This is Live. No. Really. Sort of. (DaddyTube)
This video, of Hatsune Miku, a Japanese Vocaloid star (?), blew my mind. You have to watch long enough to really get the effect I got. I don’t want to spoil it but I will tell you that this is a live concert. Watch a bit of it. Hell, watch the whole thing, it’s under 3 minutes.
Did you see what I saw? Actual real-live musicians playing along with a hologram? In front of an audience of actual humans?
Wow. Just… wow.
On the one hand, it’s End Times stuff. But the technology behind it is fascinating. There is a Vocaloid Keytar! (Warning: the video is very strange and includes a person in a dinosaur suit, dancing.) It goes deep.
I haven’t found anything that indicates there are any English versions. However, listening to a couple of songs (literally a couple, I only checked out two, both by Hatsune Miku, who is not a real person but performs with a live band) I’ve decided that it isn’t as bad as some current pop music. Plus you don’t have to worry about lyrics like “brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack” because it’s mostly in Japanese.
Not too bad, right? I mean, for pop music. It depends on how you feel about that sort of thing.
Mostly it was seeing the real musicians performing alongside a hologram that freaked me out.
h/t to the folks who showed this to me, one of whom was Lucas Gonze and the other of whom was Tom.
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HBO Will Show 2013 Film MUHAMMAD ALI’S GREATEST FIGHT
Here’s the press release. I know I want to see it.
RIP Ali. The Greatest Of All Time. My childhood hero. And I wasn’t even much of a boxing fan.
English: Bust portrait of Muhammad Ali, World Journal Tribune photo by Ira Rosenberg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
HBO will remember Muhammad Ali with encore plays of the HBO Films drama MUHAMMAD ALI’S GREATEST FIGHT, which will be presented on the main HBO channel this Wednesday, June 8 at 9:00 p.m. (ET/PT) and Friday, June 10 at 8:00 p.m.
Debuting on HBO in 2013, MUHAMMAD ALI’S GREATEST FIGHT goes behind the closed doors of the United States Supreme Court as the nine Justices – Chief Justice Warren E. Burger (Frank Langella), Hugo Black (Fritz Weaver), William O. Douglas (Harris Yulin), John Harlan II (Christopher Plummer), William Brennan Jr. (Peter Gerety), Potter Stewart (Barry Levinson), Byron White (John Bedford Lloyd), Thurgood Marshall (Danny Glover) and Harry Blackmun (Ed Begley, Jr.) – decide the outcome of Muhammad Ali’s landmark 1971 case for being a conscientious objector. Justice Harlan, a respected jurist with 15 years on the Court, finds himself at odds with the status quo after his perspective is challenged by the contemporary ideals of his new clerk (Benjamin Walker). Executive produced by Frank Doelger, Tracey Scoffield and Jonathan Cameron; directed by Stephen Frears from a script by Shawn Slovo.
Enough With The Gorilla Thing
I’m calling it – enough with the Gorilla story.
What prompted me to write this? I suppose it’s because this is still a news story.
Parents of the boy who fell into gorilla enclosure will not face charges: https://t.co/12GlLAUrD3 pic.twitter.com/pPyN2Ny66Q
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) June 6, 2016
(Full disclosure: I sometimes write for The Daily Beast.)
Now: OF COURSE the parents won’t face charges! That would ridiculous. If for some reason the zoo didn’t have the proper fencing in place, that’s who would face charges. However, by all accounts that I’ve read, the zoo DID have the proper barriers up. Unfortunately, a small child got through them and landed in the gorilla’s area.
Here’s some video. It’s not that shocking but if you don’t want to see it for whatever reason, you’re not missing much, in part because half of it is blocked by a tree. But it doesn’t feature the gorilla getting shot, or the child being harmed.
Here’s Jack Hanna, animal expert, defending what the zoo had to do, which is kill the gorilla.
It’s sad that the gorilla, named Harambe, was killed. But what were they going to do? Let the kid get killed? The gorilla was dragging him around like a sack of potatoes.
By the way, this isn’t the first time a child has fallen into a gorilla habitat. I don’t think this particular gorilla was a Silverback, but that’s only because I don’t know stuff like that. (It appears to not be a Silverback because it doesn’t have a silver back, but I’m color blind, so who knows.) Here’s a video from — wait for it — 2015. You know, a year ago.
This incident worked out much better because EVERYONE was OK. Not saying the circumstances are the same. However, in the 2015 video above, you can see the barrier and in theory it should be enough. It wasn’t.
Oh look! Here’s another time a kid wound up in a gorilla habitat at a zoo. In 1996.
