I just found some awesome videos on the internet.  Here are 10 of them!!!

10.  Some soccer guy headbutted some other soccer guy!  Holy crap!

9.  These guys are dancing on treadmills! Holy crap!

8. Woah!  This hampster is staring at the video camera!  Holy crap!

7.  These guys put Mentos in Diet Coke!  Holy crap!

6. This guy sings funny!  How does he breathe? Holy crap!

5. This kid is swinging a stick around like it’s a lightsabre!  Holy crap!

4. This kid is high as a kite!  Is this real life? Holy crap!

3. This guy ruined a perfectly crafted plan!  Holy crap!

2. This guy thinks he is dancing like Beyonce!  Holy crap!

1. This girl seems to like Obama.  Hope he gets elected.  Holy crap!

Has anyone else seen any of these videos before?  Probably not.  You’re welcome.  I just thought of a new way to type – instead of using proper punctuation, I’m going to use symbols and numbers and letters out of place.  So instead of saying “you’re welcome”, I’m going to say “ur w3lcum”.  Holy crap, that’s awesome!  It’s like I’m speaking elitely.  I am going to call it “l33t speak”.  Holy crap!

Bonus.  Holy crap!  This guy’s singing a funny song from his computer desk!  Holy crap!

Double Secret Bonus: Movember Update. This guy is “for the win”, or how about “FTW”?

So it’s that lovable time of week again where I try to deride or poke fun at some mundane factoid hidden in America’s headlines. Minor problem, the news hasn’t been all that funny lately.

How the high holy heck am I supposed to write a weekly moment of mocking glory if you, the people of this fine world, don’t do anything stupid and dub it newsworthy??? I mean seriously, someone could’ve at least stuck their pecker in a toaster because they were convinced it would get them charged up for happy sex times, but NOOOOOOOOOO, people had to be normal this week. Heavens forbid.

Thus, I’ve decided to look at WTFs of yesteryear…not really WTFs, but to hell with ya’ll. I do what I want. For shits and giggles, here’s 10 music videos I’ve discovered over the years while surfing the internets..ALL OF THEM. For reasons that may seem arbitrary to your feeble minds, I’ve gone ahead and listed them in and order that only makes sense to me, thus creating both a Top 10 AND a WTF? Wednesday. Cower in fear of my great mind…or in fear of what you’re about to see, as a few of these are actually music videos for very popular artists in other countries.

10. Read A Book

I think Lil Jon has missed his calling as a educational rapper. Also, BET is utterly insane for airing this.

9. Run Mr. Taliban

This video is insanely funnier if you just focus on the face they chose for W.

8. Night of Fire

I have nothing to say to that other than THEY’RE 14 YOU PERVERTS. Also, silly me for thinking that this “fat pro wrestler dancing with prepubescent asian girls” thing was a one hit wonder. They did it again, and this time he’s wearing a Donald Duck outfit.

7. Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me

It’s my Theme Song!

6. Bang Bang Bang

Maybe if I took more of this approach, number 6 wouldn’t be my theme song…

5. Numa Numa Guy

Greatest lipsynch video EVER.

4. Papa Smurf Can I Lick Your Ass

They had me at ‘Smurfs Gone Wild’

3. Yatta

Japan, you are officially fucked in the head.

2. Star Wars Gangsta Rap

For more shenanigans featuring expletives, here’s the sequel.

Lastly, to be number one, you have to beat number one, and to this day no one has managed to top the rhythmic gyrations of the one, the only Daler Mehndi:

What spreads? The FUNNY spreads!

People like to share funny emails, funny pictures, funny stories, funny videos, funny blogs. Why?

There is no complicated, structured or academic answer to that. It’s simple – when you combine a hilarious piece of information with a tinge of notoriety (or vice versa), people talk about it. Firstly, it tickles their funny bone and secondly, this is I believe is a social impact of viral marketing, your credibility and likability goes up when you spread a piece of genuinely funny news.

In 2006, the Daily Mail documented history’s Top 10 Viral Videos that had been the butt of endless jokes.

