Music Video History: Joy Division Atmosphere

It’s a funeral of mourning and slapstick. Children or midgets dressed in Druid robes conduct the ceremony on a beach, and waddle around carrying a church steeple and iconic photographs of St. Ian Curtis.

The first impression is that director Anton Corbjin made a tasteless tribute to Joy Division’s late singer and drifter of Britain’s post-industrial wasteland. Yet, the band’s brooding, hymnal melodies and tribal, danse macabre rhythms still takes hold of the viewer, and the visuals soon make sense.



Corbjin lets the music flow with the gritty, decayed black and white cinematography, and he only displays the band and Curtis in still photographs, as if Joy Division is just a fading memory. Corbijn beautifully captures the moment when you lose a loved one, and you walk outside to see everything around you in stinging detail. Unforgettable.

The Best New Comedic Actor - Aziz Ansari

There are tons of up and coming comedian actors in movies these days. I love Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Bill Hader, Jason Segel, Danny McBride, Paul Rudd and so many more great actors that make me laugh. I think it is about timing as much as anything, and I give a ton of credit to any comedian that can make a great funny movie.

I don't think it is possible to rank the funniest actors these days, because there is so much amazing talent out there.

But... There is one actor that I think is amazing, and I hope his career continues to grow and he gets the exposure that I think he deserves. His name is Aziz Ansari, and he is best known in his role as Tom Haverford on the NBC show Parks and Recreation. He also has cracked me up in his roles in movies such as Get Him to the Greek, Funny People and Observe and Report.

Ansari's performance has received notable praise from critics, including Entertainment Weekly naming him one of 2009’s “Breakout TV Stars,” TV Guide naming him a “Scene Stealer” and Yahoo! TV placing him in the number one spot on their list of “TV MVPS.

If you have not seen Aziz on TV or on film, I strongly urge you to take the time to check out one of his films. He will be showing up in Ruben Fleischer's (director of Zombieland) new film 30 Minutes or Less, which is a movie about two fledgling criminals who kidnap a pizza delivery driver and force him to rob a bank within 30 minutes.

In the action-comedy "30 Minutes or Less," Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) is a small town pizza delivery guy whose mundane life collides with the big plans of two wanna-be criminal masterminds (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson). The volatile duo kidnaps Nick and forces him to rob a bank. With mere hours to pull off the impossible task, Nick enlists the help of his ex-best friend, Chet (Aziz Ansari). As the clock ticks, the two must deal with the police, hired assassins, flamethrowers, and their own tumultuous relationship.

If you haven't seen Aziz, check out this short clip from NBC's Parks & Recreation, where he is out at a bar and runs into his boss out on a date with an older gentleman from another town...

Really Funny!!!

Younger Brother Caught Stealing Donuts...

I was cleaning up my younger sons (Stryde/4yo) bedroom and came across an empty box of Hostess Powdered Donettes (which are his favorite breakfast and afternoon snack), that we had bought the day before.    We had bought the donuts for his older brother (Dryver/6yo) to take to school for his class to share.

At first I thought the box was old and there was no way he could have possibly eaten an entire box of donuts by himself.   Then I saw a trail of powdered sugar that went from his bedroom all the way down to the kitchen.

I followed the trail, seeing hand-prints of powdered sugar all over the house, including a stop in the bathroom and even a stop in the broom closet (I am not sure why he was in there).

Well, I finally found the end of the sugar trail and found Stryde 'red-handed', so to speak, and confronted the suspect with the evidence.   Having been taught well from many legendary criminals of our times, he had a good defense.

Check out the video for yourself...

Buying & Selling A Home Is EXPENSIVE!!!

I was running some calculations on how much it is going to cost me to sell our home in Alexandria and buy a new home (in the price range we are shopping).   The Realtor market is going to get almost $200,000 from me for doing very little, but it is a cost of doing business these days.

Though I believe the market will adjust and fix the problem where realtors are not compensated correctly, it is going to take a long time for this to happen.   The reason it is going to take a long time is partially because the market is locked up and there is no way the real estate companies are going to give up any of their market share.   In a perfect competitive market you would see these crazy rates that realtors are being paid change, but the problem is the realtors that own the market are never going to let it change.

