I can’t help but wonder whose eye this ancient artist used as the model for the Eye of God. The history and beauty of this complex makes me feel like I’m about to embark on some sort of DaVinci Code-like adventure, only this one will involve online business models and the mysteries of HTML5. Heh. Hopefully, I won’t be pursued by some self-flagellating Newsroom Curmudgeon, bent on undermining my message about how there is actually hope for the future, that journalism will survive, even if it does take a form that is strange and possibly abhorrent to the practitioners steeped in The Old Ways.

Institute of the Americas, Janine Warner, Rila Monstery, Bulgaria, digital migration,

It surprised me to find such an accurate depiction of the garb of the KKK in faraway Ethiopia. I guess movies or popular culture have exposed even the ordinary people around the world to our more sordid side...

Amongst all the funky art & tchotchkes, this painting caught my eye for obvious reasons.

What you can’t see, of course, are all the other exemplars of Obama’s presence here in East Africa. People walk around with Obama’s face on t-shirts, bumper stickers, hats … his face is pasted onto the clear glass shelves in the jewelry shops, and to the sides of the little “blue mule” micro-buses.

This is a good thing.

Invisible to just about everyone in the U.S., we are in a struggle for influence in Africa, which more and more people are calling “The Last Frontier.” China is spreading around the oceans of money (that we gave them in exchange for cheap plastic consumer goods, but that’s another story), and they are doing it in a very tricky, manipulative way. The U.S. and Western Europe have had decades of work, trying to figure out ways to actually benefit countries with their foreign aid. It has not been the easiest process.

However, we have figured out that nation-building takes time. Lots of it. And the investments tend to be gradual, building up infrastructure, institutions, ecosystems. The kinds of things that people really don’t see all at once – but if you take a snapshot of a country 10 or 20 years apart, you see the radical transformations. I know I did when I went back to both Colombia and Venezuela after 20 years absence in 2007-8.

In Addis Ababa, the modern struggles to catch up with the ancient.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are throwing up big, showy projects. Roads, bridges, dams, buildings. And slapping their branding all over them. Ordinary people see this and say, “Well look, the Chinese are actually doing something for us. What do the ferengi leave behind? They talk a lot, but what do we have to show for it all?”

In this kind of environment, having an African-American as President of these here United States is a definite advantage.

In a move certain to cause much gleeful cackling and dry-washing of hands at Adobe HQ, Hulu and Delve announced that they are sticking with Flash, rather than making the Jobs-mandated move to HTML5.

The money graf from Delve:

Adobe Flash provides: ability to secure content, adaptive bitrate streaming, comprehensive
analytics and monetization of video through a wide array of advertising
options. Customers that are using our mobile delivery solution are
willing to experiment with video on these new devices to figure out what
works and to keep their existing customers happy. But they all expect
that eventually the mobile/tablet features match that of the Flash
player on the PC.

Hulu said:

When it comes to technology, our only guiding principle is to best serve
the needs of all of our key customers: our viewers, our content
partners who license programs to us, our advertisers, and each other. We
continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn’t yet
meet all of our customers’ needs. Our player doesn’t just simply stream
video, it must also secure the content, handle reporting for our
advertisers, render the video using a high performance codec to ensure
premium visual quality, communicate back with the server to determine
how long to buffer and what bitrate to stream, and dozens of other
things that aren’t necessarily visible to the end user. Not all video
sites have these needs, but for our business these are all important and
often contractual requirements.

Behind these two statements, back in the misty shadows, loom the outlines of the Hollywood studios and TV networks. I’m guessing the last couple of weeks have seen lots of closed-door meetings about what happens when we all start watching TV & movies on our iPad(-like) devices.

The problem with just abandoning responsibility letting the Apple empire do all the driving is that, as we have seen in the last couple of months, Apple’s hidden face is starting to emerge. And it ain’t pretty. Allowing Apple to control the flow of content through its ever-expaning iTunes store just means that you’ve given up the pricing and distribution power on your creative products.