Top 10 Viral Videos

1 Star Wars Kid (900 million)
2 Numa Numa (700 million)
3 One Night In Paris (400 million)
4 Kylie Minogue for Agent Provocateur (360 million)
5 The Exploding Whale (350 million)
6 John West Salmon Bear Fight (300 million)
6 Trojan Games (300 million)
8 Kolla2001 (200 million)
9 AfroNinja (80 million)
10 The Shining Redux (50 million)
- Taken from the Daily Mail

If you do a Google search on any of the video titles, you will realise that the top few results are all video results. What you can derive from this is that videos, especially YouTube videos, are a very effective way of gaining favourable positions in the Google search engine. Simply cut and paste a video code into your blog or website and you’re a notch up in Google’s favour.

*Can you imagine the number of hits on your website if you were the originator of L.M.A.O videos like these?  Well, it doesn’t have to be crude or notorious, it can be smart funny or tongue-in-cheek.

Go to YouTube and look up the Star Wars Kid. The comments are fresh! As of time of posting, the last comment for the video below was 9 hrs ago. A different variation (and there are many variations) of this video had its last comment 22 mins ago. There is no ephemeral quality to videos and especially a video with good content, it becomes timeless.

Now here’s how Ghyslain Raza became the Star Wars Kid:

Hal Niedzviecki ends his novel, The Peep Diaries, confused as to what his findings have concluded. Well Hal, I’m with you on that – I also have found no logical conclusion to what you have just spent 300 pages trying to decipher.

The Peep Diaries is a non-fiction book (I am trying to read one non-fiction a month) about the current trend that he coins ‘Peep Culture.’ Peep Culture encompasses everything from reality tv, myspace, facebook, twitter and reality tv.

I can’t remember who recommended this book – a wayward friend? The Globe and Mail? Some library must-read section? Whoever it was owes me $20.

Filled with typos and nuggets of ideas that never evolve, this book reeks of lazy editing and a rushed deadline. I know who the Numa Numa guy is, and yes, I’m aware of the Star Wars kid. Filled with anecdotes of various reality tv stars, bloggers and the stars of viral videos this book seems to be written for people longing for a glimpse into the behind the scenes of Survivor castings and MySpace stalkings. Sadly, this book doesn’t even deliver that. The profiles of various Peep Culture enthusiasts dig no deeper than the surface and, in the end, add to no argument and advance nothing in the narrative.

Is Hal for Peep Culture or against it? He waffles back and forth and, in the end, decides he doesn’t know. I checked out his website. His blog, twitter account and invite to add him on facebook imply, to myself at least, that he has no problem with it. Then why the book Hal? And why the second book you’ve just released mere months after this one on what appears to be essentially the same subject? Dude, I’m not criticizing. You know lots about peep culture, you study and think about it, you write about it and do talks around North America. And yet…the book ends with no distinctive opinion on it. Any of it. Oy vey.

I’m also going to ad that, although I was less than moved by Hal’s findings, my best friend E looked at it in an entirely different light. He is a history major. He loves history. Lives and breathes it. Although he didn’t read the whole book, he commented on his writing style. It’s in the first person, very conversational and uses slang and, as previously noted, is littered with typos. Which, he feels, is very reminiscent of the voices found in blogs all over the internet. E thinks this book is going to be a very interesting historical document in 50 years (with the speed of current culture, I argue 5 years). And not just the book, the writer himself. The writer talks about his own blogs and forays into the culture. His feelings and the manner in which he thinks about these issues is very relevant of our current culture. We don’t think about it? We don’t think about putting our info online and we don’t think of whose buying our information from our MySpace accounts.

Well, as a first non-fiction for Aug (yes, it took me so long that I just finished it on the bus this morning – Sept 1st) was less than impressive. Overall opinion? Skip it. Pick up something by Marshall McLuhan or just read the privacy section of your facebook account. Think for yourself and watch your own privacy.

What's this pudgy white kid doing in the Avatar movie?

Black-face is no longer politically correct–so why is it that Asian-face is still fine? It’s not that I have a problem with the chubby white kid and his vamp counterpart so much as I do have an issue with the fact that the all-Asian main characters of Avatar have been replaced primarily by white actors, despite the fact that people aren’t supposed to be doing this sort of crap anymore. I have a problem with producers who can look at all of the Asian-Americans who can actually perform martial arts and then pass them up for the Star Wars Kid wannabe’s lightsaber flinging. Oh, and I guess they watched Twilight, took one look at Jasper’s startled Edward Scissorhands face, and thought, “Yes! Here is our Sokka!”

