Drowning in links!

There is just too much good stuff on Facebook today. I have 16 tabs open and I am not caught up on Facebook.

I swear, sometimes following my Facebook feels like a full time job.

Anyhow, here is today’s royal vlogness.

I am pretty happy with this one. For starters, I feel like I really poured my personality into it, which was one of my goals in starting this whole video blogging thing in the first place. I just forgot that when I started playing around with video editing again.

But originally, part of my rationale for going video was that while my writing is good (ish), it does not use the other assets I have, like a warm and lovable personality. So in going the video blogging route, I hoped to put that personality of mine to good use.

Time to let this little of mine shine. It’s been under that damned bushel for too long.

But in addition to the personality thing, I also added some pictures to this one in order to make it less just me talking and more something with a little visual variety about it.

Pictures, text… even a very brief video clip. I am getting all multimedia up in this shiznit.

Like I said yesterday, eventually, I want to produce high quality high density high focus material like the super popular YouTubers (like a couch potato, but more 2.0), but I am not going to get there overnight. I have a lot of growing to do before I can focus like that.

I mean geez, my vlogs are ten minutes long. That’s never gonna make it. The super tasty stuff is three minutes or less. That is the stuff that goes down like popcorn.

But I have so much trouble picking one thing to talk about and staying focused on it. I will have to learn to think in smaller, denser units.

I have other things to share, of course. Like this freaky story of a woman’s skeletonized body found in her hoarder husband’s home after he died.

When they found the body, this woman had been missing for nearly 30 years. That means that her now dead husband killed her and hid her body behind a false wall, and lived there with her corpse for almost thirty years, until the day he died of natural causes.

Usually, if you find corpses in a hoarder house, it’s either dead cats or the hoarder themselves. This is, as far as I know, the first time it had been somebody else.

I would say this was just screaming to be the basis of an episode of Bones, but they already did their “hoarder” episode, so this would be going back to the well for them.

But hey, producers of crime shows that have not done a “hoarder” episode… get on this! It is a totally macabre twist that nobody has done yet.

I guess the old guy just wanted to make sure she would never leave him again.

Then there’s this killer PSA from Australia.

Kapow! Straight down the line. That is such a good PSA slam, such a perfect way to get behind people’s defenses with your truth bomb, that it feels like something I could have written myself.

This kind of PSA has much of the structure of satire with, of course, an entirely different intent. Satire highlights and exaggerates absurdities and hypocrisies in order to teach with laughter.

The classic killer PSA instead uses the same kind of sophisticated understanding of things (there is a reason satire skews highbrow) and deep understanding of message to misdirect you into making an assumption and then challenging it.

The classic example that was just devastatingly effective the first time it was used is the car safety PSA where a perfectly normal scene in a car is suddenly and horrifying interrupted by a massive car crash.

That works. It illustrates how tragedy comes out of nowhere and can happen to anyone, anywhere, so you have to play it safe.

Of course, after the first few, you could see it coming because no other commercials start with perfectly normal people driving in a car and apparently being tapes on an eighties camcorder which is apparently hovering a foot outside the backseat window.

But still, massively effective at first, and sometimes it takes a big shock to the system like that in order to wake people out of their semi-sedated states and get their attention.

Way to sharpen your point into a dagger, folks!

Finally, we have today’s King of Badasses, a man who caught a burglar breaking into his home, rushed him, subdued him, hogtied him, then left him on the law for the police to find because he was late for work.

That’s not just badass. That’s Clint Fucking Eastwood badass. Nobody else has that combination of toughness and sangfroid. Even other legendary badasses that I love like Tommy Lee Jones or Rip Torn could only hope to be that badass.

If they had done it (in a movie, obviously) they probably would have made some kind of speech about it. Not our Eastwood of the day, the man called Houston. He didn’t have the time.

Can’t you just imagine Eastwood getting up from where he hogtied the guy, brushing a little dirt off his knee, straightening his tie, and saying “Now if you’ll excuse me…. I’m late for work. ”

And he wouldn’t even mention it at work unless someone asked him why he was late. And even then, all he would say was “Problems at home. ”

(and this is Eastwood in his prime, of course, way before he ever talked to a chair. )

Finally, see what LeVar Burton… LeVar Fucking Burton… feels he has to do to be safe in America.

LeVar Burton. Kunta Kinte. Geordi LaForge. Host of Reading Rainbow. Has to act like someone trapped in a room with a dangerous and violent lunatic in order to not get shot by the cops.

Because to a black man in America, every cop is a violent, unstable, and dangerous lunatic.

Un fucking believable.

2 thoughts on “Drowning in links!

  1. Todd “Willis” Bridges went through that every day in the 1980s. He was making enough money from TV to move to a white neighbourhood and was pulled over every day by the local police, making him late for work. Nobody at work believed him then, but they do now that this kind of thing is more commonly known.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.