Today’s vid at the end.

But first, a very sad but very beautiful ad from Thailand.

Well, technically it’s an ad. One for Thai Life Insurance. But I can’t see how life insurance would have gotten the narrator more time, so to me, it’s really just a one and a half minute short film about the timeless subject of parental regret.

Looking back over your life, wishing you had spent more time with your children, that you had been kinder, more patient, more gentle, that you had not let anger rule you so often, that you had taken the time to get to know this brand new person that you brought into the world instead of retreating into anger, judgement, and contempt… that has been a lesson that (largely) men have been wanting to give to other (mostly) men since, I would imagine, the dawn of humanity.

Parenting can devolve into a brutal contest of wills, especially during your child’s teen years, and like all contests of wills, the most important thing becomes winning, no matter the cost.

This goes double for same-sex parent relationships, where the always confusing and very hard to acknowledge realm of territorial competition comes into play.

Then it becomes not just a contest of wills but a dominance fight, just like two mountain rams slamming their heads together to see who get to mate.

And by the time the hormonal haze clears and we come back to our senses and realize just what we have been doing to our beloved children, it’s too late.

You need more time.

On a much lighter note, here is a very funny video about languages.

Of course, it’s not German’s fault that it comes across like that. Nobody set out to speak a language that sounds like a dog trying to bark with a spoon in it’s mouth. But it’s still hilarious.

And isn’t it adorable that the Italian word for butterfly is “farfalla”? That is the perfect word for something so delicate and gentle. Makes even “butterfly” sound harsh.

Plus, until now, I had no idea that “mariposa” was the Spanish word for “butterfly”. I have seen dozens of things with “Mariposa” in the name, including cities, counties, theaters, banks, and schools, and still I had no idea that they were all named, basically, “butterfly”.

Nor did I know that a “margarita” is a “daisy”. Not sure I see the connection there. It’s not like margaritas are made with daisies or look like a daisy or anything.

Maybe they are named after a woman named Margarita, and she was as fresh and pretty as a daisy.

It also means that my dear departed grandmother, my Mémé, whose name was Marguerite, was technically sort of named Daisy too.

And I find that highly apropos, given her legendary green thumb. You could give her the most bedraggled, neglected, mostly-dead plant, and within a week it would be green and perky and thriving.

My totally unbiased, scientific opinion : plants loved her.

Next, we have some marvelous son et lumière from Singapore. Fullscreen this one, it’s worth it.

The statue you are looking at is a massive monument of Singapore’s national animal, the mythical Merlion, which as its name suggests is a lion’s head on a fish body.

The lovely light show is created by a combination of lights on the Merlion’s body and laser projection.

As impressive as it is as a YouTube video, I imagine it must be simply breathtaking live. I was lucky enough to see the son et lumière show they have in Ottawa during the tourist season, and that was pretty darned cool.

And that was back in old 1988! Imagine what they can do now with high definition laser projectors and high speed computers to pump out the graphics!

I am a big fan of the art of spectacle. To me, it is the art of thrilling the senses and creating a sense of wonder and joy in people, and what could be a purer form of art than that?

So whether it’s fireworks, son et lumière, trompe l’oeil, or just your average stage magician trying to make the audience gasp in wonder and delight, I consider spectacle to be high art.

Despite the bad name that people like that human seizure Michael Bay tends to give it.

No art form can protect itself from being done badly, and no art form lacks examples that could be used to prosecute it in the court of art.

That’s why you have to refuse to judge an art form by its worst examples.

I mean, we’d rather judge writing by William Shakespeare than Dan Brown, right?

Finally, in terms of OPC (Other People’s Content), we have this totally slammin’ bit of poetry and verbal fireworks relevant to today’s world.

I know I say this whenever I post poetry, but daaamn, that is the SHIT. That is the STUFF. That is how you poetry, son. Passion, power, and perspicacity rendered molten and poured into the white hot cauldron of an active and observant mind and forged into words of smoking steel by the laser of the soul, hell yeah.

That’s poetry all right. Hard to believe that guy’s team only came in second.

I wonder what first place’s poetry sounds like?

As to the points he is making, I can’t say I disagree with any of them. We are at a strange state of history where we have more virtual connections than ever before and where anyone can use the Internet to get all the mind could ever want of stimulation, communication, information, and connection.

But at the same time, we connect with each other for real less than ever before. We are both more connected and more disconnected than ever before, and the effect of having more information than ever before it mitigated by the effect of never having to deal with anyone who disagrees with you, ever.

I have asked myself, many times, what my life would have been like without the Internet.

Possibly a lot better. When I got bored, I would have to go out into the world to find some form of stimulation and no more virtual company, either. I would have to find the real thing.

Bit late now, though.

And finally, here’s today’s vid, where I review Inglorious Basterds.

Spoiler : I don’t like it.

