Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

I think that one thing that should be taken away from this madness is that Ann Coulter thinks the Birther movement is foolish and that Orly Taitz is a crank.

That’s like Josef Stalin looking at you and saying, “Dude, you need to crank your intensity down a notch or two.”

Here are two stories that show two wildly different reactions to new media and viral video.

First on the block, we have Warner Music Group. Someone on YouTube recently mixed the wildly popular Keyboard Cat meme with a performance by a young Helen Hunt portraying an acid trip, then followed it with a Hall and Oates music video that had Keyboard Cat spliced in as a member of the band. It was cute, it was funny, and it added a new take to an existing meme. As videos like that tend to do, it went viral and got across the web faster than your average porn spam—which is saying something.

Such massive exposure for Hall & Oates’ “You Make My Dreams Come True,” which hasn’t had cultural relevance for a couple of decades now, was certain to grab Warner’s attention. So they quickly responded by demanding YouTube remove the audio from the track. This is a new tack that the RIAA member companies are taking with YouTube. This will encourage users supposedly to swap the audio out with music from YouTube’s licensed library, although that would kind of ruin the joke.

I’d also like to point out at this time that YouTube’s licensed library is only available to you as an after-the-upload option. You have to be willing to swap out the audio on your video for the music in their library. All of the audio. Because that’s so much easier and better for producers than simply letting them access a database that tells them the titles of the songs they can use, letting them build their productions around it.

Of course, this move has drawn a lot of fire for WMG. They took one of the most popular videos online and overnight pulled the plug on it. If they didn’t expect a backlash, then they are either extremely stupid or extremely out of touch. And I haven’t quite ruled out the possibility that they may be both.

Switching gears, DJ Steve Porter created a YouTube phenomenon with “Rap Chop,” a video in which he remixed the infamous Slap Chop infomercial (“You’re gonna love my nuts!”) to a hip-hop beat, autotuning hawker Vince’s voice to fit the new beat and melody. (I am currently converting this to my ringtone. Yes, I know I’m a geek.)

When the powers behind Slap Chop learned that this viral music video was racking up more hits than a hyperactive mafia enforcer, they had a very natural reaction to it.

They licensed it from DJ Steve Porter to air as their new infomercial.

Natural, yes, but also incredibly smart. Rather than step in and be the bad guys who shut down a viral phenomenon, they claimed it and recognized its ability to sell more of their product. Which was pretty brilliant. My father’s reaction to seeing the music video? “It really makes me want one of those!”

What we can see in these two parallel stories is two different approaches old media can adopt toward new media. You can battle it, suppress it, and attempt to sue it out of existence, or you can embrace it and all of the good that it can do for you. The latter gains you new fans and allows your customers to see you as a company (or individual) with a sense of humor who knows a good thing when they see it.

The former makes your customers see you as the bastards who are ruining the internet.

[Note: If you’d like to see the way the new “silencing” tactic destroys internet videos, take a look at “Internet Date”—a video from one of my favorite sketch comedy troupes that had its audio silenced due to a complaint from WMG. Most of the joke is lost as a result.]

I enjoyed Thud’s take on this meme, so I figured, eh, why not?

Using ONLY SONG TITLES from ONE artist, and cleverly answer these questions below. Make sure you send a copy to me when you respond. Do not use the same artist as I did or duplicate song titles.

All of these songs are from The Monkees:

Are you a male or female: Salesman
Describe yourself: (I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone
How do you feel about yourself? Looking For the Good Times
Describe your ex boyfriend/girlfriend: The Girl I Left Behind Me
Describe your current boy/girl situation: This Just Doesn’t Seem To Be My Day
Describe your current location: Pleasant Valley Sunday
Describe where you want to be: I Wanna Be Free
Your best friend: Regional Girl
Your favorite color is: Early Morning Blues and Greens
You know that: Tomorrow’s Gonna Be Another Day
What’s the weather like? Shades of Gray
If your life was a television show what would it be called? Cuddly Toy
What is life to you? Daily, Nightly
What is the best advice you have to give? Laugh
If you could change your name what would it be? Shorty Blackwell

They say that only the good die young. Well, yesterday was my birthday. Where do I fall on the scale?

