Video Friday #7: "Don't Let's Start", They Might Be Giants
I was a nerd in high school in the late 80's. Of course I loved "They Might Be Giants".
My favorite TMBG song is "Ana Ng"--it's pure lyrical genius, at least to "nerdy high school Mike". (And let's be honest: is "present day Mike" all that different?)
But I've got to choose "Don't Let's Start" as my favorite video, simply because the giant rolling "William Allen White" heads look EXACTLY like my AP American History teacher, Mr. Ming.
Video Friday #6: "Groove is in the Heart", Deee-Lite
I missed last week (vacation) and I'm not even prepared for this week. But I know I'm going to link to "Groove is in the Heart" eventually--it just can't be helped. So might as well be today:
How do you say "Deee-Groovy"? Everything I know about dancing I learned between 3:07 and 3:23 in this video.
By pure coincidence, I was in the bay area starting a week long vacation on the same day that Survivial Research Labs was putting on a show in San Jose. I bought tickets, and on Friday, my brother and I went to the show.
This was a little bit of a disappointment compared to the previous two shows I've attended, maybe because this show was sanctioned by the city of San Jose, whereas the previous shows were much more underground. I never really felt the visceral sense of danger I've come to expect from an SRL show. The large crowd probably didn't help--most people there were far away from the action, so they never totally got into it.
Even so, it still made for good entertainment. Joe and I stood near the giant Van de Graaff machine which spewed 15-foot arcs of electricity every which way, and since it was a large show, most of the favorite robots made an appearance, including the six-legged walker, the super-bass gun, and the 2x4 pitching machine.
I'm back from my two-part trip to the Bay Area and King's Canyon, and I'm already behind.
I've got a metric assload of photos I'm sorting through and posting to Flickr. I'll make a highlights reel, too, because nobody (including me) really wants to go through 500 photos! (The curse of the gigantic flash memory card is that it lets you take photos nilly-willy.)
This is how staggeringly pointless the killing in Iraq is getting: shepherds in the rural western Baghdad neighborhood of Gazalea have recently been murdered, according to locals, for failing to diaper their goats. Apparently the sexual tension is so high in regions where Sheikhs take a draconian view of Shariah law, that they feel the sight of naked goats poses an unacceptable temptation. They blame the goats.
This Saturnight, Sleater-Kinney will play their last show ever. What a sad passing of a great band.
Kendra sent me this article from Slate, "Last Exit for Sleater-Kinney", which gives a feminist-centric look back at the band. I joined the Sleater-Kinney club a little late, around 1999, and at the time, I didn't fully realize they were a post-riot-grrrl supergroup. Guitar-driven rock-and-roll was pretty comatose, and Sleater-Kinney was rock's last, best hope. While some people saw them as a great "girl band", for me, S-K was always about the rock.
This old kryptonite lock was on my old blike, in a holder, but locked around the frame. I lost the key years ago, and I'm going to be getting rid of the old bike, so I figured I would see how tough these things really are. I believe it was Archimedes who said, "Give me a dremel and a supply of cutoff disks and I'll cut the world in half."
Two cutoff disks and 10 minutes later, here's the lock. OK, not quite: it was about 10 minutes of work, but the dremel was heating up quite a bit. So it was more like 5 minutes of dremeling, a 20 minute break, and 5 more minutes of dremel.
My dremel technique was a little off: I caught the disk a few times, and I started the cut in an sub-optimal location. I'm fairly certain that with some practice, I couold probably cut a lock in under five minutes total.
If I were to make a list of "great songs with terrible videos", this would definitely be near the top. It might have sounded like a clever idea at the time, but putting the literal interpretation of the word up onto the screen is a terrible idea. It's only a few seconds into the video, but the "wipe the smile right from your face" sequence lets you know how bad it's going to get.
