I love when technology does things like this:
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NEW YORK — And the winner for best music video: “Chocolate Rain.” Tay Zonday morphed from an unknown musician to an Internet superstar who got booked on national TV shows after his song “Chocolate Rain” – an amateur clip of his baritone crooning – went viral last year. Now he’s among the 12 winners of the second annual YouTube Video Awards, recognizing the top user-created videos of 2007. YouTube users voted on six nominees for each category: music, sports, comedy, instructional, short film, inspirational, commentary, creative, politics, series, eyewitness and “adorable.” “It’s the new Emmys,” Zonday, 25, said of the video-sharing site’s awards in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “It’s the next Oscars. The next People’s Choice Awards. It’ll be interesting to see what happens five years, 10 years (from now).” |
Here are a couple of the winners:
In the Short Film category, a 6.5-minute video about a girl dealing with the onset of her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. It’s quite poignant:
Battle at Kruger
I met Kevin (av8rdude) at the gym at 4:00, where today I did 30 minutes on the lower body machines, ending with the oh-so-dreaded abs machine.
Afterwards, I did 45 minutes on the elliptical machine at level 4, during which time I listened to 23 ABC News Money Minute podcasts. I’d say two-thirds of them were related to the mortgage debacle going on in this country right now.
Today’s workout statistics:
Duration |
or Area Worked |
|
|---|---|---|
|
Resistance |
30 |
Lower Body |
|
Cardio |
45 |
895 |
I met Gregor (wild_sun) at Manbites Dog theater at 7:30 for the 8:15 show, to which the Board of Directors treated me. When handed my complimentary ticket, I made a $20 donation.
I know I must sound like a raving lunatic about this theater, but once again, their current show is outstanding. If you like magic (and even if you’re just mediocre about it), you will love this show.
What I liked most about it, though, was, yes, Joshua Lozoff is a fine, fine magician, but I felt totally connected to him as a human being—that’s what moved me most about this show. It will make you laugh—potentially almost to a fit during the segment where he shows the audience how to do the basic make-an-object-disappear-into-a-handkerchief trick; make you exclaim OMG a number of times; and once or twice, it might even give you chills up and down your spine.
The show is a great mixture of story-telling; amazing card tricks; what I’ll call in my layman nomenclature “physical object displacement” tricks; and most compelling in my humble opinion, what I thought of as “human connection” tricks.
The show has a three-week run, which is totally sold out, but the rumor is that on Monday, another week is going to be opened. Check their website Monday morning for an update, or call the box office then @ 919-682-3343.
After the show, I joined my friend and in-coming President of the board, Gregor, and Ed and Jeff, who are the founding fathers and the heart and soul of Manbites Dog, at Piedmont just up the road from the theater, where we had great conversation about the history (down to its DNA) and vision of the theater and what role I might play on their Board of Directors.
I got jazzed up during our talk about grant writing needs that they have, as I took a course in grant writing during my recent Master’s in Technical Communication program, it was something I liked, and it’s something I’ve actually thought of as a job I might like should I be laid off from IBM. So, it would be a win-win if I started off on the board contributing in that space.
I have to say that at one point in the evening I thought, “I’m having drinks and conversation with two great, great contributors to the arts, not only in this area, but especially in the GLBT community of which I’m a part.”
We left Piedmont when it closed at midnight, and I met Joe at Flex, where he had met Brian and Chris, two guys visiting Raleigh from Tampa on a scouting-out-a-possible-place-to-move-to trip.
We played a couple of games of free, partners pool, and then went to Legends, but by the time we got there the show was completely over. Toward the end of the evening, we had a 5- or 10-minute from none other than Tula Box (mediacafe), who among a lot of other things, told us she’s now contributing to an area blog about her morning commute on public transportation on weekdays. He promised to send me a link to it.
We closed the place down, and just after two o’clock left Brian and Chris to walk to their room at The Curler, and Joe and I went to iHOP.
We had the funniest exchange with this group of people behind us in the line. It was a girl, with her boyfriend, we think, and two or three other guys, one of whom we thought was gay. The girl said something that assumed that Joe and I were a couple, and I said, “Oh we’re not together like that.”
I could tell by the way she reacted (with an “Oh please, Mary” look) that she thought I was denying that we were gay, so I said, “Oh, I do have a boyfriend, but he isn’t him,” I said indicating Joe. They all just howled—loud enough that everyone in the waiting area turned around and looked at the lot of us.
It was way too late by the time we left there—3:30. Joe and I were falling asleep waiting for our check. Ridiculous.