Posts Tagged ‘DaddyTube’
Watch Hero Dogs of 9/11 On Animal Planet
Ah, the Twitter. It is many things. One of them is a distraction, of course. But out of distraction comes information. Sometimes information one didn’t even realize that one wanted to acquire.
For example: through a series of tweets, the good folks at Animal Planet alerted me to a show called “Hero Dogs of 9/11” that is airing tonight, September 10, 2013, at 8pm EST.
@brettsinger Hero Dogs of 9/11: Check out a sneak peek here – http://t.co/7yNIWeJkJ5 #HeroDogs
— AnimalPlanet (@AnimalPlanet) September 10, 2013
Aaaand here’s the video sneak peek. It has dogs in it.
Watch the whole thing tonight, 9/10/13, 8pm EST, on Animal Planet.
Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s something in my eye…
Video – Alabama High School Football Coaches Fighting (Stupidity)
Via Deadspin, a story about high school football coaches behaving very badly:
Alabama high school football coaches coming to blows after a game shouldn’t be that surprising, considering how seriously Alabama takes football in general, but that doesn’t make the incident any less ridiculous.
The key phrase above is “but that doesn’t make the incident any less ridiculous.” I don’t care how “seriously Alabama takes football in general,” these are adults being paid to coach kids. Yes, high school football is a big deal in some parts of these United States. Youth sports in general have become increasingly popular over the past 10+ years (my estimate), with major media coverage of younger and younger players. Remember the story about a 13-year-old QB committing to USC in 2010? (Here’s a follow-up on the now 17-year-old David Sills from June of 2013 if you’re interested; I admit to not actually watching the video I just linked to because I don’t really care.)
In case the above parenthetical was unclear, I’m not a fan of the excessive media coverage of youth sports. These are kids, most of whom will not go on to have professional sports careers, and they don’t benefit financially from the attention they receive unless they do manage to make it to the pro level. I am a fan of kids participating in youth sports, and I hope that the increased scrutiny of young athletes hasn’t taken away any opportunities for less talented youngsters to get on the field. For example, I was a sub-par baseball player — my first season I didn’t get a hit, although I was third on the team in walks because I quickly realized that 12-year-old pitchers don’t hit the strike zone all that often (at least they didn’t back then). By the time I stopped playing, I was good enough to start at first base and probably hit about .260 (guessing here). But I loved baseball. I was never going to be a superstar, but neither were most of my teammates. Why did I quit? Because the kids AND THE COACHES became increasingly hostile and hyper-competitive. Competitiveness can be a good thing on and off the field. But when a grown man screams and curses at a 10-year-old for striking out, that’s insane. A lack of sportsmanship from teammates doesn’t help either. This isn’t to say that everybody has to congratulate you for whiffing at an easy pitch and ending the inning with the bases loaded. But, to paraphrase Lisa Simpson, why would you come to our game just to boo (and curse at) us?
That’s why the video upsets me. It looks like a freakin’ bar bawl. I know these aren’t little kids; many high school football players are anything but little these days. It doesn’t matter. No one should behave like this, but for non-professional coaches it’s even more embarrassing.
via Alabama High School Football Coaches Get Into Postgame Brawl (Deadspin)
Lee Daniels’ The Butler Is A “Father And Son Story” (DaddyTube) – UPDATED
In this video about the new movie The Butler, Lee Daniels says that he wanted to make the film because it’s “a father [and] son story, a love story between a father and his son”. The father is Forest Whitaker, the titular butler, and his son apparently gets involved in the civil rights movement. I did not know this. Now I do.
In general, the video makes a much better case for the film than the trailer. By that I mean I’m more interested in seeing it, in part because it’s about fathers and sons, and also because it seems to be about more than what was in the trailer. Not to pile on the trailer. I just think these interviews make the movie seem a lot more interesting.
Link below in case the embed doesn’t work.
Lee Daniels’ The Butler 2013 – Movie Trailers – Fandango.com.
UPDATE: Not of the “breaking news” variety, but I wanted to mention that the interviews were done by Brad Barton, and that he posted a longer version of his interview with Oprah Winfrey. See below.
