Your stoopid

So, my friend Jason Roeder (who suffered alongside me on our high school newspaper after it was hijacked by a harpie) is now posting a very funny video series, "Magical Jason: Secrets of the Professional-Caliber Magician" on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/JasonSRoeder).

His email about the humorous series implored friends to leave comments, ratings, bird seed, etc (actually, his exact directions were: "If you like what I've got so far, please do right by the vids: send or post the link, five-star, comment, etc. If you're unsatisfied, you can just say that you couldn't watch because your operating system doesn't have a required plug-in or whatever. For future reference, I'm VERY easy to trick that way.").


Jason's second video, "Dizzy Ball," slips in a reference to "Space Jam." Nicely done.

As I dutifully attempted to leave a comment, YouTube prompted me to sign in, like some self-important bouncer at a cheesy over-40 night club in Sunrise, FL. Disheartened, I almost clicked back to the kitty porn I'd been viewing when I remembered that I'm a YouTube member.

Thanks to the one video I posted back in January, I was able to leave Jason some encouraging words. My only video is the one I taped off my Uncle Mark's TV of me on the NFL Network asking Tom Brady a question at the AFC Championship press conference (my panties are still drying, BTW). Its posting had one mission: so I could share it with all of my Patriots-loving family and Patriots-hating friends.

"Magical Jason" comments successfully posted, I decided to check out how MY video was doing in the comments/ratings department. Surprisingly, 1,175 people have watched the video since I posted it six months ago (I have a big family but not THAT big). Better yet, THREE people actually left comments.

Excited to see what kinds of comments my super-awesome reporting skills had elicited, I clicked on the video. Not sure what I was expecting but here are the caveman droppings I discovered:

Jeterfan906 (4 months ago)
what a fuckin douchebag any other athlete beside football player and theyd get fined so much there next paycheck wouldnt even come

walkontheocean8888 (6 months ago)
tom Brady is having a shitty day. Suck it Tom!

madness410 (6 months ago)
my name is tom. fuck you.

I've now watched the video three more times to try to understand how these comments apply. I am now giving up. I think the first one, "my name is tom. fuck you." pretty much says it all (although he gets points for correct spelling and punctuation).

Clearly, the bar for YouTube comments is subterranean. I worry that the 15 seconds I took to compose a coherent thought in response to Jason's "magic" was 14 too long. What a loser I am for using logic and grammar. What a waste of capital letters. Using one booger-encrusted finger, I should've just banged out "your stoopid" on the keyboard.

Listen, I get that the rules are relaxed here but are we at the point of being so relaxed that we're comatose? Who started this "if I write it online, it doesn't have to be literate" trend?

Or, is it naive to assume that laziness is to blame and not ignorance? Does the proliferation of email, text messages and IM offer a terrifying snapshot of the illiterate masses?

Seriously, are we THAT stoopid?

Dionne Warwick earworm

Friday, September 07, 2007

So, today was a really hard day @ work because my boss is a human wart. Without getting into specifics, I'm sure I've never worked for someone so unpleasant and insensitive before. Thankfully, my days here are truly numbered (15 more to go!).

Anyway, to help me through the day, I'm lucky to have good co-workers whom I consider good friends, too. Just when things were looking especially bleak, one of 'em sent me a link to one crazy ass video:

(it even has a remix: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZytJhACn5z0)
Thanks, Rachel! The old chick in the tin foil to the left is my favorite. Ya gotta love public access -- the interesting part about it is that this show could've been filmed any time between today and 1970, based on how most public access shows go.


Then, when the day took an even darker turn, Nakeba sent me this link:


Between pickle licks, it occurred to me: this is what friends are for.

And then the Dionne Warwick earworm got me ("I'll be on your side for-e-ver moooo-ooore. That's what friends are foooo-ooooor!"). So to my awesome co-workers: THANKS! I needed that! What would we do without each other and freaky ass people on the Web to keep us from quitting our jobs?

BTW, this pic reminds me of the kind of stuff I used to put in the column I wrote for my college newspaper ("Preditorial"). I used to label the graphics "Figure 1.1" etc. and pretty much anything was game. I once scanned in a vibrator my friends gave me as a b-day gift and wrote a column about why I refused to use it. In retrospect, that was probably not good journalism.