"Corgi on a Carousel."

Via Metafilter.

And here's Buzzfeed's "40 Most Important Corgis Of 2013."

"In the video below, you'll see a local boffin get to work digging for bones with a nasty hook/knife implement."

"At this point cunning Reg readers are probably thinking that a very large, rather dead, creature is going to have rather a lot of gas trapped somewhere within its innards. And that if the organ containing said gas isn't handled well, nasty things may result. Let's roll tape to put that hypothesis to the test...."



Oh, quiet down. It's not like you weren't warned. I know it's Thanksgiving. Maybe you'll be deterred from overeating, and this is one more thing to be thankful for.

"You will spend the next hour watching this new video for Bob Dylan’s 'Like a Rolling Stone'..."

"...  Good luck not spending the rest of your day watching this."

I linked to that yesterday, and I'm only bringing it up again to observe that I — a big Dylan fan for 5 decades — spent only about a minute looking at it, which is much less than the length of the song itself. So what's the deal with all these journalists claiming that we're going to become obsessed with watching it for hours or all day?

The quote I've chosen for this post seems about typical to me. It comes from David Malitz at The Washington Post, and Malitz appears to be a fairly young person, at least not an old boomer Dylan fan like me.

My reaction to the video was: 1. Here's the Dylan song that's used to represent all Dylan songs when you want to reach the largest possible audience with the message that you are playing a Dylan song, 2. I'm hearing the Dylan recording but I'm seeing some TV person mouthing the words, a type of performance that is annoying even when your dearest loved one does it; it's not cute. 3. So there are a bunch of TV people who were willing to go on camera mouthing the words of the entire 6+ minute song. 4. Either show me Bob Dylan with the voice of Bob Dylan or cover the song with your own voice and do it well (not cutesy) or leave me alone.

People like Malitz aren't so much interested in the Dylan song as in the various TV personalities who signed on the project and did the full 6+ minutes of mouthing and the technological achievement of making an interactive video that allows you to drop in on the various celebrities at any point in the song. Isn't it charming how they're all there on different channels, all synched to the same place in the song? It's not so much about Dylan as it is about hey, it's Steve Levy, hey, it's The Property Brothers. This is what could occupy a lot of time: checking out who all the TV people are and being charmed by how they look keeping up with the song. You've got to find that cute.

But Dylan is not about cute. Sample Dylan uses of "cute":

"And she buttoned her boot/And straightened her suit/Then she said, 'Don’t get cute'..."

"Now your dancing child with his Chinese suit/He spoke to me, I took his flute/No, I wasn’t very cute to him, was I?"

It was all about not getting cute... back in the 60s. But now maybe, with these kids today, cuteness is what it takes. You're supposed to get cute.

"We could tell you that the interactive video consists of 16 separate videos starring familiar actors and TV personalities lip-synching the lyrics to Dylan's 1965 karaoke classic 'Like A Rolling Stone'..."

"... and that viewers can use their keyboards to flip between these videos seamlessly throughout the duration of the song, so that the opening lines are performed by the guys from Pawn Stars and the song wraps up in the middle of a History Channel special about the Great Depression."

Or wherever you direct it... with no direction home.

But why not just watch it?

Like a complete unknown celebrity.

Viral videos I have not seen, that everybody saw.

Meade is free-associating with elements that I am not getting at all. He can't believe I never saw this. Everyone saw it. It was viral!

What's happening to this world in which there will be allusions — not to the great books and important historical events — but to old viral videos?

From "Change" to "Exchange" — the deflation of Obama elation and how can old enthusiasts find comfort.

Surely, it must be happening, an emergent Obama nostalgia, to take the edge off the dreariness of what the Obama administration has become. There must be those who, seeking solace, are looking back to old comforts like Obama Girl:



Let's close in on that 4th verse:

You’re into border security
Let’s break this border between you and me
Universal healthcare reform
It makes me warm
You tell the truth unlike the right
You can love but you can fight
You can Barack me tonight
I’ve got a crush on Obama

Oh, it's so hard to keep nostalgia pure. Can you watch — and by "you," I mean only those who have loved Obama — and not talk back? Universal healthcare reform/It makes me warm. Yeah, "warm" as in: overheated with anger. You tell the truth unlike the right... Yeah, that's true if you read it the right way. It could mean that all politicians talk at us in a manner that is intended to be received as "truth-telling," that contains elements of truth, exaggeration, and falsehood, and that there are different ways to perform this necessary political activity, and the politicians on the right do it one way, and the way Obama does it is a different way.

