Showing posts with label video. Show all posts
Showing posts with label video. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 3, 2026

Top Ten Unique Videos I've Seen Recently

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks for "unique" videos reviewers have seen recently.

Unique? Err umm...I imagine that means no popular songs of bygone years, nothing in the "Stupid Pet Tricks" genre, no tales of the unexplained, no collections of moments in sports, no tours of small towns where the vlogger's in-laws happen to have real estate for sale, no people reading their own poetry, no political rants, no high school marching bands, no hidden cameras spying on wildlife, no demonstrations of cooking or knitting or battery-changing, no Stern Du Tube collections, no "relaxing" videos of raindrops sliding down windowpanes or animals scampering in gardens. Those can be fun but each one has become a genre. By now YouTube is so densely populated that by "unique" I suspect it's only possible to mean "bizarre."

I think the most unusual thing I shared recently might be a video of church academy students rehearsing for a church performance on the shore of their favorite lake, with the lead tenors actually paddling in canoes as they sang. Has that become a genre yet? It could easily have done! *lemmecheck*

Actually, it has sort of done. Google's plagiarism bot actually offers comparative ratings of different church school bands and choirs. Well, this one's new to me. What makes this video special is that, American though they sound, the college is in Fiji. Most, though not all, of the students are Fijians who have never visited the United States. 


Now this church school group may still be unique. It's a tough act to follow. In the mid-twentieth century some people at Andrews University thought it would be fun to combine orchestra, pop band, choir, AND gymnastics performances in one show, thus reducing the amount of study time students would lose to travelling with more than one group. Andrews is a good-sized school and has other musical groups besides the Gymnics, but the Gymnics became famous because, most years, they've been unique. Their performances can be long. This video link is for a full concert: two and a half hours. Well, that's what the "pause" button is for.


I have mixed feelings about these church school groups. I belonged to some of them, shortly after the cooling of the earth's crust. Andrews University was where I got chronic mononucleosis from the unnecessary measles vaccination.

And this is the school that tried to double-bill Grandma Bonnie Peters. But they always did have a solid classical music program, and, I'm glad to learn, still have, even now that it's changed its name and become even more pretentious than it was in the Awesome Eighties.


Enough. Have I found anything really unusual that's not in the church school concert genre? Of course I have. One of the Substacks I've followed longest belongs to Wu Fei, an expert in classical Chinese music, specifically the zitherlike instrument called the guzheng. She's been sent on tours of other countries to build a repertoire of non-Chinese music and compose new, foreign-influenced music for the guzheng. In the summer of 2023 she published this video of improvising a Duet for Guzheng and Freight Train.


I posted that link to Glen Campbell's playing the "William Tell Overture" on a guitar, playing a few bars with the guitar on top of his head, just last week. That's too recently to post it again, isn't it? I'll mention it, but it's not on this list. Scroll down.

The thought of "unique videos" made me think of a TV show of bygone years called "You Asked for It," where a TV personality, formerly best known for imitations of other people's voices, travelled around filming things most US audiences hadn't seen and did not necessarily believe existed. One winter when we were in Florida occupying one of my aunt's properties, my brother and I watched at least a half-dozen half-hours of "You Asked for It." I think both of our favorite sequence was a brass band who "marched" on bicycles. At the time the presenter said that such a band was unique to Belgium. Now, Google says, Belgium doesn't have an active bicycle-mounted band any more but the Netherlands has a few highly rated ones.


"You Asked for It" tended to focus on odd local customs, the kind of thing travellers would describe when they came home and their families would say "I'd have to see that to believe it." 

