Going to do the buildup today, not because I think today’s video is something amazing, but just because I am bored with the other way.

So first, let’s see the oddest Danny Trejo role ever, and yes, I am including Machete.

It’s also quite funny, with a message that a lot of ladies need to hear and a rather fun way of presenting it. I love the way eventually the whole restaurant is dancing just to tell her what she needs to know.

It’s like this restaurant is some Twilight Zone type place designed to free people from terrible relationships or other self-destructive behaviours.

Tune in for the next songs in the series, “You’re An Alcoholc”, “It’s Cause You Were Molested”, and “Refinance That Car Loan”.

And in the interests of fairness, there are a lot of guys with nasty bitchy abusive girlfriends who needs to be told “Your Girlfriend’s a Psycho”.

And of course, the equivalent for same-sex relationships.

But what makes the video weird is seeing Danny Trejo, that super rugged tower of Latino machismo, apparently singing in a voice that could not possibly be his.

Talk about Inappropriate Lip-Sync.

I think the actual singer of the song, Dustin Tavella, plays the titular (snigger) douchebag in the video. If so, he does a great job of making me wanna smack that douchebag in the face.

It’s always disgusting to see someone act as if they do not have to give anything in a relationship and they can be completely selfish and make the whole thing about them and their needs.

But it’s enraging beyond endurance to see that actually seeming to be the case.

Next up, we have a completely kickass Ted talk by that made from solid 24-carat awesome guy, Andrew Solomon, about what it is like to raise a child who is different.

Let’s talk about those awful things written in Time Magazine way back in 1966, almost half a century (47 years) ago.

They don’t surprise me, although of course they are brutally harsh and hard to hear even in this massively more tolerant era. I imagine I have some inkling of what it is like to be a black person hearing the words of the Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan now.

Clearly, the reporter who wrote that did it out of an overwhelming disgust. And as I have discussed in this space before, disgust is the enemy of compassion. That is what makes zombies such an enduring horror with such deep roots in the collective psyche.

Zombies are mindless horrors who are definitely people, but people with all the humanity removed and who are rotting and disgusting and awful. It maximizes our disgust, our fear of death and disease, and the modern lurking horror of the unwashed masses of humanity with whom we must cohabitate

For the most part, the modern human copes quite well with the biologically stressful challenge of living in such crowded conditions. We have all kinds of unspoken rules and socially received habits designed to minimize the stress.

But somewhere in all of us is a monkey who is freaked the hell out by being surrounded by strangers all the time, and the zombie phenomenon taps into that, as does other post-apocalyptic scenarios.

Ahem. But I digress. Back to that Time reporter. I don’t hate the man, he was simply no better than his era. The modern world was still in the grips of a very moralistic psychology which still believed that people did bad things because they were bad people, people who somehow, via weakness or neglect, had allowed some unwholesome influence into themselves and who therefore only have themselves to blame for becoming the wrong kind of person.

This mystical pseudo-scientific worldview was very reassuring to the desperate middle class masses who lived lives of quiet desperation behind a facade of normalcy. It relieved them of the potential cognitive dissonance of having to have compassion for someone who had made them angry or disgusted.

It was yet another version of the just-world fallacy, where everyone gets what they deserve. This is a particularly attractive philosophy to the people who people who are doing well, because it means that they deserve what they’ve got, and that is far more important to people than greater morality.

In fact, people will change their entire system of beliefs from nipples to nuts just to get to believe that they deserve what they have (and more!).

And if that also excuses you from having to care about the less fortunate, so much the better.

Finally, la piece de mild anticipation, today’s vid.

Yup, another phone calls from celebrities. If I do two of something, the odds are extremely high that I will do a third. For some weird reason, I have this compulsion to complete sets of three.

It’s like… 1 is a stable number. 3 is a stable number. But 2 is unstable, and I hate unstable things, so I just have to go on to 3.

I don’t know how high that could go if I just kept extending it.

And I am pretty happy with how today’s vid turned out, but I don’t feel like I broke any new ground with it compared to yesterday’s and so I don’t think I will do a fourth.

The whole reason I am making videos every single day is to learn, expand, grow, and acquire technique as fast as I can. Doing the exact same thing two days in a row does not achieve that.

And I would rather crash and burn than stagnate into stasis.

