YouTube Digger

Okay, not everyone loves Sesame Street, but everyone has seen it. You’re either a kid, have a kid, were recently a kid, or have grandkids, and any of those things means that you’ve seen Sesame Street.

When my kids were little, the Street had started to have guest appearances from some very big celebrities, including many musicians and bands. They always perform one of their big songs, but with some sort of Street twist on it. Many of them have been extremely clever, but none more so than REM’s Street rendition of “Shiny, Happy People,” originally released on their 1991 album “Out of Time.” The Street version is called “Happy Furry Monsters (having fun).” The whole band performs it in the midst of a crowd of happy (wait for the twist!) bouncing muppet monsters. Keep your eye out for guitarist Peter Buck, here on banjo, trying not to laugh while a big yellow muppet cuddles up to him.

I’m not sure why I found this video so charming, but it probably has something to do with the wind-that-wasn’t-a-tornado that came through my neighborhood several years ago. One evening, in the midst of a big thunderstorm, there was a “wind event” that destroyed major swathes of trees through our town, neighborhood, and very own yard. I have an acre lot that is mostly wooded, and by my best count, we had twenty trees completely uprooted, four more cut down by the utility company that was trying to untangle major power lines from our downed trees, and at least six more severely damaged trees that had to be dealt with by the tree people.

We also had one of the panels of our front door blown out and down the front hallway, while the garage door, a mere twenty feet or so to the right of the front door, was sucked out of it’s frame and into the driveway. Fortunately, we had no roof or other damage to the house.

There were trees down and debris blown all over the area. It certainly looked like a tornado. But the TV weatherman that night explained it had been a downdraft, which is a sudden blast of air from a thundercloud that shoots straight down to the earth at great speed, and when it hits the ground the wind moves outward from the point of impact until the energy finally dissipates. Whatever. It did much the same damage a tornado would do, and we had far fewer trees in our woods than we had before. It took the utility company two days to repair the line that ran along our property (and therefore two days to move their heavy equipment out of our driveway), and another three days or so for the army of tree people to cut and chip all the trees in our yard.

This video documents the removal of a very large oak tree which was felled by a tropical storm.

Spring arrived last week. Some of us have flowers, others will in the next couple of months, but sometime in the Spring, everyplace will show out their native flowering beauty. I spent the first decade or so of my life in North Carolina, which absolutely explodes in the spring with azaleas and dogwoods. Mature azaleas in North Carolina are large bushes that flower with pink to purple hued blossoms of the most delicate and gossamer like kind. The bushes grow in groups, so that when they are in bloom it looks like great, fluffy purple and pink clouds. And not far overhead the dogwoods bloom similarly delicate flowers in white with a light pink shading.

I later lived in Maryland, where the spring show was not quite as spectacular, but much more welcome after the bleak and gray winter. Now I live in Texas, in the part which is dry and western enough that azaleas grow only with difficulty and not very big anyway, but we have something that we are proud of (which kind of goes without saying - if it’s in Texas then Texans are proud of it). And that thing is Bluebonnets. Wild flowers of many kinds pop in fields all over central Texas in the spring, but the most beloved of all is the bluebonnet.

And finally, here’s a little flower silliness.

Today, a joyous day in the lives of candy lovers everywhere, I have joyous, happy dancing bunny videos for you.

So enjoy!

Yes, it’s Easter weekend, so of course I have YouTubes of bunnies. But this first one is not your typical bunnie and chickie Easter scene. Apparently, animal society has the same character types as people society does. Here are a couple of thug bunnies, the wastrels from the wrong side of the tracks. They run into a couple of tough, street-wise older guys, perhaps they started out the same as these bunnies, disaffected misguided youth, and have now grown into role models who haven’t forgotten where they came from but have a learned a better way.

At any rate, it’s very unexpected to see this from chickens and bunnies. It’s amazing to me to see how much this looks like a human street scene. Two boys (rabbits) fighting, then the older men (in this case chickens, how ironic) swoop in and separate them. Each chicken takes a bunny off to the side, keeping them separated until they have a chance to calm down, maybe offering a bit of advice or common sense, and then once the adrenaline has been tamped down and the chickens are satisfied the fight won’t flare back up, they leave. Who knew?

