YouTube Digger

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.

We had some excitement on my street last week. One of the neighbors’ house was struck by lightning and caught fire. Although the inside of the house was a royal mess - and unlivable - the fire department arrived very quickly and so the structure was not burned too badly. The roof of the house did not burn, which meant that you could see, very clearly, the giant, charred hole where the lightning had actually made contact. I wonder why we don’t regularly use lightning rods on houses around here?

This video shows a tree being struck by lightning at close range.

This video news report has footage of a minivan being struck by lightning while driving down a road.

I used to live in Los Angeles. I was there for several earthquakes, mostly small, inconsequential quakes. Once you go through your first quake, you see why the veteran residents don’t seem to be all wrought up at the thought that their lovely state is on the verge of falling into the Pacific Ocean (something my father mentioned a lot while we were growing up far away on the east coast, but he said it to remind us all that if you act like wacky nuts – his opinion of Californians – then it was inevitable that Mother Nature would eventually annihilate you). The first earthquake was kind of fun, once I realized that it actually WAS an earthquake, and was sure it was over and not coming back again. In the coming months there were a couple more little quakes – what fun! Because I got to call the family back on the east coast and talk about the quake in jaded, laconic prose.

Then one morning, while I was getting ready to leave for the day, another quake came, and it didn’t stop at “little.” My previous quake encounters had been over so quickly that I never had time to take any of the earthquake safety advice my new LA friends had so generously shared with me. This time, however, I needed the advice. Of course, my first instinct was to do exactly what I had been told not to do – try and run outside. The first rule of earthquake safety is to stay still in a spot that is least likely to offer the opportunity of having things fall on you, like under a heavy table or in a doorway, where the bracing of the door frame offers protection from falling ceilings. But when the shaking started, and didn’t stop three seconds later, I went for the front door. However, we had a keyed deadbolt and the building was shaking so badly I couldn’t get my hands on the key which we kept on top of a bookcase beside the door. So, my dangerous instinct thwarted, I stepped in to a nearby doorway, where I was bounced from side to side by the 6.1 magnitude quake.

While nothing to sneeze at, 6.1 is not a huge quake, and fortunately the damage it left was mostly minor, thanks to good building codes in the city. Not so with the famous, and catastrophic, 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. This YouTube photo montage of damage in the city is set to the Natalie Merchant song “San Andreas Fault.”
This is actual film footage of the quake’s aftermath, although the film quality has deteriorated greatly and is difficult to see. It’s still stunning to see moving pictures of this event, though.

There’s also footage from the more recent 1989 San Francisco quake that caused extensive damage and loss of life.

And this amusing little clip is of a local news team reporting on the Los Angeles quake that I personally experienced.

Starting today, I get to share my YouTube treasures with you. I am agog (yes, agog) at the wonders that can be found on YouTube - it’s part entertainment, part vanity, part school, part encyclopedia, part news, part emotional release, part emotional incitement, part voyeur, part lost in space, and always astounding.

The very first share I will do with you is my own personal, all-time favorite YouTube find, Code Monkay as interpreted by Spiffworld. A guy named Jonathon Coulter wrote a song named “Code Monkey,” and invited others to create videos for it (how he got people to do this is a discussion in and of itself for the viral marketing wannabes). Many people made videos, most of which were mediocre to non-descript. And then came Spiffworld, with an absolutely brilliant interpretation of the Code Monkey, a gentle, good-hearted man who wants nothing more than a simple life and a pretty girl to love him, but has absolutely no idea how to get the girl. So here’s the best Code Monkey - my favorite part is the kittens under the desk. It always makes me smile.

Farewell.

It’s time I take my leave here from YouTube Digger. I’ve had an excellent time cruising the YouTube world and finding awesome videos, it’s time for me to move on to different spaces.

Thank you for all your comments and support. Hopefully there will be another writer to supply you with YouTube goodness soon.

You’ll still be able to find me at Fiction Scribe, Long Relationships, The Book Stacks, and Write Anyway.

Regards,

JM

Well, there certainly is a lot of crap to be waded through on YouTube, but I did find some reasonably good videos to help you celebrate Halloween.

These scary and sometimes weird videos feature ghost and orb sightings – or at least what the people believe to be ghosts and orbs. I think the haunted swing is the best, even though I could only embed the video that says it has proven it’s not haunted. I think the debunking videos are as interesting as the actual videos of the events.

And don’t worry; none of these videos are those silly pranks that get you to look close before cutting to scary face and playing a scream.

(I got scared by one of those before learning to look at the comments before watching the video. I really do hate those ones.)

Haunted Castle

Haunted Swing Explanation (Haunted Swing video not available for embedding)

Ghost Sighting?

Monte Cristo - Australia’s Most Haunted
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cPbIb5fXSE

YouTube, video, ghosts, orbs, sightings, halloween

Happy Halloween everyone! May your costumes be spooky, and may you get a large variety of sweets in your stash. Or, may many of your favourite spooky movies be on.

Halloween was always a love/hate part of my child. Love because of the fun and candy, hate because it reminded me how much money we didn’t have, given I usually had to make costumes out of things we could find at home.

Still, it’s a holiday many look forward to around the world.

But it didn’t quite start out that way…

Read the rest of this entry »

Australians might not celebrate Halloween as widely as other places, but I thought I’d get into the Halloween spirit anyway and post up a twisted video.

Hitchhikers are a pretty classic part of horror story history for decades now, and this video plays one that element quite well.

When a woman, all alone except for her dog, pick up a hitchhiker, only bad things can happen when the dog is the only thing keeping the hitchhiker from touching her…

Then the dog falls asleep…

I have to say I saw the ending of this one coming for the most part. The dog (you’ll see what I mean) I didn’t expect, but otherwise… It’s still a good creepy short and quite enjoyable.

Another good aniboom channel video to go in the YouTube Digger archives.

This is what happens when people with a lot of time and an imagination have fun.

Balloon bowl skateboarding!

I admit it; I am completely jealous of this guy. Or I would be if I could skateboard. This looks like so much fun. Just imagine being in a bunch of balloons that, put together, are taller than you.

Read the rest of this entry »

I love Saturday Night Live, but there is nothing like the classic Saturday Night Live days with Christopher Walken, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, Eddie Murphey, and more.

In this hilarious clip, Steve Martin gets down King Tut style with his “King Tut” song. The beauty of Steve Martin’s comedy is it doesn’t have to be outrageous to be funny. He can have fun with whatever he’s doing and you can’t help but laugh because he’s just plain funny when he’s having a good time.

This video is no different as he sings and dances – Nile style – along with a full entourage of Egyptian musicians and groupies.

If the Steve Martin dressed up as Tut can’t make you laugh, then I have no idea what will.

YouTube, video, King Tut, Saturday Night Live, Steve Martin, Christopher Walken, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, Eddie Murphey, Nile, Egypt, singing, dancing, costumes, music, comedy