Same Love

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis feat. Mary Lambert. Wonderful song, wonderful film.

Thrift Shop-Macklemore and Ryan Lewis feat. Wanz

K-pop idol G-Dragon

Get your cray on

Great little introduction to K-Pop over on Boing Boing for those of us who have found Gangnam Style stuck in our heads for the last month. The dark underbelly of these pop star factories is a talent recruitment system that sounds terribly exploitative.

Snack! Snack! Snack! CRUNCH!

Hot Cheetos and ....Takis? What are Takis? Mexican junk food, yo.
And this great viral hit was made in Minneapolis! Our favorite snacks of childhood are powerful memories.

Responding to art

Today in class we did some writing assignments in response to Frida Kahlo's painting The Two Fridas (1939). By coincidence, I found this video through Tumblr this morning:
FOUND by Carina Garcia from Van Maximilian Carlson on Vimeo.

History lessons as earworms

I bow down before the "historyteachers" YouTube channel! Their original lyrics give history lessons, set to popular songs, and combine their love of dress-up with clips from films to make learning fun. There are 47 as of now, and they are history teaching gold.
Some are tongue-in-cheek like this lesson on prehistoric anthropology to Britney Spear's "Toxic."

Others are oddly gripping like this lesson on the Vikings set to "Personal Jesus"("And when we expire we set our boats on fire")


I like how they the Canturbury Tales to the tune of "California Dreaming," and included a recitation in Middle English!


The Lady Gaga "Revolution in France" vid has received the most views, I think ('Bread bread bread, off with her head!") but I really like this one about the Odyssey.

How a flu virus reproduces (NPR story)

Using animation tools from Zirus. My poor baby has the flu, so miserable!

Rap around the world video

I am absolutely fascinated by this video: it's a sampler of rap in 30 languages from all around the world. A testament to the power of hip hop culture as a world-wide phenomenon, it also shows--ever so briefly--how languages with different sounds, rhythms, and tone systems have taken what young people identify as some of the basic elements of rap, and made them fit their own circumstances. I would so love to have an idea of WHAT they are singing about!


The YouTube info lists the 30 languages and identifies most (but not all) of the artists. Two notes: the language identified as simply Chinese is, I believe, Mandarin Chinese (because Cantonese is a Chinese languge too). And there is no language called "Swiss" so I suspect it is Swiss-German but I have to listen again.