Ya know, I was gonna try to be nice to the laughably untalented altar boys of ironic Internet sensation Final Placement, but then they had to go be jerk wads and force Youtube to remove the smorgasbord of videos the online community painstakingly recorded in tribute to the band's tone-deaf song "Shine". Yeah, I was prepared to dismiss their out-of-tune guitars, complete inability to keep time with one another, puberty-tastic vocals and horrible, horrible lyrics as par for the course where Christian rock is concerned. But oh no, Final Placement had to be dicks about it, so I'm not going to be decent. Of course, it's likely that none of this stuff is real, so I'll try to channel my indignation into a wave of skepticism instead.
Every job has its compulsory moments. For instance, if a police officer, whether on duty or not, witnesses a person attempting to rob a store he is obligated to protect and serve his community. "I was off the clock" isn't a good enough excuse for letting the Gas-n-Go get knocked over by a meth head. Similarly when I log on to Youtube and see a video titled "Drink My Breastmilk?" it is my sworn duty to click that link, to watch the video in its entirety and then go drink myself uncouth in a vain attempt to erase the sheer stupidity from my mind. Since no amount of glorious, holy vodka can turn back my experiential clock to the moment before I watched Spricket24's video, I suppose I'll just have to perform some Internet jujitsu and redirect its aggressive energy into an elegant blog-throw.
Because I'm going to be spending the better part of next Friday in a criminal amount of discomfort with no means of contacting the outside world (hooray for American air travel), I decided to bump up Net Insanity's obligatory Valentine's Day coverage to today's Youtube Nation entry. See, Valentine's Day is actually two separate but related holidays, only one of which is actually relevant to Youtube. One half of Valentine's Day is a celebration of romantic love that couples get to enjoy/be obligated to by eating expensive meals, buying gifts for one another and overlooking the troubling implications of being kinder and more loving to their partners for one day than they are for the rest of the year.
So, the Winter Olympics are just around the corner, which means that approximately nobody gives a damn except for that friend everyone has who still thinks it's 1997 and any respectable people still pretend that "extreme" sports like half-pipe snowboarding are cool. This hasn't stopped the continually flailing folks at NBC from dedicating whole UHF stations to qualifying runs. Skiing, bobsledding and whatever gerund is applied to the luge plays all day, every day as if people enjoy them. Sadly, the Winter Games are never more interesting than the host location, but this year it's in Canada, so that's out as well. No, the only remotely interesting things about the Olympics have to do with the Summer Games, but even then most of us only pretend to be excited for them.
I'm a naysayer. Whenever something new and potentially groundbreaking pops into existence I'm much more willing to assume it'll fail to live up to anyone's expectations for it than to hope it'll be the next big thing. Especially where the Internet is concerned, I just don't have much faith in the ability of individuals or groups to realize true potential. Virtual systems almost all necessarily start out as toys, only later blossoming into useful technologies and often through inexplicable means. Youtube is a prime example. In its humble beginnings I was pretty sure it would remain a full-motion version of Livejournal, but then something strange and wonderful happened to the Internet. In short, it became legitimate. With the help of a few dedicated individuals who actually know what they're doing, web media evolved beyond the toy chest. Case in point, Marina Orlova, a spunky Moscovite who may just be the world's only celebrity philologist.
Because winter is the time when everything good about life either dies or becomes significantly less pleasant, disease has found its way into my apartment. Common sickness does strange things to the human psyche, including increasing its desire for old TV shows. Last night I sat with my roommate, the bastard who brought the dreaded seasonal rhinovirus into this home, and we flipped through the few channels we could get on our digitally-converted antenna TV, stopping occasionally on whatever program our plague-addled minds found interesting. This led us more often than not to one of several PBS stations. After watching Rick Steves embarrass his fantastically white self in Iran, we delighted in the grandmotherly decadence of Julia Child and her caretaker/assistant Jacques. Two things occurred to me then: Ouch, my throat really hurts, and cooking shows have really, really low production values. So, I decided to pop over to Youtube to see what the cheap videographers of the medium have to offer in the form of cooking shows.
Ever since the age of 18, which was the first time I ever lived in a big city, I've wondered just what it takes to send a person into the forbidden depths of complete reckless abandon. How exactly did the street corner bum become a bum? At what point did the full-on drunk transition from being a heavy but functional drinker to the hopeless gutter-dweller that he is now? While the change from contributing member of society to wretch is almost certainly a gradual process, there's got to be a single, defining moment. Just like growing regional tensions eventually resulted in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand to begin the First World War, the epic slosh in this week's video had to have a pivotal moment in his likely sordid history to culminate in his fifteen minutes of Internet fame.
It's the weekend after Christmas. All the thrill is gone, the trash is full of gaudy wrapping paper and everything seems a little less vibrant, a little less festive, a little less alive. Maybe it's the memories of your childhood slowly fading a bit more every year. Maybe it's the realization that in just five more gray days you'll be forced to reflect on the 365 shades of disappointment you just walked, only to watch 365 more bloom on the horizon. Or hell, maybe it's just the fact that, once again, you discovered only too late that you can't stand to be around your family during the holidays so you drowned the frustration in something as inherently ill-advised as brown alcohol mixed with cream, eggs and nutmeg. Whether actual or psychosomatic, you've got a Christmas hangover and all you wanted to do was surf the Net and have a laugh, except now all you've got is some cantankerous Jew who kinda hates Christmas hitting you with some crazy, androgynous Youtuber lip syncing to a ridiculous Nordic kid's song. Great. Just freaking great.
This being the holiday season and therefore prime temporal real estate for religious folks to plaster on an extra layer of crazy, I've been spending a not insignificant portion of my energy mocking the most absurd of 2009's yuletide developments. So far, they've all made some kind of sense, at least according to their own internal logic. Then, the above video found its way into my life and for all of my analytical prowess, I just don't get it. It would be one thing if this guy, the creepiest of the creepy grandpa Internet all-stars, was just some random mental case who lived in an intricately constructed universe of nonsense pulled entirely from his own confusion. But that's not all there is to The Master Teacher. He's not only a disturbingly unbalanced individual, he also fancies himself some kind of Christian guru.
