Don't ask me, I'm old
Posted: Thursday, March 29, 2007 1:08 AM by Will Femia
Today's entry took a little longer because it's a lot of video, which is harder to skim.
The YouTube award winners - I think we've seen them all at one point or other on this blog. I'm wondering if this Terra Naomi could be the first big celeb that was a Web celeb first. (Remember she's the one who shared the chords to her songs and people played their own versions of them as video replies to her on YouTube. Brilliant. NOTE: If you let that first song play you will have it in your head until you die. And if you're like me and never learn the words to songs properly, that death may come by your own hand.
Meanwhile, Ask a Ninja was on the Blades of Glory press tour. I never really got into this guy but it won't be long before he's the ultimate divider of young and old. Some entertainment show or award ceremony will have him on for a brief skit and if you're young you'll know it and love it and it will represent the validation of cyberculture and if you're old you won't get it and who the hell was that guy. Having just turned old a few weeks ago this may have already happened and I'm too out of touch to know it.
Speaking of songs in your head, I wanna rock - Because it is in a rental car commercial that played over and over on MSNBC today. It has three words so everyone can sing along, even people who never learn the words to songs.
Chevy to show 3 microcar concepts in New York and Do-it-yourself cars (also pretty micro with a 50cc motor). It's enough to make me think there's a micro car movement afoot, but I don't see how they could ever cope with SUVs on the road. Maybe if they were given special status.
Top 40 Feedburner sites - What's good about the feedburner list is that it shows sites that people subscribe to. Most lists show what people are linking to, but that doesn't show readership and it's very prone to cheating. It's also different than a raw page view ranking because reads in an RSS aggregator don't necessarily show up as page views.
28 weeks later - This is the 28 Days Later sequel and it looks pretty good. I was a little disturbed to see that the military character is American and says, "We've lost control, kill everyone." Come to think of it, that would make a great t-shirt.
Kermit doing Johnny Cash doing Nine Inch Nails - NOTE: Sometimes it's funny when a familiar childhood character does something outrageous but this is so dark you'll probably find yourself horrified by the end. That said, being horrified by Kermit the Frog is a pretty amazing achievement in itself. Contains one S-bomb and very adult themes.
Speaking of bad cover songs, 20 Worst cover songs in pop music history - I don't know about that Guns and Roses item (the live version, not the Tom Cruise version), and for that matter I don't mind Sheryl Crow's Sweet Child o' Mine.
Google's directions from Stanford, California to Stockholm, Sweden. It's step 33 that's the doozy.
I've often wanted to slide down the shiny metal space between really steep escalators. Sometimes they have little knobs placed along the length of the escalator, I imagine to discourage that very thing. Knowing that, you can see why this video of a guy skiing down a really steep, long escalator has some appeal.
dan le sac VS scroobius pip "Thou Shalt always Kill" - More like a list of pet peeves than real commandments, and full of Britishisms and a couple names I didn't know. The guy would probably be upset to hear me say it, but I kept waiting for him to say, "She drinks a whiskey drink, she drinks a vodka drink." Next time I'm taking a long drive or maybe if there's a power outage I'll have to give some thought to why I'm always so interested in people's lists of rules.
You thought turning mailboxes into R2-D2s to promote stamps was something? How about 7-11s into Kwik-E-Marts to promote the Simpsons movie?
The story of my life.
"The reactable, is a multi-user electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface." What? You really have to see it. It's an instrument, but you're not exactly doing Pete Townsend windmill strums on it. (The part we're supposed to be especially awed by is "multi-touch" technology that allows the screen to recognize being touched by more than one thing at once.)
Life imitates comic book: Space fireball just misses jetliner - Was it satellite debris or meteor? Or was it the spawn of Saturn's hexagon cast to Earth to enslave us all only to be defeated by a rag-tag group of farmers led by a high school quarterback and assisted by a goth girl in a biplane? I mean really, the question answers itself.
One thing you have to appreciate about bloggers is who else is going to find C-Span highlights? In this one, someone from the General Services Administration is trying to explain that she has no memory of using her office as a partisan tool for election strategizing. Toward the end is the best when it's revealed that all of her people already ratted her out and she still has to say she doesn't remember any of it. A good Congressional hearing schadenfreude video. A fuller set can be found here but I haven't watched them all yet. (Hey! That second one is no blog, that's Pelosi's site. Of course it was just a matter of time before legislators began providing their own highlight reels.)
A look into the future that never was. This is the ultimate "where's my rocket car?" blog.
"Sewage treatment plant officials in Michigan are trying to figure out what happened to 15 million gallons of partially-treated sewage, which used to be stored in lagoon near the village of Sand Lake – and now isn't." The real question is where do sinkholes go? Did you see Pan's Labyrinth?
Viacom blogs still using YouTube - Not only that but the other day Stephen Colbert was especially brilliant for encouraging his audience to remix clips and images from his show. The only disappointing part was that the guest was a guy from the EFF who didn't present any real response to Stephen's recitation of the corporate line. (The corporate line is that if people are getting copyrighted material for free, the revenue stream dries up and the content has to go away. The real answer is that by giving away copyrighted material the audience makes greater use of it, generates buzz deepens their devotion and helps market your show. There may be a scaling limit somewhere, but The Colbert Report is still small enough that it can benefit more from word of mouth marketing than in can from having a clueless parent company.)
Seven essential stations every home should have. This sounds ridiculous at first but what I really like about it is that it questions the traditional structure of our living space. Do we really always have to use the bedroom/living room/kitchen/bathroom structure? Is there a way to recategorize the routines of our lives so our rooms serve us differently? I'm not proposing we replace the bedroom with a "gift giving" room, but I appreciated the help in thinking outside of these traditional boxes.
