Elders React to Viral Videos is a new web series by Benny & Rafi Fine (aka The Fine Brothers) on YouTube that features senior citizens reacting and expressing their opinions about viral videos. The debut episode, Elders React to Nyan Cat, is really wonderful, as we get to hear candid remarks from the “elders” about the internet meme, Nyan Cat. They have also included bonus material. You may remember their 2011 video, Kids React to Nyan Cat, that we previously posted.

It’s got rainbow farts.

How long does this last?

Does it change color or anything?

I feel like that animal is my friend.

I don’t get it.

via Chris Torres

omg!NOW has confirmed that Judd Apatow will soon be producing a new Pee-wee Herman movie, which will of course star Paul Reubens as his beloved character, Pee-wee Herman. Reubens is currently voicing Pavel, a character for the animated Disney XD series Tron: Uprising, but expects to start filming the new Pee-wee Herman film afterwards. Previous Pee-wee movies include Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985) and Big Top Pee-wee (1988).

via Pee-wee Herman

Ash Ruiz, a former member of Latin boy band Menudo (1990s), has launched his solo “electroganic” pop music career with Burn (One Love), a song that addresses the 2012 Burning Man ticket situation (it encourages people without tickets to “create the experience” at home). Los Angeles-based Ruiz is a past participant in the annual Burning Man festival. Here is a rough cut preview of the music video for Burn (One Love) from his 7-song debut EP titled Electric Innocence. The final video, which is directed by Elevate Films founder, Mikki Willis, will be posted by Ruiz on YouTube on June 12, 2012.

From the press release on PRWeb:

Despite Burning Man Festival’s efforts to create a smooth ticketing process for the 2012 late-summer festival after last year’s sold out festival crashed online ticket sales, this year’s lottery system instead created an unprecedented crisis. The massive desert lake-bed festival, capped at 50,000 people by contract with Nevada land management authorities, relies on experienced veteran attendees (called “burners”) each year to create the extensive fusion display of art and music. The lottery system failed to account for that need, and thousands of essential veteran burners have been unable to secure tickets for the approaching sold-out festival.

Ash’s Music Video for his original song, “Burn (One Love)”, addresses this with an up-tempo invitation for those who cannot attend the festival to create the experience in their own homes and communities. Given that the Burning Man culture has always encouraged people to bring its ethos of joyful – and responsible – human expression out from the desert and into mainstream, Ash’s video works to visually create what that can look like. Ash says, “When people watch this video, I want them to be inspired to live everyday like the fabulous creative beings they are!”

Ash Ruiz at Burning Man

Ruiz is also looking for band members to “rock the planet with electroganic vibes”:

via Joseph Pred

images via Ash Ruiz

Comedian Andy Samberg did impersonations of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and actors Mark Wahlberg and Nicholas Cage in the speech he gave for the 2012 Harvard College Class Day.

Here is the full speech which includes some other funny moments:

via The Next Web

photo by Blake Boston’s mother

Scumbag Steve is a persona of Blake Boston, a man whose MySpace picture was made into an internet meme in 2011. The photo shows Blake (then a high school student) standing in a hallway wearing a backwards cap. Unbeknownst to him at the time, redditors made up an entire character named Scumbag Steve by adding white blocked text to the photo that, as described by Know Your Meme, “centers around unethical behavior regarding drugs, partying, and other hedonistic behaviors.” Later, his trademark hat became a submeme as people began photoshopping it to other images using similar captions as the original meme. When Blake first discovered his image was all over the internet, he was hurt but later embraced what was happening and adopted the meme as his own.

In May 2012, according to TechCrunch, a Brisk Tea ad campaign featuring his memed photo began running on Imgur. He also began starring in a weekly web music video series titled Scumbag Thursdays as an effort to launch his rap music career. His debut video titled Scumbag Steve Overture currently has over 2 million views on YouTube.

Team Laughing Squid recently met Scumbag Steve at The Webby Awards in New York City and became part of his latest music video titled Dirty Girl. In the video, there are cameos of PRGuitarman (Nyan Cat creator) Brad Kim (Know Your Meme), Shira Lazar (What’s Trending), our own Scott Beale and David Klass, and yes, yours truly. For the record, Blake isn’t a scumbag at all. He’s a really great guy.

video by Ben Lashes

Scumbag Steve (Blake Boston) & David Klass at The 16th Annual Webby Awards

Chris Torres (PRGuitarman), Ben Lashes, Scumbag Steve (Blake Boston) & David Klass

photos by Scott Beale

Scumbag Steve (Blake Boston) & Rusty Blazenhoff

photo & text by Scott Beale, photo memeification by Ken Dashner

More information about the Scumbag Steve meme can be found at Know Your Meme.