I have had enough stasis to last a lifetime. I want to move and grow and explore and feel and not be held back by my fears any longer.

Fuck fear. Bring it on.

Oh, and one last thing. Savour this extremely geeky joke.

I think it’s funny, but I am not certain.

Major LOL. 🙂 If you don’t get it, click here.

Have a nerdy day, folks!

Well, here’s my latest thang.

It isn’t the project I originally set out to do today, but that one fell victim to a very stupid flaw in the software I was using at the time, and so I have put it on the shelf for now.

Instead, I decided it would be fun to have a fake telephone conversation with sound clips from movies. I think it turned out rather well, honestly. I am not sure if it is funny to anyone but me, but hey, every artist has to please themselves first.

Plus it was fun to make believe that I have all these famous friends who call me up for advice, one of whom is entirely fictional. It would be kind of neat to be the non-famous friend of a bunch of famous people.

Someone who is not a star, and hence does not compete with or threaten them, as well as being someone who can keep a secret and be trusted to never betray their confidence and sell sleazy pics of them to the tabloids or whatever. Someone who can be their buddy, their friend, and their confidant.

Someone who is genuinely concerned for their welfare with no ulterior motives. I bet they could use someone like that.

Plus it was fun to make. So I might do it again, with a few technical refinements. I have some things I wanted to do but just did not have the energy for it. I wasted a bunch of energy trying to get the first thing to work, and that used up a lot of energy I could have used on the second thing.

Maybe, once I have let it lie fallow for a little while, I will go back into tonight’s video and fix up the things that I think need fixing, like balancing audio levels and slowing down the credits.

Still, it was hella fun to make. There might well be sequels. You never know with me.

After all, I did four editions of Don’t Say That.

Had a fairly pleasant day. One of those days where things go a lot better than you thought they would.

Had therapy in the morning, and on the way there, found out that Joe’s hours will change come next week and he will be working 7:30 am to 3 pm, and this is going to make him driving me to and from therapy rather tricky to say the least.

So my therapist and I spent a long time just trying to figure out the scheduling. The news of the change in hours for Joe surprised me, although it should not have, as this happens every summer.

But that sort of long term remembering things is a tad beyond me. I mean, I am an absentminded guy. I have enough trouble just remembering things that are happening this week, let alone next year.

Anyhow, we have things sorted for now. I will be making my own way to and from therapy next week, which will be an adventure, and then after that things get… complicated.

One good thing though : Joe will be on vacation for the first two weeks of August, so there should be no problem with drives then. We can even have the appointments in the afternoon if we like.

Other than that bit of administrivia, though, the morning went quite smoothly. I has to go to the welfare office to pick up my check, and I was anticipating long lines and enormous hassle and them telling me that now that I had given them the information they needed, only THEN would they MAIL me my check.

This has happened before.

But amazingly, especially for the day after Check Day, there was no line whatsoever at the office and the nice lady behind the counter just got my Social Insurance Number and handed me the check.

I felt so good about it that I filled out next month’s stub right then and there, and put it through the slot. So I am totally set for the next month. Keen gear!

And to top it all off, there was no line at Money Mart when I went to cash my check, either. All in all, it went super smooth, and I am extremely grateful for that.

That reminds me… I still have around thirty bucks sitting on my Amazon.ca account, waiting for me to figure out what I want to use it on.

I better use it before Amazon finds a way to take it away with service charges. Well, I suppose I could always just get more books. Books are always good.

I already got two Vonnegut books, Breakfast of Champions and Cat’s Cradle, via a different gift certificate from a different bookstore. Technically, I have read them before, but that was in junior high, so they will be almost new to me by now.

Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors. There is such warmth and humanity to his books, despite his tendency to have truly awful things happen to people, that reading a Vonnegut book feels like spending time with an old friend to me.

Recently, I was pondering the difference between the authors you like and the authors you love. For instance, I like Asimov. I love his books. I envy his extraordinary deftness of prose and the way he treats ideas really expanded my mind as a child.

But I don’t love Asimov. I love Vonnegut, and Bradbury, and to a lesser extent Terry Pratchett. (Sorry, Terry.) I guess the difference is that Vonnegut and Bradbury both have great emotional depth to their stories and a real sense of humanity and understanding, and that is what makes the emotional connection I feel towards them so strong.

