9 posts tagged “youtube”

It seems like I was the last holdout on truly hating this song, but this is a version I can get into:

I definitely just YouTubed the video for "Down Under" by Men at Work. That songs deserves a really awesome rock band to cover it. The problem with '80's new-wave pop, though, is that when someone does get around to covering it, it's some really crappy pop-punk band, like Reliant K or somebody. Watch it!

Alright, two points on which I simply must blog today; I'm making them into two entries because they're each that long. It's rare that anything relevant really happens, and there are two of them today. These things happen.

First off, the rumors are true: tomorrow is Karsa. What's that you say? Well I'll tell you!

For those of you who haven't heard Fernando's Mormon jokes, my family belongs to a tiny tiny ancient Eastern religion known as Mandaeanism. There's a pretty decent article on Wikipedia, but the basic idea is that it isn't an offshoot of anything, despite the importance of John the Baptist, it's the only Gnostic faith still being practiced in the world, it may in fact pre-date Judaism (there are experts looking into it), and there are like, I don't know, 40 of us in the world. You haven't heard of it, and it's not surprising.

Karsa comes but once a year. The setup is actually pretty cool. Earth is guarded by untold numbers of angels. Millions of years ago or whenever these things happen, you know, all the angels left Earth and ascended to heaven to ask god (Haai Zaaken) how the world works. This exchange is printed in one of the Mandaeans' holy texts aptly titled The 1,012 Questions, and it's pretty awesome to read. There are things like Why is the grass green or Why is the sun so small and the answers are all correct, in modern scientific terms. I personally don't think there's anything mystical to it; ancient Babylon was after all home to the world's first scientists. It's just really great to think about my heritage in that way.

Anyway, back to Karsa: humans, being as we are slightly clueless and extremely accident-prone, find ourselves completely open to attack from the evil beings who also inhabit Earth and who sadly do not have a convention of their own to attend that day. As a result, we do not leave our homes for 36 hours, just to be on the safe side. It starts at sundown tonight and ends Sunday morning. No one is allowed in from outside (exception can be made if you are a Mandaean and have not crossed a body of water), and you're not allowed to touch plant life or use running water. In our house we still use water, but not excessively -- no showers, but if you think about it, who are you try to impress? You're not going anywhere.

Most people get confused on this point: the belief is not that this happens each year. Rather, it's something that's done as a tribute to the time it happened. I compare it to the lighting of the candles at Hanukkah.

My mom really digs on this holiday because it means Bessam and I are mandated to hang out with them for a whole day.

The reason why this holiday always stuck out for me is that for a long time, it landed on my birthday. A few years ago, it slipped backwards one day (something about the lunar calendar, I don't know, I'll ask my father) so now the Emergence is on my birthday, which is a lot better situation. For a long time, though, I wasn't allowed to leave the house on my birthday, number 21 included, and this fostered a certain amount of bitterness in my already-rebellious mind. My father once said, on the subject of his failure to say happy birthday to me, "Karsa is more important than a thousand birthdays!" We all seem to have gotten over our respective issues in time. He makes a big deal out of my birthdays these days, and I happily go hang in the house, eat Tostitos, and watch movies all day. It's nice to have any excuse to deal with exactly zero things.

For those of you animals looking to party, I took Monday off from work. Sunday night drinking! Don't knock it!

This Times article has been passed around a lot recently, as pretty much everyone I know works at the library and is going to library school.

New Rilo Kiley single, The Moneymaker, is out, and it is ILL. It's all over the blogosphere; here it is on Hype along with a number of other Rilo Kiley gems (cover of Rock and Roll Suicide, what?). Distressing, and distressingly awesome, video here.

The highlight today, I have to say, is this recently-released Nixon memo from 1970, wherein the embattled president complains that people think he's mean. The intro on Slate does a good job of parsing out the brilliance of the piece, but my favorite part is probably where Nixon boasts that he phones people "when they are sick, even though they no longer mean anything to anybody." Poor Dick- this document actually contains the phrase "with regard to the whole warmth business." I mean, with material like this, are we really not supposed to kick him around?

One last thing: when I searched out Rilo Kiley on Hype, I came across this video. It's one of the new batch of Jenny Lewis songs she was doing on tour last year, which are all as good as or better than Rabbit Fur Coat, if you can imagine such a thing. I decided to post this for poor Fernando, who has had to deal with the ABBA nonsense his whole life. I feel you dogg. Important points: Jenny in her standard dress and cowboy boots, your new crush the Watson Twins, and how funny it is that Conan O'Brien is like a head and a half taller than her.

I mean, this is pretty much the funniest thing I've ever seen.

This was one of Bessam and my favorite things in high school, we used to watch it constantly. It pretty much nails my next-to-impossible-to-describe sense of humor.

This gets a little tedious after a while.