"Kids React to Gay Marriage."

This video has gone viral.

Much as I support same-sex marriage and think these children are adorable, I have a few problems:

1. Using children to get out a political message. They're too young to consent, so it's an invasion of their privacy, and they're too young really to understand the issues, even if their out-of-the-mouths-of-babes opinions charm us (especially when we agree).

2. The video is edited, so we don't hear any "wrong" answers the videographers didn't want us to hear, and we don't hear the extent of the leading questions and promptings by the adults... which takes us back to point 1: using children. When you do things with children, that particular child's interests must be placed first.

3. These children — at least most of them — have probably already been indoctrinated. We're told they are "from California." What schools have they attended? What have they been told? Do they even know what sexual feeling is? Do they understand the issue basically in terms of being nice to other people and liking what you like?

Pianist Maria João Pires horrified, frozen, as the orchestra begins a Mozart concerto other than the Mozart concerto she prepared.

Watch her dismay, and watch the conductor, Riccardo Chailly, push her to go ahead and play the concerto she didn't expect to be playing that night. Watch her regain her composure and play.



And if you're in the mood for more emotion and music, here's a baby listening to her mother sing and displaying an unearthly profundity of response:

"What is this feeling that I have inside? It makes me feel gloomy..."

Lena D is out to "reduce shame and embarrassment." Meade laughed much more than I did, and I especially liked the part where the guys in the locker room join the catchy refrain: "It's my PEER-eee-udd..."

Great shakes.

The previous post talks about the 1960s dance called "the shake," which The Supremes were instructed to do with their "buttocks under" rather than "protruding." I wanted to see some video of what this old dance really looked like, a search that was complicated by the YouTube era meme the Harlem Shake... not to be confused with the actual dance called the Harlem Shake, which goes back to 1981 and is also not the 1960s shake I'm looking for.

I amend my search to "1960s dance  the shake," and I get this old TV commercial:



Both Meade and I felt a big nostalgic twinge of recognition at the point where the pyramid-shaped packets of powder are dumped out of the plastic shaker.

And speaking of pyramids, the inventor of the dance the Harlem Shake, Al B says:

It's a drunken shake anyway, it's an alcoholic shake, but it's fantastic, everybody loves it and everybody appreciates it. And it's glowing with glory. And it's respected. But if we could mystify it, and become historian, about this Egyptian jazz... Pharaohs invented this thing, with spears, and hats, and gowns. And so, it becomes a subject of being communicative to the system and to realization. If you get my drift.... It was a drunken dance, you know, from the mummies, in the tombs. That's what the mummies used to do. They was all wrapped up and taped up. So they couldn't really move, all they could do was shake...

Yes, but how about the 1960s dance? I see "'Shake!!' - RJ & The Del Guapos - (60's dances)," but the dancers are obviously doing the twist and the pony, so this is not an authoritative depiction. And here's a video with the Sam Cooke song "Shake" — "a new dance that's going around" — but, again, somebody just threw together clips of 60s people dancing a jumble of 60s dances. But I did immensely enjoy the appearance of  the word "shake" clipped from the Great Shakes TV commercial!

So... finally, here's The Supremes, singing and dancing "The Shake" on the British TV show "Ready Steady Go" in 1965. That's kind of bad. This is much better, also on "Ready Steady Go." The year is 1966:



BONUS: The Who do a Great Shakes commercial. But those of us who followed The Who back then — I was a member of The Who Fan Club before they released their first album in the U.S. — know that The Who sold out early. It looked like this:

"Our generation wants to know what is going on, but we want it to be fun.... We think people get virality all wrong..."

"The reason people share things are not just because they are shiny and cute and crazy and fun, but because it is about something they are deeply passionate about. It can be about putting your best aspirational self forward."

Says Peter Koechley, on of the founders of Upworthy, interviewed in the NYT.

They began thinking about a site focused on what they considered noble causes, but it took until 2011, when [Chris Hughes, an early founder of Facebook] gave them $500,000 in seed capital, for both to start working on it full-time....