A lot of authors have entertained me, moved me, enlightened me, even stretched my mind into new and interesting shapes with their words.

But only a few writers have truly connected with me on a spiritual level.

And lo and behold, the books where they did are my favorite books of all time.

I hope to be that sort of author some day.

I think your taxes are too low. I think you should be taxed more.

Disagree? On what basis? Do you think you already pay too much taxes? Why? What is your basis for comparison? What tax rate should you be paying instead of the one you are paying now? Why?

In the video linked above, I reiterate some points that I have made before in political essay form. Basically, I attack the very notion that taxes are too high, and I do it by presenting my audience with a startling modern heresy : saying taxes are too low.

I don’t actually know if taxes are too high, too low, or just right. I just want to shock people into realizing just how shallow and crassly manipulative the whole “my taxes are too high” bullshit is. It is exactly the sort of political message that people swallow hook, line, and stinker because they like the sound of it, and are then led around by callous and elitist leaders who have realizing that it is perfectly legal to buy votes as long as you use the government’s money and not your own.

What could be a more perfect deal for the One Percent? You get to buy votes with some else’s money while conveniently cloaking your own sociopathic greed as some form of patriotism, when in reality it is the exact opposite of patriotism.

It is refusing to pay for the society from which you benefit. Worse, it is often accompanied by naked attacks on the very concept of government in favour of some kind of anarchism where only the strong survive and the rest perish.

This is a philosophy always favoured by the strong, but the real trick is convincing the sheep to go right along with it. The trick is to get them feeling like they are the strong, too, and so sure they are selling out millions of their countrymen, but it’s nobody they know and the people getting screwed possibly even deserve it.

The real truth is that the One Percent, those myopic monsters, do not give a shit about anything outside their own cloistered world. The only thing that truly matters to them is socially competing with other rich people in their peer group as to who is the richest and that means they will do absolutely anything it takes to get richer.

The concept of having “enough” money is alien to them. To them, it is crystal clear that as long as there is one person in the world who thinks they are better than them because they have more money, they do not have “enough” money.

And even if they become the richest person in the world, they will still collect wealth with equal rapacity just because getting more money feels good. And woe betide anyone who dares to tell these incredibly spoiled brats that they can’t have something they want or that they can’t do what they want to do. They will use all the power that their enormous wealth gives them to destroy all remaining ties to the world outside their own ivory towers, and this whole idea of excess taxation plays right into their hands.

They do not give a fuck about the consequences of tax cuts, because they know that they will not be the ones to suffer them. We will. All they care about is that mean old government is making them less rich than they could be and that is the most evil thing ever in their childish world.

This excess taxation lie even lets them pretend they have something in common with the average citizen. It is, in fact, the perfect set of sheep’s clothing for these fat and greedy wolves. Hey, we are all entitled and thoughtless enough to think taxes are the worst thing in the world, right? Government is just a big meanie that takes our toys away and makes us share with others and take our turn.

And they only think that society could crumble all around them and they would be fine, and they would finally be free of those taxes and regulations that remind them they are not gods. In truth, even their self-centered little world is enormously dependent on government support and assistance. The very currencies that make up their wealth are backed by the full power of nations in which they refuse to pay taxes. And that money would be worthless if there was not a highly advanced and complex society held together by social programs and public services producing things for them to buy.

So in reality, they are just greedy little children who want to be able to get away with not paying for the world they live in and getting all us chumps to do it for them instead.

But we can fight back. We can save them (and us) from themselves. We can reject all this “my taxes are too high” bullshit and be proud to say “My taxes are fine. They pay for the country I love. I’m adult enough to know that freedom isn’t free and that I am living in the best time to be alive there has ever been and that does not come without some kind of sacrifice. I am just glad that modern civilization is so advanced that I can get all of this without having to do anything more than pay my fair share of the taxes!”

If we have the courage and the vision to do this, they will lose so much of their power over us. They are counting on us not knowing how civilization actually works and being as shortsighted and self-destructive and immature as they are.

But they are the children. We are the adults. We can rise above their petty tricks and reject their self-serving political philosophies and act instead like good parents who know when to tell their children “no” for their own good.

Sure, they will scream and kick and cry and tell us how much they hate us and that we are the worst people in the world for being so damned mean.

But we will know we did the right thing.

Had a rather stressful afternoon.

