Happy Friday! This video clip of two Chinese students lip syncing to a Backstreet Boys song just made my entire day. I’m not sure I wanted it that way but I’m still happy that I got it. My favorite part is how there is a third jersey wearing guy in the background paying zero attention to the guys carrying on in back of him. Enjoy!
In honor of its 10th anniversary, Amazon has had celebrities deliver packages that involve them in some way to randomly selected lucky customers. For instance, Jason Alexander delivered Seinfeld season 1 through 4 to someone in Brentwood, California (where my brother-in-law and future sister-in-law live – maybe it was their building, it sort of looks like it…). Amazon and UPS then are donating money to a charity of the celebrity’s choice. Everyone wins and most of the videos are really fun (Harrison Ford was boring) to watch. Enjoy.
For the next few weeks, AOL Music has every Live 8 performance available for you to stream to your very own computer. Watch the biggest concert event in history, on-demand, as many times as you want. Some performances are obviously better than others. You decide which is which. Enjoy.
I use FireFox as my web browser as much as I can help it – there are still some sites that are better viewed using IE but that number keeps falling – because its so wonderful. I love the tab based browsing and the bazillion of other neat features that FireFox offers. Today, I was checking out the various extensions offered after reading about a social networking plugin on Slashdot and found the following fun (to me) plugins:
A little over a year ago, I posted about a number of interesting search engines that haven’t gotten combined the amount of press that Google alone has garnered. Today, the NY Times had an article about search engines which provided two more interesting engines that I felt compelled to list. Here they are:
Challenge Darth Vader to a game of 20 questions he likes to call The Sith Sense. My object was an radish which he guessed on the 17th question. Once again, the agency handling the Burger King account has developed a seriously cool viral concept. I especially likes the effect when Vader shakes your screen.
Cool stuff.
Thanks Scott
If you google me (Jeff Lipson) your result number one result is this journal entry that I logged while I was at Woodstock ’94. Even better than text, if you click on the picture, you hear my 17 year old voice leaving an audio entry – sweet! My friend George logged an entry as well. This is truly old school in terms of the ‘net – again, it was done in 1994 – which might explain why both of ours are the #1 results for our names. Longevity matters in some respect to how search engines crawl and classify sites. Speaking of results, a previous post to this blog is the #2 result for George which is nice. Now I’ve got to work on getting this blog associated with Jeff Lipson and with Seven Squared – only sevensquared returns results. Verdict: not good.
Meta tags rule – literally and figuratively, but figuratively only if you are on top. Otherwise, they are a plain drag.
This video has been around for a while now – its a kid lip-syncing and rocking out in front of his web cam. I saw it back in 12/04 when Chris posted it to Blah Blah Blog. Since then, I forgot about it until someone else sent it to me last week when we were looking for the old hit “The Super Bowl Is Gay.”
So, please watch and enjoy. It helps if you make you window smaller as the flash file will shrink/expand based on the window size.
If you are wondering, the song is called “Dragsotea Din Tei” and its by a Romanian group called O-Zone. You can even buy it on iTunes if you want to thoroughly annoy your friends and neighbors. After the jump you can even read the lyrics.
Thanks Chris as the comments to your post provided the extra info
UPDATE (2/26):
Today there is an article in the NY Times about this kid. He’s actually from NJ. After the jump, you can read the entire NY Times article. Also, I found a link to the actual music video as well. There are many other versions floating around as well but I don’t think they are that good.
Translated Lyrics:
Hello [on a cellphone], greetings, it’s me, an outlaw,
I ask you, my love, to accept happiness.
Hello, hello, it’s me, Picasso,
I sent you a beep [cellphone signal], and I’m brave [or strong],
But you should know that I’m not asking for anything from you.
You want to leave but you don’t want don’t want to take me, don’t want don’t want to take me, don’t want don’t want don’t want to take me.
Your face and the love from the linden trees,
And I remember your eyes.
I call you [over the phone], to tell you what I feel right now,
Hello, my love, it’s me, your happiness.
Hello, hello, it’s me again, Picasso,
I sent you a beep [cellphone signal] and I’m brave [or strong],
But you should know that I’m not asking for anything from you.
Internet Fame Is Cruel Mistress for a Dancer of the Numa Numa
By ALAN FEUER and JASON GEORGE
There was a time when embarrassing talents were a purely private matter. If you could sing “The Star Spangled Banner” in the voice of Daffy Duck, no one but your friends and family would ever have to know.
But with the Internet, humiliation – like everything else – has now gone public. Upload a video of yourself playing flute with your nose or dancing in your underwear, and people from Toledo to Turkmenistan can watch.
Here, then, is the cautionary tale of Gary Brolsma, 19, amateur videographer and guy from New Jersey, who made the grave mistake of placing on the Internet a brief clip of himself dancing along to a Romanian pop song. Even in the bathroom mirror, Mr. Brolsma’s performance could only be described as earnest but painful.
His story suggests that the quaint days when cultural trinkets, like celebrity sex tapes, were passed around like novels in Soviet Russia are over. It says a little something of the lightning speed at which fame is made these days.
To begin at the beginning:
Mr. Brolsma, a pudgy guy from Saddle Brook, made a video of himself this fall performing a lip-synced version of “Dragostea Din Tei,” a Romanian pop tune, which roughly translates to “Love From the Linden Trees.” He not only mouthed the words, he bounced along in what he called the “Numa Numa Dance” – an arm-flailing, eyebrow-cocked performance executed without ever once leaving the chair.
