Midichlorian Rhapsody

"Star Wars"-themed parody of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody". This video is composed of 100% WIN.
 

What's my line? Crumpet.

I imagine it would have been difficult enough for the celebrity panel of the game show "What's My Line" to guess the occupation of the guests based upon "yes" or "no" answers to a few questions, but what if the guest was an individual with a highly varied and idiosyncratic resume?

Wonder no more...via Roger Ebert's excellent blog, a snippet from the 1950's era show with none other than Salvador Dali as the guest. Amazingly, the panel manages to guess correctly based on what can't be anything more than an intuitive leap. Appropriately surreal, to say the least...



HT: Roger Ebert (via Twitter)

Cami Secret Parody (Boob Apron)

I know I shouldn't laugh...but it's funny...



HT: Patton Oswalt

GENIUS!

Personally, I find the idea of chatroulette kinda creepy, but this is hilarious! The guy improvises songs about the people with whom he connects:



via twitter: @petersagal

The coming storm...

By now, most of us have probably seen the deceitful anti-gay marriage video created by NOM, the National Organization for Marriage (how an organization that actually opposes marriage has the balls to style itself "for" marriage is beyond me). If not, here it is:



Pretty stupid, no? Well given such excellent material to work with, there have been parodies popping up all over the 'net. One of the very best I've seen so far is the one Stephen Colbert put together:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Gay Marriage Commercial

Hilarious. And I love the tagline: "paid for by generous donations from an anonymous group that may or may not be the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints". BWAHAHA!! Totally epic win...

The Fast And The... WTF?

I'm sure this appeared on SNL at some point, but I found it via My Confined Space:

Where the hell is Matt?

I noticed this on Hemant's site in July of last year, but somehow never got around to posting about it.

Matt Harding is a young man with a perhaps odd, but nevertheless amazing story. He traveled the world videotaping himself dancing.

I know, it sounds kind of freaky. But the reality is far from it. He didn't just stand in front of a camera and dance (although that's what he actually did on his first trip around Asia), he invited locals to dance with him. And the results are simply amazing.



If you can make it through that video without getting a little emotional, there's something wrong with you. As members of the species homo sapiens, we share a commonality greater than all of our differences. Laughter, art, music, and dance are a few of the ways we express this commonality and Matt's projects highlight all of these in a particularly compelling manner.

I found three "locations" (in this particular video) especially interesting:

Solomon Islands: because the children dancing with him appear to be enjoying themselves so much and Matt is apparently laughing too hard to continue dancing.

DMZ, N. Korea: because Matt is dancing alone in front of a motionless, expressionless N. Korean guard. Kind of says it all...

Gurgaon, India: Music and dance as a universal language. Beautiful.

There are more videos and stories both from Matt and some of the other dancers available at Matt's website. This is a unique story, but it deals with a part of human nature that we all share...

Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Daoibh!

Beware of new car envy!

Hilarious ad spoof from late night TV:



Take that, O odious and smug Prius owners!

HT: The Awesomer

The Whiner Generation

From Late Night with Conan O'Brien, a hilarious take on our blasé acceptance of all things technological.



HT: Hit & Run

What's Opera Doc?

A Childhood favorite, courtesy of YouTube:

Derren Brown: The so-called Messiah

Found via Pharyngula: a (what appears to be) BBC show featuring Derren Brown (a British magician/illusionist) in which he travels to the U.S. and presents himself to several "experts" in the world of supernatural/paranormal phenomena as one of their own in the hopes of gaining their "endorsement" of his alleged "abilities". In other words, he fools them into thinking that the tricks he performs are actual paranormal/supernatural phenomena. An excellent example of skepticism in action! See YouTube for all eight episodes.

The Ascent of Man

I've said before that I don't want this blog to become a YouTube showcase, but I find so much really neat stuff there. This clip is from the 1973 TV series The Ascent of Man. Hosted by Jacob Bronowski, the series was designed to promote science (in a manner similar to Carl Sagan's Cosmos series). Here Bronowski is defending the idea of scientific knowledge as opposed to doctrine and dogma. He does so from the grounds of the Auschwitz concentration camp where members of his own family perished during the Holocaust. His argument is both eloquent and timeless and the presentation riveting.

The Forbidden Kingdom

Okay, I have to confess: I enjoy martial arts movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Fearless, Hero, House of Flying Daggers,etc. I'll even occasionally watch the ones that come on late at night and feature such awful acting and even worse voice dubbing. I'm not sure why I enjoy them. I am something of an asiatophile, but I suspect it's more to do with the action as I enjoy the Westernized versions of such films as well (Blade, The Matrix, Underworld, etc).