How stressful? This video was the best I could do for you folks today. Sorry.

Be glad I got rid of the background music.

As the video says, I got myself into this mess. I wanted to get the webcam working with YouTube and after Googling the problem, it finally dawned on me to see if the living room computer could read that mini-DVD-R that came with the webcam and presumably had the proper drivers for it.

And yay, it did! So I tried to email the file to myself. Woops, gmail doesn’t allow executables as attachments. A sound policy, that. Must cut way down on the spread of viruses to the computers of the hapless and the trusting.

But being a non-idiot, I just changed the extension from .EXE to .LOL and lo, it had no problem with it any more. Hey, it’s still keeping your grandma from double clicking on something that says it is kitten pictures and getting a computer full of virii. The policy still works.

It’s just not meant for clever types like me.

Well, semi-clever. Clever enough to get myself into trouble, anyhow, and this time at least, eventually clever enough to get back out of it.

Once I had the right file on the right computer, I changed it back into an .EXE and ran it, and then checked to see if I had fixed the problem with YouTube.

Nope. Absolutely nothing coming through. Damn.

So then I checked to see if the webcam itself was working, and the answer was NO. And then I knew that very special kind of panic you feel when you realize that you may have just fucked up big time.

And so it all began. Eventually, I invoked the nuclear option, which is to uninstall absolutely everything to do with the errant hardware, do a cold boot with the device disconnected, then install the drivers again and only THEN plug the motherfucking thing back in.

And that worked. But man, I have a lot of respect for the people who do this sort of thing all the time. You know, the sysadmins and maintenance workers and repairmen (and women) and all those other people who troubleshoot and fix things all day long.

Frankly, I don’t think I could handle the stress. I would much rather troubleshoot a joke. Those I can almost always fix.

The day’s drama aside tho, I am feeling pretty good lately. I think that Wellbutrin I have been taking for two months has finally reached its full effect. I have more energy, more drive, more focus, more persistence, and just plain more life in me.

I feel a lot more solid and complete inside as well. Partly that’s the drugs, and partly that is the progress I have made in dealing with my anger lately. Just going ahead and letting myself hate my father has been a huge step for me, one of many to come, I hope. And it had released a lot of emotion in me that I now have to deal with, and that is proving… fun.

Don’t get me wrong, I would never go back. The effects of relaxing the suppression of emotion are far to pleasurable and beneficial to even consider it. But now I have all that anger bouncing around inside me and it’s not something I am used to dealing with, so I do sort of get the feeling like I am picking my way through a minefield sometimes.

It is not exactly that I feel angry all the time. Far from it. But the anger is very close to the surface at all times and it has made keeping to my usual very high standards of behaviour much trickier than before I let some of my anger roam free.

I still refuse to take my anger out on others. Hence the high standard. This makes finding a “safe” way to express all this rage inside me rather difficult, but I am managing okay.

My record is not spotless and I know that there have been a few times lately when I snapped at people close to me with a sarcastic comment or two, and for that I am truly sorry.

But I think I have it under control for now. It is just a matter of getting used to a higher emotional power level than before. It makes it harder to control oneself and I have definitely been more impulsive than ever lately, but self-control is still possible.

Largely, of course, I have been pouring all this newfound voltage into making videos. It keeps me busy for a good chunk of the day, and it’s an absolute joy to be able to just take an idea and run with it and keep flogging away at it until it is done.

I could do with more strain in my life, and making videos provides it. Living an idle life sucks big time. You have to find something you like doing and then just pour yourself into doing it. Then you can reach the zone where you are completely absorbed in your task and that leads to great happiness.

Humans need to work. We are born to strive. I have felt that way for a long time. I have had almost twenty years of uselessness, idleness, disconnectedness, and loneliness to teach me just how badly human beings need work they can do and get a sense of accomplishment, as well as a feeling like they have a place in society where they have status and a sold identity.

Every day, you have a certain amount of energy to spend, and the goal is to spend it all, knowing that with sleep and food, it will all be back again the next day.

The more you spend, the less the stress (up to a point), and the better you will feel.

At least, that is how it looks from where I am right now.

Today has been an OK day.

Went to the welfare office. I screwed up filling out my stub and had to get Joe to drive me there to fix it out, and damn it all if there wasn’t like eight people in line already when I got there.