Did fishermen really train cormorants to catch fish for them? Yes. It's not so much a matter of training as it is of restraining. The birds naturally want to catch fish. They need no training, just a little practice, to catch fish for themselves. Each tame bird has a little leash around its neck so that it can easily swallow small fish, but has to bring bigger fish to its human. The birds aren't hurt; arguably their family lives are disrupted by living with humans, but, also arguably, as with many wild animals, the individuals in captivity enjoy more protection from predators and live longer. The tradition is preserved for tradition's sake, although it's no longer considered a viable way to earn a living--not competitive with more modern fishing techniques. It's more a matter of knowing how to do what one's ancestors did. It is hard to imagine anyone wanting a cormorant as a pet but the birds do seem to recognize and go to their men (cormorant fishing was traditionally done by fathers and sons). And if you want to see how it's done, click here:


Nobody actually wanted to watch how "head hunters" traditionally shrank severed human heads, which I think might have been on a different show. We did watch a minute or two of Los Penitentes, a Spanish-Portuguese-American brotherhood of men who try to atone for their sins by beating themselves bloody with whips and carrying wooden crosses about. Apparently this induces a sort of stress "high," like a Sun Dance, which is felt like spiritual joy. A group of "The Penitents" let the TV man videotape their procession, no doubt in exchange for a generous donation to their (Catholic) church. Google has enough videos of these processions that they're not unique. I'm glad. I can't say that they're not on a valid spiritual path but, if they are, I don't think it'd be respectful to watch their self-flagellation on video.

As I recall, "You Asked for It" featured many nice, uncontroversial documentation of traditional arts and crafts techniques. People would feed the producers questions like "Do Shetland knitters really cut knitted fabric?" or "Do glass artists really blow air into hollow beads of molten glass through pipes like giant drinking straws?" The answer to both questions is yes, but if you want to try cutting knitted fabric I must emphasize the importance of knitting with Shetland wool, which sticks to itself enough that the fabric won't unravel when cut, as cotton or acrylic would do. 

"Are there towns in England that still really pay a Town Crier to shout the news out loud?" As I recall, the "You Asked for It" show gave the impression that the producers had interviewed the last living Town Crier, but reportedly towns still employ these people and there are trainings and competitions for them:


And fans used to throw the host, Rich Little, softballs like "I want to see your imitation of..." some other TV person. So much for that show. Some other memorable spectacles that I don't think have become genres, yet...

Well...Berea College had a special traditional relationship with Tibet, and once hosted a group who performed the Lhamo Folk Opera. Obviously a different group, by now much older, than this group:


Whereas Andrews University once hosted the Wiener Sangerknaeben, Vienna Boys' Choir. That would have been different boys than the ones in this recording, too.


And I remember, on a road trip, being summoned to watch a Chinese performance on a grainy black-and-white motel TV screen. I don't remember whether it was Shen Yun but it was their sort of thing, and Shen Yun is/are another tough act to follow and has/have not become a genre.


If onlyYouTube and TikTok videos count, here's a YouTube alternate. Their goal is to add at least one video from each country on the continent.


And that makes ten!
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Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Kingsport Vlogger's Walking Tour of Gate City

Just one link with lots of comments, in which "Big O" walks through my town and does a pretty decent vlog. 


Comments:

"Big O" doesn't sound local and mentions, in the video, having come from Atlanta. An immigrant! Probably that's typical of the best "walking tour of a small town" vlogs. People who have always lived in a small town tend to overlook things that they're not advertising. You get a better view of the town through fresher eyes. More balance. More willingness to focus on things like litter, and, by focussing on one piece of litter in this video, celebrate the general tidiness of the streets.

Gate City was only starting to talk about building the middle school when I was a student; actually built it when my sister was in high school. She worked on the clean-up crew in the summer! I missed all the fun! The old college building, which housed grade eight when I was in school (grade seven had to use classrooms in the elementary school building), was pulled down and replaced with a nice new elementary school gym. When I was in elementary school nobody thought kids needed a gym. On the other hand, when I was in grade nine, people thought ninth graders were competent to mingle with high school students in "open" classes, divided by how much people had already learned rather than when they were born, which made high school more interesting than grade school had been.  

Gate City does not actually have two fire departments. The one located "in the old Food City building" on Route 23 is for Weber City, which has its own zipcode. They are two separate organizations. The quiet older man walking around the fire truck is our Fire Chief; he still fights fires, operating a truck and directing the younger men. He was the first responder who arrived in time to save the Cat Sanctuary from a chimney fire in 2015. 