The only way something is going to fix this obviously broken market is for a major disruption to occur.  I am not talking about a market shift or even a change in the laws.  The only way the market changes is through some paradigm shift in the ways people buy and sell their homes.   Maybe the internet will help fix this problem, but until the sellers or buyers actually feel the pain when they have to pay 6% of their total home price to sell it, with zero performance incentives or guarantees, the problem will never go away.

The only way to fix this is to have the contracts written where the realtor is paid when the house is sold above the appraised (or market) price.   There should be accelerated payments where the realtor can make up to 40% of the incremental amount on the deal after the floor is hit.   For example, if our house is appraised by the city at around $1MM, the realtor will make $2,500 for being the realtor, and then for every $1 over the $1MM they make .25 cents.  For every $1 over $1.2MM they make .50 cents on the dollar.

- If we sell our house for $1MM, the realtor makes $2,500.
- If we sell the house for $1.1MM the realtor makes $27,500
- If we sell the house for $1.3MM the realtor makes $102,500
- If we sell the house for $2MM the realtor makes $452,500

This is a simple way to make the sellers agent work.  The buyer agent needs to work in a different way, but should also be tied to finding a home and getting the best deal. 

This video says it all!

I Love Living In DC!!!

Where else can you see a commercial like this from Eastern Motors? I used to watch tv during the day when I was a kid and you always saw the local ads for car dealers that looked like a homemade video. I still remember many of them, even over the great national super bowl ads that were funny.

Even when I was seven I always wondered why the quality was so crappy and that they did not spend much time actually creating a professional look and feel. My dad owned an advertising agency and I always asked him why the dealers did not come to him to make a nice ad.

Well, now I understand. Watch this commercial from Eastern Motors, it is the best ad ever produced and just damn wonderful! You can see others at their website download page.

Wow! It is like a fine wine, it needs to be aged.

Flight Patterns

I have seen this video on documentaries about air traffic control and even September 11th. It is really amazing to watch the flights across the US and how many planes are in the air at any given time.

I fly a lot for work and I am always amazed at 3 things every time I fly. First of all, how the heck does a big bus of steel can get up in the air. Secondly it is amazing that these airplanes don’t run into each other in the air, or on the ground. And last, but not least, how the hell the airlines can keep things on time (oh forget that one).

This is a great video of all the airplanes flying around the US on any given day. The producer of this video went a step further and actually added some interesting graphics and comments.

It is worth the few minutes to watch. You can see more of this work at the Aaron Koblin website.

Justin Bibler's Swag Coach's Swag Coach...

This is one of the funniest self-promotional videos I have seen in along time...

Very Important Concept for Businesses

This is part of a talk that Jeffrey Hazlett gave at the annual ANA conference.  I saw him speak at the IAB annual event and he gave the same talk.   This is a part of the speech he gave where he talks about his experience as CMO at Kodak.

This concept for all business people is critical, especially for a business that has to innovate but has a lot of red-tape running the show.

This guy is cool...

Given all the crazy stories going around lately about nutty religous nuts trying to burn books, this story made me smile.

Leave it to a guy that looks like Jesus Christ on a skateboard to put things into perspective...

This is just too good not to post...

So sick of hearing about Jennifer Anniston and her love life. Well of course The Onion has brought us the Hollywood story of the year!

Not Sure How I Missed This...

I have no idea how I missed this video, it is really funny. I think Jimmy Kimmel has been hitting it out of the park lately, and is so much better than Leno and even Letterman. I know it takes decades to change people's late night viewing habits, but he should be around for a long time.

Watch this brilliant video, it is really amazing the cast they brought together for this. Though they did this over months as they had guests, it is well written and really funny.

If you have 10-minutes, it is well worth watching...

This is very sad, but it is the state of many countries in our world. Haiti has always had problems with sanitation and even keeping their basic water supplies clean from disease.

Even before the quake, Haiti’s water and sanitation situation was dire. This open ditch is just one example. It runs along the streets in Port-au-Prince, filled with garbage, drain runoff, food waste, animal waste and human excrement.