Ask the music industry guys how that worked out for them.

If you can find any, that is.

So let’s take a look at the objection of the big video players to Apple’s vision of the future:

1. Content security. If you don’t think that the movie & TV guys have been sweating blood over the nightmare scenario of their business model going the way of CDs, think again. For the last five years, I’ve been going to tech conferences in and around LA, and at each and every one, the most popular booths are the ones touting various DRM/security features. Now, publishers such as O’Reilly may hold that “DRM is more costly than piracy”, but in the executive suites at the studios, that is a minority view.

You just can’t make a business out of producing $200 million movies like Iron Man 2, and then hope to recoup your costs by giving away the content, and hoping … ads will support it? Or that you will sell enough merch through wider audience? Nuh-uh.

Adobe and the Flash team have spent years banging on various content-security technologies, some of which tout NSA-level encryption schemes to try to mollify the big content creators. I’m guessing there’s not much love for Apple’s “blind faith” scenario with HTML5.

2. Adaptive bitrate streaming. Sounds like something a character played by Dan Aykroyd in his heyday would have spat out in staccato fashion. Basically, it means that when the web is congested (or your bus travels between a couple of skyscrapers as you watch video on your Droidphone), the video will momentarily de-res a bit until the signal is once again clear.  We’ve found that having a momentarily blurry(ier) video is far less disruptive to the viewer than having fits, starts, jumps and the little hourglass on the screen.

Not having this technology means that watching a video is going to become a throwback to the early days of the web … when you’d be downloading a GIF and watching the lines appear … and then hesitate … think about it … then another line appears … then it hangs for a minute … then ten lines appear all at once … then you start clicking in frustration, trying to get to another page that doesn’t so closely resemble a chamber of Hell.

If you really want to Geek Out, check out this excellent deconstruction of the (supposed) HTML5 video standard VP8 on the x264 blog. It explains far better than I can all the nitty-gritty issues behind the hype on “open source” video codecs. Again: not pretty.

3. Analytics. Apple is maintaining that firewall for content served through its store & technologies. You can get raw numbers, such as how many people downloaded the app/video. But nothing more than that. Which feeds into the next point, big time –

4. Advertising. The big selling point for online/mobile video over broadcast is that we’re better able to target the ads to the users, based on the data we collect from cookies, user agents, location, time, etc. If this is missing, so is the competitive advantage, and the dollars start flowing back to tried-and-true TV.

Also, HTML5 is not as robust an ad-serving technology. For Hulu, which is the bigtime play of the TV networks, if the ads can be skipped as easily as with a TiVo, or excised altogether, what then is the point of serving up all that content for free? If the advertisers aren’t getting any value for sponsoring the programs then they quite simply … won’t. And then where does that leave us with our fancy new tablets? Watching more dancing cat on piano keyboard videos?

Apple quite simply does not care about that. Their point is not to help content creators or advertisers. Their focus is on selling as many overpriced gadgets as possible, and then locking the users into having to pay thru the nose thru Apple’s store to actually get any content to watch/listen/read on that gadget.

VP8, iPad, Flash, Hulu, Delve, HTML5, Steve Jobs, platform battles, Apple fanboys

The first thing that strikes you about the Nook is how much *faster* it is than the Kindle. And Janine loved the touchscreen. More video to come on Digital Family.

The song itself is kinda beside the point – it’s bubblegum synth-disco-pop, about as bland and processed as the stuff the taxi drivers in Moscow used to subject me to on the way back & forth from my gig there. Which may be why it’s getting so many views – this is the kind of stuff that works internationally, since the thumping beat and lyric structure make it sound pretty much interchangeable with everything else on the radio.

Can't wait until she starts marketing the exploding bustier shown here; Madonna's Wannabees all wore their undies over their shirts. Wonder if GaGaEttes are going to be lighting their smokes off their flaming boobs.