"Pal's" is a local fast food chain. Their signs always feature "Pal's Instructions"--sometimes calling attention to new menu items, sometimes giving advice on life in general. The pastel checkered buildings were challenged under an eyesore law in Kingsport, where the chain's based, and ruled to be just exactly as ugly as local eyes could be asked to endure. Anything tackier would absolutely be illegal. The Pal's in the video is managed by a relative of mine and is my pick of the fast food places in town, though the McDonald's and Taco Bell are writer-friendly and have better food selections than Hardee's.  

The glass plant's been closed for a while. 

Q.S.Q. was named from its owners' initials and closed when the last one died. It and the laundromat next door have been known to attract drug traffic, because neither is monitored in the evening.

How much of a drug problem do we have, really? "Scag" is about the rudest name a local person of my age and background ever called anybody. We used it to mean any drug addict including, if we wanted to be nasty, cigarette smokers. Decent human beings do not talk to scags. But mild non-prescription stimulants such as coffee and tea were always socially acceptable and, unfortunately, some people trying to work through injuries or compete with their grandchildren's generation on jobs have become meth addicts. Others have become addicted to prescription painkillers as a result of trying to work through injuries or compete with their grandchildren's generation on jobs. So we do have a drug problem, with the attendant social problems, illegal traffickers trying to take over blocks or open-air markets, addicts stealing property or engaging in prostitution to support their habit, people falsifying their medical records to get more prescription painkillers for resale. About 2000 some too-clever-for-her-own-good body got a grant to open a methadone clinic and twelve-step group meeting place. There weren't a lot of heroin users interested in methadone, and my understanding is that someone closer to Kingsport took over that business, but Gate City has always had plenty of twelve-steppers. Classic alcoholics, mostly harmless, they don't really bother anybody but just hang around downtown lowering the tone of Kane Street. Drug activity usually takes place around the state line and involves the welfare-and-other-kinds-of-addicts brought in to stock those awful apartment towers. Yes, there's a lot of it.

Nancy Broadwater was the vet who offered to euthanize Mogwai-cat when her hind legs went spastic. I've been told that that degree of spasticity really is fatal to a majority of cats who develop it...as with polio, though in cats it's caused by a different virus. The odds might really have been against Mogwai making a full recovery, but she did. A year after Dr. Broadwater recommended putting her down, she'd grown up with all her oddly proportioned body parts fitting together into a classic Siamese-type body shape, and become a beautiful, healthy, athletic cat with funny-looking spots on her face. She did look freaky and as if she might not have been meant to live as long as she did, though, as a kitten. I don't really blame Dr. Broadwater. There are just cats who are dumb animals, useful as small predators but pretty much interchangeable, and cats who contribute as much to your family as any of the humans and more than your brother-in-law...Mogwai was one of the latter. I have felt sort of...weird...about Dr. Broadwater ever since. Like the way you feel about the Canadian government trying to salvage its government medical system by urging everyone with a chronic disease to "choose" suicide. It's not possible to hate Canada but...ick.

"West Jackson Street or whatever"? Jackson Street buildings are numbered either "west" or "east" from that central location.

There is not a lot to see in Gate City after 5:00 p.m. When the street lamps come on, some stores keep lights on for security but hardly any are open to the public. There's not a lot of traffic in the daytime. Generally the town looks liveliest between 8 and 9 a.m. and slows down to a siesta pace by mid-afternoon. 

Broadwater Drugs has changed a great deal. It was once the classic 1950s American "drugstore," with all the over-the-counter pharmaceuticals getting legitimacy from being sold next to racks of greeting cards, books, toys, snacks, and the classic soda-fountain bar. High school kids might stop for "Cokes" (generic term including other brands of soda pop) and hamburgers at the Campus Drive-In. (Once long ago Gate City had a two-year teachers' college--back when a two-year course was thought to qualify teachers.) Elementary school students, and many of their parents, hung out after school at "the drugstore." It was called that because a Broadwater owned it, though someone from a nearby town also operated a drugstore, without a bar, when I was growing up. In the 1990s the store passed down to the next generation, who closed the bar and took out the fun stuff, having determined that the money was in having a drive-through pharmacy and displaying only "home medical supplies." It went from being a social hub to doing a tightly limited, strictly confidential trade. I've heard that this decision paid. A lot of people like doing small-town gossip but those people are, if possible, more fanatical about their own privacy than those of us who stay out of the gossip.