Jason Bailey of Flavorwire has posted “Threequel: Even More Famous Faces in Their Film Debuts” which gives a fun glimpse of famous actors in their big screen debuts. The first two montage videos in this very popular series by Bailey can be found here (1, 2).

Starring (in order of appearance): Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Warren Beatty, Jodie Foster, Tommy Lee Jones, Robin Williams, Bill Murray, Tom Hanks, Kevin Spacey, Steve Buscemi, Vincent Gallo, Chris Rock, Robert Downey Jr., Jeremy Renner, Scarlett Johansson, Angelina Jolie, Penelope Cruz, Jessica Alba, Katie Holmes, Jennifer Garner, Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Amy Adams, Jason Segel, Paul Rudd, Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling, Cameron Diaz, John Travolta

Eric Drath directed Here Now, a superb documentary film that follows baseball living legend Pete Rose in his life today. The former Cincinnati Reds player and manager was banned from the game in 1989 and put on the Major League Baseball permanently ineligible list for his questionable gambling practices. Today, he lives a quiet life in Las Vegas where he works 20 days a month selling autographs and collectibles. We learn in the film that his hope is to get a second chance and be reinstated to baseball so that he can manage a major league team.

If you want to put something on my tombstone that was very important to me: it’s 1,972. That’s how many winning games I’ve played in, so that makes me the biggest winner in the history of sports.

Here Now is the first in the latest round of 30 for 30 web series films by ESPN Films and Grantland which premieres in fall 2012 and runs through 2014. The series features 30 new sports documentaries from 30 filmmakers.

An unprecedented documentary series featuring thirty films from some of today’s finest storytellers. Each filmmaker will bring their passion and personal point of view to their film detailing the issues, trends, athletes, teams, rivalries, games and events that transformed the sports landscape from 1979 to 2009.

via Daring Fireball

Portraits by Florida-based artist Scott Scheidly are “a series of ‘fabulous’ depictions of tyrants, dictators and popes.” Each portrait is framed in hot pink, including one of Kim Jong-il donning heart-shaped glasses and another of Hitler sporting a pink and purple uniform (and more). Spoke Art Gallery in San Francisco recently debuted the series at ArtPadSF fine art fair and states “Scheidly’s work casts some of history’s most notorious characters in a new light rife with suggestion and commentary on masculinity, power, and satire.”

via The Daily What

images via Spoke Art Gallery

I am visiting New York City for Internet Week New York and spotted this Beastie Boy Adam “MCA” Yauch tribute mural by CRAM Concepts on East 7th Street in the Village. It reads “Just Me, My Posse… And MCA…”.

photo by Rusty Blazenhoff

“Off the Grid” is a photo documentary series about Americans who have left mainstream society in order to live closer to nature. The series is by French photographer Eric Valli.

There are growing number of people
who have decided to live light on the earth
to not be a part of problem anymore
I spent the last few years with four of them
striving for harmony with nature
in the most pristine corners of United States.

via The Fox is Black & Boing Boing

“Living Without Laws: Slab City, USA” is a short documentary about Slab City, a desert settlement in Southeastern California that is populated by a combination of vacationers, eccentrics, and squatters. The settlement is on the site of a WWII era Marine training base—the leftover building foundations give Slab City its name. The documentary was created in 2010 by Ernie Quintero for VICE (see the accompanying article & photo gallery).

via Nerdcore

The Baltimore Sun is reporting that cult filmmaker John Waters was picked up hitchhiking in Ohio by indie band, Here We Go Magic. Their tweet announcing it read: “Just picked up John Waters hitchhiking in the middle of Ohio.. No joke. Waters in the van.” Waters, who is apparently hitchhiking cross-country, spent six hours with the band during which he bought them all lunch.

DCist has the full story from the band:

Now what do you say to conspiracy theorists who think that John Waters is a huge fan of Here We Go Magic, and this was just orchestrated as a publicity stunt to promote the band?

[Laughs] Wow. That would…I’d be completely awed. I would push that story, I wouldn’t mind at all! But the truth is we actually picked him up hitchhiking. It was a complete and utter coincident.
So what happened once the car pulls up alongside him and he gets in the van? We pulled up and we saw him and everyone went, “That’s definitely John Waters.” We opened the door and I said, “Hello how you doing? Where ya coming from?” And he said Baltimore. We were like, “Uh huh,” totally knowing that he was from Baltimore. So we said, “Come on in!” He got in the van and he got all tangled up in the seat belt, it was really adorable. That was the first thing that happened. We’re traveling in a van and there are all these seat belts that block your way. You know, the ones that go from the side to the seats in the middle.

