Final post for today, I’ll stop polluting your RSS reader/twitter stream/facebook news for now 🙂
This is a YouTube video of a song that has had English subtitles added. Not normally my favourite style of music necessarily, but Ira skyped the URL earlier, so I had a look. What do you think?
Apr 13 2011
Machete Love
Apr 13 2011
Hide, Seek And Pass
Continuing the theme of catching up with Anna’s picture and videos, here we have a couple of clips, taken on the same day as the last post’s pictures (24th April 2010). To any new-ish (well almost six months have passed since Anna’s media uploads) readers, I try and include the original date the pictures and movies were taken, as these posts are automatically imported over at Anna Merriman’s blog, and at some point I want to alter the posts’ dates to reflect the date in the picture/video, not when I actually got around to publishing them. I also need to go and manually embed about a year’s worth of video on her site, as the auto-import function doesn’t pick the videos up properly.
The first clip is of Anna playing hide and seek (and testing her walking skills a little) in the corridor outside the in-laws’ kitchen…
Once again practising balance and carrying an object, Anna helps Ira in the garden here.
Comments Off on Hide, Seek And Pass
Apr 01 2011
Slowly Loading Water Scenes
It looks as though YouTube videos are a problem for some users here in Kazakhstan right now. I found that in the last week or so, content was slow to load, and occasionally timed out. Having just tested the same url in Opera, using their Turbo technology (their servers load the content, then feed it to you), I think the issue, be it technical (packet losses? haven’t done any real testing yet), political (usually explained as a technical issue by local authorities) or random is definitely local. Having remoted into a UK PC and watched the same video without using Opera’s Turbo mode, it loaded fine.
Anyway, the video I’m talking about is embedded below. No last minute twists in it, but definitely something to make you think…
Comments Off on Slowly Loading Water Scenes
Apr 01 2011
One Man Disney Movie
The range this singer possesses is pretty impressive. Nick Pitera is his name apparently, I’m going to check if there are any more clips by him in a sec. He plays/sings six different parts, and if the first 30 seconds don’t grab you, just leave it playing in the background for a while. I do like the interactions between the different versions of him, filling the time between each of them is singing. Some YouTube members complain his female voices all sound the same, but I think there is some variance, what do you think?
Comments Off on One Man Disney Movie
Apr 01 2011
How Not To Behave
This video is Kazakhstan related, though it does date back to twelve years ago, when a surprise candidate entered a Presidential election here at the last minute. He appears on a TV show to be interviewed by a brave/bored of a mundane life journalist.
The man in army fatigues is Gani Kasymov, a presidential candidate in this year’s elections. The journalist interviewing him doesn’t really mince words and accuses the then Customs Committee chief of being a megalomaniac, that his election campaign funds came from bribes that he acquired from his work in Customs, and then to top if off, asks if he is an alcoholic. If your Russian is as basic as mine, checkout EurasiaNet.org’s article (that originally led me to the video) here. If you’re too lazy to read and just want to skip to the video punchline, you’ll want to skip to around the 5’35” mark. I think. YouTube is misbehaving right now. Ah, scrap that, just re-read the EurasiaNet article, the timestamp you’re looking for is 6’38”.
Mar 29 2011
Chatroulette (Suitable For Work!)
Unlike most encounters on chatroulette, this one does NOT feature…
Old men
Men with no trousers on and something in their hand
Justin Beiber clips pretending to be a live webcam OR footage of a cure animal next to a snake, both of which are attempts to convince young ladies to ensure their chest doesn’t overheat
However, it does have a funny love song, a woman happy to listen to it, and a lot of preparation.
I know it is a bit soppy, but it has survived in Google Reader for 10 days (if I can’t decide to post something, I keep marking it as unread. Eventually I either get bored of it and let it disappear, or embed it if I still think it is worthy of your attention).
Mar 29 2011
Funky Ferry!
As you may have guessed by now, I’ve got a lot of videos in tabs left open, and items in my RSS feeds marked as unread, from the last couple of weeks. I’ve whittled them down to ones that still seem worth posting after the initial “wow, cool!” factor has died down. I understand that some people won’t find some/any of them interesting, and also that family and friends back in Britain have been waiting a long time for new photos of Anna. Once I’ve cleared down the backlog of open tabs etc., I’ll be moving onto Anna’s pictures and videos. Anyway, it is a little difficult to describe this clip without giving the game away totally, but suffice to say it involves high speed bailing, a 4×4 and a river too deep to drive though…
Mar 29 2011
United We Rise
Charlie Chaplin’s famous speech from “The Great Dictator” film. From around the 50 second mark there is also footage from recent uprisings/revolutions/protests. I have not yet seen the movie (it seems to involve a Prince and the Pauper style look-a-like scenario), but I will download it from isohunt rent it the next time we are in Britain. Do check out the basic plot line if the sight of someone in a Hitler moustache instantly gives the wrong impression.
Mar 29 2011
Japanese Nuclear Situation Simply Explained
In case you haven’t yet seen this video, I wanted to post it up here. It was originally created to explain what was going on with the nuclear reactors at Fukushima to concerned Japanese children. However, add in the English subtitles, and you get a pretty clear explanation (though if you squirm when anything toilet related is mentioned, you may want to ready yourself). I love the fact that someone (/some people probably) thought to actually spend the time and create this to help explain what can be very scary to adults, let alone children. Nuclear Boy translates complex science into concepts that even toddlers could grasp, and whilst not whitewashing everything by claiming that all is well, it tries to tell children why some adults are stressed.
Comments Off on Japanese Nuclear Situation Simply Explained
Mar 18 2011
Anti-Balloon, Pro-CBT
An article over at eurasianet.org seems to have completely missed the real reason why some young men attacked a group raising awareness of a campaign to boycott the upcoming presidential elections. Before continuing, I’d ask you to at least watch the video below, if not also read their article.
Now it seems obvious to me that the youths recorded in that clip were in no way acting on behalf of Nur Otan or anyone politically affiliated with this country’s beloved president. They were not attempting to stifle the Alga! DVK activists attempts at publicising the campaign. No, these poor boys obviously have severe globophobia (though not ligyrophobia one can safely assume) and either felt the best way to remove the dangerous balloons from their situation was to pop them, OR perhaps a well trained psychologist had encouraged their behaviour as an attempt at cognitive behavioural therapy – proving to themselves that the act of a balloon (no matter what the message on them) bursting was not something to break out into a cold sweat over.
When you see the thugs scared youths hide their faces, they are not attempting to disassociate themselves from any non-existent harassment of opposing political viewpoint holders, but genuinely concerned that their friends and family may well recognise them and stigmatize them all for their overwhelming fear of balloons. Eurasianet owes these innocents a large apology, and I just hope that local justice officials will take note of political activists’ selfish tunnel vision at the time when they tried to protect these panic attack inducing balloons from a just demise.
« Previous Page — Next Page »