Chris Brauer Media Project [BLOG]

As a kid my friends and I spent two weeks practicing our New Kids on the Block air band routine for Hangin' Tough. We performed it at the epic annual Battle of the Air Bands in front of all the teachers and cool kids from participating schools. Everything went well until bandmate Steve slipped out of Jamie and my hands trying his second backflip and crashed off the stage into the power cord feeding the music. A short roundtrip to the hospital took care of his injuries but our pride never recovered. Thankfully the art of the air band didn't die with our stage demise and the cast of Scrubs tackles it with their usual offbeat charm and skillz.

Labels: funny, video

The best work Tom Hanks has ever done is in classic Money Pit moments. Watch two comedy scenes from the film.

Labels: film, funny, video

For years pundits and analysts have been predicting that video will experience the same treatment as text and audio on the Internet. Social networking sites will dominate, copyrights will be infringed relentlessly, and memes will spread like wildfire. Everyday is seems a new site pops up offering users the web-based ability to upload and rate videos or embed code on sites to share. Some examples are youtube, castpost, clipshack, googlevideo, dailymotion, grouper, ourmedia, revver, vimeo, and vsocial.

In my travels across these sites I watched a lot of fun short clips. There is something for everyone and some of the originality in remixing is really creative. Like this video of George Bush mixed to show him singing U2's epic Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Labels: funny, internet, music, politics, video

When describing a hustling bustling area of London you can opt for sociocultural, socioeconomic, and multicultural exemplars. Or you could just tell stories like for example what happened today when I came out of New Cross Gate station to find a man standing there with his penis hanging out of the top of his track pants.

Just standing there minding his own outside the entrance. And the really funny thing is that people just cruised along on their business, barely taking notice and not even really sidestepping. The police had arrived by the time I cleared my errands and made my way back home. They shuttled him off with a caring hand.

Labels: funny, london

While the rest of the world focuses attention on the bubbling cauldron in the middle east, Gates, Bono, Clinton and Blair pledge 2005, the year of Africa, enlightened worried Canadians have turned their attention to a much more pressing homeland security issue -- the Greenland Conspiracy.

Now to be fair, like all great conspiracy theories, I am not aware of anyone else on the planet with the insight to have identified this particular subterfuge. So let's get started, before it's too late and we're all assimilated into working for small shipyards and saluting Hans Enoksen, the great leader.

OK. It obviously all starts with that strange textbook fact from our primary school years that Greenland is icey (0% arable land) and Iceland is green. But there's more of course, if that's not enough.

While many have pointed the finger at the Danish in the territorial dispute with Canada over little Hans Island, a small rocky outcropping near the northernmost tip of western Greenland, it can be suggested that the Danish are acting at the behest of the Greenlandians, and not the other way around.

Let's put Greenland under the magnifying glass. Not that we need to when speaking of the world's largest island, three times the size of Texas, already suspicious because everyone knows nothing is bigger than Texas. And yet it is also suspiciously shrinking with developments in cartography, hiding from the world's glare. A finger has long been pointed at the unfairness of Greenland looking the the same size as China, and larger than Africa or South America. Now if we look at more recent projections like Peters or Winkel Tripel Greenland seems to be sinking into the sea or at least vanishing into the great white north.

Hmmm. All very interesting and suspicious. And with rumors swirling that hunters from Greenland were making their way across the frozen baring strait to illegally hunt Canadian polar bears, our strongest northern perimeter defense, the Canadian government finally decided to do something about it and launched a major military initiative, Operation Narwhal, that mainly consisted of us setting our helicopters on fire on our boats and losing ground troops overnight in icey caves, possibly kidnapped by evil Greenlandian polar bears, who everyone knows wear patches over one eye.

So all in all it reeks of conspiracy. And it hits home on a very personal note in our household where my girlfriend and I were thinking of picking ourselves up a little bit of retirement paradise with a chunk of Hans Island after reading a Dept of Fisheries and Oceans report that described it as "sandy in colour with a 150-foot cliff on one end". With global warming and the climate, described as "cool in summers, cold in winter" bound to heat up, we could be sitting on a beach-colored cliff-diving oasis. Alas, we are obviously not the only ones with such designs ... Damn you Hans Enoksen! ... Send more polar bears to the perimeter. This thing isn't over. Not by a long shot.

Labels: canada, funny