As Kimberly Harrington pointed out on Medium, “do accidents happen anymore? Especially when a kid is involved?” (That’s just a quote from the headline. The whole article is worth reading.) Kimberly posted a lot of memes/tweets that resulted from the Harambe incident, but these two really horrified me.
I mean… wow.
Here’s a quick quote from Ms. Harrington’s excellent article:
This is the perfect (shit) storm for the Internet, especially the American variety, because it involves: a) kids, b) animals, and c) parenting. All of the things that the Internet likes to flip its collective wig over. All of the things that allow the Monday morning quarterbacking to gush forth in a rage orgy. Someone needs to pay! She’s a woman? Let’s call her horrible names! This is our chance, Internet!
Yeah. That pretty much says it all. In 1996, maybe all the Prodigy and Compuserve chat rooms were aflame with enraged parents and animal rights activists digitally duking it out. But I sort of doubt it.
Bottom line: everyone needs to take a breath and calm down. Jack Hanna says the choice was between a human life and a gorilla life (paraphrasing here) and the zookeepers chose the child. It is absolutely sad. But there’s no excuse for the kind of vitriol shown above. You can see much more at the link below.
Me? I say enough. No más. It’s over, Johnny.
Except that these are the Interwebs. It’ll never be over. Well, maybe when something else shows up to outrage people.
See also: Hey America, do accidents happen anymore? Especially when a kid is involved? — Be Yourself — Medium
Watch Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths for Free
Apparently you can watch the animated Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths for free on CWSeed.com. It’s on The Flash’s official twitter account, so it must be true.
Check it:
See @DCComics heroes battle their evil counterparts in Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths: https://t.co/GJLIe8N1Yzhttps://t.co/AfOMoXouO2
— The Flash (@CW_TheFlash) June 1, 2016
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this, although I can’t say for certain, which isn’t a great sign. Although it’s also a sign of aging. In other words, don’t take the fact that I can’t remember seeing something as a sign that it’s no good.
Actually, now that I look at the Wikipedia page for this direct-to-DVD DC animated universe superhero movie, I’m more confident that I’ve seen it. The writer is the late Dwayne McDuffie, who was extremely talented and died much too young. As I recall, I liked it, just not as much as I liked Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, both of which McDuffie worked on and are among my favorite cartoons, along with Static Shock, which I really hope they release on DVD because it’s so damn good and why the hell hasn’t this happened yet?
Anyway, free stuff you can watch legitimately. Go figure. (Kidding.) Here’s the link. Enjoy.
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Brad Pitt Stops A Kid From Getting Crushed By Fans (Video)
This is kinda nice. Brad Pitt stops a kid from getting crushed by fans in Spain, or to use the lingua franca of the place where it happened, “Brad Pitt rescata a niña en rodaje de Allied”. Allied is the movie Mr. Pitt was filming, and he took a break in order to say hello to a crowd. More specifically, he waved at a rather large group of people who were clearly REALLY stoked to see him.
But perhaps they were a little bit too stoked. According to the story, and the video backs this up, a little girl was being crushed against the fence. Mr. Pitt saw this and had his bodyguards pick her up and pull her out of the crowd, then comforted her until medical staff arrived. Here’s the video.
I think this is an example of how having kids changes a person. Not that I don’t think Mr. Pitt would have done this before becoming a dad. But the behavior, to my eye, looks very parental. There are things that become instinctual after you have children of your own. In this case, that was a good thing.
Via Time
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Really? We’re Still Blaming Cartoons?
I should write more about how an “Egypt official blames ‘Tom and Jerry’ for spreading violence” (source: ABC News), but I’m stuck on “Still blaming cartoons? Seriously?”
Feh.
Source: Egypt Official Blames ‘Tom and Jerry’ for Spreading Violence (ABC News)
Sesame Street Avengers Parody (DaddyTube)
Apparently today is National Superhero Day. Even if it isn’t (I’ve been fooled before), this Sesame Street Avengers Parody video “The Aveggies- Age of Bon Bon” is quite amusing. Sorry, forget to say Spoiler Alert.
At the risk of spoiling the best jokes… OK, I won’t. But the Sesame Street writers manage to come up with amusing vegetable-themed names for all of the Avengers, and even works in a version of one of my all-time favorite lines (from the first Avengers movie, which this is technically a parody of, rather than Avengers: Age of Ultron). Makes me wish I had a little kid to hang out with so I could watch more Sesame Street.
If that makes you hungry for more (see what I did there?) here is a Sesame Street Superhero Playlist, which begins with none other than Superman. Ah, the good old days.
