"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
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"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Saturday, June 05, 2010

Saturday YouTubing: Crying Boys, Pop Music, and Subliminal Mind Control
Posted by Jill | 6:21 AM
After months of a FUBAR DSL line that barely loaded pages, let alone videos, we are finally back to normal. Of course this means that The Big FIOS Decision has to be made sooner or later (and the sticking points are a) that $350 cancellation penalty for the triple play, which the tech insisted has been eliminated, and the allegedly sucky FIOS DVR, which from what I hear doesn't have the beauty of the Dish 722 that we have. You see, we record A LOT of stuff. Just the other night we sat and watched about six "Colbert Report"s in a row. If you don't think that messes with your mind, try it sometime. But the Dish DVR is a beautiful thing, with disk capacity so huge you can record enough stuff that you'll be dead before you have time to watch it, and the ability to record two things at once. The Verizon tech assured me that now Verizon's DVR does too, though I'm still skeptical.

The other thing is that Dishies tend to be almost cultish about their TV provider. Charlie Ergen operates in kind of a vacuum...sort of like Cheney only without the malevolence, death, and murder. While Cablevision is always fighting with various programming providers, Ergen does all his stuff behind the scenes. It's probably like making sausage; you don't want to know how he does it. But while Dish is still the only provider that carries FSTV, many of the Dirty Fucking Hippie channels we like -- things like Veria (until we realized they have had no new programming since 2008), Planet Green, Current, Ovation, and Palladia -- are now on FIOS as well. So while we love and are grateful to our beloved Dish for having made it possible to tell Cablevision to go fuck itself for lo these many years, the Evil V Empire may be making us an offer we can't refuse.

Anyway, now that I have the ability to watch videos, I was finally able to watch that video posted by Jesse a month ago, of the little boy in the car who's devastated because his dad tells him he can't be a single lady like Beyoncé. I must be the only person in the known universe who finds this video tragic instead of cute. Over 3 million people have viewed this video, and the family has joined that couple with the wedding dance at the confluence of YouTube notoriety and Weekday Morning Show hype. But the fact remains that at the time this occurred, the little boy's joy at being able to move to a bouncy song took second place to "OMIGOD He thinks he's a single lady...that means he must be GAY!!!!" in his father's instinctive reaction. Because even though the father quickly backtracks, the damage is done, and at the end of the video, the kid may not be actively crying, but he's clearly learned a lesson that he shouldn't have had to learn.

I kind of wish I hadn't watched it, becuase that fucking song is so catchy I can't seem to get it out of my head. But if you have to watch a video of a little kid bopping to a song that has a beat that's, as Jerry Garcia once said, "down where even white people can find it" (and there seem to be a kazillion of them, which makes me wonder what kind of weird subliminal mind control is in that song), I prefer this one:


This one has over THIRTEEN MILLION views. And I have to admit, that vaguely Bollywood-influenced dancing in the video is pretty cool. But I'm a little bit concerned about the kid in this video, because his parents are much better marketers than those of Crying Boy.

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