Video roundup
Some fun videos that various people have pointed me at in the past week or two. If you only have time for one (and you're not at work), watch the first one.
- Consent, a funny short film about the importance of sexual consent forms. (Not work-safe.)
- Planned Parenthood's How Pregnancy Happens. Definitely not work-safe.
- Flags with client comments, from Clayborn Creative Consulting, presumably an ad agency. Actually, most of these sound more like intra-agency comments than like client comments, but cute anyway. (See also the old world's flags given letter grades site, which is not a video.)
- Nutcracker Suite excerpt performed entirely on bicycle parts.
- Live action hamster video game.
- Way back in 1984, Harold Faltermeyer performed a tune called Axel F, the theme to the movie Beverly Hills Cop (in which Eddie Murphy played a cop named Axel Foley). Apparently the tune has gone on to further great success as a remix, most notably (for my purposes today) the Crazy Frog song. I'm a little bit unclear on the chronology here, but there was also a ringtone having something to do with Crazy Frog, and somewhere in there there was an animated video for the song, featuring a bounty hunter chasing the Crazy Frog character, who rides an invisible motorcycle through a future cityscape. And then two boys released their own Crazy Frog Bros video featuring the two of them dancing and lip-syncing to the song. I can't decide whether I find it amusing or annoying, but they're kind of charming.
- Speaking of odd music videos, here's shoes, also not work-safe (for loud shouting of profanity, among other things). It's by comic Liam Sullivan, who apparently performs live regularly in LA.
- And finally, I just learned about the Scopitone, a 1960s video jukebox that prefigured the music video. I found out about them by way of a particular Scopitone video on YouTube, Queen of the House (features innuendo and several scantily clad women). The lyrics (that version's a little different from the ones in the video) were apparently written by Mary Taylor (song was recorded by Jody Miller); it's a filk of Roger Miller's "King of the Road." As with the above videos, I'm really just not sure what to make of this, so I pass it along as a cultural artifact of mid-20th-century America.
Sigh. Safari just crashed, which means I lost most of the last week's worth of pages that I was saving to post about. I was in the midst of copying down all the URLs, but was focusing on the videos first; at least I got through all of those. I should've known better than to run a lot of Flash videos in Safari windows after the browser had been running for a week. Still, I really hope a future version of Safari has some of the state-saving features I've been seeing in other browsers lately.
I did manage to recover most of the lost pages by a quick skim through Safari's history list, though.