We always knew that Sleeping Beauty chick was a bitch. A self-described YouTube "nerd" who goes by Pinkwhig has mashed up the "Mean Girls" trailer to clips of classic Disney princesses -- and the result is a clever and remarkably spot-on articulation of the subtext that's always been lurking in those animated fairy tales. And Ariel should definitely consider calling her agent about starring in the Lindsay Lohan biopic.
The Chicago band OK Go, perhaps known more for their ingeniously quirky viral antics than their songs, have unleashed another jaw-dropping visual spectacle with their new video for "This Too Shall Pass." This one involves not treadmills or intricately choreographed dance moves but over three minutes of Rube Goldberg splendor. To celebrate those elegant, fascinating contraptions, we bring you the top ten videos of Rube Goldberg marvels in action.
Little girls – one minute they're begging you to replay that Wiggles song about fruit salad, and the next, they're singing about boys trying to touch their junk. The viral queen of the week is a bespectacled 12-year-old named Avery whose pint-size version of the Ke$ha mega-hit "TiK ToK" has been quietly accelerating on YouTube since she posted it in December. Then yesterday, on Ke$ha's 23rd birthday, the thing took off.
The homage video is a Web classic; someday, entire college courses will be devoted to all the versions of "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)." (Post-feminism in the age of air-punching gyration: Discuss!) But for parents, there is something about the sight of a child cavorting around to a song that celebrates drunkenness, fighting and over-identifying with Diddy that gives one pause.
Suggestive lyrics and little ears are nothing new, and I say that with all the authority of someone who could do the full 17-minute version of "Love to Love You Baby" at 9. Anyone who's grown up any time in the pop era and anywhere outside of Amish country probably has a similar story, and there's a pretty good chance it involves a Prince song. Ergo, just like Avery, my own 10- and 6-year-old daughters can belt out the inappropriate dance hits with the best of them. Just yesterday they stopped me in my tracks at the supermarket by warbling along to "Sexy Bitch." (We keep it pretty real at my supermarket.)
But where once the beyond-your-years pop culture aptitude merely mildly scandalized parents, kids now have the option of entertaining and/or appalling the multitudes. Anyone with a laptop can become a star -- and that's where it gets complicated. Is toothy, unself-conscious Avery's lip-synced "TiK ToK" kind of adorable? Absolutely. Is it also a little disturbing, knowing a) her bedroom antics are out there for the world to see and b) her parents had to consent to this? Yep, that too. By putting herself out there, Avery is open to the geniuses who comment that "Wow you are a fucking annoying ugly brat" and "You know you want my cock."
Based on her other videos, wherein she enthuses about the books she loves and does a full-on homage to farting, Avery seems a pretty grounded, funny kid. She's like a lot of girls, including my own, in her exuberant eccentricity. Her vogueing for the camera bears little resemblance to Ke$ha's grown-up, celebratory skankiness.
And that's why her video is so unnerving, so surprisingly bittersweet. It's not that she's singing about brushing her teeth with a bottle of Jack; it's the innocence with which she does it. (Though if you're looking for disturbingly sexualized young video queens you don't have to look far.) While Avery is self-aware enough to do a video hanging out alone in her room titled "Get a Life," she -- like every other little girl busting a move on YouTube -- will soon be a young woman. By then, she'll have already long figured out that she's not just performing for herself here. She'll understand that she is being watched, being scrutinized for her looks, her clothes, her glasses, her allure or her perceived lack thereof. Welcome to the rest of your life as a female, kid.
For now, though, she's still just a little girl, playing in her room and blowing her speakers up. On her YouTube bio, she writes with heartening sagacity that "95% of kids laugh at other kids because they are different. Post this on your channel if you're part of the 5% percent laughing at the other kids because they're all the same." Ke$ha may not be the world's great role model, Avery, but every minute you keep laughing, you are.
On the list of things we love, "romance, sarcasm, math, and language" are reliably in the top ten. Hence our membership in the cult of xkcd , Randall Munroe's dry as vemouth, sweet as vin santo Web comic. And when a bunch of our Net culture heroes like Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton, Jason Kottke and Cory Doctorow get together to sing a little ditty of its praises, there is but one word to describe our delighted response.