So much for the idea that the Monday before cheque day would be quiet. I guess a lot of people are worried about their checks this time of the month.

And there was this one girl in line who just would not stop talking. Just on and on and on, barely pausing for breath, let alone acknowledging what the person I had assumed must be her close personal friend and who was the focus of this nonstop barrage was trying to say.

Then Miss Motormouth gets to the head of the line and the moment she is done her business, takes off like a shot alone, and I realize that the two weren’t even together. The poor “companion” was just some random person unlucky enough to be stuck in line behind The Eternal Gabber.

And I mean, I am not normally one to judge that kind of thing. Gosh knows, I sure as hell can talk an ultraviolet streak when I get going.

But at least I pause for breath! And I do my best to make absolutely sure to take turns when talking precisely because I know that if I don’t watch myself, I can start monologuing just like Miss Chatterbox and nobody’s got time for that.

Apparently, Miss Neverending Story Of Her Life lacks such self-awareness.

Here’s a fun story from The Land Down Under (If North Was Up Which It Is Not Because There Is No Up Or Down In Space).

A sports betting company, creatively named Sportsbet, wanted to advertise their service in a very big way, and so they had a gigantic mural painted right on the tarmac at one of Australia’s busiest international airports so that everyone arriving in Australia could see it.

Now being a sports based company, they wanted to show their support for one of the local sports teams in a way that would really catch your eye.

The mural depicts the mascots of two Australian rugby teams. See if you can figure out which one the people at Sportsbet support.

Even in rugby, this has to be a foul.

Yes. It’s the Wallabies.

Now I am a furry and so that kind of thing doesn’t bother me. But predictably, a lot of Australians are pretty upset about and so are, I assume, a fair number of travelers accompanied by children to whom they now have to explain just what Mister Kangaroo is doing to Mister Lion.

According to Sportsbet, the two are just “cuddling”. Hah. I could use some of that kind of cuddling.

Of course, that might not be a Wallaby at all, but the Christmas Kangaroo.

(sorry, that’s the best quality version I could find)

A merry little Xmas indeed.

In other news, there is mystery afoot in the Manchester Museum in England.

An ancient offering statue dedicated to Osiris, the Egyptian god of death, has started to…. rotate.

Check out this time lapse video taken at the museum.

Spooky, huh? Almost like it is turning to look at you.

And of course, people are saying that it is the spirit of Osiris foretelling doom and all that fun but not at all plausible stuff.

But just saying “differential friction” is not much of an answer either. A true scientist would say “Well, the statue has never rotated before recently, and it is kept in a locked case monitored by video cameras so tampering is highly unlikely. So the real question is : what has changed?”

It’s fairly unlikely that the statue or its case have changed much over time. Ditto the tilt of the floor in that part of the museum or incidentals like temperature, humidity, and airflow.

No, the most likely culprit is some form of vibration. That’s the only force I can think of that would penetrate the case and get the statue moving. My guess is that what has changed is that there is some new source of vibration either above or below the audible range and that is what is causing the statue to slowly turn during the day.

It might be something as big as nearby road construction sending infrasound into the ground, or something as small and simple as an air conditioning unit turning itself on.

Well, I have put it off long enough. Here’s today’s experiment in video.

It was fun to make (and time-consuming!), and I am glad I did it, but now that I have done it, I can’t say I am very happy with the result.

I tried a bunch of things I have never tried before, and that’s good, but the actual story and comedy seems pretty stupid to me now. I can’t imagine it being as fun to watch as it was to make.

Oh well. That’s what makes it an experiment. The nature of experiments is that you use them to find out about things. If you know the result beforehand, there is no point in experimenting.

And you don’t get anywhere in life without taking risks. A smart person minimizes risk in all they do, but they do not expect to eliminate it entirely and they certainly do not make risklessness a prerequisite for all endeavor across the board.

That gets you nowhere. Life is a gamble. You can play well. You can even beat the odds. But you can’t guarantee the result you want every single times.

And who knows, maybe once I sleep on it and take a look at the thing when I am all rested and renewed, I will like it more. I have spent all day with the damned thing after all. I might be a little biased.

Do you think the text jokes are too much?

Once more, it is time to do that thing where I post a bunch of videos, with my own last.

First, a rather marvelous little social experiment.

