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In 1953, a young North Carolina actor named Andy Griffith did a stand-up routine about the game of football. The recording of it became a runaway bestseller across the country, and it quickly propelled Griffith toward major motion picture roles and of course The Andy Griffith Show. And since that time “What It Was, Was Football!” has become one of the best-known comedy monologues in history.

I first heard this bit around 1984, when the local edition of P.M. Magazine did a video clip of Griffith’s routine accompanied by footage from a local game. They even had a guy act out the “Buddy have a drink!” part. I thought it was pretty hilarious and years later when I spotted an Andy Griffith CD at a store in Asheville I bought it, just for “What It Was, Was Football!”. It’s now on my MP3 player 🙂

And guess what? You ...

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Right now I’m averaging just one blog post a day. Which means that behind the scenes, I’m up to something.

But whenever I’m not on sabbatical from blogging (boy did that one go SNAFU or what?) I like to keep a little activity going so that the site doesn’t stagnate.

Here’s something that I found tonight that’s well worth sharing: from a 1994 variety show at a New York high school, it’s a live-action on-stage performance of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s classic song “Nature Trail to Hell”!

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Click here for “The Home Video Prince Doesn’t Want You To See”, a story on the ABC News website. It’s about Prince, AKA The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, scouring the Internet for “copyright infringement”. The Lenzes, a family in Pennsylvania, had a video of their 18-month old son Holden on YouTube. The clip is only a few seconds long, but in the background you can hear Prince’s song “Let’s Go Crazy”.

That was plenty enough for Prince to have YouTube yank the family’s video.

Well, little Holden’s mom Stephanie Lenz fought back and filed a DMCA counter-notification claim through YouTube against Universal Music Publishing Group – which is Prince’s label – and their claim of copyright infringement. A few weeks later the video was back up.

And somehow, my similar recent situation with Viacom was brought into the discussion…

Caught to

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Search Engine hosted by Jesse Brown is a show on CBC Radio One (“CBC” being the Canadian Broadcasting Company). It’s about issues pertaining to the Internet and it’s heard by our good friends all across the Great White North. Last week Jesse phoned all the way down here to Reidsville, North Carolina and interviewed me about my recent situation with Viacom and the supposed “copyright infringement” on YouTube involving my first school board commercial. The segment is running on this week’s installment of Search Engine and you can listen to it as an MP3 podcast here....

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It was one year ago today – on October 6th, 2006 – that the now-(in)famous first commercial from my campaign for Rockingham County Board of Education started broadcasting on WGSR in Reidsville…

I had just finished it that morning, and while the video was doing the final render I ran out to find Debbie Moore so that I could give her the check for a month’s worth of airtime. Then I got home, burned it onto a CD and drove it over to WGSR and handed it to Matt Smith. Right after that I had to go to Greensboro for an errand, then got back home and after seeing Lisa I went back to the station to see if the commercial was running yet.

Ooh-boy…

Y’know, this commercial, I had to make it. If I didn’t produce it for my school board run, I would have regretted it for the ...

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So I’m watching it again – ‘cuz it’s one of my all-time favorite movies – and I’m wondering…

Dare I post a video on YouTube of myself doing my extremely disturbing yet hysterically funny impersonation of Buffalo Bill?

It seemed to be a rather popular trick when I was in high school. So much so that during a swim meet my senior year my teammates asked me to do it while I was standing up on one of the diving blocks. Of course, I obliged them.

So I’m thinking of videotaping it and sticking it on YouTube. Might become a sensation. And then again it might get me arrested.

What do you think? 😛...

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While going through some older videotapes I found this, made during the first Christmas that Lisa and I were married. This was at her parents’ place in Calhoun, Georgia and is a chronicle of the third turkey that I’d ever fried. Since then I’ve done many more (and have become much better at it, I think). Lisa was running the camera and the guy you see sitting in the chair with the University of Georgia cap is her dad:

I might make another video about turkey-frying as we get closer to Thanksgiving, this one doing a step-by-step from marinading the bird, to actually frying it. But this one gives a pretty good idea about the process and the extreme danger involved 🙂

EDIT 11-18-2007 10:25 a.m. EST: I’ve decided to stop publicly showing this video, because I’m taking a lot of heat for how “burnt” the turkey looks. And in ...

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Because a lot of people have expressed interest in this, and because I haven’t been able to see any reason to withhold this info at this point, here is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act counter-notification claim that I submitted to YouTube.

(And in case you don’t know what this is about, here’s the original post about my situation with Viacom over a YouTube clip that I had uploaded and here’s the post about its resolution.)

It all started with the following e-mail that I received from YouTube on the morning of August 29th, 2007:

Dear Member:

This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Viacom International Inc. claiming that this material is infringing:

Web Junk 2.0 on VH1 features my school board commercial!:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddyVQwpByug

Please Note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result

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