Thanks to the sharp folks at Mental Floss, we have our answer: It’s all part of a slick branding scheme by The Weather Channel. Last November, the channel announced its plan to name winter storms in order to “raise awareness”, “[make] it much easier to follow a weather system’s progress” on social media…and create hashtag alerts that all lead back to The Weather Channel’s own content.

Smart, you guys. Very smart. We love how TWC “reserved” classic names like Brutus, Iago, Gandolf* and Yogi for the 2012-13 storm crop. Someone has a sense of humor–but it’s not the good people at the National Weather Service, who are totally not on board with this whole “branding the storms” deal (because they can’t stand TWC getting all the attention).

RT @max_read: if you call this storm nemo you’re letting the weather channel win // They’ve already won.

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 8, 2013

And here we figured it was all part of Disney’s plan to convince everyone in the Northeast to stay inside and re-watch Pixar movies this weekend…

*We’re not even Tolkein dorks and we knew that Gandalf’s name does NOT include an “o”. Come on!

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Jones appeared in a bizarre YouTube video that just happens to double as a promo spot for The Forerunner Chronicles, a multi-media project pushing the “end times” Seventh-day Adventist movement. He makes his new-found allegiance to God quite clear in the pseudo-interview while bemoaning his current gig, telling viewers to “please stop watching Two and a Half Men” and “filling your head with filth” and encouraging the public to “do some research on the effects of television and your brain” because “it’s bad news.”

This little incident provided the Internet with more awkward chuckles than a Charlie Sheen rant while creating a huge headache for anyone who makes money producing, promoting or performing on what remains one of TV’s top-rated sitcoms (and that’s quite a few people). Based on follow-up reports, it seems like the only folks happy with Jones’s online outburst are his friends at Forerunner Chronicles and the Valley Crossroads Seventh-day Adventist Church–because everyone loves free PR from a semi-famous “soldier of truth.”*

Anyway, we had to ask: why would a massively successful actor pull a stunt like this? And how can the show’s PR team contain the damage done?

continued…

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But is this incident really a big PR problem for the royal family? The British public seems to turn to them for entertainment in tough times, and the royals occasionally make concerted efforts to showcase their sillier side. So certain, uh, slip-ups might actually make them more relatable, especially in the land that invented tabloids and reality TV. Despite their history, the Brits do sometimes manage to keep it classy: their mags have refrained from publishing the nude photos themselves at the request of the royal family’s PR team. Color us surprised.

But this is really just another day in the life of the crown. Our trivia-minded friends at Mental Floss remind us that the royals have seen far worse: continued…

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