A Big Bag of wtf

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but sometimes I can't even think of the questions, either. Here's a case in point: unless the question is "Why has someone recreated the final battle scene from Star Wars using... lots of hands?" all I can say is:

"Dude, wtf?"

Here's what George Lucas was doing all those years between Return of the Jedi and that other one with the kid with the bowl haircut.

I've never been a fan of Jethro Tull, with their fey Celtic melodies and oh-so-quirky prog rock imagery. Since they were proudly anti-drug, it always seemed a bit lame that they ran off the back of psychedelic videos that just didn't quite cut it. Kind of like when you're a little kid, and you pretend to be drunk by imitating drunk people you've seen in movies and on TV. But lord, you don't base your career around it.

Still, the following video has got to be one of the stranger ones of the period, and I think it might be that drugs or no, frontman Ian Anderson was, actually, quite insane.

But while the Tull just could have been losers, I'd stop short of calling them complete morons.

On the other hand, I recently received an email with the subject line "A bunch of idiots review 1984," a line I instantly fell in love with and which I decided to title my autobiography.

Being exactly what it sounds like, it's some chap's (CAN WE REALLY KNOW ON THE INTERNET?) collection of great reviews of Orwell's 1984 as taken from amazon.com.

It contains such gems as:

"Let's try to be a little more optomistic, and work on a happier ending, shall we?"

"Thus, it doesn't make any sense to think that a novel like this one is really any better than say, Michael Crichton or Stephen King."

"This book isn't as good as Harry Potter in MY opinion, and no one can refute me. "

"first of all its NOTHING like the future is probly going to turn out."

"Maybe if you live in a country that's a monarchy, this book's worth reading, but this is *America*, ok? The whole reason we live in a democracy is so that we the people don't have to worry about things like this. "

"please george do us all a faver and stop writing books."

"It's 2000. 1984 was a bad movie with Michael J. Fox. "

"WE MAKN WITH THE BOOK LURNIN"

Perchance, to Dance.

People often ask me how to fix up their rubbish lives and the world and stuff. At least, a whole series of strangers decided to do that last Friday night in a very weird hour or two at a bar. It turned out that my oracle/life coach skills are at a much higher level than I realised, as every one of these people walked away happy and warmed in their hearts as if little cosy hearths had been stoked there (metaphorically - never try lighting an actual fire in your chest cavity).

I tend not to give advice so this was an exceptional night, but I think that one piece of advice that can never go astray is pretty clear here - you can never really go wrong dancing. I mean, I suppose you can go wrong dancing in lots of ways, but it's never going to deplete our dwindling water supplies or kill a whale or contribute to global warming in a significant way.

My good friend Mark knows me well enough to have emailed me the following link today:

How to do the Robot. As the title suggests, it's a sequence of instructional videos on robot dancing. My favourite part is the fact that the guy doing it seems neither particularly exceptional at the robot nor particularly interested in it. It's as if he wants to be excited, but he'd really just rather be chilling on the couch with a beer and his Wii.

This kid really knows his robot, though; wait until the weedy dude in the orange skivvy shows up, as he actually contributes several original moves to the form. The robot pirouette is at a very high degree of difficulty.

Someone really needs to get over to Europe and work out why so many ravers have become possessed by jumpstyle (this horrible move that becomes quite hypnotic when performed in unison by dozens of the freaks - which is exactly what happens).

Can't stand the music, or the outfits, or the very idea, but how on earth in this day and age can grown people become obsessed with a "move" a la the macarena or something? It disturbs, even moreso since there seems to be nothing written about it anywhere, only youtube videos, so I can't even trace the phenomenon.

The Belgian Jump is even weirder. What's going on with these freakin' kids? It's like one starts doing it and the others get infected with this crazy epileptic move and can't help all rushing out to join in.

In the Nederlands it's quite horrible, taking over shopping malls. Here's a TV spot on it:

But at least it has a strong historical pedigree.

We apologise for the interuption

We're on an extended hiatus here at Born Dancin' Enterprises, with the potential never to come back to this internet thing, since it seems such a 2006 kind of place. But just when you thought there was nothing left to it, something like this comes along, combining Dick Van Dyke dancing with Herbie Hancock Rockitt-ing. And if this guy wasn't born dancin', I don't know who was.



This is pretty much me all day, every day, including the black and white and the bit with the marionette-strings and the giant scissors. If like to imagine one day in the future, when Richard Wayne Van Dyke shuffles off this mortal coil, that he'll be mixing it up with a little Tamil electro-midget in the great dancehall in the sky. But I try not to imagine it too much, since it hurts my head.