Only get to use THAT trick once.

Let’s start off with a story about the number one thing old people want to tell young people.

You might be forgiven for thinking they would want to say “Get off my lawn!” or “Obama’s a socialist” or “Man, I love me some hard candy”, but the real message is something way less snarky.

What they want most to tell young people is “Don’t waste your life at a job you hate. ”

They surveyed over 1500 seniors and support for this axiom was not merely widespread, but extremely firm. The oldsters were adamant that young people should not waste time working at a job they hate. They should quit that job and go find something they enjoy or at least can stand.

And I find that quite interesting, and heartening too. They could tell us younger (ish) people anything, and the thing they really, really want us to know is that nothing is worth working a job you hate.

These are people with long biographies that have given them a lot of time to examine their lives and thinking about the things they wish they had and hadn’t done, and the thing they regret the most is staying in jobs they hated.

That is some serious food for thought. I bet there are a lot of worker drones out there who are working soul-crushing jobs purely to support their families and put food on the table.

It never occurs to them that they could get the same thing from a more rewarding job.

Next, we have a guy who is doing marvelously spooky art in spooky places all over Europe.

Just how spooky is it? It’s this spooky.

(oh and NSFW warning, shadow wang)

Is that amazingly cool or what? Being someone who loves a good scare, I adore good quality creepy art, and this Herbert Baglione is my kind of weirdo.

Oh, for bonus scares : said artwork resides in an abandoned lunatic asylum.

Sadly, that sort of means that it would be impossible to actually own a Baglione of your own. It’s installation artwork that stays installed. I would have to be crazy rich to be willing to go all Banksy and pay someone to rip down the wall so I can hang it in my home.

He’s done similar installations all over Europe, and I would love to see them all. That is some serious Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark shit, and I love it.

Even as a kid, I was attracted to scary things. I somehow missed becoming a big fan of horror, though. Perhaps I became too jaded about it too young.

There was no Goosebumps or Are You Afraid Of The Dark when I was a kid to maybe put a genuine scare into me, and of course, most of the “scary” stuff aimed at kids is quite pathetic, especially to a kid who grew up with a horror-loving mom.

Next up, we have a very viral video that just makes my heart glad when I watch it.

Yup. That’s a big chubby beardy old hillbilly dancing to Aretha Franklin with an honest to goodness fuzzy chubby live raccoon.

I thought that kind of thing only happened in those super-happy old-timey black and white cartoons, back when hillbillies were hillbillies and hadn’t turned into rednecks yet.

And sure, city folk thought hillbillies were pretty funny with their old fashioned ways, but there was always a certain amount of affection to it too.

And deep down, I think a lot of city folk felt a kind of longing for that simpler, more basic kind of living. Sure, the people didn’t have much money but, at least to us city slickers, it seemed like despite that, they might just have an easier life than us rats in the rat race.

Less things, less work. Might just be a better deal.

This came to the head in the seventies, of course, when all kinds of people got the notion to get back to the land, and intellectual liberal urban types were finding common cause with dirt farming rural families that might not have all the same views as one another, but they both loved good food and good music.

And back then, that was enough.

But then the Republicans set the rural folk versus the liberal “elite”, and we have suffered ever since.

I think it’s time we all got together again, don’t you?

And finally, naturally, we have today’s vid.

I started off to do another silly re-dub of a foreign language clip, but somehow it became silly subtitles instead. I did the subtitles for that German bit I did in a previous vid, and that was kind of fun, so I decided to give a longer bit of subtitling a try.

And it was still kind of fun, but also a lot of work, so I doubt I will be doing it again soon. Then again, there was a distinct flaw in the technique I used that made it a lot harder than it should have been, so maybe I will try again with improved technique some time.

At one point, I was thinking of re-dubbing some public domain animated short off of archive.org , but I looked a few up and, for some reason, the idea of re-dubbing them seemed just far too overwhelming to face.

Maybe it was overwhelming for one of the same reasons I love animation, and that’s because it is so much more vivid and intense than real life.

Watching that is one thing, but trying to insert my creativity into it is quite another.

Still, I will probably do it some day, when I am more psychologically prepared for it.

Or I could just have fun pulling an MST3K on one of the many old educational videos they have there.

Archive.org is really a treasure trove once you get past the clunk old-fashioned interface design.

Stay tuned for further bulletins.