Don’t worry, I didn’t forget today’s vid.

Tastelessness warning : these are jokes about death.

Not super happy with it. I need to come up with a better premise for the next one.

Something about weddings….

As usual, today’s experiment will be at the end.

First, I will share this intriguing list of 50 great films you’ve probably never seen.

I am always eager to dig into the vaults for lost media gems. There is an inexpressible joy that comes with discovering something great that time has forgotten. You feel like you rescued it from oblivion and are now keeping it alive by loving it so much.

OK, that sounds kind of creepy, but you get what I am going at.

So a list like the one I linked is a great place to start looking for lost gems that I might well enjoy. A lot of the movies on there sound either good, or bad in the fun way, and what more can you ask than that?

Demonstrating the deep maturity and seasoned wisdom that only comes by living these forty long years, the one I am most interested in is a cartoon about poop.

It’s an animated feature about a future where the ultimate fuel source is human feces. Unsurprisingly, it is from South Korea, the country that brought us a movie about an animated dog turd.

A movie based on a bestselling children’s book, mind you. A movie that is now a beloved children’s classic. I am beginning to think the South Koreans are going to give the Germans a run for their money when it comes to weird issues about poop.

From what I have heard from second generation South Korean immigrant kids, their culture is extremely uptight and very Catholic, two things which are not unrelated.

Next up we have a movie based on the premise “What if gay was normal and being straight was the exception?” They phrase it as “What if gay was straight and straight was gay?”, but to me that’s just like saying “What if black was white and white was black?

Then everything would be exactly the same, bong boy.

Oh, and trigger warnings galore. If you have every been bullied, whether it’s for being gay or not, this is going to be hard to get through.

It’s very earnest and not exactly subtle, but it’s well made. The people making it are obviously very sincerely concerned with the issue and I am sure that, in their minds, they are hoping this is a mind-blowing role reversal that will really make people think about the issue.

Plus plus points for including the line about “except in breeding season”. An all homosexual society just could not survive for pretty obvious reasons. It was bugging me.

Of course, for a forty year old sci fi fag like me, it’s all very old hat. The idea of this sort of role reversal is at least as old as The Twilight Zone, and probably a lot older, and so the idea of swapping social places with the straight people many times.

To me, the real lesson is that it would be just as bad. Swapping places with the oppressors might seem just in the short term (it isn’t, by the way), but in the long run, it just makes you the new oppressors and the world is just as bad as it was before.

Worse, even, because victory has caused righteous people to compromise themselves in the name of revenge and become that which they hate the most.

And then there’s this bit of pure uncut nightmare fuel from the always uncanny world of dolls for girls. (Dolls for boys are ‘action figures’. )

Warning : I am serious. This may haunt your dreams.

Of course, that’s what makes it so funny.

That’s not a normal laugh!

The creepy laugh is bad enough, but it’s the expressionless, almost robotic way the girls turn toward the doll that takes this out of “accidental nightmare fuel” territory and into “horror movie” land.

It’s like they are turning in dumbstruck horror to face the demonic fiend that will surely devour their souls so they can get one glimpse of their doom before they are consigned to a hellish oblivion.

And the narrator’s not quite convincing laugh is like Satan’s running commentary on the nightmare world he has made for what must have been some very naughty girls.

Oh. And the rocking motion of the doll is just the icing on the cake. It rocks back and forth like a rape victim in the shower, all while laughing a completely unhinged laugh.

I wonder what the hell it must be like to be the poor sap whose job it is to test those demonic toys before they were packaged.

Burnout rate would be high because inevitably, you start hearing that laugh ALL THE TIME.

Hope their worker’s comp system has a sanity clause.

And finally, today’s video experiment.

Not really happy with how it turned out. It could have been so much better, but problems got in the way and I had to just go with what I had.

First of all, as I suspected, video editors make lousy music makers. They make it hard to put the video clips (which are your samples, after all) exactly where you want them because the video editor assumes that you want all the piece to come right after one another.

When video editing, that’s a godsend. Video editing is all about that kind of serial sequencing and having to place every clip over and over again while arranging them would be a serious drag.

But music is all about precision placement, and while I tried to compensate with those black space you see in there, the final product is still not nearly as precise and funky as I wanted it to be.

But the real problem was that motherfucking Ulead kept crashing. That is the reason I had to just output the thing and add the intro and outtro.

I may try the project again some time, perhaps using the Cyberlink editor instead. I think it lets you add all the video overlay channels you want, which would be a big help when making video into music.

God I wish I could afford a decent new computer. Something modern with scads more memory and a bitching CPU. Something that could handle video editing with ease, instead of this old nag of mine that is always on the verge of breaking down from it.

Something with an SSD in addition to the hard drive. Video editing from a giant memory stick must be so much faster than doing it from a hard drive.

Oh well. Some day.

Talk at ya later folks!