But the real action here is in the video to the song. Blew my mind. Didn’t think that people had budgets like this anymore. Costumes that would make Gaultier sick with envy — white latex with “Where the Wild Things Are” shiny plastic crowns, some kinda homage to LeeLoo’s orange strappy outfit in The Fifth Element and a Eastern European mobster/white sex-slave buyer with a steampunk-ish articulated brass chin. Looked to my eye like about a week in production, probably about $500K in total costs of models, locations, crews, lighting, post-production.

The plot seems to be that Lady GaGa wakes from her sleep the way normal people do – by sticking her hand out of a gleaming white Tylenol-shaped coffin – getting forced to drink high-end vodka and the gyrate for & be sold to a bunch of strange pervy dudes.I half expected to see Liam Neeson kicking someone’s ass in the backdrop and telling her, “Here’s the scary part. You’re going to be taken…”

Nobody does these kinds of elaborate music videos anymore, because there is no way to recoup that kinda cash from the moribund music industry.- at least, not until now.As Dan Neil points out in the LA Times

the “Bad Romance” video, which features placements for no less than 10 products: a black iPod; Philippe Starck Parrot wireless speakers; Nemiroff vodka; Gaga-designed Heartbeats earphones (via Dr. Dre); Carrera sunglasses; Nintendo Wii handsets; Hewlett-Packard Envy computers; a Burberry coat; those crazy, hobbling Alexander McQueen hyper-heels; and enough La Perla lingerie to choke an ox.

This isn’t a music video so much as the QVC Channel you can dance to.

I had thought that Madonna and Michael Jackson were about as sophisticated as you could get when it came to figuring out ways to build up a juicy public image, and then squeeze it until rivers of cash started running out. Not so. Lady GaGa has rightly recognized that selling CDs if for chumps; anyone can pirate them, and pretty much does.

No, you need to sell things that people can’t copy – or at least, if they do, it kinda defeats the purpose. So Lady GaGa’s come up with the list of high-end commercial goods to do “Hero Shots” of in the video and obviously done revenue deals with them.

As a business model, I have to say hats off to the Lady. She’s adapted to the draining of value from the content (i.e. nobody actually buys music anymore – at least, not like they used to), and migrated over to where the money still lies.

When advertising no longer works, when information is a commodity in which we all drown for free, then the only things that are left that have any value are physical objects that we can wear, eat, drive or plug in, as well as what cultural anthropologists call “fetish objects” that bestow special status because they signify that we hae enough disposable income so as to be able to waste a couple grand on some gaudy sunglasses.

I’m not sure if this is the way that all news & entertainment is going to have to go in the future. All of it sponsored, with big shout-outs to the guys footing the bills worked into the info-stream every 10 seconds or so.  I do know that if this works, we’re going to see a lot more of these “branded videos” online.

I didn't know the Russian phrase for "Group hug, people!" So I just stood in the back and spread out my arms.

I showed them some of the very basic tools to promote your content – the simplest being the blast e-mail alert to people you’ve signed up on a subscription list.  A couple of people in the class were already up on Twitter, and I sang that particular gospel, as well as the advantages of setting up Facebook groups or using the same functionality in the Russian equivalent, which is a Classmates.com-alike.

As always, the skill level in the audience was very uneven. Some people were way out in front of the pack, others seemed to be lost. I tried to deliver a wide variety of tools to hit everyone. I got just a couple of hours to do some very basic tourism after this session.  The scale of the construction going on here is truly awe-inspiring.

It's pretty chilly here; not snowing yet, but it's thinking about it - thus the heavy clothes. Also, behind me is the new Presidential Palace.

Anyway, this is a 3-D animated tag cloud to promote the Adobe MAX conference here in LA; but I think they might want to regulate this a bit more, because some of the user-chosen tags are getting a little … pungent.  Hey. That’s pretty good. Maybe I’ll go there and add “pungent” to the mix…

If this strikes you as over the top, please click over to the regularly scheduled media criticism & analysis; but let me have a moment here, please, because this has struck me at a deep & unexpected level.

Our Honeymoon Never Ended

I got Duce just before 9/11.  I have told the story often, because it explains a lot about our relationship.

