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Greg Veis, YouTube Hunter: MLK Day Edition

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Martin Luther King, Jr., said that*, but you're going to hear presidential candidate Obama repeat it more than a few times over the next year. You'll also hear him say that it doesn't bend itself. Undeniably true, and the reason why days like yesterday are important. Sure, Martin Luther King Day is a fantastic opportunity to reacquaint yourself with a Nintendo habit--the Hunter watched a dizzying amount of 24--but, at the risk of eye... READ ON

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Greg Veis, YouTube Hunter: Sportscenter Holiday-tacular!

Tis the holiday season, and the Hunter is swimming in nostalgia. He remembers the fresh snow falling on a Los Angeles Christmas morn. He remembers running downstairs to see what Santa had delivered during his fitful slumber. He also remembers that he was, in fact, Jewish and had received his presents earlier in the month, meaning that Christmas Day would bring little more than a matinee at the AMC followed by some Moo Shoo Pork. (Which, incidentally, never failed to be delicious.) Oh well. As the... READ ON

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YouTube Hunter: EPIC 2014 and the Future of Newsprint]

This month's Atlantic includes a fascinating article by Michael Hirschorn on what newspapers have to do to stay relevant in an increasingly diffuse, almost schizophrenic, media environment. We've got blogs and MySpace and YouTube and, shucks Jimmy!, however are newspaper supposed to stay afloat? Certainly, as everyone's been saying for some time now, the future doesn't look bright. Circulation figures are dwindling, younger generations haven¹t developed their parents' taste for broadsheet, blah blah... READ ON

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Greg Veis, YouTube Hunter: YouTube Turnip

Today's other mental_floss blog column, the delightful Tuesday Turnip, inspired this jet-lagged and sleep-deprived entry. You know the idea: type a word into a search engine and see what "turns up." Well, as you might expect, this leads to some rather strange results in YouTube Land. People be nuts, like Almond Joy. (That was my attempt to write a rapper-like simile. Day job: keeping it.) Anyway, as proof of people's being a wee bit touched, typing in "Harold and Kumar" yields 175 returns. Do we really... READ ON

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Greg Veis, YouTube Hunter: Are You Ready for Some Parkour?

My first thought, so stereotypically Jewish it's guilt-inducing, is a practical one: that cannot be good for the joints. The resulting arthritis is going to be monumental. And yet, what I'm watching is something I'd never imagined a human body to be capable of. It is exhilarating. It's the first long action sequence of the new Bond film, Casino Royale, and the burnt-faced bad guy is trying to escape 007 in a conveniently located construction site. He's climbing walls, jumping from metal beam to metal... READ ON

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Greg Veis, YouTube Hunter: The Jobs/Gates War

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Oh, the outrage they incite. So much as mention the name Bill Gates around a Mac-olyte, and you're promised to get 10 minutes of intolerable screeching that will include the words "devil" and "nerdy little goober." Same vitriol goes the other way around, too, except substitute the references to: "pompous prick" and "substance-less prick." Me, I don't have a horse in the race. I prefer Macs and my iPod gives me the tinglies -- but Bill Gates certainly does some nice stuff for... READ ON

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Greg Veis, YouTube Hunter: 1 Filthy British Kids' Show

YouTube Hunter Quiz! Q: From Transformers to Barney, Sesame Street to Dora the Explorer, what, more than anything, do children's shows aired on American television lack? A: Filthy sexual innuendo. An easy one, I know. But consider Rainbow, a kids' show that ran on British TV for 20 years, from 1972 to 1992. (There have been ill-advised revival attempts, but that's neither here nor there.) By day, this show helped tiny Britons with their English skills while making them laugh. Oh, the laughter! By... READ ON

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Greg Veis, YouTube Hunter: 4 Triumphs, a Borat, and a Goulet... Oh My!

Sometimes I dig so deep for you. I trawl and I dredge and I scrape to find YouTubes at the far end of the Long Tail, YouTubes so obscure that they're watched only by shut-ins taking rejuvenation breaks during Shannon Tweed movie marathons. But in this deep-sea diving, you can miss the meaty nourishment near the surface. (That may have been the worst metaphor I've ever used.) So, today, I resolve to bring you the best of the obvious: Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, Borat, and Will Ferrell doing his Robert... READ ON

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Greg Veis, YouTube Hunter: 4 International Superstars (and 1 Drunk Orson Welles)

Gladsome times here at YouTube Hunter HQ! And how could we be wearing anything but a frown turned upside down after the recent YouTube/Google merger worth $1.65 billion in stock? Think about it: before this column started about three months ago, YouTube was an abandoned internet backwater, barely more influential than this guy's little blog. And now (significant thanks to us) the company's founders could, if land were still worth the same as it was during the Louisiana Purchase, buy the world 893 times... READ ON

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Greg Veis, YouTube Hunter: 7 booze commercials from the '80s that taste great, are less filling

I'm not going to beat around the bush today, folks. I like beer. I like the '80s. I like commercials. Now let's go YouTubin'... I think I can safely say -- and you can safely agree with me -- that Miller Lite won the macrobrewery commercial wars of the early 1980s. (It took the Bud Bowl later in the decade to narrow the gap.) John Madden and an endless string of cameo appearances (what, Bronko Nagurski was busy? Oh wait, there he is...) catapult this ad to the heights of RAWK: And this Miller... READ ON

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