They picked the right guy for it too, he has the classic big jolly belly laugh that is extremely contagious. He is totally the kind of guy you want in the audience when you are doing standup.

And what pleases me most about this little experiment is that our designated laughter instigator has genuinely made all those people’s days better. Just by sharing a laugh with them, unprompted as it was, he caused all those people to have a great time and helped rid them of a lot of stress.

The medical evidence for the concrete medical benefits of laughter is overwhelming. Laughter reduces stress, and less stress makes everything better in terms of health.

When we are stressed, our body stays in a flight or fight adrenalized mode all the time, and that is very bad. The adrenal mode assumes that what is most important is surviving the current threat, and so it abandons nearly all long term maintenance functions in lieu of throwing all its resources into fighting or fleeing the thing threatening it.

Which is great for actual physical danger. It even works well for highly stressful activities. But when your stress mode is stuck in the “on” position, your body never gets to completely rest and totally restore itself, and so your condition just gets worse and worse over time.

And you know what’s really stressful? Being sick and feeling like crap all the time.

Enter laughing. It reduces your stress level quite efficiently, and feels great while doing it. That’s why a good laugh not only feels good while you are doing it, but makes you feel good after as well.

Suddenly your stress load has gone down, and that feels freaking amazing. And the rest of your body will thank you for it.

Beats the hell out of crying about it, that’s for sure!

Next up, a very touching PSA about a very modern issue.

I haven’t yet had to deal with the issue of someone you are theoretically talking to spending the whole time gazing at their handheld data gizmo, but I am quite sure that I will not handle it well.

I am extremely sensitive to feeling like I am being ignored, and if someone can’t even be bothered to stop fiddling with their fucking iPuds long enough to have a conversation with me, then they are not worth my time, as I am so clearly not worth theirs.

I refuse to compete for someone’s attention. You either engage fully, or not at all with me. If I was a modern parent, I would totally clash with my kids over them preferring to thumb type their besties with the gizmos I bought them over actually spending time at the dinner table talking to dear old Dad.

That is not. fucking. ON.

And I would be perfectly willing to take said gizmos away for good if that is what it took to get my kids to look me in the eye.

See how they like being the only kids at school who can’t text or take pictures. That will teach them a thing or two about the value of facetime.

And yeah, I know that to today’s youth, this totally makes me sound like a crusty old fart who hates everything new and who is a total hypocrite because he spends all day online himself.

But the difference is, I have a very strict policy to NEVER EVER choose video games or the Internet over interacting with real live people.

I made that rule around 17 years ago and I have stuck to it since then. Nothing can replace real human interaction, and this is coming from someone who has had way more than his fair share of the virtual kind.

Put that thing down and take a good look at the world around you kids, and the people in it.

And finally, Hitler on drugs.

Made using this magnificent tool (plus a little video editing of my own to add the intro and outtro stuff), this is the Hitler video I have been wanting to make for a long time but never had a topic for until recently.

But when I heard from a friend of mine that some fucking quacks had put his girls on Risperidone (generic name), I hit the roof. I was so damned mad and there was nothing I could do about it. Son of a bitch!

That stayed in my head for two weeks, then just yesterday, I thought “I haven’t made a Hitler video yet…” and I instantly knew what the topic would be.

These assholes with their prescription-pad medicine. We should threaten to replace all the GPs with pharmacy technicians trained in matching symptoms and/or lab results to drugs, and see if that gets their fucking attention for once.

After all, if all they basically do is look up your symptoms on a mental chart of drugs, why should we the people be paying a doctor to do what someone with roughly a lab technician’s skill could do, and for a fraction of the cost?

And to be pumping potent psychoactives into the tender and vulnerable brains of preschool kids just for acting their age is beyond an outrage. It is a crime. It is the chemical abuse of children, and someone has to put a stop to it.

I don’t think you can diagnose any kind of mental illness in a child younger than five. All kids that young are insane by adult standards. They do things like throw tantrums in public, pretend to be a dinosaur for hours on end, and watch their favorite videos over and over and over again. All these would be signs of serious mental impairment in an adult.

But in a preschooler, that is all perfectly normal and healthy.

But I guess Big Pharma is waging war against the very idea of drug free health.

Pretty soon, they will be trying to convince us that we all have a terrible illness called Not Taking Enough Drugs Syndrome, and only they have the cure.

Of course… it’ll cost ya.