Thank you, big movie producers, for the loss of even more of my precious faith in the world.

Sometimes e-fame is neither expected nor wanted. 14 year-old Gyslain Raza did not expect people to ever see the video he made of himself acting out a light saber battle. On November 4th, 2002, after recording the footage in the basement of his highschool (Séminaire St-Joseph in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, Canada), Ghyslain forgot the tape only to be found later by fellow students and posted on the file sharing network Kazaa as “The Star Wars Kid”.

This was the original video:

As interest in the Star Wars Kid grew, several of “remix” videos were created and posted online:

As of November 27, 2006 the video (and it’s remixes) had been viewed an estimated 900 million times.

Ghyslain did not welcome his new-found celebrity status. He dropped out of highschool and in July 2003, filed a CA$250,000 lawsuit against the families of four of his schoolmates. He claimed that he “had to endure, and still endures today, harassment and derision from his high-school mates and the public at large” and “will be under psychiatric care for an indefinite amount of time.”On April 7, the Raza family reached an out-of-court settlement with the defendants.

Too bad he didn’t feel up for capitalizing on the exposure. His story and likeness has become a pop culture icon parodied by the likes of “Weird Al” Yankovic, South Park, Stephen Colbert, and the video game Tony Hawk’s Underground 2, just to name a few.

#1 – “Star Wars Kid”

This is YouTube’s Monolith. The Revolver of YouTube videos. The total game-changer.

The moment the shackles were finally 100% gone and everyone stood up and took notice of its full potential. Suddenly, no one was safe. We all realized that the internet could ruin anyone’s life. Not just celebrities or politicians, but some nerd who was already on the lowest rung of the high school social ladder. Even that guy with seemingly nothing to lose could be further destroyed by the internet. Or, become an online celebrity.

Admit it, since the day you first saw this video, anytime you’ve done something stupid, somewhere in your head you’ve thought, “Holy crap I hope this doesn’t wind up on YouTube.” And anytime you post a video of someone else doing something stupid, you think, “Oh man I hope this becomes the next Star Wars Kid.”

At the same time, lots of other nerds realized they too could become “famous” via YouTube and they flocked there to start vlogs, post their “music videos”, etc.

YouTube ruined the Star Wars Kid’s life. And the Star Wars Kid gave YouTube its own. Seems like a fair trade.

Anyway, that’s what I think. Let me know if you think I missed something really vital and perhaps I’ll post it because posting classic YouTube vids is fun for everyone.

-Dropout

Computer bites man

Online shopping at 3am, Facebook, iTunes, email… No one can claim the internet was a bad idea (we’ll let spam go for now…)

But just occasionally something happens to remind you how dangerous that little box in the corner of your room can be to your reputation. Businesses have already woken up to the wildfire that can spread online and decimate their reputation in hours, but it’s even more frightening when this occurs to an individual.

Take what happened recently to a prominent Lost re-capper and reviewer. From the outside this was just a young guy who enjoyed making videos analysing the TV series. In fact, he had amassed a large audience of over 10,000 on YouTube and had even appeared on national TV. But when he was accused of stealing content from other bloggers in the Lost community, the response was irate, immediate and overwhelming… his YouTube videos were removed, his account suspended and copyright infringement claims filed. In a few short days his reputation was shredded to the extent that he may have to give up any thoughts of entering journalism or television presenting.

Still, at least he wasn’t the Star Wars Kid.

This is a purely online phenomenon. There are many cases of high-profile plagiarism in the real-world that have even been taken to court and yet have received little media coverage (have you ever heard of Sofia Stewart?).

Of course, this is partly to do with the huge audience that anyone can find themselves exposed to online. But it also results from the fact that online bloggers and social media addicts have a completely different news agenda to the mainstream media and sometimes even larger audiences. They also have no tangible regulation. And if you do something that angers them, well, you’re in big trouble…

Online, the line between fame and infamy is always dangerously close.

