So I was feeling lazy. They are still funny!

Not my best work. I thought I had this thread quite well thought out, but it turns out, not so much.

Oh well. There’s always tomorrow!

I have another enormous batch of video goodness to share today.

It never rains, but it pours!

First, a triptych. Remember this song?

Hard to forget, it was everywhere in 1992. I absolutely love the song now. At the time I was “too cool” to like something so mainstream, but later in life I gave it a real listen and realized it was the perfect song for Miss Houston because it let her use those amazing pipes of hers to do all those vocal acrobatics she favours while also having very powerful and touching lyrics.

Well I am not the only one impressed. Just this week, I came across two amazing covers.

First, we have this one, which I absolutely love because this nebbishy looking chunky Asian dude who you would expect would be a lot better at online poker than singing absolutely nails the song to the wall.

And I love it when people surprise me like that.

Fun fact : the song was originally a Dolly Parton song.

Anyhow, even better than Chunky Asian Dude is this completely amazing cover, because this time it is some grunge dude who manages to do an equally powerful version, but one that he makes uniquely his own.

The fact that he can make his voice, which sounds extremely unsuited for this kind of singing, do such an amazing version of it simply blows me away.

Plus, that is one marvelous intro story.

Next up, from tales of excellence to its complete, yet equally glorious, opposite.

The comedy takes a little while to build but by the end you will be laughing like hell at the acting in this completely serious, not at all meant as comedy, genuine ad for a Samsung product.

Needless to say, this thing has gone made viral. The actors say that they were instructed to act like that because that is the style of acting preferred in South Korea these days, and the ad was intended for an English-speaking Korean market.

As opposed to being the product of evil androids from the Uncanny Valley here to feast upon our souls.

Also, the script was written by people for whom English was not their first language (no kidding), hence the bizarrely direct and nuance free wordings.

It’s like someone got sent an email that said “We want the commercial to say these things about the product” and they just shrugged, translated into robot English, and turned it into the script for the ad.

I love this clip because it really illustrates what that all important last mile of translation is all about. There are no mistakes in grammar, syntax, or any other aspect of English in this ad.

In fact, it’s easy to imagine how these sentences all seemed like perfectly normal English sentences to someone who is quite good with English, but hasn’t spent a lot of time actually speaking English to native English speakers in the real world.

So the lines are missing that last level of refinement required to make them seem natural.

And so they come across like they are animatronic.

Next, someone pretty much wins the Internet with their use of the custom character tools in WWE ’12.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Ultimate Crack Smoking Warlock.

Whoever made this, I doff my comedy hat to you, because that is one of the most glorious stupid things I have ever seen come out of character creation tools since I used to play Toon.

In a similar vein, we have the Piano Car Mod for GTA IV.

Feel free to stop watching after a few minutes… you will have the idea by then.

Personally, I would have chosen a much more interesting piano based song, but chaqun son gout.

Now someone needs to do a character mod where you can be Elton John or Billy Joel….

Or heck, even Ben Folds.

For our second last entry, we have this eye popping and incredibly simple science demo that anyone can do with just some soda, a freezer, a little courage, and a timer.

Is that not utterly amazing? You could totally rock any party with that little trick. It totally looks like impossible magic and yet it’s all based on relatively simple high school science.

You could found a religion on an illusion like that.

The courage comes in when you shake up that bottle or can of soda and then stick it in the freezer. First you have to shake it up a lot, but not so much that it explodes. Then you have to trust that it will not go kerblooey in the freezer, which is a bit of a leap of faith as far as I am concerned.

But the results would totally be worth it. You can do three different illusions with it, all of which seem like the violate the laws of physics.

And yet, it’s all just pressure and cold. The pressure, I think, is to lower the freezing temperature of the liquid, and the cooling is obviously to get it into that radical supercooled state where it is below freezing but hasn’t frozen yet.

But it really, really wants to!

Finally, we have my own vid of the day, which is sadly not nearly as entertaining and is, in fact, quite serious. Sorry about that.

It kind of dovetails with my thoughts on the Myth of the Work Free Job.

The thing is, human beings want to work. Leisure is for rest, not for life. Sure, unlimited leisure seems good when you are at work, but trust me, you would get sick of it pretty quick.

That’s why I don’t believe in retirement. People want to be busy doing something meaningful. We are programmed to work for the common good, or at least, that little tribe in our workplace.

So by tapping into this natural desire to work via reassuring us all that we are “hard workers”, the elite can pacify us just enough to keep us from asking questions about the direction of our lives.

After all, work isn’t your real life, right? So why take it seriously?

Because everything is your real life. If you are alive, that’s real life enough.

And a lot of people are not happy at all.

And I think that is a problem.

Another goofy pics and voice captions thing.

Had a metric whack of good video come my way today. Mine will be last.