I was looking for a cat as a companion to Faust; a snaggletoothed tabby I’ve had since 1994.  I went to a big pet adoption event at the La Brea tar pits, looking for a kitten, since Faust is a little timid, and I didn’t want to bring in a snarly cat that would fight with him and beat him up.

I saw a cage with a sign on it that said “Tommy.”  In it was a big gray tabby, who looked a lot like my other cat Mephisto, who had run away.  I opened up the cage and took out “Tommy,” and he put his big paws on my shoulders and looked me in the eyes. Then he started butting his big head against my chin and purring. I petted him for a few minutes, then put him back in the cage, intending to move on to find a kitten.

When Duce wanted your attention, you knew it. He would let nothing stand in his way when he wanted some special bonding time.

Duce immediately started yowling and biting the bars of the cage, trying to get back out to me, reaching through with his paws desperately.  It was absolutely touching.  The woman working that booth told me that he had been out on the street for probably six months, that he had been stuck in a cage for six weeks, and that this was his last chance. If they didn’t find him a new home, they were going to have to give him the needle the next day.  He was set to “walk the kitty Green Mile.”  He was not a wild street cat – he had been neutered and his front paws had been (clumsily) de-clawed.  He was a lovable, friendly cat, but most people were looking for kittens and that he had been stuck in that cage for six months.

He was miserable in that cage, and stared out at me, as he twisted and strained to reach out and touch me with his great big paws.

“OK, OK, you got me,” I said resignedly. I signed the paperwork and put Duce into a cardboard cat-carrier and walked the three blocks back to my house.  To acclimate him to his new surroundings, I shut “Tommy,” who I quickly renamed “Deuce” – as in “Mephisto 2″ because he looked so much like the cat who had run away – in a spare bedroom.  I gave him food & water, and to settle him down to his new home, I slept in the bed with him.  Deuce, soon to be spelled as “Duce,” spent that first entire night sleeping on the pillow above my head, licking my hair and purring loudly.  He was so happy to be out of the cage, and I could feel the way that he appreciated the way I was lavishing attention on him.

A couple days later, still trying to acclimate him to his new house & brother, I went to check on Duce.  I had cracked a window to let some air into the room.  In my absence, Duce had jumped onto the narrow window sill, pushed the screen aside – despite the fact that it had been stapled into place – and squeezed through the narrow bars.  He was gone.  I was stricken with guilt and berated myself; I figured Duce had run off to wherever his old house was, following the homing instinct animals seem to possess.

Hard to describe his walk - not a strut, not that arrogant. Perhaps a stalk...

But the next morning, there he was, sitting patiently by the front door, meowing to be let in.  I rushed to praise him for coming back (rather than punishing him – which would send the message that I hated that he had come home), and he rubbed his big head against my leg and then sauntered inside, in search of breakfast.

I soon learned that there was no real way to keep Duce in the house.

Any little crack in a window, a door left unattended for a second – hell, he once tried to crawl up the chimney – and Duce would be gone, out in search of adventure in the wide, wide, fascinating world.

Duce refused to sit inside the house and let life pass him by.  No matter what the consequences, no matter how dangerous it might be, he never backed down.  Not an inch.

I tried to find a compromise – I got a little kitty harness, put Duce into it, and tried to see if he would just walk the sidewalk on the end of a leash.  Duce just laid down on the lawn, clearly depressed and uncomprehending.  I tried to be enthusiastic, to get him to explore the world with me standing by to protect him from it.  But no.  It was to be total freedom or nothing for Duce.

Catnip mice were considered quite tasty.

Eventually, we settled into a routine. He would wake me up as soon as it got light, I would stagger to the back door and let him out, hoping that he would stay in the enclosed back yard.  By the time I got back to bed, I would hear Duce climbing the 8-foot fence next to the bedroom window, teetering for a second to judge conditions, and then dropping over with a thump.