There are 390,000 self-identified followers of the Jedi faith in Britain, according to the new census. Setting aside the question of what an army of British Jedi means for international security, also setting aside the question of what a truly practicing Jedi would look/act like, and setting aside the question of whether or not Jedis are a little bit fascist, let’s focus on this: what’s the difference between a fake religion and a real one?

First, the difference between a cult and a fake religion: not all fake religions are cults. It’s the difference between the Jedi and the Heaven’s Gate crowd. A cult might be a fake religion, though. Or it could be a young religion that doesn’t have an evolutionarily sustainable strategy. Like having all your members kill themselves every time a comet passes near Earth.

One way to separate the Jedis and the Scientologists from the Christians and the Muslims would to require religious sources to be separate from science fiction literature. If a danger of young religions/cults (they’re generally indistinguishable at the beginning, which is not to say they’re the same thing) is that they are marketing schemes concocted by charlatans to make a lot of money, then that criticism is particularly potent when the religious founder has established herself as a talented storyteller and marketer.

This criticism is different from Hume’s attack on religious belief, which was that the likelihood of a mistaken perception or a lie is always greater than that of a miracle (defined as breaking the laws of nature, which have been tested by centuries of human experience and experiment). I’m afraid that Hume’s argument boils down to: miracles are inordinately unlikely, and it’s not good policy to believe that inordinately unlikely things are true. I have problems with the mechanics of this argument and its implications. The talented storyteller/marketer criticism focuses more on the problem of being used instead of the problem of believing a false proposition.

Let’s take a Wittgensteinian tour of religious propositions just to show why I would focuse on used-ness rather than truth. First off, lots of religious language isn’t propositional, it’s imperative. Peace be with you. God bless you. Love your neighbor. Such sentences are meant to influence lives, not to describe the world, and so they don’t have truth values. Of the relatively few religious claims, like Christ is risen, Jesus loves you, We’re all God’s children, or God set the universe in motion, some look like historical claims, but I believe that, properly understood, they are actually extra-scientific. Like expressing views on the origins on the universe, or moral attitudes. Areas where science has no methods for generating truth.

This isn’t to say that religion and religious language are always properly understood by believers. People who claim that the earth is really 6,000 years old or that Jesus rode dinosaurs are offering claims that land squarely in the jurisdiction of science/history, and claims that happen to be contrary to all kinds of evidence. That is an example of religion overstepping its bounds. But when religion is within its bounds, discussing human dignity and the good life, judgment, and c., there’s no direct way for science to contradict the statements, because they’re more generating and sustaining attitudes than describing states of affairs. And then all’s right in heaven and on earth.

Exhibit H5starZippr7: Politico is finally catching on to the GOP’s Palin problem.

Need to waste some time?  Top 100 interweb videos.  Evah!

Another Dem on a wiretap. I love her hinky existential declaration.

I’ll have a vodka martini, bacon, not stirred.

We’re really in trouble if Texas gits aholt a’ one of them Gatling guns!

Oh, shit, so this is where all the PUMAs went.

Very happy 420 day to you.

This is a list that will suck up far too much of your time. Posted today on LaughingSquid, I definitely had to share:

Top 100 Iconic Internet Videos

(Sadly, while on the list, the Numa Numa song didn’t quite make the top 10.)

Jawel dames en heren, uw literaire krijgsheren maken reeds hun rentree op deze eigenzinnige blog. Zwaffelijzer is immers hot, en wij kunnen het ons niet permitteren om u, ons trouw lezerspubliek, te verwaarlozen.

Daarom willen wij u op deze moment verblijden met een klein literair stukje over een internet fenomeen dat we reeds in onze allereerste blog lichtelijk hebben aangehaald: Boxxy.

Deze frisse, jonge deerne is het absoluut waard om hier een eervolle vermelding te verkrijgen. Haar enigszins aparte stijl heeft ons, de twee frisgeschoren schrijvers van Zwaffelijzer ( oké neen, we gaan eerlijk zijn, één frisgeschoren kin en één niet geschoren Ken) kunnen bekoren. Nu, veel mensen uiten kritiek op haar bizarre stijl maar wij, van Zwaffelijzer moedigen dit aan! Een eigenzinnige toets kan immers van goudwaarde zijn om te kunnen overleven in de grijze massa van onze meelopermaatschappij. Er zijn er velen die proberen om het niveau van onze virtuele schat te benaderen, helaas, het kaf wordt van het koren gescheiden door jullie, de e-generatie. Velen verdwijnen wederom in de diepe, zwarte, eindeloze gaten van onze samenleving om hun roemloze leventje verder te zetten.

