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One of the greatest title sequences for a children’s cartoon ever.

The theme song alone will make you want to go flying off into outer space on a World War II battleship with a bunch of other men…

Okay, so it wasn’t originally called Star Blazers, the original Japanese title is Space Battleship Yamato, but it’s still an awesome show no matter what language it’s translated in 🙂

Maybe someday the suits at Disney will finally give us that live-action version that’s been promised since 1995. Would be cool to see what the wave motion gun would look like…...

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A judge has ordered YouTube to hand over ALL the history of its users – including videos watched and IP addresses – to Viacom, as part of Viacom’s “infringement” lawsuit against YouTube and its owner Google.

I first found the story on Slashdot, which is reflecting a lot of outrage at the judge’s ruling.

Since it’s already been established that Viacom has STOLEN video from ME, perhaps I should sue and have a judge also give me YouTube’s user history so that I can see how many times Viacom watched my own videos…?...

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Yesterday this blog reported the passing of Kermit Love, longtime Muppet designer and operator. His work on commercials led me to look around YouTube for any other examples of Muppets used in advertising.

That’s what led me to re-discover the spots that Jim Henson made in the late 1950s for Wilkins Coffee.

Over fifty years ago, Henson was hired by Wilkins Coffee to create some commercials for their product. The result was a series of clips starring Wilkins and Wontkins. These are not only some of the earliest examples of the Muppets on television, they are also the longest-running campaign to feature the Muppets and certainly the most violent! Poor Wontkins dies by cannon, by point-blank shot from a pistol, run over by a bandwagon, not to mention threatened with a guillotine! In one of the commercials he’s also shown smoking a cigarette (try doing that nowadays!). ...

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It might be a few days before I can watch “Turn Left”, tonight’s new episode of Doctor Who which the BBC just transmitted across the pond to our Brittish brethren (and after two years nobody has still gotten that little joke!). “Turn Left” marks the return of Billie Piper as Rose Tyler: the Doctor’s first companion after the series was revived after a fifteen-year hiatus. Rose, her family and boyfriend Mickey became trapped in the alternate universe at the end of Season 2 (or 28 if we’re counting the original series) and the Doctor said that there was no way to escape. If you’ve been watching this season’s Doctor Who you know already that she wound up back somehow, beginning with her jaw-dropping silent cameo in the season premiere “Partners in Crime”.

So to celebrate the imminent reunion of the Doctor and one of the most beloved of his companions, ...

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A few weeks ago I wound up helping with the video for a friend’s baby dedication ceremony. Well actually she’s more of my sister’s friend (and my sister’s in this video too) and they called here wanting some advice about audio editing, and I offered to do it for them and e-mail it for their project. Or something. Anyhoo, they had the ceremony for baby Paige a few days ago and because she’s the cutest lil’ thing, and because her parents are really great people and also ‘cuz Lord only knows when I’ll ever get to use pink as a border color for a YouTube video again, here is their presentation!

...

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Yesterday YouTube rolled out a new feature called Video Annotations. It’s a way to add interactive content to YouTube videos and after playing around with it some, I think this might be one of the best things that YouTube has done yet for its users. You can include commentary, add dialogue balloons, even link to other YouTube videos. Lots of possibilities here. During a break this morning I gave The Baritones the “Pop-Up Video” treatment…

I’m thinking, whenever I get the time, to include annotations for Forcery and Schrodinger’s Bedroom as well. By the way, right now Video Annotations is a beta feature and doesn’t support embedded videos (so you’ll have to click on The Baritones link above to check it out). It’s also automatically on by default, but you can toggle the feature with a new button that’s to the right of the “full screen” one (it’s the ...

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You know what haunts me most about this scene? It’s that Ben is crying. This is the last thing that he’s about to do for the Island, the final gesture of his duties as the previous chosen one. And for the first time, we are seeing fear in the face of this master manipulator.

Just before the white light cascades over everything, I can’t help thinking that what’s going through Ben’s mind is, “I’m going to die. Please forgive me.” He knows he’s going to be banished from the Island… and he doesn’t know where he’ll be sent to. He could wind up anywhere in the world, or anywhere above it or inside it. The next moment could find him on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, for all the good that it would do him. I like to believe that this was a “leap of faith” moment for ...

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In spite of what I said about no hard feelings, there ain’t no way that I’m gonna let this one slide…

Many of you no doubt remember what happened between me and Viacom several months ago, regarding the first TV commercial from my 2006 school board campaign.

To quickly recap: months after the election, Viacom’s network VH1 chose to use my commercial for a segment of its show Web Junk 2.0, without bothering to ask me about it. I didn’t mind, heck I thought it was pretty funny. So a few days after that episode runs I posted the clip of Web Junk 2.0 running MY commercial onto YouTube, so that I could share it on this blog.

A month and a half later, I was notified by YouTube that Viacom had demanded that the clip be removed, and YouTube was acquiescing with the order. Viacom ...

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