100. … (Is that it?)
Brilliant idea.
[via Laughing Squid]
January 9, 2008
October 18, 2007
Watch Daily Show Video Clips Online
By golly they DID IT!
Watch Daily Show Video Clips Online
Comedy Central’s putting all Daily Show videos online (paired with subtle and well-thought-out advertising, natch).
1999-Now. Seven thousand one hundred twenty-eight videos so far.
The national productivity index makes a whooshing sound as it plummets by.
September 27, 2007
Mothers, don’t let your babies grow up to be sk8trs
Fun with ping pong balls.
Time spent? Who knows? Probably time enough to develop a perpetual motion machine or discover the meaning of life.
[Rube Goldberg, eat your heart out.]
September 22, 2007
"If your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let ‘em do it."
Read/watch this lecture, billed as Randy Pausch’s “last lecture.”
As an intro, the article in the WSJ that talks about the lecture.
The video of the speech is an hour and three-quarters if you watch to the very end. There’s also an edited five-minute video, but it doesn’t capture what the full video does.
Randy Pausch’s speech (and Randy Pausch), inspirational.
September 21, 2007
A coach. An act of kindness. Goosebumps. Tears.
The video this post links to is dashing around the Web this week even though it was taken four years ago.
Made me cry. I’m sure the young woman singing the National Anthem still remembers that night and the kindness of Mo.
Check out this article, written not long after the video was taken in 2003.
*sniffles*
Also check out Patti Digh’s blog, 37days, which is where this all came from.
September 20, 2007
For K and for those second cousins of mine who wear big buckles
Wandering from song to song in YouTube, I came across a couple anthems for a cowboy grandma and my second cousins who wear big buckles:
The Highwaymen: Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys
and
The Highwaymen: The Last Cowboy Song
‘night.
Who knew? Brian Hyland
I was reading someone’s blog tonight and they mentioned Brian Hyland and Gypsy Woman.
Gypsy Woman? What? I knew Gypsy Woman, of course, but had never associated it with Hyland. Why would I? I knew Hyland because of his big hit in the summer of 1962, Sealed With A Kiss. I know it was 1962 because that was the summer after fifth grade, the school year when I’d swooned over Phil Johnston, whose sister Sheila was in my older sister’s class. When school ended in June, Phil’d up and moved away. Sealed With A Kiss, was my anthem that summer as I mooned about. Sealed with a kiss, if only.
Same Brian Hyland? How many Brian Hyland’s singing in that time frame could there be?
So, I popped /”brian hyland” “gypsy woman” “sealed with a kiss”/ into Google and found out Hyland wasn’t a one hit wonder. He was indeed the same dude and, furthermore, his first and biggest hit (recorded in 1960 when he was a sophomore in high school) was Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini, written by Paul Vance and Lee Pockriss.
Who knew?
Last, but not least, my Web searching scored me a vid of Hyland lip-synching Sealed With A Kiss on some bandstand show, probably Dick Clark’s.
Check out the dancers! There’s a classic nerd with black rimmed glasses and plaid jacket and a girl doing what looks like the Frug. (No, not those on the stage behind him. Later in the video. Watch! The guy she’s dancing with is dressed in a buttoned cardigan sweater. No lie!)
Nostalgia hits hard tonight.
June 28, 2007
Some folks with faaaaar too much time on their hands
(For those who can’t embed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kvdq8cRNBM)
Rube Goldberg cooks ramen.
For jeffkos ’cause we all know how much he likes ramen and because I’m tinkering with the bookmarks I recently moved to http://del.icio.us/towse and I happen to be poking around in foodie links and came across Matt Fischer’s (moved since I first found it while he was at umr.edu) Official Ramen Homepage which eventually led me to YouTube (as all things do) and ’cause kos said the bikini wax post “did nothing to help my day along. Not a thing.” Here’s something to help your day along, Jeff. The things I will do for my funs.
Just six and a half minutes of your time. (You could be watching an egg hardboil.) This is better. Trust me.
NOTE: Japanese play-by-play …
June 13, 2007
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted – Amy E. Boyle Johnston
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted – Amy E. Boyle Johnston, LA Weekly.
[...]
Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.
“Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.
His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point.
“Useless,” Bradbury says. “They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.” He bristles when others tell him what his stories mean, and once walked out of a class at UCLA where students insisted his book was about government censorship. He’s now bucking the widespread conventional wisdom with a video clip on his Web site (http://www.raybradbury.com/at_home_clips.html), titled “Bradbury on censorship/television.”
As early as 1951, Bradbury presaged his fears about TV, in a letter about the dangers of radio, written to fantasy and science-fiction writer Richard Matheson. Bradbury wrote that “Radio has contributed to our ‘growing lack of attention.’… This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people.”
[...]
“I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV,” Bradbury says in the censorship/television video clip. The collection of clips includes his explanation of how he wrote Fahrenheit 451 in nine days in a clip titled (oddly enough) FAHRENHEIT 451.
The Bradbury site also includes a wonderful obit for Marguerite Susan McClure (Maggie) Bradbury, who died in 2003.
Sic Press: Book Repair & Cleaning Supplies for Booksellers
Sic Press not only sells supplies but also a how-to book: UNBOUND: Book Repair for Booksellers ($16).
Sic Press also offers (free!) on-site informative how-to videos with titles like “How to Remove a Bookplate” and “Re-attaching a Single Cover.”
Useful info on the Web for the bibliophiles with beat-up old books amongst us.