Two days in a row? Wow. I guess I really am getting in the swing of things again. Well that, and my job bores me to tears, so I have ample time to troll the internet in search of little nibbles of awesome. Whatever those taste like, I’m in.
I’ve actually got a lot of stuff today, and less of my normal “hey you, listen to this, they’re really good, no seriously, here’s a video, and an mp3, and a link to their MySpace, and… oh. You don’t like them? Well fuck you then.”
I don’t know how many of you do it, but sitting and staring at the visualizer in iTunes or Media Player is just so awesome. Like when you really want to listen to something but you feel like you should be doing something else (like “working from home”, or homework, for those of you still in school). Well this guy has taken it a step further, by incorporating the actual lyrics of a Goldfrapp song into an extremely interesting solar visual.
Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.
This is a video montage found on Gawker that compiles all of the perils of being a TV newscaster. I can’t embed the video, but the clickthrough is definitely worth it. Included: 90’s reporter gets her hair set on fire by a dirtbike rocketing out of a truck, news reporter gets bombed and knocked out by some sort of flying objects from a small engine plane. It's the small things that are the most awesome sometimes.
I’m not sure that I’ve praised “Stuff White People Like” on this blog – it was something that was all over the internet a while back, and is a really funny site. It’s all about, well, stuff. That white people like. And it’s all so, so true, from their explanation of outdoor gear to people’s love of Mos Def. But! That’s actually not even my main point – there’s another site, called "Not Hating, Just Saying" that is kind of the same thing, where they, well, hate on stuff. Like “Office One-Liners”:
And no I don’t think it is Friday yet, but let me check the calendar again.
And I agree it IS another day, but I think I’m making more than a dollar I hope.
I wonder if this is some elitist way of speaking. Office speak. I wonder if other workplaces have their own phrases?
Slaves: You oppressed or you oppressing?
Prison Labor: Is it Friday yet? Cause I’m supposed to get raped then.
Illegal immigrants: Another day another…cheaper labor.
Oh, wow. I can’t believe I put this so far down. This video pretty much takes every question you ever had about Lost and sums it up. I seriously don’t even feel like I need to watch it anymore, I have so many answers now.
Just kidding. Fuckin’ Lost. Oh, and if you’re looking to get your Lost fix in a completely auditory way (weird, I know), there’s a band that does a musical recap-interpretation of each episode. For the one on “Meet Kevin Johnson”, the beginning is just the band members singing, “Waaaaallllt! Waaaalt!”, which is all stupid Michael does in the series anyways. http://www.myspace.com/previouslyonlostmusic
If you tried to click on any of the videos on the YouTube front page on April 1, you would have found yourself in front of the music video for Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. Well, apparently, the Mets decided to let their fans choose which song they would like played during the 7th inning stretch, complete with a “vote for your own” blank. Some blogger got ahold of it, put it on Digg, and thousands of inter-nerds voted to RickRoll the Mets. So, this entire season, while everyone is usually screaming along to “Sweet Caroline”, they’re gonna have to bop along to the deep-voiced crooning of the red-headed singer. Lulz.
Finally, I wanted to link a really, really good article, one that actually won a Pulitzer. Read the whole thing, you might learn something about yourself. Here’s an excerpt.
HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play. It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43
minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.
Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment? On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?