Desalniettemin kunnen we concluderen dat Boxxy is opgerezen uit de grijze massa als een ware vrouwelijke, adhd-Messias. Zij, en haar hele unieke, felbesproken persoonlijkheid kunnen plaatsnemen in het rijtje van weblegendes. Onder haar illustere voorgangers bevinden zich bijvoorbeeld Chris Crocker, de sneezing panda en, hoe zouden we ze kunnen vergeten: Numa Numa guy en collega papzak/no-lifer: Star Wars kid.

Maar we wijken af. Onze lofzang voor Boxxy is lichtelijk naar de achtergrond gegleden toen onze aandacht bij de internethelden van weleer bleef steken. Maar te hard uitweiden over deze enthousiaste jongedame zou eveneens geen meerwaarde kunnen creëren, aangezien woorden wellicht te kort zullen schieten om deze wonderlijke openbaring te omschrijven. Vandaar laten wij Boxxy voor zichzelf spreken. Geniet!

voor de kijklustigen die maar niet genoeg krijgen van de youtube-helden, hebben we eveneens de filmpjes naar andere legendarische internethelden hier verzameld:

Sneezing Panda

Star Wars Kid

Numa Numa Guy

Chris Crocker

Evil Chipmunk

en er zijn er nog veel meer, maar we sluiten af met de twee toekomstige helden, die de fakkel van ons aller Boxxy gaan overnemen: Vingerhoets&De Vynck, Hell Yeah!

I just finished reading the Long Tail by Chris Anderson and found everything in it to be a real light bulb on thinking about this industry. Everyone wants to be on the top, everyone wants to be that number one guy/girl. They want the fame. Fame doesn’t bring the money or success anymore. All fame runs out eventually and it never stands out to long in the pages of history.

I admit it, I want to be famous. Ever since a little kid I have been working on random schemes to get myself noticed. It wasn’t for the money or anything like that, it was just for that ability to walk down the street and have people recognize me. I tried to be a comedian, a rock star, a movie producer, a director, an artist. The list goes on, but lets face it, none of that happened, I am still sitting in Rochester and getting ready to graduate and go into that real world and get one of those “Jobs”.  I have scaled back my dreams and aspirations of becoming famous, because right now it doesn’t look possible.  I could go the route of making the hilarious viral video such as the numa numa kid or the star wars kidbut I really don’t want to go that route. Plus, its not the fame I’m looking for.

You can say that I am trying to go for that fame by trying to write a famous blog, I am not going to deny that, but this book gave me an idea. Most money is made from the lower selling products, from people who crave those niches. The corporate America is slowly going down hill, they are going to loose that battle eventually. Don’t get me wrong that will be a very sad day, Heck I got in this business to work for them, and within the three years of my degree they have went from the only source to loosing the battle. Social Networking is here. My thought has been to open up my own firm eventually, but why not now. There are so many musicians or film makers, all those people who are doing what I dreamed of that have the talent but don’t know how to use this new source to make them as popular as George Lucas or Spielberg. Those guys were nothing other than talent and they were guided through the right channels to attract the fame.

The long tail exists and makes money, my goal is to help people, who are talented, take hold of the tail and make money off of it. That means I am making money in turn and can afford gas and rent and food. But if enough of us do that do we just become the middle man’s corporate America. This is my only issue with it. The long tail exists and helps people who have that talent but not that luck  to get their break. With the rise of the long tail, the decline of the hit and corporations running the show is happening. If I and several of my colleagues step in to help the stragglers out and make money off of it, do we just become the replacement of the failing industries who charge a little less but attracts more clients. It is very difficult to figure out especially since the industry is changing day to day, literally. I have no clue what its going to be like next year or even next week.

