Category Archives: YouTube

Missouri Department of Transportation is YouTube’ing.

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MoDOT (Missouri Department of Transportation) has new videos about highway and bridge projects, highway safety and other projects on YouTube.

  • A flyover animation of the future landmark Mississippi River Bridge – St. Louis
  • Footage of the rapid construction of the Jefferson Street Overpass – Jefferson City
  • MoDOT Saving Lives and Reducing Injuries – A synopsis of MoDOT and the Missouri Coalition for Roadway Safety’s initiatives to reduce fatalities and injuries on Missouri roads.

There are also several other MoDOT videos available, showing how dedicated truck lanes would work, dramatic footage of the Route 19 Missouri River Bridge demolition, guard cable crash tests and an aerial view of the ongoing construction on the new Interstate 64 in St. Louis.

During the early days of YouTube, I hear the clueless ask, “Who wants to watch some guy doing the chicken dance? What a waste of time!” They couldn’t (can’t) see that, in time, even big old state agencies like DOT would figure out creative uses for the technology.

John McCain’s YouTube nightmare

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“Six of the top 10 videos returned by a “John McCain” YouTube search Thursday pegged the 71-year-old as inconsistent, extreme, wooden or a combination of the three. (The one clearly favorable piece came from the McCain campaign and focused on his Navy service. Contrast that with a YouTube search of “Barack Obama.” It’s a swoon fest, with virtually all of the top entries featuring the Illinois senator at his eloquent, uplifting best.” — From LATimes.com

Damn. This McCain video has been viewed 1.5 million times. Pre-YouTube, his opponents could have assembled this video easy enough. And they could buy some TV time and air it. But YouTube just changes everything. How do you answer something like this? “They took my remarks out of context” is getting pretty lame. We’re entering (we’re IN?) an era when everything is recorded and everything shows up on YouTube.

I’ll take geo-political history for 500, Chris

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This segment on last night’s MSNBC Hardball is one of the things I most dislike about cable news (yes, I did watch it).

“Chris Matthews, convinced that LA radio talk show guy Kevin James wasn’t real strong in his knowledge of geo-political history, asking James if he knew what Neville Chamberlain did at Munich in 1938. If you answered, “He signed the Munich Agreement, conceding a portion of Czechoslovakia to the Nazi regime,” you are right. If you answered, “He talked to Hitler, and caused 9/11 to happen, just like Barack Hussein bin Laden wants to!” then you are Kevin James.”

When did it become okay to just shout the other guy down? No wonder the rest of the world thinks were a bunch of assholes.

Tarzan the Ape Man (Pygmy scene)

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When I came home for lunch yesterday, Barb was watching the Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). The original Johnny Weissmuller/Maureen O’Sullivan classic. I grew up on Tarzan movies. I came in on the scene where Jane and her father had been captured by pygmies who took them back to the village where they planned to drop them in a pit with a giant ape. This clip runs about 2:50.

If I could rent a time machine for just a few days, I’d go back to the filming of this movie, specifically to those breaks in filming when all the little people were standing  around, waiting for their next scene. Everyone in costume with bones stuck in their pygmy wigs.

“Have you heard about this Wizard of Oz project? Word is they need a bunch of us to play Munchkins.”

“What the fuck is a munchkin?”

Poor Man’s Steadicam – Take 3

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My friend Jamie seems to be getting much better results from the Poor Man’s Steadicam, so I have to conclude I haven’t mastered the tool yet. In the short video above, notice how smoothly they come down the stairs and even when Jamie starts jogging, the shot remains very steady. Well done, Jamie and Anonymous Cameraman.