Hello there, how are the days going by? Remember the times you laughed when the days were good, and when your cried when all the days were bad? I hope you can remember those emotions in distinct ways because the video has something that you ought to see. I don’t think the audio is clear enough to actually tell when the mother of the baby is saying for the baby to change emotions so quickly.

Nevertheless, its not that hard to get laughing or crying mixed up, but the video proves otherwise. Its not as hilarious as the one baby video where the baby just laughs whenever someone says a word, it doesn’t even matter what the word is. Regardless, if this doesn’t make you laugh just the slightest bit, then you must be under a lot of stress or completely unemotional.

According to some psychological event, when you see a person smile, the natural response is for you to smile, you can not evade it, it just happens naturally (or its supposed to anyways). I can see how one can suppress their emotions of not smiling, but this is not good for you, as some of the Indians say “Laughing is the best medicine.”

Try this: At least once every hour, just smile for the heck of it ,there doesn’t have to be a particular reason, but if you do find one, its perfectly fine. Now, its not going to work over just 1 or 2 days, try it for a week making sure you smile atleast once every hour, and I can assure you that you will be able to feel happier for no apparent reason. But you will definitely find a reason to be happy about, and think that is the ultimate reason. See if it works out!

Please feel free to leave any comments as all are appreciated and welcomed :D

Well, Hello all!
Here is something that you must see. Its dice stacking, I’ve heard of cup staking and a lot of other things like this but never dice stacking, but nevertheless, youtube has it. Anyways, the art of dice stacking takes plenty of practice, and all you really need is a couple of heavy dice a cup with no interference, and maybe a little practice, and byt the time your done, you’ll be just like the rest of people who spend an arbitrarily large amount of time making videos to impress people?

Well, it doesn’t seem hard right? Well, I think you might be a little wrong yourself, I haven’t tried it myself, but I believe it will take at least 2 hours for me to learn the art, I am much better with cards (and don’t push the envelope there because I’m not the greatest there either… ) Before going through all of youtube’s videos, I found myself wondering how the dice stacking was even possible, but the simple answer to that question is: INERTIA

Inertia is what keeps the dice from falling from the cup to the ground, and also why all of the dice stack into proper columns. The way the person throws the cup back and forth make the dice rotate around the inside of the cup, and all at the same time if done in a properly fashion, that is exactly what makes the art of dice stacking possible.

Here are some videos and tutorials of how it is possible (don’t count on it that greatly because it could just be a bunch of little kids teaching you how to do something… :P Not that its a bad thing)

I love bloopers, especially news bloopers. I guess it’s the contrast between the studiously serious demeanor of most newscasters and the utterly human mistakes they sometimes make. Or maybe I’m not any different than the Three Stooges fans that love slapstick. Anyway, here’s a good set - I particularly love the newsperson walking into the screen prematurely, and the very last one with the runaway camera.

Here it is folks, the Iron Man trailer, supposedly in HD as I got it off of youtube. (First of all the resolution for Youtube is not set to HD, so there is no way you can actually post a HD version of Iron Man on youtube! ) But worry not folks, because this video is worth the watching.

With all the high gadgetry moments flying around us every day (i.e. iPhone, tablet PCs, etc, etc…) this movie intrigues us all when there is a man who can do everything from shooting missiles from the forehand of his suit to flying with the Airforce. As much as we want this to be true, we all know that it cannot be true, and this is what we seek. We seek exactly what that can’t be done to amaze us to thinking that someone in a movie can actually do it.

This is why Spiderman, Batman, and Superman have become such great movies. Other than the heart-filling endings each of them have, the ability to do extra-ordinary things is what makes us want to watch movies. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I sure wish I had the ability to even just make the suit that could fly. Forget launching deadly missiles, I just want to be able to fly without getting hurt.

Just one thing that I don’t understand about the suit is that how can it not hurt the person who is accessing the suit inside? How is this phenomena possible?

Please feel free to leave any comments, as all are welcomed and appreciated :D

My husband’s niece is in Austin today, cheering for her high school boys basketball team in the state semi-finals. He and our daughter got tickets and went to watch, leaving at 6:30 this morning to get downtown, parked, and in their seats before the 8:30 am start time for the game. The early start probably means no popcorn and cotton candy snacks, which no doubt makes my daughter enormously sad, but I bet they’ll have a ball anyway.

