Filipino call center catfight - "I Kell You!"

I hope Jerome got fired. He's famous now anyway. :P

The Element Song: various versions

Got home at 2.30, after watching DJ Shadow + Cut Chemist at Luna Park
in the city... (http://au.youtube.com/results?search_query=dj+shadow+the+hard+sell) then checked my email... noticed a link about Tom Lehrer, who's famous for the Element Song, a crazy romp through the periodic table, sung to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's, "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" from Pirates of Penzance (thanks to Bob Funchess for the song title)

end result: just spent 30 minutes going through youtube, checking out
various versions of The Element Song.

Damn you Google blog!

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/heres-to-tom-lehrer-elemental-geek.html

(and he also did that song about "silent e" for Electric Company! OMG.)

my faves so far:

the original (audio only):

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=WNfx0FO4hzs&NR=1

great version at a talent show:

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=9cbgAELAX18&feature=related

sung by a 4-yr old (who kinda sounds like Martin Price from the Simpsons):

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=QWkVO6Bp8VM&feature=related

showing the elements' location in the table:

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=WNfx0FO4hzs&NR=1

this isn't a version.. but still interesting rapping with *some* of
those elements..

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=pmTXtbRR7c0&feature=related

YouTube viewing session

Interesting what I ended up watching and how I got there. (Most recent is at the top, so go through the list from the bottom.)

It all started with me trying to educate my wife about Rage Against The Machine, and how the Sydney Entertainment Centre would have to be one of the worst places to see them, since no one in their right mind really wants to be seated when watching these guys. "WHAT? You don't know who they are? ZOMG! Watch this then... And feel the funk, y'all!"

I love Daft Punk. I really do. Okay, maybe just the first 2 albums. They became popular around the time these new-fangled things called "electronica" and "big beat" were making the rounds. That faded, and then we all started listening to Post-Rock, then New Rock, then that "angular post-punk proto-new wave sound". God knows what they call it this year. At least hip-hop doesn't suffer from the proliferation of labels like this. There may be strains of hip-hop, but no one ever goes and denies that it is hip-hop. But yeah, you say, all these labels just come from music critics, press releases and assorted musical wankers who blog. Fair enough. You never hear the actual artists themselves putting labels on their music. They just tend to say "rock and roll". Okay... so I've just shot down my assertion about rock music in the second sentence of this paragraph.

Anyway, back to Daft Punk. I just realised last night what an utter fool I was for not getting those tickets to their upcoming appearance here in Sydney. Bugger. Bollocks. Fikifikifiki. Woof woof to the doof doof. Aaaaaargh. I was looking up their live performances on YouTube and they're pretty awesome. Not life changing, but enough to make you dance so hard that you'd fall down. I remember actually dancing to Around The World in front of the stereo over and over again. Of course, only after checking that there was no one home!

I, for one, welcome our new (old) robot overlords.

Babies laughing - always cute, always works!

Found the perfect vid to cheer me up after my despairing rant about h8rs on YouTube:



Turn up the volume, for best cheering up effect!

Wanted: YouTube h8r cancelbots/ crowd-moderation

YouTube, til recently a cause of great joy and wonder, is now turning into an embarrassment and cause for despair. Why? "leet h8rz" speech. Almost *any* post that gets popular enough is certain to receive shitloads of hateful comments. You can't call it criticism, and "comments" is giving it too much weight. It's more like cowardly sniping by morons, hiding behind their usernames.

David Pogue on the NY Times wrote something recently about the decline of Netiquette, so the issue's been lingering in my head and I'm wondering if this is all just being alarmist or if it's actually getting worse.

I was just looking at a video of a baby smiling after it farted (it was a YouTube Featured video okay, I didn't look for it!) and it has received a 1million views and around 2000 comments. Most of the comments consist of - "ugh! this is so gay", "faaaake!", "this baby should've been aborted", "ignorant white trash dads". Oh come on! Whatever happened to babies being cute and adorable and undeserving of such trash talk?



Then I clicked on a similar vid, of a Spanish baby making farty noises with its mouth (it's a whole new genre for short film!), and what do we get? Racist taunts about Mexican immigration! Fucking hell. Doesn't take long to get the rats coming out of the woodwork.




Was looking at another one where this Vietnamese-Australian girl was complaining about "bogans" causing a disturbance on public transport , and sure enough, after a day or two, out comes the comments along the lines of "If you don't like it, go back to your country", "Your ancestors were savages in rice paddies", "Me love you long time suckee suckee".



I think there should be another law similar to Godwin's law, a YouTube version of it, stating that "As the number of comment pages on a video goes past 4 and there's any indication that the person in the video is not a white American, the probabilty of a racist comment approaches 1."

Anonymity is the reason why juvenile idiots, racist scum, and plain old jerks are able to pour out their hate (and I use that word repeatedly because that's what it is) without any regard for the consequences of their speech. I'm pretty sure people would at least think twice before spewing this much bile and filth if they had to use their real names to make a post.

Of course, those with underdeveloped IQs and potty mouths would be doing it - but how long would you persist if you knew that everyone in the world, or at least everyone you would ever meet from that point on - friends, future schools, universities, employers, would-be lovers - would be able to Google your name and see what an asshole you really are.

I can't see why Google, having spent truckloads of money to buy YouTube, would just sit by and let it get clogged with all these moronic, hateful comments. Given the collective IQ at that place, can't they find a way to institute some form of self-policing by the public, or have a system where certain users can get responsibility for controlling the comment flood. Slashdot and Digg have crowd-moderated systems, and WikiPedia still seem to be successful with a system that everyone can still edit - so what's YouTube gonna do?

This is the user-generated content that Time voted as "Man of the Year"? Nice one.