So he was totally tangled and he didn’t even remove himself. He just sort of sat down, entrenched in seat belts. He was a perfect gentlemen. We addressed the fact that we knew it was John Waters and he very calmly accepted that information. It sort of rolls on from there. The shock of the event wore off pretty quickly in exchange for the warmth and the kindness and cleverness of this human being that’s now sitting next to you. He became a human being very quickly. He answered every single question and he was even a little shy about photos. Finally it was like, “My mom wants a picture” and “Do you mind if I Tweet this” and he was fine with it. We were like, “What on earth are you doing this for?” He was like, “I have a lot of control in my life and I just wanted to let go of the reins a little bit, have an adventure.” He’s such a true artist and it’s so cool!

A sad parting. Best of luck Mr. Waters! Wish I could put u in my pocket.

via Richard Von Busack

images via Here We Go Magic

NBC reporter Ben Aaron recently spent an afternoon chatting with Harvey and Eddie, two delightful octogenarian best friends from New Jersey’s Fair Lawn Senior Center that give their humorous take on modern life.

via Tastefully Offensive

Zuckerberg: The Musical! is a short musical created by the talented folks at New York City-based cdza. The musical chronicles the life and times of Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg starting in 2004 when he left Harvard and started Facebook.

Singing – Lora Lee Gayer, Tess Soltau and Ryah Nixon
Piano – Michael T.
Directed by Joe Sabia

Laura Milligan, Greg Behrendt, Brian Posehn, Blaine Capatch, and Patton Oswalt, photo by Dan Dion

San Francisco-based photographer and comedy show producer Dan Dion recently posted an article on his blog titled In Praise of Patton Oswalt which featured some wonderful early photos of the comedian. One photo, in particular, shows Oswalt with Laura Milligan, Greg Behrendt, Brian Posehn, and Blaine Capatch in 1994. Oswalt will be hosting the 16th Annual Webby Awards on May 21, 2012.

Here’s a snippet from Dan’s original post from February 2012:

Hollywood had once again siphoned off some of The City’s most promising performers, and was trying desperately to figure out how best to vampirize native daughter Margaret Cho. But SF was still a mecca for stand-ups, and a peak was imminent with the ascension of a few bright locals, and the immigration of several others- locals Greg Behrendt, Laura Milligan, Brian Posehn, and Arj Barker broke out. Fiery journeymen Marc Maron and Tom Rhodes hung out their shingles from our hills, and from the Baltimore/D.C. area came Jeff Hatz, Blaine Capatch, and Patton Oswalt- a comic triumvirate raised on Monty Python, Alan Moore, and The Pixies. “The Class of 1992″ had arrived.

I was a part of that class, too. albeit with a different function. I’d put my Jesuit philosophy degree to work as a staff member of the Holy City Zoo, San Francisco’s most historic and legendary comedy club…It was here that I married my love of comedy with my photography career and started shooting portraits of these most dynamic artists.

via Patton Oswalt and Jonah Ray

photos by Dan Dion

In 2011, The Monty Python Museum posted this video clip of John Cleese playing Satan in a circa 1966 sketch on the satirical television show, The Frost Report.

Open Culture describes a bit of the show’s history:

John Cleese plays a cash-strapped Prince of Darkness in this classic sketch from The Frost Report, the show that launched Cleese as a television star in Britain. He was 26 years old at the time. The program was hosted by David Frost, who is perhaps best known for his 1977 interviews of Richard Nixon. There were four other future Monty Python comedians on the writing staff of The Frost Report–Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Eric Idle–but only Cleese was a cast member. The show was broadcast in 1966 and 1967, with each weekly episode centered around a particular theme, like love, leisure, class and authority. The ‘Souls in Torment Appeal’ is from a March 24, 1966 program about sin. It’s a funny sketch.

via Dangerous Minds and Open Culture

Under the Sea is a Sketchbook film about stop-motion animator Hayley Morris. The film, directed and edited by Danny Gregory and co-directed by Tommy Kane, captures her creative process as “she makes drawings and critters for her latest stop-motion animated film titled Bounce Bounce.” You may remember we posted Red Hook, another short film by Danny Gregory.

Some notes from the filmmaker about Morris and her process:

Despite her scratchy line, Hayley puts down each stroke with confidence and vigor. Her drawing seems to pulse and vibrate. She layers her watercolor quickly, wet-on-wet, creating more vibration and vitality. I like the ease and spontaneity of the way she makes art — you’d think a stop-motion animator would be enormously controlled in her work but Hayley leaves room for reaction and response as she makes her art. In an era of CGI and digital processes, her work harkens back to stop-motion puppeteers like the Jan Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay. It’s beautiful and emotional.