In December, the Web site newgrounds.com, a clearinghouse for online videos and animation, placed a link to Mr. Brolsma on its home page and, soon, there was a river of attention. “Good Morning America” came calling and he appeared. CNN and VH1 broadcast the clip. Parodists tried their own Numa Numa dances online. By yesterday, the Brolsma rendition of “Love From the Linden Trees” had attracted nearly two million hits on the original Web site alone.
The video can be seen here.
It was just as Diane Sawyer said on her television program: “Who knows where this will lead?”
Nowhere, apparently. For, in Mr. Brolsma’s case, the river became a flood.
He has now sought refuge from his fame in his family’s small house on a gritty street in Saddle Brook. He has stopped taking phone calls from the news media, including The New York Times. He canceled an appearance on NBC’s “Today.” According to his relatives, he mopes around the house.
What’s worse is that no one seems to understand.
“I said, ‘Gary this is your one chance to be famous – embrace it,’ ” said Corey Dzielinski, who has known Mr. Brolsma since the fifth grade. Gary Brolsma is not the first guy to rocket out of anonymity on a starship of embarrassment. There was William Hung, the Hong Kong-born “American Idol” reject, who sang and danced so poorly he became a household name.
There was Ghyslain Raza, the teenage Quebecois, who taped himself in a mock light-saber duel and is now known as the Star Wars Kid.
In July 2003, Mr. Raza’s parents went so far as to sue four of his classmates, claiming they had placed the clip of him online without permission. “Ghyslain had to endure and still endures today, harassment and derision,” according to the lawsuit, first reported in The Globe and Mail of Toronto.
Mr. Brolsma has no plans to sue, his family said – mainly because he would have to sue himself. In fact, they wish he would bask a little in his celebrity.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” his grandfather, Kalman Telkes, a Hungarian immigrant, said the other day while taking out the trash.
The question remains why two million people would want to watch a doughy guy in glasses wave his arms around online to a Romanian pop song.
“It definitely has to be something different,” said Tom Fulp, president and Webmaster of newgrounds.com.
“It’s really time and place.”
“The Numa Numa dance,” he said, sounding impressed. “You see it and you kind of impulsively have to send it to your friends.”
There is no way to pinpoint the fancy of the Internet, but in an effort to gauge Mr. Brolsma’s allure, the Numa Numa dance was shown to a classroom of eighth graders at Saddle Brook Middle School – the same middle school that he attended, in fact.
The students’ reactions ranged from envious to unimpressed. “That’s stupid,” one of them said. “What else does he do?” a second asked. A third was a bit more generous: “I should make a video and become famous.”
The teacher, Susan Sommer, remembered Mr. Brolsma. He was a quiet kid, she said, with a good sense of humor and a flair for technology.
“Whenever there were computer problems, Gary and Corey would fix them for the school,” she said.
His friends say Mr. Brolsma has always had a creative side. He used to make satirical Prozac commercials on cassette tapes, for instance. He used to publish a newspaper with print so small you couldn’t read it with the naked eye.
“He was always very out there – he’s always been ambitious,” said Frank Gallo, a former classmate. “And he’s a big guy, but he’s never been ashamed.”
Another friend, Randal Reiman, said: “I’ve heard a lot of people say it’s not that impressive – it doesn’t have talent. But I say, Who cares?”
These days, Mr. Brolsma shuttles between the house and his job at Staples, his family said. He is distraught, embarrassed. His grandmother, Margaret Telkes, quoted him as saying, just the other day, “I want this to end.”
And yet the work lives on. Mr. Fulp, the Webmaster, continues to receive online homages to the Numa Numa dance. The most recent showed what seemed to be a class of computer students singing in Romanian and, in unison, waving their hands.
Mr. Reiman figures the larger world has finally caught on to Gary Brolsma.
“He’s been entertaining us for years,” he said, “so it’s kind of like the rest of the world is realizing that Gary can make you smile.”
Check out this optical illusion and be prepared to be wowed and weirded out at the same time.
A few months back, I received a mailer about a one-day course on “Presenting Data and Information” that was being taught by Edward Tufte and while I didn’t go to the class, one of the graphics that it contained really impressed me and I’ve been meaning to post it ever since (click on the thumbnail to launch a popup that contains a larger image):
“This map drawn by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the left on the Polish-Russian border near the Niemen, the thick band shows the size of the army (422,000 men) as it invaded Russia. The width of the band indicates the size of the army at each position. In September, the army reached Moscow with 100,000 men. The path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales. The remains of the Grande Armee struggled out of Russia with 10,000 men. Minard’s graphic tells a rich, coherent story with its multivariate data, far more enlightening than just a single number bouncing along over time. Six variables are plotted: the size of the army, its location on a two-dimensional surface, direction of the army’s movement, and tempreature on various dates during the retreat from Moscow. It may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.”
Okay, impressed yet? Here is a bit more about Mr. Tufte. Edward Tufte is Professor Emeritus at Yale University, where he taught courses in statistical evidence, information design and interface design. He has written several books, which have won 40 awards for content and design. The NY Times has called him “The Leonardo da Vinci of data.”
Still not impressed? Then try reading this essay which was published in Wired about how PowerPoint affects thought. It will blow your mind. I highly suggest you read it if this topic interests you at all because he is to data what Stephen Hawking or Brian Greene is to physics.
One of my goals this year is to read as many of his books as possible. Wish me luck.