So far, I am not as good as:

• Ritchie Valens


• Aaliyah


• Buddy Holly


• River Phoenix


• James Dean


• Janis Joplin


• Jimi Hendrix


• Otis Redding


• Brandon Lee


• Kurt Cobain


• Jim Morrison

But I’m apparently right at the age where Hank Williams died. And he died in my home town – go fig.

But I am apparently still a few years better than:

• Andy Gibb


• Jim Croce


• Patsy Cline


• Bruce Lee


• Mama Cass


• Sam Cooke


• Sylvia Plath


• John Belushi


• Chris Farley


• Andy Kaufman


• Jesus

All of whom died within 6 years of my current age.

Awwww… Why can’t Kitteh and Roomba be friends?

Every time I turn on the news these days, I’m hearing Republicans complaining about earmarks and how they’re going to kill us all. CNN’s crawl yesterday said that the Republicans are declaring “The era of big spending is back!”

Unfortunately, CNN did not follow that crawl item with the other major, related story: “Republicans apparently spent last eight years in a coma.”

But as this story from the Houston Chronicle teaches us, complaints over budget earmarks are so much sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Rep. Ron Paul vehemently denounced the $410 billion catch-all spending bill approved last week by the House of Representatives.

But although the libertarian-leaning Republican from Lake Jackson cast a vote against the massive spending measure, his fingerprints were on some of the earmarks that helped inflate its cost.

Paul played a role in obtaining 22 earmarks worth $96.1 million, which led the Houston congressional delegation, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of more than 8,500 congressionally mandated projects inserted into the bill. His earmarks included repair projects to the Galveston Seawall damaged by Hurricane Ike and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway.

I am not about to complain about money being appropriated to repair the Galveston Seawall and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. Hell, I think they’re worthwhile. I think that if more budget earmarks had resembled those instead of bridges to nowhere (championed by Paul’s fellow Republican, Ted Stevens), then we wouldn’t be surrounded by crumbling infrastructure today.

But that’s just the point – earmarks are how the budget works. It ensures that while the big business of running a nation gets done, the smaller business of keeping states up and running is made easier, as well. Our horrible response to Katrina (which, as Bobby Jindal pointedly ignored, was a failure of a Republican administration) is nothing compared to the prior four years (also under a Republican administration) when the Army Corps of Engineers told the federal government they needed money to shore up and improve the levees, only to be ignored by Republicans who were complaining about all this goldurn unnecessary spending. All while they were building bridges to nowhere and funneling billions into a war that didn’t even appear in the budget.

The point is, it’s not about “no earmarks.” It’s about good earmarks. It’s about finding what actually puts people to work, builds our infrastructure, and provides for the common good, rather than what puts money directly into the pockets of the wealthy.

Bonus lesson: When you allow an unelected, loudmouthed ideologue to grow into the voice of your party, you’ll learn to regret it. And, also, if you’re going to say you’re here to defend the Constitution, you might want to stop illustrating how little you know about it in the same breath.

First things first: Here’s a clip from the Mark Twain ceremony for George Carlin. The whole thing is good (as is the whole show), but in particular pay attention from 4:53 on.

Then, when you’ve finished that, read what Salon dug up.

For some reason, I decided recently to subject myself to reading Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Perhaps it was Sudafed intoxication, the NyQuil, or maybe my inner masochist just didn’t feel that my head cold made my suffering complete.

Whatever the reason, I have to say that I can’t help but be amazed by the gusto and efficiency with which Ayn Rand knocks down straw men. She sets up ridiculous conditions that her sociopolitical opponents would find abhorrent, themselves, then knocks those constructs over and declares herself the victor. It’s as though the only conversations she ever had were those between herself and her other self – the one who didn’t really like playing Devil’s Advocate, but she lost the coin toss and had to, so she was going to do as ridiculously poorly as possible so that the other side would clearly win.

