Yup. That is what this post will contain. Three fun video clips that I have come across lately. Just what it says on the label. That is the kind of honesty and integrity that people have come to expect and rely on from the find people here at Bloggeridge Farms. When you read the subject line of one of our fine, hand-crafted premium blog posts, you can rest assured that it relates somehow to the contents. That is our guarantee and we stand behind it one hundred percent. We are regular, hard-working, ordinary, God-fearing people just like yourselves, unless you are some kind of hippie pervert freak.

Our first clip is one of those collaborative high school videos that I have come to love because of the energy and enthusiasm that they radiate, and because they are just plain fun to watch.

It is from the yearbook club of Walt Whitman high school and it shows you that some nerdy looking guys can really dance.

Love the music too… that is the good kind of dubstep to me. It uses the tight volume envelopes, reverse dynamics, and filtered beats to make something that is pretty damn funky, and that is hella cool for a thick bodied curly haired dude to dance to in a music video.

Plus I love the kind of visual impact you get from these increasingly ubiquitous film tricks that show a person apparently doing a single thing while the background changes around them. All it takes is the subject moving at some kind of even rate, being very careful to frame them right in each shot, and then some simple clever editing, and you get a very cool effect that really leaps of the screen.

I suppose I will get tired of that eventually, but for now, I think it looks fantastic. Such an attractive balance of static and dynamic elements!

Way to go, kids of Walt Whitman High School, class of 2012!

Next up, we have a sweet little animated monologue where a man talks about the extremely hard working and strict father that raised him.

First off, I love art dedicated to telling people’s stories. As a writer, I always want to hear people’s stories, the narrative of their lives, the substance and texture of their lives. Like the Desiderata says, “listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.” Everyone has their own tales to tell and their own experiences to share, and there is no person’s perspective that will not enrich your own if you can just stop thinking of others as sources of entertainment and think of them as sources of enlightenment and understanding. You can learn a hell of a lot from people who are absolutely nothing like you.

So bravo to the people at StoryCorps for taking this man’s story and giving it visuals, thus givng it greater wings to fly, especially in this YouTube era.

And speaking of the visuals, I love that animation style. It is clear and somewhat realistic without losing the basic charms of the color and simplification of cartoons, and I particularly like the animation’s timing in relation to the story. Things happen pretty much exactly as our narrator is saying them, with very little slippage, and I think that kind of sync between words and images really makes the story resonate in the mind. Makes for very powerful storytelling, and I am all about the story.

Plus, the animators add just the right amount of little animation flourishes and gags to keep things going. You could watch the video without the voiceover and still more or less get what is going on. That is using animation right, in my opinion.

And I love the story of his father making the narrator walk home with his silent, angry father right behind him. Poor kid must have been terrified. But it made an impact.

I bet that guy grew up very honest, because the moment he thinks of doing anything dishonest, he feels his Dad’s heavy disapproving stare on his back.

This is how people get values.

Our last video is a little number from Cracked.com with an interesting theory as to the origins of two of the biggest cults in the world.

Now just to get this over with, obviously this is just a silly skit and not meant to be even vaguely historically accurate, and the odds that Hubbard ever banged Rand are a million to one, and blah blah etc blah blah.

But it is a cute premise and I think the two actors pull it off quite well. I am always happy to see women in skit comedy and I think that the woman playing Ayn Rand did a particularly good job with her lines. Which is good, because she has the lion’s share of them.

And the script is decent. It is not as polished and slick as I would like, but it has enough good writing to make the whole thing work, and I particularly like the ending.

“I’m going to make actors think they have superpowers!”. That is a good closer.

In a way, it would be comforting to think that Ayn Rand was a cynical prankster who only wanted to make the world a worse place, because that would mean that she did not actually believe the crazy evil horrible shit she said, and that would mean the world had contained one less Objectivist.

And they are so damned slappable.

But no, she believed all that shit she said, and would no doubt be pleased that, many decades after her death, she is still making terrible people even worse.

As for Hubbard, it is hard to say how much of Scientology he actually believed. I think like most cult leaders, he had the part of him that believed every word he said, and then a little part of him that knew it was all bullshit fresh from his own ass and that kept track of reality for him so that he could protect his little empire.

And his boat full of little boys.