First, we have a pretty good piece of meta-comedy from Funny Or Die and Will Ferrell.

It’s the writing I love the most about it, although the execution is quite good too. But every bit from it shows a very high level of hip self-awareness by the people at Funny or Die. They clearly have a good sense of humour about their own sense of humour and the sort of things they produce, and that wins them mad respect from a big old comedy nerd like me.

I think my favorite moment is the “Maybe it’s time we changed the name of Fart Mountain to something else. “NEVER! *savage splitting of log”.

I didn’t like the Will Ferrell laughs too long at Benjamin Butthands bit, though. I am so totally over the whole “it’s funny because it goes on too long’ thing (Thanks, Seth MacFarlane!”). It is always great to see David Spade, though.

I have had sort of a crush on David Spade since his SNL days.

Just something about him draws me to him.

And next, the kind of simple, elegant genius that makes guys like me want to weep with joy.

That is jaw-droppingly brilliant. A seemingly intractable problem solved by the simplest of low tech technology. Just imagine all the stress that would save. Circling around looking for parking (or ‘park sharking’) is a maddening, frustrating and highly stressful thing because it is both uncertain and competitive. You really want to park and you get super pissed when someone else takes “your” spot, the one you were “clearly” about to take.

Amazing how driving brings out our territorial urges, isn’t it?

Of course, I have logistical questions. Like, who keeps the balloons full of helium> Or do they have balloons so perfectly gas-tight that no helium can escape now?

Because helium is a tiny atom. It gets out or damned near anything less than a steel pressure tank.

Also, what keeps the string on the balloon from getting tangled up in the cars? Sure, with a nice boxy vehicle backing in, everything’s cool, but that string is going to get tangled up in the grill of a lot of vehicles, and probably get snapped.

Still, I adore the kind of visionary ingenuity behind such a plan.

Next up, a spirited attempt to take over the Internet by making the ultimate cat video.

What I like the most about this vid is that the makers did so much with (mostly) just using what cats normally do. (Obviously, not so much with the synth playing cat. )

Videos like this one always give me a queasy feeling because I love cats so very, very much, but I don’t like seeing them made to do tricks or stuffed into costumes so much.

I once had to leave the audience and go behind the stands at the Moscow Circus because it bothered me so much to see the big cats demeaned by being made to do tricks.

I’m telling you, being sensitive ain’t for wimps.

So videos like the one linked above bother me, and they are always walking a thin line with me on how the cats are being treated.

But this video uses fairly natural cat reactions plus loads of CGI to keep the cat bothering down to a minimum. And I have to admit, they are highly inventive.

Am I wrong to think that video had to be made by fags?

Here’s a viral vid of the day : a truly epic bit of criminal fail.

The pacing is a little slow, but the payoff is totally worth it.

Now to me, that looks staged. I am pretty sure it would be very hard to actually throw someone out a window like that in the real world. It’s a hilarious visual,and of course, we all like to see criminals fail in public, painful, humiliating ways.

Plus, who the hell would grab an armed guy anyhow?

That does not prove it’s staged, of course, and I really hope it isn’t, because if that is not staged, it is freaking awesome on many levels.

One more before my own vid. This thing made me belly laugh like a lunatic. It is just such a perfect example of the kind of comedy that can only come naturally.

It’s such an incredible perfect storm of comedy. You start with something tacky and awful (a singing trout), add a cheap version of an okay but overexposed 60’s pop song… and then have things go marvelously, horribly, satanically wrong.

What sells the comedy, of course, is that the “singing do wa ditty, ditty dum, ditty do” parts are perfectly normal but the actual verse is completely terrifying. The contast is so strong that you just can’t help but find it either horrifying or hilarious, and I am a sick son of a bitch, and so that video makes me laugh so hard it hurts.

Probably should get that looked at.

And finally, the piece of resistance, today’s vid.

I am particularly proud of that title graphic. Turns out, Cooper BLK plus different colors makes anything look a lot like a book cover from the Seventies! Far fuckin’ out, man.

As for the content, those are, as usual, ideas I have been pondering for quite some time. So many people my age went to school, followed their dreams to university, got the degree of their dreams… and ended up in menial low status jobs because a dream is not a job and there is no mechanism to make sure that there are enough of every job that anyone wants to do to just waiting for them when they graduate.

And when it comes to the very academic degrees, the ones where basically the only job you can get with them is the same job your professors had…. even if you somehow get that job in academia, there are 499 other people who did not, and will be paying student debt for decades on a degree that did nothing but waste four years of their precious youth.

I tell kids today, don’t give up on your dreams, but get a practical, marketable degree if you are going to go to university at all. That way, you will be able to make a decent living while pursuing your real dream in your spare time.