Here is Bounce Bounce, the stop-motion animation for the song “Bounce Bounce” by Hilary Hahn and Hauschka from their album Silfra:

Game of Thrones theme song by Camille and Kennerly Kitt

Identical twins Camille and Kennerly Kitt are known as the “Harp Twins” and perform awesome covers of familiar songs on their harps including the Game of Thrones theme song, Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, Guns N’ Roses’ Sweet Child O’ Mine and more.

More information from their website:

As the world’s only known identical twin professional harpists, Camille and Kennerly have a passion and flair for arranging and performing contemporary music for Harp Duet. The Harp Twins perform on identical statuesque 6ft 3in (1.9m) Concert Grand Harps as well as identical modern ebony Electric Harps. The twins were trained classically but their true musical love and passion is playing rock, pop, hip-hop, metal, country, New Age, jazz, alternative, and crossover genres. Camille and Kennerly are known for their remarkable duet harp arrangements of songs by artists such as Lady Gaga, Guns N’ Roses, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Pink Floyd, U2, Journey, Taylor Swift, The Cranberries, Rihanna, Coldplay, The Beatles, Britney Spears, Enya, Johnny Cash, OutKast, P!nk, Deep Purple, The Smiths, Elton John, Joy Division, and many more. The twins also arrange and perform a jukebox of Broadway, Video Game, and Movie Soundtrack hits. In addition to being prolific arrangers, Camille and Kennerly compose and perform their own original pieces for Harp Duet.

via Geeks are Sexy

photos by Anthony Yoon

The Conversation is an interview project that will engage American thinkers and the general public in a conversation about the future. Radio producer Aengus Anderson is currently touring the United States conducting interviews with a diverse selection of American thinkers. Listeners can hear the interviews as they are posted and take part in the project by commenting and suggesting follow up questions. Anderson and his collaborator Micah Saul are raising funds for the project on Kickstarter.

The Conversation will be a new type of media project. It’s not journalism, documentary, or oral history. Instead, it is an asynchronous conversation about the future between a cross-section of American thinkers and you, our participants on the web.

The actor who played Biff Tannen in Back to the Future, Tom Wilson, carries around a business card that answers common frequently asked questions about himself and his famous role. Wilson, a touring comedian, also has a very funny song that he put together to answer these questions.

via io9 and Shaun Usher

image via Shaun Usher

Old Jews Telling Jokes is an ongoing web series that, not surprisingly, features old Jews telling jokes. It was created in 2008 by Sam Hoffman (who also directs the videos). His rules: joke tellers must be at least 60-years-old and Jewish (“The age thing I would be strict about, the Jewish thing would be in spirit.”). . Eric Spiegelman and Tim Williams of Jetpack Media produce the series which launched in 2009 and became an immediate success. An archive of all of the jokes are available to view. An off-Broadway play based on the internet series also titled Old Jews Telling Jokes opens May 20, 2012 at New York City’s Westside Theatre.

Risqué jokes from a bygone era, delivered by a generation that loves to tell them . . . in private.

In this video from 2011, Boston-based piano technology instructor Jack Stebbins shows how he can whistle and harmonize two notes at once. He demonstrates this talent by whistling the Andy Griffith Show theme and Beethoven’s choral fantasy oboe duet.

via Gawker

American Coalition for Labor Reparations is a public initiative headed by Mother New York where folks can repay their mothers expenses incurred as a fetus. These expenses can easily be calculated by using their online form.

The American Coalition for Labor Reparations is a public initiative whose goal is simple: compensate mothers for their labor.

Every laborer deserves a wage. Your mother went into labor for you and has never been repaid.

ABC News has reported on a family in Charlottesville, Virginia that boasts an amazing six living generations of daughters. The eldest is 111-year-old Mollie Wood (b. 1901) and the youngest is 7-week-old Braylin Higgins (b. 2012). Photographer and neighbor Christian DeBaun saw the opportunity to capture some amazing portraits of the family.

via Dave Bebris

photos by Christian DeBaun

Ancestry.com recently posted the yearbook photo of children’s author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. It reads: “Your delightful drawings make us all gay, A famous artist you’ll be someday.” Sendak graduated from Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School in 1946.

The iconic author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, who died yesterday at the age of 83, was considered one of the most important children’s book artists of the 20th century, and will forever be remembered with his groundbreaking children’s masterpiece “Where The Wild Things Are”. Before he went on to become who we all know him to be, we found hints of his stardom in his 1946 Lafayette High School (Brooklyn, NY) yearbook, which he also was the art editor for.

via Sarah Elizabeth Murphy