Here’s today’s bit o’ fun.

I am fairly happy with how it turned out. I was originally going to do subtitles instead of dubbing, but then I thought about it and concluded that comedy that you have to read off a YouTube window is comedy working against a mighty big hurdle, and one I could do without.

And let me tell you, it is a lot of work to do the dub comedy. The thing is around two minutes long but it took me two hours to complete it, largely, I suspect, because I was writing it as I went, plus it sometimes took a lot of takes to get the jokes to line up with when people are talking.

That’s part of what made it such a challenge. Because the premise is that this is an English dub of a foreign film, I don’t have to actually match mouth movements like Dayjob Orchestra or Bad Lip Reading, and that is a deliberate choice on my part. Not only am I not interested in going into competition with those guys (especially BLR because that operation is TIGHT), I don’t want to place such a severe limitation on the kind of gags I use.

That limitation is why those two groups’ comedy tends to be the “LOL SO RANDOM” variety. Writing actual jokes that happen to match the mouth movements of a piece of video would be insanely hard. I mean, I am pretty cocky about my comedy writing skills, and even I don’t think I could do it.

At least, not unless I was being paid a lot of money and given a lot of time.

Using foreign language films gets rid of any expectation that the lip movements will match. They rarely do in dubbed films. That makes my job as a writer much easier, although I still have to roughly match the amount of time the character is talking.

I could probably be a little looser with that and still get away with it, of course. But that whole “ha ha, isn’t it hilarious that this foreign person said thirty syllables of gobbledygook and it only translated into ‘Oh look, bandits!’ in English!” type humour is dead, dead, dead. It died with one of the Wayne’s World movies (the one where Wayne is dating Tia Carrere) and has stayed dead since then.

Plus, when it comes to comedy, my muse is very exacting. I am not normally someone who is any good at accuracy, but I have a highly trained comedy ear and I know when something is funnier or better quality than another thing quite easily.

Kind of the way an oenophile develops a sophisticated palate and perforce must become very picky about their wines, I have developed, via a lifelong rapacious hunger for comedy combined with the sort of analytical mind that must know why something is funny, a very sophisticated comedy palate, and that makes me very hard to please in terms of comedy.

And of course, to make good art, you must first please yourself.

I know the vid is not perfect. For one thing, I wish I had done a better and more consistent job of making the hero and the gas jockey sound unique and different.

And I apologize to my nerd brethren for the sort of nerd bashing tone of some of the comedy. For what it is worth, I don’t think any lesser of the hero of the piece for being so geeky.

It’s just that the only way I could think of to have my hero moving a limp and lifeless chick around and have it not seem completely creepy (as in, date rape creepy) was for her to be a RealDoll, and… well, let me put it this way.

You probably don’t get a lot of alpha males buying RealDolls. I might be wrong, but I am pretty sure the market demographic for said product skews pretty geeky.

In order to make today’s vid, I had to finally get around to finding a way to download video off of YouTube. I was a little reluctant to do so because I have already lost one YouTube account due to copyright violations, and I would hate to lose another.

But I know that sooner or later, I would exhaust my interest in stuff I could do just with the webcam and still photos, and playing with real video can be ever so much fun, so I knew I would give in eventually.

However, I will try to stick to stuff that I am fairly sure does not have active and litigious rights holders ready to jump me if I should go over the line.

Oh, and sorry for the somewhat uneven volume level on my overdubbing. I tried to keep the microphone the same distance from my mouth each time, but without a microphone stand, that is pretty darn tricky.

Overall. though, I am pretty pleased with how it turned out. I will no doubt give it another shot some time soon because it seems like a fairly effective form of comedy (and I love the name I came up with for it… Interpretive Dubbing, LOL) and it was fun (and hard) to do.

With more polish on the technique, it could even be my own little comedy niche… really funny fake dubbing. A good way to show off my talents that I can do on my own.

Although I would like other people to come along to do voices. I have never really tried to develop my voice acting talents, and who knows, I might get good at it, but it would still be much easier to have different voices with…. well, different people. With their own voices.

Who knows, this could turn into a “thing”. Certainly, it’s more viable than long rambling philosophical talks from a naked looking me.

Anyhow, that’s all from me today. Hope you enjoy the vid, and remember, I love comments, people, either here or on YouTube, so comment away!