Southern Graphics looks dead at sundown, when the building is probably empty, but it's a nice, modern print shop. They do everything from signs to books, but they're not publishers, merely printers. They print all our high school yearbooks and most of our local history books.

One of the few businesses that aren't located on Kane or Jackson Street is the telephone and cable company, up the hill to the left on Woodland Street. Apart from that I think we really might see "it all" in this video. 

Where "Big O" stops is across the street from the elementary school, the School Board, a row of houses that are "suburban" enough to have had a cat sanctuary (when I was growing up they were patrolled by a free-range bantam hen), and then the post office and the Department of Motor Vehicles. But he's right to turn back, because he started so late. There's nothing to see there after dark. A woman walking out there alone, here I stand to testify, is likely to get the "pretty little girl / lady of your age" (note the absence of anything in between, any willingness to acknowledge that women are ever competent responsible adults) "shouldn't be out alone after dark" kind of annoyance. A man just might  be arrested. 

When he walks back and looks up King Alley, nothing's going on in the parking lot behind the stores. At one time that parking lot housed a Bristol-Jenkins bus station. (The buses, old school buses painted pale green, ran from Bristol to Kingsport to Gate City to a few other towns ending with Jenkins. The fare for a ride between two stations was a quarter. I rode in from Kingsport on a B-J bus once, the last year the company was in business, 1976.) After the bus company shut down there was still a cab stand up into the early 2000s. I looked for a cab in 2006 and was told that all three of Gate City's cab services had shut down in 2005. Since then the alley has been monitored to keep out illegal activity, which means that most of the time it's dead, but sometimes it's used for open-air concerts and parties.

The Maple Tree Cafe replaced the Roberts Family Bakery Cafe, former home of this web site. Mr. Roberts died and Mrs. Roberts wanted to concentrate on running her AirBNB since it had been less damaged by the COVID panic. She sold the cafe and the gift shop to old friends from Tennessee, where she grew up. Immigration is such a nasty thing if your children want to get a good price on a store, such a wonderful thing if they want to date someone who already lives here and won't try to pull them away. Grandma Bonnie Peters grew up in Indiana. Adayahi immigrated from Wise County. This web site will always be liberal about individual immigrants, even if we can't encourage them, but does observe that, when local people complain about "carpetbaggers" liberalizing the local Republican Party or inflating property values, those local people are getting what they deserve for not sponsoring my book biz.

That "Antique Mall" and "Antique Alley" used to be the Hackney Furniture store and Nichols Department Store. People miss what used to be in those buildings. Alas the mortality of humankind. No living Hackney seems to have wanted to sell furniture and no living Nichols (or Nickels or various other spellings; they're all one family, they were here before Noah Webster brought in the idea of standard spelling, and the name is German) wanted to keep up the big department store building. What's in those buildings now is overpriced but not bad, though currently the corner of the Nichols Building is occupied by an "Italian bistro" that is pretty disgusting.

"Big O" doesn't mention the little building tucked in between courthouse and law firm behind that statue of a soldier. The statue was done by Jim Speers. The building was the quaint little independent local library I loved as a child; after that it's been used by the Historical Society and by business owners' groups. Both deserve a good close look, by daylight.

And yes, isn't it funny how most of the businesses located within a block of the county courthouse are law firms? There's a bail bonding company, too, if you know where to look. However, a wonderful third-or-fourth-generation hardware store remains to be discovered in that Part II video..
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Wednesday, August 28, 2024

Links to Funny Animal Videos

This week's Long & Short Reviews question asked reviewers to link to funny animal videos.