Later, as I got ready for work, I would hear Duce yowing from the front porch. I would let him in; he already had bacon on his breath, and I eventually figured out that he had established friendships with my neighbors, and a little old lady down the block was sweet on him, and gave him bacon every morning.  The little scavenger.

One day, when my parents were in town for a visit, my dad & I were sitting on the front porch, talking.  We stopped as we spotted Duce across the street, trotting down the sidewalk.  In front of him was a woman walking two huge, fierce-looking German Shepherds.  Duce paid them no heed whatsoever, weaving through her legs and past the dogs on his way to his spot, sleeping under a bush on the front lawn. “Would you look at that cat? Now that’s confidence,” my dad marveled.

I moved a couple of times, in the next years, but no matter where I went, Duce quickly became famous in my neighborhood. I would be jogging a couple of blocks from my house, and I would see Duce, sprawled out on the sidewalk on his back, as someone rubbed his tummy.  “Hey, that’s my cat!” I would say.

Duce would run ahead of people and do a curious shoulder roll on the ground, winding up on his back & exposing his belly for rubbing.

“Oh, Duce is yours? He comes over all the time,” I was told, over and over again. He had his own life that I could only guess at.

Not that it was always fun & games. Duce had a big sense of responsibility, and he felt it was his job to protect his house and his yard.  This, despite the fact that he had no front claws.

I found him on the roof of my neighbor’s house, because my neighbor had a raccoon living in his chimney and Duce thought that was just unacceptable.

I wound up taking Duce to the vet at least three times, all clawed or chewed up. “Fighting out of his weight class again,” is how Janine put it.

This is after we came home last summer; not only had our house been robbed, but Duce had been wounded, and his poor tail was hanging because of an abcess.

But no matter how much punishment Duce took, he never backed down.  I don’t know if it was courage or stubbornness, or some form of deep refusal to accept any limitations whatsoever.  In his mind, he was the King Cat, and trespassers had best beware.

But he was not just an ornery fighter. What made Duce special was the tenderness that he had with people. He was the most dog-like cat I’ve ever known. Wherever people were – that’s where he wanted to be.

Duce worked the room at parties like a veteran Hollywood agent, making deep eye contact, flattering guests with his wide-eyed enthusiastic attention that made you feel like you were a movie star about to be discovered, and leaving behind his calling card (a wisp of shed fur).   LA’s Westside Writer’s Group all came to know Duce and addressed thank-you cards to him after our gatherings here.

Janine said she knew the first time she saw Duce and I together that we could be a couple, because when I picked Duce up and cradled him in my arms, Duce responded by squirming in utter happiness, bumping his head into my chin.

Janine often showed off how Duce would “hug” her – he put his paws on her shoulders and clung to her, content to be carried around.  Well, at least until what we called his “Paw Pilot” went off and reminded him he had an urgent appointment kicking the ass of some pretender to his throne.  That, or a nap.

Duce loved to hug Janine, and vice-versa, obviously.

When I finally moved us into this house, I felt that at last I had found a place where Duce could simultaneously be free and protected.  We have a huge back yard (well, for Los Angeles, at least), enclosed by high fences and thick shrubbery on all sides.  I made sure that the kitchen door had a flap so he could come and go as he pleased; the lack of that in previous places had led Duce to mark his territory inside the house, ruining a couple of otherwise nice couches.

The yard was full of deep clover and I figured he would have more than enough to do here without going wandering. Besides, I had built high fences on all sides.

He was so excited to use the clover as cover to pounce on the birds nearby. He never got one, but that didn't stop him from trying...

By now, I should have known what was coming.  Fences were made for other, lesser animals. I found Duce on top of the garage – I still don’t know how he managed that with no claws.  I would see him doing the balance-beam act on top of the 8-foot fence. He dug and burrowed little passages under it.  And he spent hours chasing critters around the bushes, sometimes bringing half-eaten mice into the house as a kind of “back atcha” offering to us.  Again, I made sure to praise Duce effusively for his presents, even if I discovered them by stepping into a squishy mess in the middle of the night.

