor in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, the Rebel Alliance rejoices. It’s a thrilling moment of victory after eons of interstellar military adventuring: Forests…