When it come to gullibility, I’m right up there with Gomer Pyle — with the rest of the world being my Sgt. Carter. The first time I saw this video of an amazing catch at a baseball stadium, I thought, “Gollee, will you look at that?”

But I’m getting better about the viral stuff floating around the Web. I soon concluded it had to be a fake, and I was right. The whole thing was created to somehow sell Gatorade.

That knowledge, though, perversely left me feeling like a 20th century guy trying to make sense of 21st century marketing. If you watch the video again, you’ll see that a bottle of Gatorade is visible for only the last three seconds. Furthermore, I’ll bet you didn’t notice it the first time around; you surely had to be told to look for it. I understand about subliminal suggestion, but the Gatorade video strikes me as sub-subliminal suggestion — it drills right through your subconsciousness and lodges itself so deep in your gray matter that you’d need a hundred sessions with a Freudian analyst to find it.

How’s that help more Gatorade to get sold?

Still, the video succeeds as a pass-around item. It was forwarded to me last week by two people within days of each other. There’s a difference, though, between a message and the spreading of a message. Some viral marketers are much better at the second than the first. It sometimes seems that the cleverness of a viral video is the first consideration of its creators, rather than its effectiveness.

I’ve seen two examples in the past year of viral videos done well, in the sense that they compelled me to both want to forward them to my pals, and made no mystery of what they were selling. What they have in common is a blatant political incorrectness, which ensures that you’ll only see them on the Web because mainstream television likely would never clear them to air. This one requires you to have some knowledge of biker culture, and the shirt-lifting that comes with it. This one requires a healthy appetite for black humor.

Best of all, I’m spared the embarrassment of admitting to my pals that I thought those things actually happened.

You may know a little about the New York Times’ pro-Stalin guy in Moscow back in the 1930s, or its pro-Castro guy in Havana in the late 1950s. You may even know something about the Times’ well-documented effort to not make too big a deal of the Holocaust as it was unfolding. Bruce Bawer connects those dots, and adds a fourth — the Times’ mild approach to radical Islam — to make the case that the newspaper’s tendency to put the fabled journalistic ideal of “objectivity” above the calling out of tyrants and despots is repeating itself once again. As Bawer notes, ” … the Times is not a liberal newspaper at all, but deeply conservative, determined above all to provide its largely comfortable and affluent readers with a consistent, predictable picture of the world that doesn’t challenge their own worldview in any significant way or make them feel obliged to deal with things they’d prefer not to deal with.”

I’d never heard the phrase “choice architecture” until I read this yesterday, but I’m already in love with the concept. Simply put, it’s the science of arranging things so that when people make a choice — whether to enroll in their company’s 401(K) plan instance — they choose the wise and socially beneficial path. When practiced by government, it’s the difference between mandating that people do things, and nudging them to do so. With mandates, of course, come the extra cost of enforcement and bureaucracy. With nudges come … well, not much else. You remain free to choose as you wish, and the government takes less of your money in taxes. What’s not to like?

I washed my car this weekend. I don’t know if it was legal, what with the water restrictions and all, but it seemed to make more sense than going to a commercial car wash, where water consumption would have been much greater than at home. In any event, it made me think of the greatest movie car wash scene ever. Ever wonder what happened to Lucille? She runs a cake-making business in California now.

George Carlin, the recently deceased comic, was a national treasure. I know that because the many accolades published this week told me so. One of them directed me to this video of a show Carlin performed earlier this year for HBO. This was his opening:

I’d like to begin by saying, fuck Lance Armstrong. Fuck him and his balls and his bicycles and his steroids and his yellow shirts and the dumb, empty expression on his face. I’m tired of that asshole. And while you’re at it, fuck Tiger Woods, too. There’s another jackoff I can do without.

I’m tired of being told who to admire in this country. Aren’t you sick of being told who your heroes ought to be? Being told who you ought to be looking up to? I’ll choose my own heroes, thank you very much.

And fuck Dr. Phil, too. Dr. Phil said I should express my emotions, so that’s what I’m doing.

Tee-hee. Yeah, ol’ George was a funny fellow. Those are some rib-ticklers all right. But why am I wincing, instead of laughing?

I’m wincing because by the end of his career, Carlin had come to personify the evolutionary arc of stand-up comedy. At first, he was funny. Then he was funny and raunchy. By the end, he was just raunchy. All the humor had been leached out, replaced with free-floating anger and paranoia.

I have to wonder, as I read his words above, whether Carlin wasn’t secretly contemptuous of the people who turned out for his shows and guffawed at such knee-slappers as “fuck Lance Armstrong.” After all, he was much-admired while still alive, a darling of the media — yet there he was just a few months ago, declaring his disgust with a celebrity-obsessed society that jams “heroes” down our throats. Unless Carlin was so utterly lacking in self-awareness so as to not know he was one of the very people that others are told to admire, then he had to be sourly and privately amused by the adoration accorded him.

Then again, maybe Carlin was devoid of such self-awareness. Maybe he made no connection between his career and his words. If so — that’s funny.