But the most special bonding time we had happened in the hammock I strung outside on the patio we built.  Duce would wander over and stand on his hind legs, paws on the rim, eyes asking my permission to come aboard.  I would reach down and scoop him up, or he would jump on his own, and then would come the ritual. I rubbed his face until he drooled in pleasure, purring so hard he sometimes coughed. Then he would settle down into the crook of my arm as I read or talked on the phone.

I could go on and on – about the Japanese couple that lived next door to me in Culver City that wept when I moved and begged me not to take Duce away, and showed up with special salmon dinners in Tupperware for him.  Or my neighbor in the front half of the duplex, who showed me how he and Duce sat on the couch, watching Dodger games and eating snacks while I was at work.  Our dinner parties usually ended with us all sitting on the couch and talking, while Duce went from person to person, soaking up the love and attention before settling into my lap.

Duce represented for me all the traits I aspire to: loyalty, courage, unshakeable self-confidence and conviction, an unquenchable curiosity about the world, and the resilience to bounce back from the wounds and cruelties of the world and still maintain a bottomless capacity to love and be loved.

In the hammock with the phone; when Janine was off shooting videos, Duce wanted to hear her voice, and she wanted to hear him purr. I could never get him to take messages, though...

The trouble started a month ago.  Duce had started acting strangely aloof, spending all his time outside, hiding in the bushes. He came in for meals, but only ate a few bites.  We just figured he was acting moody, or that he had found another soft touch in the neighborhood, and was “eating out” again.

I thought this was cute, but it was actually a sign of trouble ahead...

It turned out that he had a blockage of his intestine, and while we were gone for a week on vacation, Duce spiraled into crisis. He lost about 8 pounds, and his sleek, silky fur was rough and matted.  Our pet-sitter took him to the vet, and they prescribed laxatives.  But within a couple of days, he was in crisis, and we took him in for an emergency operation.  His intestine had ruptured, and Duce was in agony from peritonitis, with big infections in his abdomen.  What we thought was a minor problem became life-threatening. Worst of all, it meant that Duce was in the place he hated worst in the world – back in a cage, far from the people he loved and trusted, unable to explore the world.

Janine & I kicked ourselves for spending so much money on a cat at a time when the economy is so unstable.  But when Duce came out of the hospital, and as we nursed him back to health, we started congratulating each other for rescuing our beloved cat once more.

By Thursday morning, we sat out on our back patio, as Duce ran around the yard, excitedly sniffing the plants.  “Our kitty is back,” we said, and it all seemed worth it.

But only hours later, on Thursday night, Duce made a noise unlike any I had ever heard him make. It was a shouted “AROOO!” that contained depths of pain and despair I hope never to hear again.  Duce then started vomiting all over the dining room floor.

We hoped that it was just a case of food poisoning, or maybe some kind of infection. But the next morning, Duce crawled on his own into the kitty carrier – an acknowledgment that he had given up, that he knew that something was wrong with him.  Normally, it was a struggle to get him into it, as he knew that meant a trip to the vet.

Duce had barfed up everything he had in him and more during the night. He was dehydrated and panting, and drool was coming out of his mouth. Not the good kind, that meant I was petting him in just the right way – but foam and awful gurgling.

This was in the hammock; rubbing his cheeks and then his head would make him purr and drool happily. A little gross, sure, but endearing.

Duce was still so thin from his previous ordeal that the x-rays couldn’t show what, if anything, had happened in his abdomen. The vet said she had felt a hard mass, and speculated that there was a tumor in there that they had missed in the first surgery a month ago.

I looked down at Duce. He had crawled onto our laps, and lay there, too weak to move, panting. He had put his chin onto my hand the way he had done thousands of times before, but immediately started convulsing in pain.

I knew he wouldn’t survive another surgery. And even if he did, it would mean weeks in the cage at the vet, IVs in his now-frail arms, pain wracking his guts. And that a couple of weeks after that, it was likely that we would be right back there again.

I gulped for air. “I think it’s time,” I rasped. “I just can’t put him through this again. No more pain.”

