Roger’s Roundup
A while ago, I posted a column with a few of my favorite Facebook things that have made me laugh, think or go hmmm. Today’s version is a little more Youtube-centric and includes videos from Youtube I’ve posted on my Facebook page to share with friends and family.
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Do you have a favorite song from an opera? Mine — if it isn’t the always popular Nessun Dorma from Puccini’s Turandot — then it has to be the duet Pa-pa-pa from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The opera is basically about a prince named Tamino, who is caught in a squabble between the evil darkness ladies and the good daylight men. Papageno is Tamino’s sidekick. He’s a bird-catcher and wears an outrageous costume of feathers. He has a magic glockenspiel. You know the type.
Anyway, Papageno’s one desire is to find a woman, fall in love and have babies. Toward the end of the opera, he meets a female version of himself named Papagena, who magically falls in love with him. It’s pretty shallow. But the song when they meet, the aforementioned Pa-pa-pa, is great. It’s basically them repeating each others’ names back and forth, stuttering over all the “pa”s, and talking about how many babies they’re going to have. And it’s usually sung with overwhelming, simple joy that is just amazing.
I posted a video of it on my Facebook a while back, and it’s easy to find on Youtube. Check it out.
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While I’m on the subject of Youtube, checkout anything by Bad Lip Reading. These guys take a video and add dialogue to it that fits the mouth movements, but is totally hysterical. One of my favorites is a song called Seagulls (Stop It Now), which involves Yoda and Luke from Empire Strikes Back being plagued by, you guessed it, seagulls.
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There’s a group called Postmodern Jukebox led by a gentleman by the name of Scott Bradlee. These folks take modern (or what was modern not too long ago) songs and re-interpret them in other styles of music — usually jazz, swing or blues, although I’ve seen some country and barbershop. One of my favorite PMJ singers is Haley Reinhart. She’s an American Idol alum. Check out her PMJ versions of Radiohead’s Creep and Seven-Nation Army by the White Stripes.
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There’s a lot of talk among Youtube mathematicians (yep, that’s a thing) that the entire sequence 1+2+3+4+5… all the way up to +infinity adds up to -1/12. There are videos showing proofs of this concept.
Obviously that isn’t the math I was taught in Texas public schools.
Roger Cline is a staff writer for the Snyder Daily News. Any comments about this article can be made to roger@snyderdailynews.com