Upworthy produces none of its own content. Instead, it employs roughly 20 “curators” who find obscure video and graphics (but not text) in topic areas — like sexuality, civil rights or economics — that they feel are meaningful, but being passed over. The site repackages the freely available content with snappy headlines and content teases....

Disclosure: Koechley was one of the editors of a Madison high school humor zine, who used to meet at my house back in the 1990s.

Related fact: If only I'd taken my first husband's name, it would be more obvious — on the internet — that I am the author of a non-existent book titled "Post-Divorce, Pre-Death."

"You need to help me make the bed."/"You need to take me to the ball."

Did you like that? You need to answer in your king's voice.

I quit, because my boss only cared about quantity, not quality, and now this video has 8,532,328 views in 4 days.

Videographer dances her parting words to her boss, Via Metafilter, where people don't all appreciate the humor of her going after virality when she resented the boss's pursuit of virality. And:

I don't get it. I love a viral video as much as the next person, but neither the original nor the response was amusing or cute or interesting. She didn't do anything fantastically rebellious, or dish dirt, or anything. She just danced around the office a little -- we've all done that.

There's also the problem of appropriating someone else's music. And someone complains about her title for the video — "An Interpretive Dance For My Boss Set To Kanye West's Gone" — when "that is not interpretive dance/that is just bopping around."

Here's the above-referenced response from the company.

(Actually, the whole thing seems like a "subversive"-type ad for the company. Is it really that cute? And what's Kanye West going to do about it?)

ADDED: I've removed the embedded video, partly out of respect for Kanye West, but also because I've become convinced of what I was previously merely skeptical was the case: This is viral advertising.

The mutable sexuality of an internet celebrity.

Antoine Dodson, the hide-you-kids-hide-your-wife viral-video celebrity, has been tweeting about causing a pregnancy in a woman:

"I just became the happiest man alive!! My beautiful Queen and I are having a baby!!" he tweeted. "Wait what?" one user wrote. "Aren't you gay?" another added.

Last May, Dodson claimed he wanted "a wife and family" and "to multiply and raise and love my family that I create." Dodson explained in a series of tweets that he had become a "True Hebrew Israelite descendant of Judah" and referred to his former lifestyle as "foolish."

"I have to renounce myself, I'm no longer into homosexuality," he concluded.

ADDED: He doesn't seem to be denying his homosexual orientation, just rejecting the behavior urged by the orientation, which is exactly what many religions teach. He isn't claiming to be sexually attracted to the woman that he's gotten pregnant. You'd think if he were devoted to following traditional religious teachings he would refrain from pregnancy-causing behavior outside of marriage. Who knows what the whole story is?

There are several moral/religious issues that we can't disentangle in this particular case without knowing more. And I don't really need to know more about Antoine Dodson to go on with the issues raised in a more general fashion:

1. A man's desire to produce offspring is separate from his desire to have sexual intercourse with a particular human being, and many men of homosexual orientation have produced children with women who don't interest them sexually. One reason it's helpful to be honest and not repressed about homosexuality is so that people don't deceive themselves into entering sexually unsatisfying marriages.

2. A homosexual man who wants a family with children might attract a woman into a marriage (or other child-bearing relationship). He could be deceiving himself and her — which is very sad. He could be only deceiving her — which is just plain wrong. Or the 2 of them could be eyes-wide-open about what they are doing, which is, if they really understand what they are doing, a matter of individual choice.

3. It's a separate issue whether that man and woman, having formed a family like that, give each other permission to find sexual satisfaction with other partners. That's not traditional morality, but it is a matter of individual choice.

4. And it's a separate issue whether a man and a woman, having come together to bring a child into the world, must stay together to raise that child. This is the most serious moral issue, because the child isn't given any choice.

Fly like an eagle.

"Is string theory right?/Is it just fantasy?/Caught in the landscape/Out of touch with reality..."

"Tim Blais, a physics graduate student at McGill University, performs an a-capella version of his masters thesis to the tune of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody."

Butting heads.

(Via Metafilter.)

Aging.

A 5-minute visualization, brilliantly achieved:

Danielle from Anthony Cerniello on Vimeo.

"Who the hell are you?"

Are you living a wholesome life?

The video here makes the best argument for living a wholesome life that I've seen in a long time.