And so the vet gave Duce the shot and his breathing slowed and he relaxed in Janine & my arms.  I didn’t see him breathe his last, because my eyes weren’t quite working right at that point.

As I said, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.  Duce was my friend, my constant companion, and, as far as a feline can be so, an inspiration to me.  Uncompromising courage. Boundless affection and loyalty. Resilience. Playfulness. Refusal to be trapped or caged.

What I tell myself is that by the end, Duce’s body had become the cage that he so feared and despised. He was trapped in there, in absolute agony. I had rescued him once eight years ago, from a life spent in misery.

I rescued him from that misery again.  All the stale, worn-out bromides that it was a mercy, that his time had come – they all are true, yes, but they fall short.

I set Duce, The Cat Who Would Not Be Caged, free.  It was the last gift I could give him, after he had given me so much.

If there is a heaven, I will surely see him there.

Rest in peace, big guy.  I love you and miss you.

Sleep in peace, kitty.

I asked the audience how many of them "got" the central image here, and could put it into its viral meme context.

Over at the Online Journalism Review, Robert Niles makes a compelling and far more comprehensive argument about why the whole concept of ownership of the news & the national conversation has been toxic to the mainstream media’s efforts at retaining its audience share.

Another point that I tried to make was that it is OK to use humor in your reportage, now and again. The relentless barrage of bad news these days is making us all a little crazy (see this excellent Newsweek article on this topic).  There’s a reason that John Stewart & Stephen Colbert are so popular – they report on the news, they give it the kind of context that is so often missing on these stories, and they do it in a way that makes us crack a smile.  It’s the voice that I remember from my early b.s. sessions at seedy bars with grizzled news veterans.  It’s a human voice. The voice that says, “Well, y’know, I hadda write the story about [local businessman X] getting the Nice Guy award for the paper. But the funny thing is that everyone knows that he’s a screaming tyrant whose wife tried to run away…”

It’s the kind of voice that can re-establish the trust that our audience has lost in us.  The one that doesn’t feel the need to kneel and genuflect at the altar of he-said she-said “objectivity.” The one that can make us feel informed, energized, and in control a bit – because things that we can laugh at are no longer quite so scary.

[And yeah, I know, my much-promised blog post about the effects of fear in the media on all of us is still in the works. Forgive me.]

So for all of you trapped in office cubicles, or just in need of a bit of diversion at the end of the week, here are the top viral videos:

1.  Top of the list is this hypnotic slow-motion camera capturing images at a soccer event in Europe, a field hockey game, bouncing koosh balls, jello bouncing – it all keeps you watching.  Let this one run, sit back and enjoy the slowcore techno beat, and feel the tension drain away. Aaaahhh…

[Note: Break has been a little annoying with its embedding function, so if this video won't play in the embedded window, just click on the link above.]

Amazing Cam Shoots 1000 Frames Per Second – Watch more Funny Videos

2. Next is a slightly more violent extension of the same concept – this is a commercial for Philips’ new extra-widescreen TV.

3. As an antidote to all the Twitter hysteria (and yeah, I know, by mentioning it I am just feeding into the hype), here’s a video of a guy seated in the smallest, most utilitarian room in the house, reading the Tweets of Connie Reece, the “Mother Nature of the Twittersphere,” one of the most respected social media experts in the world.

The tweets are punctuated by actual birds twittering their birdsong.  Nice touch.

Official Tweet Reading XII: Reading Connie Reece from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

4. This is a little old, but it made me giggle, and then made me nostalgic. Great display of editing and syncing skills on the part of the creator, BTW.  Getting Bert & Ernie’s mouths to match up with the lyrics is a tough task.

5. OK, this one is very, very NSFW.  It stands in stark contrast with Scott Berkin’s blog post on Top Ten reasons managers become great. Seth Rogen channels the boss who is trying to convince himself that he’s still in control, but who spirals out of control, goes on a booze-fueled rampage and commits increasingly unspeakable acts upon himself and what appears to be a giant fish.