Here in the United States we take access to safe water and sanitation for granted. But this wasn’t always the case. A little more than 100 years ago, New York, London and Paris were centers of infectious disease, and scenes like this one were commonplace. It was sweeping reforms in water and sanitation that enabled human progress to leap forward.

This is brilliant & funny!

I love Steve Carell and wish he wasn't leaving The Office after next year. He is so funny, as you can see from this clip from the ESPY awards. This is a take-off on 'The Decision' played brilliantly by Steve Carell and Paul Rudd.

Check it out...

Five Years from Today? 11/01/2014

Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando recently. His talk was interesting as he focused on where we go from here and what we are going to be living in 2014. He had some really interesting points, including the idea that the web will be dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Mr. Schmidt did highlight the need to move the web to an even more 'Real Time' basis, and agreed that figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age."

Read Write Web has extracted 6-minutes of the most interesting portions of the talk which you can watch below:



The most interesting concepts boil down to a few that are pretty relevant even today...

* Moving away from focus on US and Western Europe, and look at Pan Asia
* Teens today are going to set what Web 5.0 will look like, and it isn't destination driven.
* Moore's Law continues to hold true, which means the power of even the home PC is going to be a super computer of today.
* Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
* Video, video, video
* The web will move towards actual 'Real Time'
* It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

These all support the concepts around Brand Communities, you don't want to build your site and hope people come, they are not going to work that way. You need to build a community or relationship and leverage the assets and collective value of that relationship to create exponential value for the community and for your own business.

You can watch the whole 45-minute video here, there are many interesting insights that are presented throughout. Some of the concepts include a general statement that a Google OS Netbook will be here in 2010, with HTML5 local caching for offline use. Additionally, it is clear Google is investing in platform and systems to offer value add as the user base gets more advanced and has higher demands.



Of course Mr. Schmidt is a brilliant mind and amazing business man, but the future is hard to predict and though Google has a perspective, it isn't unprecedented that large players have miscalculated the future, regardless of the amount of talking and propoganda they introduced into the market.

Great Infographic Video

Finally someone takes a simple view of what happened last fall in the credit crisis and who is really to blame. I think this is the best explanation of what transpired and what we all lived through.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

A really great video explanation!

Call Me Crazy

But ever since I saw the movies Mammoth and The September Issue, I can't get this song out of my head. It is a really cool song, and it is used perfectly in these two movies. This is a remix of the song that is interesting...



If you want to hear the actual song, try this video. What a really cool song.

Great Movie Scene - Root Beer

I may have posted this already, if so forgive me. The only thing is it is one of the best scenes from one of the most under rated movies from 2009. If you have not seen the film Big Fan, you need to go get the DVD today!

I think it is brilliant in every possible way a film can be brilliant. Great acting, excellent cast, and just a darn good movie.

Daily Reminder

These kinds of speeches are daily reminders to me why I voted for President Obama and support him as the greatest president since Clinton, if not Kennedy!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Define: Dad

I love this video, to me it is the true definition of a loving father. You all know what the guy was thinking when he caught the foul ball and everyone around the park was cheering and his adrenalin was pumping. For a fleeting second, as the crowd patted him on the back and he had 30,000 eyes on him, he was in the moment.

I am sure as he caught the ball he was thinking what every dad thinks about. He was thinking how fun and exciting this is to be a part of an amazing sporting event with his daughter; he was thinking about how this ball could be placed up on his daughters shelf in her bedroom; he was thinking how they might be able to get a player to autograph the ball after the game. This dad was thinking about how the ball signified the great times he spent with his daughter, and though as a father there is never enough, this would be something to look back on and point to as he watched and experience his daughter growing up. No matter how unimportant that foul ball was to the inning, or the game, or even to the season, it would mean a lot to this father and his daughter.

Then the best thing happens, she does what every kid does, she does the unexpected.



The greatest part of this whole video is his instant reaction to her. The immediate shift from a dad that was thinking about the short time he would have with his daughter growing up trying to hold on to anything possible, to a dad that was in the moment with his daughter and realized how much that instant and experience meant to him and his daughter. I really think this video, though short, displays what fatherhood is really about. It is about those small insignificant moments when you get to experience your children and realize the unconditional love that is the true definition of fatherhood.

The Reason YouTube is Worth Billions $$$