I love the fact that around the world, the emerging global culture plays off the fads&trends that have their origin in what kids in the U.S. find cool & interesting. In this case, it’s doing a mash-up between the soundtrack from a 1930s-era cartoon about the three little pigs, combined with the Angry Birds mobile/tablet game. (I love how the video includes little gems of gameplay that shows that the animator has actually played Angry Birds, and knows enough about it to make it funny & honest to the game experience. Also: note that the big savior is the Mighty Eagle, with the American flag branding. More on that in a bit.)

All the work I’ve done internationally has shown me over and over again, that while people around the world (quite rightly, at times) view the U.S. government with suspicion, skepticism or frustration … they eagerly embrace the latest videos, music, online games, online technology or silly internet memes that come from the U.S. It’s not a case of the medium being the message – it’s that the medium is so rooted in U.S. culture that American values and points of view just start to permeate thinking.

The whole argument that “Twitter doesn’t topple dictators” is a tired one, and Jay Rosen has a great article with exhaustive links explaining why that is such a straw man for People Who Should Know Better By Now. However, I do agree that Twitter itself doesn’t topple anyone – but it’s the shift in attitudes that occurs because of the slow drip, drip, drip of American open-source/democratic/anti-authoritarian discourse that is landing in the brains of web-connected young people around the world, that the powerful, slow but relentless force driving these uprisings.

More than anything else, this gives me hope for the future. These changes have been taking place incrementally, under the radar, really. But it’s why when I talk to the nerd/New Media outlaws in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Colombia or Azerbaijan – they all speak great English. Because that’s the language that the tech manuals come in. English & American is the language of freedom & hope. Which sounds corny, but when you have these kids in their teens & 20s coming up to you with this look shining out of their eyes … it’s hard not to choke up just a little.

It’s been a real rollercoaster of a week:

1. Started out with the fear that Bush would figure out some last, triumphal way of screwing up on his last day in office
2. Felt pride, relief, hope and a growing sense of “what the hell just happened to us all?” during the Inauguration
3. Felt sick in the aftermath as it turned out the economic meltdown wasn’t going to give us a break, no matter what
4. Even sicker when Xeni Jardin championed a documentary about how the U.S. tortured innocent people through depraved intermediaries

Anyway. Here’s a couple of things to lighten things up -

OK, this is childish, and an advertisement to boot, but the only other thing I saw like this was Jim Carrey’s dancing eyebrows in “Me, Myself & Irene”:

This gem from the Vancouver Film School that shows off 1) the 3D animation-fu of the creator, and 2) a deep-seated psychological fear of uncontrolled facial hair

Next, this is a movie trailer for a film being distributed by Ted Perkins, a friend of mine. It’s not a chucklefest, but the photography is beautiful, and I gotta give Ted a shout-out:

RED RIVER TRAILER for BERLIN from Ted Perkins on Vimeo.

This is kind of a rip-off of the famous scene from “Fisher King,” but I love it anyway.  The thing to pay attention to is how many people are using their cellphone cams to take pix or video of the flashmob.  In the future, we’re all going to be self-contained news gatherers – in much the way that Twitter has turned us all into terse Telegram-style news alert generators, the coming 4G phones will make us all part of a constant info-web.

Next, this somewhat creepy talking baby shows us all the outtakes from the Super Bowl adstravaganzas that we AREN’T going to see this year … and more in future blog posts about the coming ad meltdown that is coming into focus…

aaaand finally, the winner of the week, with almost 700,000 views since Tuesday: