Thumbs-up for Slurpees

The other day when I was writing about literal videos, it got me thinking about THE literally literal video - Jonathan Coulton's "Flickr." Coulton is cool (in a geeky sort of way). He did a project called "Thing a Week" where he wrote a song a week for a year. Most of his songs are kind of geeky pop culture inspired tunes such as "Tom Cruise Crazy" or the Zombie tune "Re: Your Brains." Check out the video for "Flickr" here:

Flickr: Jonathan Coulton (YouTube)

In it, a fan (?) puts Coulton's song which was inspired by images seen on the photo-sharing website to pictures of the things he is describing in the song (it makes more sense if you just watch it).

Plus, check out this entry in the Urban Dictionary (here).

Coulton's site is (here).

And Flickr is (here).

No Surprises

This is the second in a series of blog entries about songs picked at random from my itunes library. For the post on last week's song, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (Love Version)" go (here).

This week's song is Radiohead's "No Surprises." I only have three radiohead songs (a random quote this just made me think of by David Spade: "I only know three songs by REM and guess what? I don't like two of them! That's right, I'm not cool- I don't like REM. Don't hang out with me, I'm a nerd.") and this is one of them. I got this song because at the time I was trying to learn to play it on my ukulele - I've kind of taken a break on learning it, though, because even though I'm playing the right chords, it doesn't sound anything like this song except for the "silent" part.

Anyway, this is a cool song, but does it have to mention suicide? I think this song would be more interesting without the obvious suicide reference. Oh well.

The video for this song features a close-up of Thom Yorke wearing a space man helmet that slowly gets filled with water. The effect is achieved by filming it in regular speed and them playing it back in slow motion - he must have sang it really fast. It's a pretty standard Radiohead video - they always do weird things in their videos. Remember that one that was filmed all with light or something?

Speaking of videos (I'm going somewhere with this) Have you heard of literal videos? They are pretty popular on YouTube. People take a video and then sing what is literally happening it in. Here's a good example of one:

Total Eclipse of the Heart Literal Video (YouTube)

Favorite line: "Ringo Starr: Lined Eyes." By the way, what is up with this video? Is she a teacher at this school? And why DOES that guy have gold glitter in his fencing mask?

Here's one for this song:

No Surprises Literal Video (YouTube)

Favorite line: "Big chin."

Sources:

Wikiquote: David Spade