And if, instead of being a big rock star, you end up being a moderately successful corporate comptroller with a spouse, three lovely kids, and a house in a nice neighborhood… is that so bad?

There is no shame in being ordinary.

Here’s today’s vid.

Rambling musings from yours truly.

WE ARE OVERSTOCKED! All these links must go, go, go!

1. Science is not the enemy

A very passionate and articulate defense of science both as a route to knowledge and a path to wonder. I love this kind of science writing. It captures the magic and poetry of science as well as the practical and real world benefits of it. I am a little leery of the author’s defense of science against a supposedly siege of opposition from the arts and humanities. I am sure there are Luddites in the A&H world just as there are Philistines in the sciences. But war? I’m not seeing it.

2. Ten Lies Your Depression Tells You

Well. I guess I don’t have to write that “lies depression tells you” article after all. Someone beat me to it, and did a pretty good job of it too. Everything in that list is something I have felt about myself, some more, some less. Depression is s terrific liar because it does not even have to convince you of anything. It just makes you chemically incapable of believing certain things (regardless of logic, evidence, or probability) and leaves you to figure out the justifications yourself. Well done.

3. Abe, by Rob McLellan

A fairly good use of a simple setup and some quite simple CGI to tell a story much bigger than its budget. Abe’s mouth doesn’t even move (or blink) when he talks. A good simple robot model with a few places of articulation, an actress to do the screaming et al, and some solid voice acting for Abe our terribly confused and broken robot, and you have a dramatic little scene that is both chilling and tragic. I have the urge to set the whole thing to “Fix You” by Coldplay, though. But that’s just me.

4. An extremely offensive song

Brace yourself folks. This one has to be heard to be believed. Get ready for a concentrated dose of Mad Men era sexism sung by a suave, slick chauvinist.

Isn’t it off how sometimes something is so awful you just have to share it? Sharing that video is the Internet equivalent of saying “Smell this!”. The basic gist of the song is “Don’t you dare be anything less than perfectly sexy, ‘little girl’, or your husband will start sleeping around and maybe even leave you, and it will be all your fault and just what you deserve. ”

5. Powerful poetry about OCD and love.

Wow. There is so much amazing poetry being made by young people these days! My generation didn’t produce many poets. I suppose poetry was just too earnest and eager for us jaded types. These young people are screaming out their feelings and making themselves heard in the world by telling their stories, and I only wish I had that kind of courage. The ending of that poem makes me want to cry, it’s so sad. But I can see the girl who left him’s point. Living with OCD cannot be easy. Of course, our poet has no choice.

6. A Buzzfeed list of interesting English on Chinese signs

Here are some of my all time faves.

I hear that this is where Doctor Who shops for condoms.

As you can see, the more surreal, the more I like them. The truly great mistranslations are like a kind of minimalist poetry conjuring bizarre realms with just a few bewildering words.

And on that note… my all time favorite, bar none.

The rallying cry of… something.

The Buzzfeed people say they meant to say “dried food”, and I bet that’s what the Chinese said. But as for the translation…. tell me how those concepts connect.

7. John Corvino lays it down

I am both in awe of and jealous of that guy’s style. All the did was talk to the camera, just like I do, but he turned it into so much more just by being so stylish, witty, and concise. That is exactly the sort of content I hope to produce some day. It is perfect YouTube content. Short, dense, fun, and hilarious, all while making a serious point. I love hate envy admire you, John Corvino!

8. Why We Are Lonely, animated.

And speaking of the concision, I love this piece because it makes its point so fluently. The voiceover and animation act together in such a smooth and precise way that it really makes what is a fairly information dense presentation flow like an easy river. As for the problem it describes, I am wondering if this is more a problem for the generation after mine. I made a solid rule in my late twenties that I would never, ever, ever prefer Internet company over the real thing. And I think that keeps things contained.

9. Better Homeless Signs

A brilliant and biting piece of satire of a certain kind of clueless and entitled hipster.

Yowch! Great work. They really sell how horribly tone-deaf and elitist these people are, and manage to structure the bit to keep that proverbial ball in the air by having each successive revelation be just that little bit more awful.

Oh. And supposedly, there are people actually, unironically doing exactly what is being parodied here.

Now I don’t know about you, but I would be a lot less likely to donate to a homeless person with a super fancy sign like that. He’s clearly not broke.

10. Why Be Good?

And finally, La vidéo d’aujourd’hui faite par moi.

It presents some ideas I only recently put down in words in response to this blog post from my friend and late night conversation partner Bill “The Wizard” Honeywill.

They are all ideas that have been floating around in the primordial stew of my brain for quite a while now, but this was the first time articulating them.

And like I say in the vid, there are doubtless countless more practical, rational, self-oriented reasons why it is better to be a good person.

I would love to make a big list of them all.

Maybe you can help?