I’m definitely a basketball girl. Never played it, but I’m from North Carolina, where basketball is what football is to Texas. Well, maybe not quite, Texas and football outstrip all other activities, but nonetheless, basketball is big in my home state.

And it’s even bigger at my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dean Smith was a legend nearly the entire time he was coach there, and the number of star players produced there is hard to count.

And of course, no UNC star player ever became bigger than Michael Jordan, who played while I was at UNC. I got to watch his early days, when he played second fiddle to James Worthy, even in the 1982 NCAA championship game. Jordan was big news from the moment he signed his recruitment commitment papers, no doubt about it, but he was still just one of many on that phenomenal team - Worthy, Sam Perkins, Matt Doherty, Jimmy Black, and of course just the year prior to Jordan’s freshman year we had Al Wood. So Jordan stood out, but just barely and largely because of his odd habit of sticking his tongue out - way, waaay out - when he took shots.

This is Jordan’s very first college basketball game.

Later that year, the team, with freshman Jordan, won the NCAA Championship.

I book bands sometimes.
I hate it.
It seems like it should be fairly straightforward. Clubs book bands, bands play in clubs. Find a club where you want to play, find a band that has the kind of music you want, and boom, there should be a match. But for some reason it never actually works like that. I’ve been on both sides of the booking game, and I know there is a huge variation in the quality of the band and you have to be careful as a venue to be sure you get the level of musicianship that you are expecting. Some places are good for beginning bands, some are not. But it seems like it should be pretty easy to tell, pretty quickly, how good and how professional the band is. And yet . . . many clubs act like I act when salespeople cold call my home - I put them off and don’t pay any attention to what they’re selling. My attitude is that when I want to shop, I’ll shop, and I will not, by golly, be told by any salesperson that I have to shop right now!

But club booking doesn’t work that way. They need and want bands to approach them, but they still often act like you’ve interrupted their dinner and they can’t bebothered.

Not all club music buyers are like this, of course. There are plenty that listen to the band, decide if they are right or wrong forthe club, and then tell you straight out. Badda bing. Simple.

Just not the norm.

Anyway, I found this clip of a booking agent talking about booking bands. What she says is not funny, but I found the clip to be very funny, as it looks like she is actually saying about three times as much as the audio gives you. For some reason the video and audio are not synched up and her mouth is moving a mile a minute, unlike the word you are hearing. And it doesn’t say this, but I think she is standing on south Congress street in Austin. Check it out.

Little girls love ballerinas. There is something nearly universal about them. Even I was in love with ballerinas, albeit for only a short while. I took ballet for one year when I was in the first grade. Our class uniform was a blue tulle tutu, and I’m sure the parents were charmed by all the fluffy little girls. I just didn’t last very long. She never said anything, but I suspect my mother was confused and disappointed, but I may have been saved by the fact that not long after my younger sister started ballet, and she took to it with a vengeance. Can you say that girls dance with a vengeance? Does that work? Anyway, Lisa danced all through school, the whole four or five times a week thing that required our mother to be a soccer mom before that term was invented.

Now I’m the soccer mom, only it’s still ballet. My youngest daughter is eleven and already has six years of ballet training under her belt - and it would have been even more if I had agreed to sign her up at age three, like she wanted me to do. I just thought that was a little young for organized activities, so we bought floaty tutu’s and danced around the living room at home with wands and long scarves. For my money, that was a lot more fun for both of us. However, the ballet desire was still in her at five, so I signed her up and she has been dedicated to ballet ever since. She now spends four days a week in class, a total of six hours a week, and shows serious dedication to the art.

And last week, her class started training on pointe. In the ballet world, this is the equivalent of losing your virginity. You look forward to it for years. You talk endlessly about what it will be like. You can hardly sleep at night for thinking about it. You romanticize to such a point that the reality can never live up to the fantasy. And finally, you do it. You buy your first pointe shoes, you rise up for the very first time - and discover, amidst all the exhilaration and wondering if everyone can tell that you are a pointe dancer, that it hurts. After that, although it is still exciting, you learn that it requires a lot of work, a lot of maintenance, and it still hurts sometimes.

I discovered a whole series of ballet information and training videos produced by the Anaheim Ballet. This one instructs in the proper way to tie pointe shoes - because, like sex, dancing on pointe is both simple and extremely complex at the same time.

But this video, like a Hollywood movie shows us only the romance of happily ever after, shows only the beauty of the art.