Caught on Camera: A Week of Eye-Opening Videos

(June 11) -- "God, what is that hair? Sooo yesterday." That's not a Lindsay Lohan line from "Mean Girls." Carly Fiorina said it hours after winning the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in California. Her target was Democratic incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer. And the reason everyone knows about it now is that Fiorina said it with a TV camera pointed at her.

And she's not alone. This was a week loaded with unscripted videos that made news. Some are serious, some are trivial, but they are all memorable in their own way.

Pundits pounced on Fiorina's catty remark, one of several she made while getting prepped for a live interview on Sacramento, Calif.'s KXTV on Wednesday morning. She also said it was "bizarre" that GOP gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman had decided to go on Sean Hannity's Fox News show.

"I think it's a very bad choice actually. You know how he is. ... Sean Hannity is not an easy interview," Fiorina said, scrolling through BlackBerry messages as a makeup artist worked on her.

"Even as commentators across the country were saluting Fiorina as part of the unprecedented wave of female Republican candidates who'd prevailed at the polls on Tuesday night, she was behaving like a throwback, criticizing both her opponent's looks and her own party's gubernatorial nominee's judgment in terms that were far less attractive than a mere bad hair day," fumed Politics Daily Editor in Chief Melinda Henneberger.

Fiorina pointedly refused to apologize to Boxer during an interview with Fox's Greta Van Susteren, explaining that she was just quoting a friend who had made fun of Boxer's hair. But Fiorina did apologize to Hannity.

"It makes her look a little bit silly, a little bit petty," Huffington Post writer Ryan Grim said on MSNBC, but it's not something that "destroys her candidacy or her career like you had with somebody like Helen Thomas."

Thomas, known as the "dean of the White House press corps," resigned from Hearst Newspapers on Monday because of the uproar over her own caught-on-camera moment. An amateur video of her telling Rabbi David Nesenoff that Israelis should "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go home" brought a sudden, shocking end to a trailblazing career that spanned 10 presidencies.

Little-known factoid: Thomas, 89, got a few extra days of employment thanks to Nesenoff's 17-year-old son, Adam, the webmaster for RabbiLive.com. The video was shot May 27 during a Jewish Heritage Celebration at the White House. The rabbi had to wait until Adam finished his final exams to get the video posted on his site.

"So we waited," Rabbi Nesenoff told Yahoo News. While they waited, the deadly Israeli raid on a boat bound for Gaza happened and emotions flared on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When the Thomas video finally hit the Web on June 4, it was like gasoline on the fire. It's been watched more than 1.5 million times on YouTube.

NBC's "Today" show produced a couple of unbleeped video clips that went viral on the Web this week. (Warning: Adult content follows.)

Thirteen-year-old Kayla Manson went all Jane Fonda on co-host Meredith Vieira during a live interview Thursday. She dropped the "c-bomb" twice while talking about the near-fatal beating of her best friend. Manson's boyfriend is charged with attempted murder and Manson is accused of being an accomplice.

"We just have to be careful with our language, but that's all right, sweetheart," Vieira told the girl. Gawker's Hamilton Nolan put the blame on the interviewer, saying Vieira baited Manson into saying the word by asking her what was in the text messages that allegedly led to the attack.

Two days earlier, in an interview with "Today's" Matt Lauer about the BP oil disaster, President Barack Obama said he was trying to figure out "whose ass to kick."

Some critics who had complained Obama wasn't expressing enough emotion over the crisis mocked his tough talk. Hot Air's Ed Morrissey was reminded of the recent movie "Kick-Ass" -- which, coincidentally, got noticed mostly because of the character Hit Girl, a foul-mouthed 11-year-old action hero who uses the same word Manson did on "Today." Morrissey challenged his readers to submit Photoshopped Obama/'Kick-Ass' pictures. Check out this one, which includes Nancy Pelosi as Hit Girl.

Posterior-punting aside, Obama was the subject of more video-driven buzz this week.

Remember the 1993 Tag Team tune "Whoomp (There It Is)"? Well, whoomp, there it was again this week, because of the rumor that Obama made a cameo appearance in the music video. Gawker, which was among the first sites to draw attention to the image of a smiling guy wearing shades and a Compton hat, finally had to spoil the fun by confirming that it was rapper L.A. Sno -- not the future president of the United States.

That really was Obama giving the commencement address to graduates of Michigan's Kalamazoo Central High School on Monday night. But's he's only a supporting player in the hit YouTube video that shows a student seated behind the president yawning, nodding off and otherwise battling sleep during the 24-minute speech.

Give the kid a break. Dana Chivvis found examples of six other high-profile speeches that appeared to put people to sleep.

Maybe Obama should have brought along a snake. One sure helped liven up an interview with "Extra." Salma Hayek and her co-stars from the film "Grown Ups" acted hilariously un-grown-up when a snake slithered onto the outdoor set Wednesday. Shrieking, chair-climbing and general chaos ensued.

In today's wired, wireless, social-networked world, the notion that anything you do anywhere near a camera will go unnoticed is "soooo yesterday." The camera never blinks (as Dan Rather told us decades ago), the microphone is always on -- and somebody, somewhere online is always watching.