Hug Him And Squeeze Him And Call Him George (Video)
You’ve probably heard the line “I will hug him and squeeze him and call him George.” As I just wrote on Facebook, teaching it to my children is one of my great accomplishments as a parent. (Remember, quoting yourself may be tacky, but it makes fact-checking much easier.) I always thought the line came from a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Now I’m not so sure.
I might even have the line wrong. If so, I’m not the only one.
What follows is a condensed version of my attempt to figure out where “I will hug him and squeeze him and call him George” came from, which led me down a big Internet rabbit hole (pun intended) of cartoons, John Steinbeck, and other stuff.
At first the Internet seemed to be telling me that the cartoon in question was “The Abominable Snow Rabbit”.
In the video above, the line is, “I will name him George, and I will hug him and pet him and squeeze him…” Not an exact match, but very close. (Daffy Duck has a great line as well: “I know I’m a louse. But I’m a live louse.”)
Then I stumbled across an intriguing tidbit: “The Abominable Snow Rabbit” is an homage to John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men
OK. Sure. Why not?
However, according to the Internet there are many cartoon homages to “Of Mice and Men
Really. There are.
Here is “Lonesome Lenny”, a 1946 Tex Avery cartoon, described thusly on IMDB: “Screwy Squirrel is bought in a pet shop to be the companion of a daft dog so strong that he squeezes his playmates to death.” Well all righty then. The dog’s name is Lenny, and he calls his new pal George. (Lennie and George are the main characters in “Of Mice and Men.”)
(Tip of the hat to the folks on this AWN forum page for pointing me towards “Lonesome Lenny”.)
But there is another Tex Avery short, “Of Fox And Hounds”, released in 1940, that is also an “Of Mice and Men” thing. This is where the immortal line “Which way did he go, George? Which way did he go?” came from. (I taught that one to my kids as well. I’m an awesome dad.)
(Hat tip to LanguageHat.com. No pun intended that time.)
Research note: Lest anyone think that my sources are limited to Wikipedia and pages I found via The Google, here is a link to The New York Times’ review of the 1939 film version of Steinbeck’s book (starring Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney, Jr.), which states that “Of Mice and Men
“Of Fox And Hounds” seems to be the first animated homage to “Of Mice and Men
Lennie, George and rabbits are apparently quite the thing. Who knew?
What did we learn? A lot. Haven’t answered my original question. But that’s OK.
(Thanks to the Facebook friends who inspired this post.)
Classic Looney Tunes – YouTube.
Related articles (Note: These are offsite links; DaddyTips takes no responsibility for outside content.)
Smart Diaper With QR code?
CNET via CBS News has a story about a Smart Diaper with a QR code parents can scan when their little ones go wee-wee.
Why?
So that parents can “track changes in a baby’s urine, potentially showing signs of a urinary tract infection, prolonged dehydration, or risk for kidney problems,” according to the CNET/CBS article.
At the moment the Smart Diaper is only a dream; funds are being raised via IndieGoGo. The company behind this potential pee capturing data device is Pixie Scientific. This is an actual quote from their web site:
360 million diapers are changed every day
None of this health information has been used
Until Smart Diapers
They made the the words “smart diapers” blue, not us.
There’s a video. Watch if you dare.
‘Smart Diaper’ with QR code may track tots’ health | Crave – CNET.
New Language Began With Baby-Talk
Here is a fascinating article in The New York Times about a new language, Light Warlpiri, which is spoken by a relatively small group of Australian Aboriginal people. Everyone who speaks it is younger than 35 years old. And it began with baby-talk.
From the Times:
There are many dying languages in the world. But at least one has recently been born, created by children living in a remote village in northern Australia.
Carmel O’Shannessy, a linguist at the University of Michigan, has been studying the young people’s speech for more than a decade and has concluded that they speak neither a dialect nor the mixture of languages called a creole, but a new language with unique grammatical rules.
Here is a video, “Monster Story in Light Warlpiri Child39”, from Dr. Carmel O’Shannessy’s YouTube account.
So what’s this about baby-talk? Again, from the Times: Read more »
Gizmodo Writer Tries Bionic Leg (Video)
Gizmodo writer Brent Rose wins the Internet for the day. He tried out a bionic leg.
Really. He did. There’s even video.
Cool, right? I didn’t read the entire article, but here are a few nifty bionic tidbits: Read more »