I apoligize for rambling on about my thoughts, but it was kind of a brain blast moment. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

As always,

Anything worth doing, Do it in Public

See ya,

Jim

The internet is a reflection of the people who use is. You are being yourself when you make fun of Star Wars Kid. When this ridicule forced him from his home, you were just being honest. We live in an over lit age. Here there are no shadows. Everything is exposed under the glare of phosphorescent, neon, and in the glow of the computer monitor. You and I have no place to hide. Only now do we realize the extent of what we’ve lost. Privacy is not the name for it. We don’t have a name for it, but it’s gone. We can not go back either. The only recourse for any of us that will not stand unashamed before the light is to pray like a pagan for Avian Flu, or World War III. For the rest of us there is You Tube, Twitter, Face Book, Blogs, On-line Banking, Buy It Now, and Internet pornography. If this is a problem, then it’s one you and I can not solve. The fact is, all of these things exist because we created them. We wanted this, and we didn’t think we cared what we would be giving up in return. However, I believe there is hope. In a world with no secrets we must accept ourselves, we must accept each other, and above all we must accept responsibility. If we are ever able to realize that we are all Star Wars Kid then what we will gain we far out measure anything we loose in the process, but even if we don’t a day is coming soon where are shame and disgust with who we really are will destroy us.

We’ve all seen the video of the Star Wars kid but this is a rather splendid animation comprising of 604 rendered frames from this YouTube phenomenon. Watch and enjoy.

There is a great project taking place at the Scope Art Fair in Basel this week. 

Without You Baby There Ain’t No Us, is a project from Swiss Artists Admir Jahic and Comenius Roethlisberger (The Invisible Heroes). The project has been exhibited in NY, Miami, Kuwait and following Basel, shows are scheduled for Paris, Hamburg and LA before the end of the year. Each exhibition employs a different research and selection criteria.

At the Scope Art Fair, the pair speaks of crisis by referring to passion and absurd commitment to a joyous idea, by recreating 604 rendered frames from the video Star Wars kid, which has experienced more than 13 million views on YouTube. All 604 will be on display at the Scope Art Fair in Basel as of Monday June 8th, 2009. 

Project Details:

In an attempt to disrupt the haphazard collection of archived videos that YouTube has become, artist duo Comenius Roethlisberger and Admir Jahic transformed the visual (and virtual) language of “broadcasting” into a physical medium by producing illustrations on heavy handmade paper and recreating virtual references by allowing elemental art materials to do what they do best and add to the confusion.

Each drawing is 21 inches x 31 inches / 56cm x 76cm and based on a rendered freeze-frame, complete with video title, user ratings and number of views.

The resulting collection is both distressing and humorous in its ability to highlight our often vulgar predilections.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07A8eDoCD6U

Watch this sequence of 604 drawings, download project descriptions, artist info and hi – res images at:

http://www.nonewenemies.net

You can view work and installations from  previous exhibitions of this project at:

http://www.withoutyoubaby.com

I’m writing this blog on Memorial Day – the day we celebrate the sacrifices made by those who fought for our ideals and the way of life we say we want and deserve. It’s kind of ironic, though, because as I look at our society and our country I see us giving our rights away and it seems kind of rude to celebrate those who fought for us on one hand and disrespect their work on the other.

At this point you might be thinking to yourself – “Self, what is she talking about? We’re at war for our freedom now and everyone on TV but Keith Olbermann is saying we’re winning, so seriously, WTF?”

It’s not the enemy without that’s devouring us, though, it’s the enemy within. I started noticing it when the Patriot Act was passed after 9/11.

This act was sold to us as the government’s way of going above and beyond in the fight against terrorism. In a culture that is always being sold something it’s important for us to learn to look beyond the advertising. They say the act protects us but it does so by stripping us of our right to privacy and some of the liberties our forefathers fought for and are being celebrated for on this Memorial Day.

The Patriot Act was supposed to be temporary and we all (some of grudgingly) accepted it that way. In 2006 it became permanent and I don’t recall that making the news. I don’t recall any voices being raised in concern. I’ve long wondered where the Woodward and Bernstein of our times are. For that matter, I wonder where the actual Woodward and Bernstein are. Where are all the idealistic journalists eager to report the actual news, not just relate stories fed to them by publicists and political machines? Are those reporters unable to get jobs? With the world wide web at our fingertips, why aren’t more of us demanding the maintenance of our rights? Why aren’t those the viral videos we pass around via email? Have we become so apathetic that we no longer care enough to protest the loss of our rights?

