"Shout out, Bill. Thanks." Listers: A Glimpse into Extreme Birdwatching, by the Reiser Brothers

This isn't going to be for everyone, but if you like the idea of a pair of stoner brothers making a documentary about bird watching by jumping into the hobby with both feet, give this a watch.

I'm watching it now, and it's been highly entertaining. Some salty language, so be warned.

A sample:

"With the bird software still down, we looked to others for guidance."

"We heard this man calling from a ways away, just 'Help! Help!' Just kinda in the distance. And we look over and it's a guy with binoculars in a powered wheelchair, but he's stuck in the mud. And so we go over to help and we push him out, and in exchange for pushing him out and specifically not telling his wife, he told us a lot about birds. He told us about the Elegant Trogon, which was a bird we had never even heard of."

"Just saw the Trojan. The Elegant Trojan. A beautiful bird. Shout out, Bill. Thanks."

YouTube White

UPDATE, Sept. 14.

The Windows update  I forced a few days ago only solved the problem temporarily.

My next attemtp to fix was to reset all of my Chrome settings to factory specs. That included removing any vestige of Chrome extensions.

That, so far, has worked.

But you know, if one Google service (Chrome) was interfering with the display of another Google service (YouTube) something tells me things are a mite confused down Weinberger Way.I'm seeing a lot of this on YouTube lately.

I had to discover this (maybe) fix on my own, as no one is as of yet talking about this as a recent problem. Walt Bernbaum, get with the program.

About an hour later: Nope, not working. Dumping Chrome for now and using Brave. We'll see if that fixes it.

My video plays, but part of the way through -- sometimes after I skip an ad -- the screen goes white. I get audio, but no video. And it's like that through the rest of the session, including the ads.

No one seems to know what's going on.

I asked my techie friends on Facebook, and they suggested a few things, and they worked for a bit, but then I'd be back to the white screen with audio.

Googling the problem brought up similar things from several years ago, but nothing current.

I do know my desktop computer is ancient, isn't eligible to be upgraded to Windows 11 -- but the intermittent nature of the problem is odd to me. I'm watching a YouTube video right now, and it's all fine and dandy.

It's hard to think it's not something nefarious from Google. They were irked when I had AdBlocker. I used a private brower for a while but that meant giving up having my subscriptions front and center, because signing in meant Google knew I was using a private browser and got upset all over again.

Russian Propaganda is for Idiots

Note the title. That's pretty much what the author of this YouTube video says.

And he should know: He lived in Ukraine pre-USSR dissolution, and is now seeing his country at war with its former master.

The video was prompted by people in comments on his other videos getting mad that he was comparing Russia to Nazi Germany. Their argument was that the Nazis were much worse than the Russians, and that anything being reported as "worse" had to be western propaganda.

So he lays into them, saying that Western propaganda has to rely on half-truths, while Russian propaganda relies wholly on lies.

Inserting my own opinion here: We now have a major political party in the United States that has shifted to relying on lies for their propaganda, and the idiots on their side are lapping it up.

Just about everything this political party says triggers what this YouTuber calls the "imbecillamus," viz:

This is also the pinned comment on the video, from its author (warning, a swear in the last paragraph):

That idiotic black/white response he's talking about? It's the same from the idiots of the political party I've mentioned. So they're textbook idiots, based on the defininiton this author shares of idiocy.

YouTube, Homey Don't Play Dat

To the goons at YouTube/Google:

AdBlock is back on. Trigger? You interrupted an 11-minute video with an unskippable 14-minute commercial.

Homey don't play dat.

Update: Even with AdBlock on, the blocking of ads lasted less than ten minutes. I'm now using the Brave browser for watching YouTube videos.

Whizzo the Clown/Dead Crab

 

When your friend posts this on Facebook, you take it as a challenge.

And wow. It makes "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" appear Oscar-worthy.

Whole thread here.

Conversation With A Mule

Comedians today would listen to a monologue such as this and not give it a second thought. Audiences hearing a monologue such as this today might sit quietly for a minute or two, but quickly get bored and maybe even boo.

With the passing of Andy Griffith today at age 86, we’ve lost yet another link to the past.

I don’t remember much of Mr. Griffith’s TV work. I’m just a bit too young for the Andy Griffith Show, though I do remember somehow watching an occasional rerun, probably on Saturday afternoons when the three networks knew nobody was watching and could put up any fool thing hoping to attract even the smallest audience. I’m just a bit too young as well for the Matlock crowd, though I do remember a time or two passing the show as I was once again clicking futilely through the four channels we got on TV to find something to watch. I probably turned the thing off and went outside. Again.

But would I, today, in thinking of this conversation with a mule, change places with those who knew Mr. Griffith at his radio, his vinyl album prime?

You know for an ever-lovin’ fact that I wouldn’t.

But thanks to the squirrelers of memory, I can sit back a bit and listen to his old comedy bits and think of living in a time when this was all there was on the radio – when radio was much more than just squawky love songs. Radio was the internet of the day, with its infinite crackly stations filled with the oddities of humanity, flavored locally.

YouTube is kinda my radio these days, and there’s a lot more to be found out there than on those scratchy AM stations. And once in a while I sail into these old radio comics like Griffith and think, maybe I would trade places with that mule. At least for a little while.

This Kind of April Fools Joke, I Like

Ah YouTube. Thanks for the laugh. A little ironis celf-parody is the kind of thing I like in a joke, and given some of the old-timey movies that were made at the turn of the 20th century, YouTube's parodies here aren't that far off. Consider this one:

Had YouTube been around in 1896, Edison would have put this one up immediately.

And then there's this one: Where else would it go, but the YouTube of the day, the "moving-picture house"?

And, of course, there were the bane of YouTube today: Commercials.

Today's YouTube Nonsequitur: La Femme D'Argent

Once and a while, somebody on YouTube really throws a wildcard at you. Take this video -- ordinary traffic on Market Street in San Francisco circa 1906 (according to researchers, this was likely taken four days before the massive earthquake and fire that destroyed a good portion of the city) combined with a bit of modern technojazz, and you've got something that's hypnotic to watch.

Things I noticed:

1. Boys (and boyish men) will ALWAYS mug for the camera.
2. The more muggish boys will, in fact, run to keep up with the camera so they can be featured more than once.
3. We ought to have more horses and carts on the roads nowadays.
4. Ladies still ought to wear hats like that.
5. I want a bowler hat of my very own.
6. We are slobs today. Everybody there is wearing a suit jacket or heavy dress. Yeah, some of the cuts aren't the finest, but they're all dressed up.

Here's a bit more on the historical background of the film, if you're interested. Bonus points: Introduced by the grumpiest of TV journalists, Morley Safer.