Do You Tube ???

My month long winter break here at Berkeley has often seen me ending up with nothing to do but sit and spend time with man's best friend in modern times -- his PC (yes ... PC !! ... not a dog, but maybe a Mac).  On such occasions, more often than not, I have indulged myself in some serious investigation of the content uploaded on YouTube. Now the very brilliance of this service has often left me completely awestruck, and at times speechless -- some geeky friend of mine once said "If it's not there on Wiki or YouTube, it's not there". I have come to pay more attention to his statements thereafter ...

So, back to the main issue -- month long break, bored of going around, sitting in front of computer ... nay ... PC, and 'doing YouTube'. In the process, I have come across some really brilliant stuff, and I just couldn't stop myself from mentioning some of them here. So, here you go ... I call it a "List-of-Things-to-Watch-on-a-rainy-weekend-when-all-the-bars-have-decided-to-go-dry-for-a-day-due-to-liquor-price-regulations-and-a-single-guy-like-you-has-not-much-on-the-plate-to-chose-from" :)

• Jeff Dunham --This dude is a friggin genius. Period. Just search for his name on YouTube, and you will find this ventriloquist with a set of puppets – Peanut, Walter, Achmed, and Jose the Jalapeno on a 'steek'. These are the more popular ones, there are three more puppets – Bubba J, Sweet Daddy D, and Melvyn. Check out his site www.jeffdunham.com too. His shows are so brilliant that I wish I could attend one of his shows.Apart from his shows, there are a couple of special videos that he had included in his dvd, like “Jingle Bombs”, and Walter's run for President of United States. There are also videos of show-bloopers, and the way he recovers from such mistakes in a live show is just stunning. If I say a word more I will probably ruin it ... hence, just search and watch.

• “Happy and u know clap ur hands” -- type in exactly this, no alternate spellings, and watch the first video. You never know how a Punjabi version of this very famous piece could have been conjured up.

• “Single girls” -- I had no idea how someone could come up with this though ... again search and watch.

• “Animator vs Animation” -- some good old stick figure animation, but this is of a much superior quality than the usual ones (like, say, the stick figure matrix fight sequence). Searching for this will give you a series of animation videos, and some of them are really entertaining (check out for the one in which Avast Antivirus takes the rebel-stick-figure in prison, and then uses it's rebellious streak to block pop-ups :D) 

• “Shoes” -- I have no words to describe what this is ... you need to watch it to realize. Liam Kyle Sullivan, an American comedian, won a People's Choice Award for this. There are other similar shows of his available on YouTube too.

• “Where the Hell is Matt?” -- The fact that the background score is in Bengali is not the reason I became a fan of this video. Just watch video game designer Matt Harding dance his way to internet-fame, and you will start liking that one dance move repeated at places around the world. It has become a craze like 'Numa Numa' had become, and there are many related videos that have spawned up – including “Where on Google Earth is Matt?”, “Where the Hell are Matt's Outtakes?”, “Where the Hell is matt's Girlfriend?”, and “How the Hell did Matt get People to Dance with him ?”. Just to finish it off, I actually saw someone dancing the Matt-step in Berkeley streets, though I was not quite able to relate it to this video immediately.

• “Matrix on Windows” -- You might find a couple of videos, but the best one is the one from 'Collegehumor'. Watch out for the final statement about Neo wanting to learn Ubuntu to run the Matrix. :P

• “Jizz in my Pants” -- aired as a 'Digital Short' (videos made using digital video-cams and then edited and processed on a normal personal computer) on 'Saturday Night Live', this video is supposedly the first single from the debut album of this band called 'The Lonely Island' which includes SNL's actors Andy Samberg, and Jorma Taccone. Aagin, one of those videos which are difficlut to describe in words. (As a separate issue altogether ... Saturday Night Live simply rocks !!)

• “Minesweeper: The Movie” -- Another 'Collegehumor' video, and it is indeed quite something. Check out for the tagline for the movie “This Summer What is Yours is Mine”. And the brilliant 'link-to-the-movie-site' parody.

• “4'33”: John Cage” -- All I can say is, it's unique, and the rest is silence ... :D. Do check out Wikipedia's entry on John Cage, and on this specific composition of his.
  

That completes my list. There are now a couple of points to be addressed. Firstly, I just gave the search terms and not the links or the videos for each entry. The reason is, the whole fun in this exercise is to explore YouTube's vast reserve. You search, and then maybe you check out some other video that might have come up on the list, and discover something different. After all, you are mostly jobless to be doing this anyways. 

Second, many people have actually told me that these stuff have no point at all, save for some senseless escapades which are just a waste of time. I would like to take this opportunity to make my stand on this, and say that some of the videos/pieces on YouTube are indeed brilliant examples of creative genius, parodies, witty-mockeries, and most importantly, of skills that would have otherwise gone completely unnoticed. Such a unique platform for such seemingly out-of-ordinary or unusual talent can only do good to fostering the true spirit of creativity. That's a huge huge 'plus', whether people accept it or not. There are pro's and con's to everything.

So much for one blog entry. Enjoy, and if you come across something nice, share them so that others can enjoy too.

P.S: Not all of these are self discoveries, some of them have (obviously) been recommendations, and it would be unfair not to mention them. So let me take a moment to thank Brinda and Abhishek for entry no. 2 and 10, George for introducing me to “Shoes” (and some others, not on the list though), and apun ka Irshaad Miyaan for 'Single Girls'.