Although this web site never overburdens older browsers by posting videos, it does follow a few sites that specialize in cute, funny, fluffy things for the refreshment of the activist soul. Descriptions are provided for those who can't just click on the links and see what I'm talking about.  

Let's start with a video that was linked here in 2015. At first you may wonder what's funny about a dog bumping into things while carrying a box in front of his face. Then the light dawns. Although the dog's humans keep telling him he's "such a dummy," this dog knows exactly what he's doing. He's crash-testing a box. He's using his peripheral vision to ram the box into things without bumping his head. The joke's on the humans. They have made more than one video of this dog repeating this behavior. 


Then there's the whole "Stern Du Tube" series. These are compilations of short video clips, not all featuring animals and not all funny, but usually an animal doing something funny is in each one somewhere. The editors also like straight nature videos, especially of sea creatures swimming underwater, and sequences where humans fall down. Here's the latest episode, for those who've not seen it yet. There's a dog who's supposedly being taught to ask for an old shoe as a toy, who just knocks the man over and takes the shoe, but the sequence where I started laughing out loud is the remodelling job that is sooo not going to pass inspection. 


Actually, if you watch only the short opening sequence with the big fluffy dog, who does not look like Huckleberry Hound to me, even this Paulides video is sort of funny. For those who 've not watched them yet, Dave Paulides' videos are not funny. They tend to feature unsolved mysteries in which missing persons turn out to have been kidnapped or murdered. However, the sequence where he's trying to flatter the dog into sitting still on the set, talking about what a cool, quiet dog she is, and the dog starts barking...It's funnier if you've already seen a dozen or so of these videos where the dog does sit calmly and stoically on the set.


Dogs! Always dogs! What about the chickens? In this compilation, with the help of a pre-programmed electronic keyboard that uses a red light to show the hen which keys to peck, a hen finally learns to play a tune. 


Finally, there's the "Cat Jams" music videos. For those who've not discovered "The Kiffness," he's a musician who takes recordings of almost anything, including animal noises, and composes music around them. Is a theme emerging here? Yes, I do like funny animal videos where the joke's on the humans.

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Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Imagine a Song Parody (Some People Won't Like)

Right. These lyrics appear on a video link at "Clash Daily." I was able to open the page from a public-access computer, but Clash Daily has been known to use pop-ups that may foul up some computers. I like song parodies, and "Imagine" is one song that's been standing in the howling need of good parodies for a long time, so here, slightly edited, is one. (The original lyrics at the link below are ruder, and more likely to appeal to troops who may be deployed to ISIS-infested countries.)

This web site generally tries to avoid stereotyping sane Muslims together with the rabid rabble of ISIS, but parodies are supposed to be borderline rude, by definition, and since ISIS' fanaticism is a parody of Islam anyway I'll let it go.

Nevertheless, this post may disappear...not if anybody complains about the stereotyping (lighten up, it's a parody) but if Doug Giles complains that whoever wrote/performed it released it for profit. I've not been able to confirm that these lyrics are in the public domain. Good singable parodies of "Imagine" need to be in the public domain, but this web site won't continue to display this one if it's not.

Imagine there’s no America
It’s easy if you try
Just a big ol' ISIS mess
No Stars and Stripes to fly
Imagine all our people
Living as Islamic State slaves
Imagine there’s no Country & Western
It isn’t hard to do
No baseball or hot dogs
As far as freedom goes, we're through
Imagine all our pretty girls
Wearing black little sheets
You may say that I’m a doom-n-gloomer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll wake the heck up
And our nation will still be strong
Imagine there’s no possessions
Like SAD-dumb Hussein's plan
No need for Ford or Chevy
A veritable Berzerkistan
Imagine all our people
Losing all we have
You may say that I’m a doom-n-gloomer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll wake the heck up
And our nation will still be strong

 http://clashdaily.com/2015/11/imagine-this-anti-islam-parody-song-will-not-be-liked-by-obama/?

(This web site is aware that "Sad-daam" is a man's name and "Sad-dumb" is a rude word in Arabic, which is why this web site thinks Hussein's name should always have been pronounced with the accent on the first syllable.)
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