And as the numbered protagonist discovers his individuality and embarks on page after page of narrative self-declaration, I realize that the modern Republican party is, truly, based on a Randian (Randite? Randesque? Randbunctious?) principle of the “virtue of greed.” Although they seem to have missed that one line in the middle about “I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them.” No biggie – she only spends one sentence on the concept, so she must not have felt it was important.

And then I visit boing boing and I am immediately gobsmacked by the idiocy of neo-Randbunctious ideology.

“When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression,” [Republican Representative Steve] Austria said. “He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That’s just history.”

...

I—
...

It’s—-

...

Wow. Words fail.

No, actually, it’s not “just history.” The Great Depression happened before Roosevelt took office, as anybody who had actually passed middle school-level history should know. It was the policies of the conservative Hoover who put over 80% of the country’s money into the hands of less than 20% of the population that put us into the great depression.

Seriously. I know that one of these guys is just waiting to cut loose with “The free market has been the best system ever since Jesus gave it to the ancient Romans.” The “free market” approach of the Republicans is so apparently no longer an economic theory so much as a part of their fundamentalist belief system that they might as well write it into their religion.

You ever notice when a couple are together long enough, they start to pick up each other’s vocal patterns and mannerisms?

Awww… Fox News and Bush have been a couple for so long, Fox has even picked up Bush’s cute little horribly unfortunate misspeaks.

I still like seeing the science articles that come up at io9, but I worry more and more about their entertainment reporting. For one thing, their coverage of comic book films has pretty much declined to the point of whining about how nobody makes a comic movie by just giving the artist of the comic $20,000,000 and turning them loose. Up until the release of The Spirit (which, by the way, I really think is the 80’s Flash Gordon of the modern era), their entertainment bloggers were angrily blogging that Frank Miller’s movie should be scrapped completely and instead the artist of the current comic should be given twice the budget Miller had and turned loose.

At this point, I have to point out – just giving a comic artist a massive budget to make a film is a phenomenally bad idea. Comics and film being, hey, two completely different media.

Lately, ranting and gloating have not been enough for them. They’ve taken it on themselves to begin making the news up. First off taking the pipe dream of one of their own reporters – that Christopher Nolan would do the next Batman film as a direct adaptation of The Dark Knight Returns – and reporting it as “the latest buzz in Hollywood” that they “hope to be true.”

Then there’s the gloating they’ve done over The Spirit’s lousy performance in theatres, which has lately grown to declaring Frank Miller’s Hollywood career to be “ruined.” Honestly, Frank Miller is nowhere near as bad as Uwe Boll – and Boll still gets new chances. And leave us not forget in the ranks of wunderkind directors with truly lousy films, there’s Robert Rodriguez and From Dusk ‘Til Dawn.

But rather than continue to be bitter about the way they turn their own opinions into “the latest Hollywood buzz,” I’ve decided I can take this opportunity to do the same, myself. See, io9 wants to know who the new Doctor’s companion is. So I’m pleased present the latest buzz to come out of the Beeb offices.

Emma Watson is rumored to be (wink, wink) in negotiations with the Beeb to play the companion to the Doctor as portrayed as Matt Smith. Sources within the Beeb report that the Harry Potter and the [fill in the blank] star is far and away a favorite. Not just for her youth which will match the image of the younger doctor, or for the star power she brings to the bill, but also to help appease the wrath of author J.K. Rowling, still upset after being dis-invited from the Doctor Who Christmas special.

Allowing Emma Watson to become the Doctor’s companion will soothe wounds with the author, and may pave the way for Rowling to appear in Smith’s first Christmas as the good Doctor. Moffat, while eager to work with Watson and Smith, was apparently unhappy with the decision to reinstate the Rowling story (an idea of Davies’) until the BBC sent Rupert Grint around to his office with a switchblade.

And this rumor is a 100% real rumor. Because I want it to be.