Saturday 11 January 2014

Slow motion mysticality

I was sick yesterday, and I'm not feeling great today. I didn't have a bad day thanks to the internet. I'm fairly certain that lack of internet is why being sick used to suck. I was trawling YouTube for covers of 'I'm always here' by Jimi Jamison, which is more frequently referred to as 'The Baywatch Song', when something mystical happened. I'll get to that in a moment.


YouTube is kind of a lot like Wikipedia. Most of what you see there is only partially real at best, and it is ridiculous how easy it is to end up miles away from where you started. Not real miles. Digital miles. It's a conceptual distance. Unless you're on a train or some other mode of transport. Then the miles could be real, actual miles (or real, nautical miles if you're in a boat) as well as being conceptual, digital miles. Don't trawl YouTube when you're driving though. They don't make ads about it yet, but you can kind of extrapolate from the texting ads that they probably aren't going to be happy if they catch you doing it. It's kind of a no brainer really. If they do end up making ads for it, it means that there is a problem. Those kinds of things are rarely preemptive. It's usually on account of people doing 'x', and the scientist bursting dramatically through the political doors and saying, "Damn it, man! Look at this graph of 'x' over time. 'x' is getting way out of hand. Shit's gotta change! Damn it, man! Lives are at stake! Real, actual lives (or real, nautical lives if you're on a boat)!" The politicians then bring in their own 'scientists' who usually studied a form of statistics that allows probability to exceed 1, which results in things like 'The number of people doing "x" in 2032 will be equal to the population plus the population over pi.' So, they make an ad to scare the shit out of you. I think the YouTube one should be someone who finds a link to a clip titled 'Ultimate hot girls in bikinis driving fail', with a corresponding thumbnail, but when he clicks on it is actually him dying in a car accident. Then he dies as depicted in the clip, and there are no hot girls or bikinis anywhere!

Freshly showered and isolated in my bed with Panda and a packet of blueberry bagels, I was ripe for this kind of link-hiking. Starting with the the Baywatch intro, I progressed to covers of the song, believing that the sort of people that would cover it would be the kind of amazing people that I would want to watch brushing their teeth. Some people don't edit their clips very well, and you end up with a keen insight into their oral hygiene. I moved through the standard YouTube heroes singing a variety of ridiculously awesome songs that a lot of people think they're too cool for. You're not by the way. No one is. It makes you look less cool. You know who you are! Then there were clips of people talking about how they did their recordings, which lead to interviews with stand up comics. Whenever I think of stand up comics I think of pop-up comics, which I imagine to be a cross between a comic book and a pop-up book 'Where your heroes really leap off the page! Available from all leading book retailers.' And probably comic shops.

There was an interview with Aziz Ansari about the animation work that he does, which I didn't realise he was that into. He is. He loves it. Then there were interviews with other voice actors about their animation work, including Mark Hamill who plays the Joker in so many things. He has played the Joker more than anyone else on the planet. I'm making that up. It might be true, but I don't know that it is. I'll say it again though, and I won't even know then unless someone else tells me, but even then I am taking their word for it. We're always taking somebody's word for it. ALWAYS! Not always. Sometimes we know through empirical discovery, which is different to imperial discovery, which I have no empirical knowledge of, unless you count when you find out that someone takes up too much of the bed, which is a kind of imperialism. Domestic imperialism. My housemates are engaged in domestic imperialism with each other. She has recently taken regions in the office, while he undertakes a slow invasion of the sunroom. They tried to forge a treaty by having a son, but he has already led a successful campaign into the living room and the bathtub, and has recently been conducting some yard based reconnaissance.

Did you know that there are a lot of people who reenact scenes from cartoons with the assistance of animation? I didn't, but I would've said yes had I been asked. No. That's not true. I would've waited for an opening to sneak off and investigate. It's pretty cool. It's also 'pretty cool' how many people do similar things for iconic intro sequences from eighties and nineties television series. Particularly Baywatch. Which brought me full circle. I like to think that I had done a lap of cyberspace As I sat there looking at the the link to 'Baywatch intro', the very same clip with which I had started. I was distracted though. Right there above it was a clip. 'Baywatch: Season 1 | Episode 1 | Panic at Malibu Pier'. I'm not super sure how official this whole situation is. They've been up for over 4 years at the time of writing, and license holders are pretty severe are coming down hard on this sort of stuff. The poster seems to have posted season one in its wholepletedness, but most of everything up to the end of season four seems to be there, but looking a whole lot less 'official'. If this is a deliberate and official situation, then this is probably a good way to get people into older shows. I'm pretty hooked. Baywatch is definitely a show I never even would have thought about having started watching again unless I had the opportunity to start from the beginning for free while I was burrowed deep beneath the covers with my favourite bear.

I watched Baywatch a lot when I was younger, which some of you might have deduced from my whole thing with The Octo-Hoff. I claim now that I was a viewer solely because my mum watched it and the TV was on anyway. This isn't true. The drama is ridiculous and the situations are occasionally right on the edge of believability (I don't know enough about lifesaving to really know any better), while at times crossing right over the edge and goes deep into the realms of 90s TV action/drama fantasy land with nuclear warheads, and earthquakes, and what have you. It's great. It knows where it is at, and there are times when you're all like, "I can't talk now, Mitch's friend's kid that he kidnapped, not Mitch, but the friend, it's a custody thing, is stuck in a drainage canal and the tide is coming in, and he might drown." People are like, "What? You better get back to that." I also really like Magnum PI, which is not as mathematically oriented as the title may suggest, but has a very similar tone and more moustaches than the Baywatch. Here is a picture of me dressed as Thomas Magnum.


That's me in the middle. The one least looking like Magnum. The guy to your left was at the time my future housemate, and now former housemate, while the guy to my left is a guy of whose existence we became aware a handful of minutes earlier. About two minutes. Probably less minutes. About the amount of minutes (or parts there of) that it takes to convince someone in a similar costume to take a photo with you. Not many. If any. It wouldn't be zero though. I was quoting a song that is not related to anything I have been talking about.

I mentioned pi twice without even thinking about it!

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