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.