That brings me to the problem that’s irking me today: corporate greed, Hollywood style.

You may have heard that a union I belong to, the Screen Actors Guild (or SAG) has been in the midst of contentious negotiations with the Producers (AMPTP) over a contract to define how, what and when we actors get paid for our work and what we have to do to earn the paycheck. The contract has been agreed to by the union and the producers and is now before us for a vote. Unfortunately, our union has sold our rights and protections for the sake of getting this deal over with because the producers want to be able to show maximum profits to their share holders.

They hold the threat of work stoppage over us. They think we will have no choice but to strike if we don’t accept the deal and that means millions of working men and women being sidelined during a recession. It’s true – no one wants that. But we do have an alternative: we can band together and boycott their product. If advertisers aren’t getting eyeballs they won’t pay the networks for their product and the producers will eventually have to cave. This is easy and convenient for us, the consumers and performers – all we have to do is not tune in. That means we’ll have to find fun the old fashioned way – facebooking, reading blogs or even books!, going outside and playing with our friends.

They’re so sure they have such a strong stranglehold on our tiny little attention spans that we won’t leave our couches or comfy movie theater chairs, that we won’t peel our eyeballs from our screens to stand up for something we supposedly believe in, like fair pay and safe working conditions. Are they right? Well, are they? If they are right then, truly, we deserve what we will get. And so do they. While they make a dollar standing on our broken backs today they will fall down as we collapse tomorrow.

In order to bring change to this type of behavior we have to stop rewarding it. And we can do that, quite easily. Imagine organizing a boycott of national magnitude via facebook and twitter. We tech savvy users of these media are the target audiences for all of the corporations out there trying to make a buck. We can turn the country on it’s ear, take back our rights, freedoms and restore fairness. That is absolute power. We deserve to have some of it too.

That’s a tea party that will get some attention.

Much as I have respect and admiration for the producers and production companies that make the films and TV shows that I love to watch and be a part of, I hate that they are trying to screw the creative people who provide them with the content that makes them hugely wealthy.

We actors now have a contract in front of us that takes far more from us than it gives. Without the creative people there would be no art but the corporations that bring it to the audiences have bottom lines and to them those are more important than the art that’s being created. It’s capitalism in a nutshell but its not something you can sustain long term.

Our country has spent the last few years believing that we can indefinitely satisfy our short term wants and needs and ignore the future. We are now seeing the consequences of that kind of action in our deepening recession and disappearing future security – the loss of medicaid, social security and the American Dream. Corporations and our government are continuing on this path of living for the moment and it’s going to continue costing us exponentially more as time goes on. All of these bail outs have consequences, not letting natural selection take place in the corporate world has consequences and if you think that Obama is going to take care of everything and you can sit back and relax you are going to be pretty surprised when the life the Joads led in The Grapes of Wrath is looking pretty cushy to you in a few years.

Rather, we should all stand up and use these voices we have been given by the internet and our social networks to spread the word about what’s really going on in our world. We should organize protests – even armchair protests and boycotts and we should start standing up for our rights. It may be okay with you if your job lays you off so that they can show a quarterly profit while you struggle to put food on the table but that’s not what I want for my family.

If Woodward and Bernstein aren’t coming to open our eyes and minds to what’s going on and spur the country into taking action that makes life better for us then let’s do it ourselves. We all have the tools and the opportunity, we just have to quit waiting to be saved and use them.

Here’s something the actors are doing to get the word out on the unfair issues in our proposed union contract and why we should vote no on it.

What if we spend as much time making videos and twitter posts that enlighten and inspire our fellow Americans and humans as we do making videos about cute kitten tricks and fat kids reenacting Star Wars battles? Then you’ll have something great to post in your status update.

Here are some brave people who stood up for what they believe in:

Ghandi

American Civil Rights:

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

- Rosa Parks

Women’s Suffrage Movement

- Susan B. Anthony

- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

- Lucretia Mott

- Alice Paul

- Lucy Burns

Oskar Schindler

If you let history happen to you and you never stand up for what you think is right you will never make your mark on history and you will certainly not be remembered.