Category Archives: youtube

that's not funny that's sick, youtube

While I’m Being All Preachy

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Ack, there have been two posts I have made thus far that I felt I were a bit too obnoxiously strident. The McDonald’s post was one of them (here’s the other).

I really need to leave the moralizing to the professionals. And they don’t get any more professional than Florrie Fisher. If she looks eerily like Amy Sedaris in Strangers With Candy, it’s no coincidence. She was the inspiration for the show.

Now, thanks to the kind folks at YouTube, and the generous people who uploaded it, here’s a moving, heartfelt documentary from Fisher and Company:

The Trip Back

(Note: If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, at least watch the Q&A in Part 3).

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

stuff-you-may-have-missed, youtube

maoR If You Want To

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Having just selected the wonderful B-52’s song “Roam” for the upcoming What’s In A Word? Green Monkey Mix, it reminded me of a minor epiphany I had regarding the song (to be specific, the video of the song).

I would occasionally watch music videos back at the end of the 80’s. I loved this song, so I’d watch it if it came on. One thing that always popped out at me was the image of some men riding in the back of a pickup truck.

What struck me was the word on the back of the truck — “ATOYOT”. I know that car manufacturers have different models in different countries — for example, I rented a Ford Mondeo in Austria a few years back, a model I had never seen in the US. So, I had just assumed the “Atoyot” was a foreign-marketed model.

It wasn’t until several years later, as I was driving down a highway near Chicago, that I happened to catch a glimpse of the back of a large sign. And then, I suddenly understood.

The makers of the video had flipped the image! I didn’t realize it at first because all the letters in the name are symmetrical.

Here’s the video in its entirety. The truck doesn’t make an appearance until just past the three and a half minute mark.

youtube

This Will Most Certainly End Badly

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Oh boy, have I stepped in it.

Frank Sirmarco has answered my gayest video ever post with a challenge of his own.

I’m scrambling to find an appropriate video, but here is an initial volley.

It’s not a music video technically, but I think you’ll agree it matches Frank’s video, if not outgays it.

UPDATE!

Okay, seeing as I am up wrassling with the water in my basement, I had time between seepage cleanup to find a bonafide gayer video than Frank’s. Please, join Limahl in his personal library for “The Neverending Story”.

the gay side of splotchy, youtube

The Gayest Video Ever

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From the forthcoming Splotchy compendium, The Big Book Of Gay Videos:

Sting – Fortress Around Your Heart

If anyone wants to challenge me on this, please feel free to post your own nomination for the gayest video ever.

Oh, and you can’t choose Imagination’s “Just An Illusion” as it has already been posted here.

teevee, youtube

Spaced

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Kristi is going to talk about the latest TV series she is catching up with after-the-fact, and she expects a throwdown like that to go unchallenged?!

What the hell am I talking about? I don’t rightly know. I guess because of the fact that she was writing about catching up with a show she had never seen, and I am in the midst of doing the same thing, I thought I would share. I’m a sharer, you know.

After seeing Hot Fuzz at the LaGrange, and rewatching Shaun of the Dead recently on the teevee, I thought I’d dig a little deeper into the history of their creators, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright.

Way, way back in 1999 they put together a slackerish pop-culture rich sitcom called Spaced. It took me a couple episodes to get into it, but I’m at the end of Season 1 now, and liking it very, very much.

I’m not going to go into the details of the show — from what I can tell, every episode of the damn show is up on YouTube (though the episodes *are* split into bite-size chunks).

Still, I’ll give you a scene from my favorite episode thus far. Simon Pegg’s character gets a visit from his bike messenger friend Tyres, who is also a hardcore rave music freak that can’t help but feel the rhythm.

movies, youtube

Deliverance

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Including “Dueling Banjos” on the recent Shark Mix made me think again about the movie that popularized the song, Deliverance.

I really like this movie a lot. I know that this song has come to be used as a lazy shorthand jab at rural Southerners, but the scene containing the song is really amazing, and much more complex than the cheap jokes and inferior imitations it has spawned.

Seeing characters like the urban hillbillies who capture Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction (a scene not all that bad, especially compared with all the other psychohillbilly scenes in various movies), I just think that the greatness of this scene, and this movie, is eclipsed by a lot of easy prejudice and stupid jokes.

The “dueling banjos” scene is a meeting of two different cultures, and in the four main protagonists you get a really good sense of their characters.

Burt Reynolds’s character is full of bravado, forcefully macho.
Ned Beatty has contempt for anything different than himself.
Ronny Cox is enthusiastically engaged, only wanting to learn.
Finally, Jon Voight is sort of a blank slate (who later on the viewer is meant to identify with).

I love that this scene shows music bringing people together. During just the several minutes of the song, you see the suspicion between the cultures melt away. Burt Reynolds loses his macho scowl. Ned Beatty even manages to crack a smile. The quiet boy playing banjo starts laughing.

But, as soon as the song stops, everything snaps back. People are closed off, Ned Beatty says, “give the kid a couple bucks.”

It’s just a damned fine scene that gets soaked in parody maybe a bit too much.