So I'm pleased to see a new movie coming out April 18 that features both Jet Li and Jackie Chan, two of the biggest names in the more common branch of the genre (what we see in the West): The Forbidden Kingdom. The plot involves an American student Jason Tripitakas* (Michael Angarano) looking for bootleg Kung-fu DVDs in Chinatown. Instead he finds an ancient weapon belonging to a great sage and warrior, the "Monkey King" (Jet Li). Through the power of this talisman he is sent back in time to ancient China where he finds that he must free the Monkey King who has been imprisoned by the evil Jade War Lord (Collin Chou). In this quest he is joined by the Kung-fu master Lu Yan (Jackie Chan) and Silent Monk (also played by Jet Li as either a different character of the Monkey King in disguise; not sure which) who will together teach Jason the true secret of Kung-fu so that he can defeat Jade War Lord and find his way home.

Okay, sounds a little hokey...well, maybe more than a little hokey. But still, Jackie Chan AND Jet Li? I mean, c'mon!

Anyway, the trailer looks good. You can watch at the film's website or on YouTube.

*Little bit of interesting trivia: the American student's last name, Tripitakas, is a play on the name of the Buddhist scripture, the Tripitaka (also known as the Pāli canon).

War!

A religious war has broken out on YouTube. Proponents of two conflicting ideologies are engaging in video battles of words and images by which they hope to utterly destroy their opponents and secure victory for their own worldview.

Sound familiar? It should. It's an old, old story. A person or group claims knowledge of some Great Truth (tm) that by definition excludes or subsumes all other truths while some other person or group denies said Great Truth in favor of another, Greater Truth (tm) that, again by defintion, excludes or subsumes the Great Truth and all other truths. And the war is on. Judaism, Christiantiy, Islam, Buddhism...the names vary, but the story is all too familiar. In the case of the ongoing YouTube war, the stakes are far higher and the disagreement far older and more contentious. I speak, of course, of the relative superiority of cake or pie...

FrisbeesANDflipflops* fired the opening salvo in this video, wherein she expounded the superior qualities of cake and denigrated pie. Ostensibly her video was a response to a declaration of Pie faith she noticed on eddiegoombah's profile. Of course, Eddie didn't take lying down this attack on his beliefs and responded with an attack of his own. And from there the war has escalated.

Now I personally have no skin in this game. I have perhaps a slight preference for cake, but pie can be equally satisfying. But I would like to point out to both sides that while they each believe themselves to have valid points to make in the Great Debate, both are equally misguided. For you see the valuable qualities that both claim for the respective objects of their worship are but dim reflections of the ultimate confectionery glory that is Chocolate!

As a confectionery syncretist, I hold that all good comestible qualities are subsumed and brought to full perfection in the transcendent reality that is Chocolate. The Cakeist or Crustian may believe he or she have found the Ultimate Truth, but in reality they are peering through a glass darkly.

All glory be unto Thee O great and wondrous Cacao!

* Interested readers should check out her other YouTube videos. She's an intelligent and articulate young woman.

Funny O' The Day

Wow, it's been awhile since I've posted...just too busy in Real Life (tm). I'll try to get back to more regular posting, but in the meantime, please enjoy the following YouTube videos.

The first is Eddie Izzard's classic routine on the cafeteria in the Death Star (yes, from Star Wars).



The second is the same routine, only this time animated with Legos! How can you not love Lego animation?

The Great Question

Great thinkers through the ages have pondered the many mysteries of life. Why are we here? Why is there something rather than nothing? Does God exist? What is the capital of Assyria? But none of these questions have come close to the ultimate question of our time: What if the Beatles were Irish?

Teaching The Tongue To See

From The Frontal Cortex via Andrew Sullivan, this video of an incredible piece of technology that purports to enable blind persons to perceive and navigate their environment in a manner analogous to sight by "remapping" signals received via the tongue to the visual cortex of the brain. Jaw-droppingly amazing:



I found it interesting to note the difficulty the sighted person had in attempting to use the device. It put me in mind of the old canard about blindness heightening the awareness of other senses and I wonder if the learning curve would be as high for a blind person.

I was also fascinated to learn from Jonah's post (at Frontal Cortex) that a similar experiment was performed with ferrets wherein information transmitted from their retinas was fed to the auditory (as opposed to visual) cortex and yet the ferrets could still see! Their brains were able to "remap" the signals and translate them appropriately. Incredible.

Funny O' The Day

While I do not wish to turn this blog into a YouTube extravaganza, I simply have to share this video my mother emailed to me. Anita Renfroe distills the essence of daily mothering into 2:54 seconds of hilarity accompanied by the overture from Rossini's "William Tell". Enjoy.

Lewis Black on Fossils: "Handiwork of the Devil!"

Lewis Black is one of my favorite comedians. This clip demonstrates one of the many reasons why.



HT: Unscrewing The Inscrutable