Replay.
On the Internet, certain memes are reliably viral-worthy. Cats playing piano, for instance. Hitler getting the news of anything. But it has only recently come to our attention that teenage girls whaling on each other is this year's equivalent of OK Go dancing on treadmills.
Adolescent girls and fighting have long gone together like fake nails and clawed flesh (as those of us who survived Catholic school in New Jersey will attest). But the ease with which an adolescent brawl can become an unlikely hit became apparent last month after a Baton Rouge altercation between two high schoolers appeared on YouTube. In the clip, 14- and 16-year-old girls smack each other around while two adults stand by apparently goading them on. It's no "Thriller" flashmob, but it garnered thousand of hits – and the attention of the authorities. (The adults were subsequently arrested.) A few days later, a similar girl beatdown, this time from Lowell, Mass., popped up on YouTube as well. Suddenly, a feisty little genre had become every parent's nightmare.
But these two high-profile cases are just a taste of what's out there. In a CBS news report this week, a New England district attorney claims that 80 percent of school fights in his area are now between girls -- and national crime statistics bear out a rise in assault arrests among girls. (In related and marginally less depressing news, the legitimate field of female cage fighting is seeing a similar surge.)
But it's not fighting itself that's really skyrocketing; those same crime stats show no real increase in serious violence among girls. The recording of it, however, is another story. A YouTube search on girl fights yields hundreds of thousands of results, and that's not including the separate Web sites devoted to the action, where one can watch Brawlin Black Girls, Girl Knockouts and plenty of Ghetto pummeling. (I'm not providing the links. You want it that badly, find it yourself.)
It's true that many of those so-called fight clips are giggly affairs, obviously staged for an adoring audience of Internet degenerates. But just as many sure look like spontaneous acts of brutality. So what's grimmer, teenage girls playing fight club in the hopes of getting page views, or bystanders turning real violence into mass entertainment? And what's more demoralizing, knowing that somebody – or sometimes several rubbernecking, camera-toting somebodies -- had to coolly record and upload a face pounding, or reading the comments on how awesome or boring it turned out to be? I'll call it a draw.
The claws-out, hair-pulling fisticuff is, of course, a venerable genre. But this girl fight trend is distinct from its Russ Meyer and "Kill Bill" predecessors in a number of ways. First and foremost, it involves kids. We can, as the CBS report did, ponder aloud the issues of teen violence and bullying, but an equally troubling question is, who's watching this stuff? Well, those comments pointing out the "porno shot" moments might provide a tip-off, and the fact that the videos are often labeled as "hot sexy teen girls" beating each other makes at least one of their intended effects pretty clear. And getting to harsh on "stupid bitches" who "can't even fight"? That's a bonus. But it's not just the spelling-challenged mouth breathers out there fixing for a dustup. Even CBS News leeringly referred to the phenomenon as "girls gone wild," while AOL teased with a headline about "girl-on-girl fights." It's funny: I've never heard a news report about guys kicking each other's asses referred to as "dudes gone wild" or "man-on-man" action. Behold this terrible problem, America. PS: Mrrrrow! And maybe that's the simple reason for the spike in these videos right there. Blood lust plus underage girls -- it's angry and violent and so easy to snark on and just a little bit gay! The titillation factor is just too irresistible, whether it's a jerk with a cellphone or a major news network.
Imitation Web sites of both Google and YouTube have emerged in China as the country faces off against the real Google over its local operations.
YouTubecn.com offers videos from the real YouTube, which is blocked in China. The Google imitation is called Goojje and includes a plea for the U.S.-based Web giant not to leave China, after it threatened this month to do so in a dispute over Web censorship and cyberattacks.
The separate projects went up within a day of each other in mid-January, just after Google's threat to leave.
"This should be an issue with Google's intellectual property, also with China censorship," said Xiao Qiang, director of the Berkeley China Internet Project at the University of California-Berkeley. "I cannot see how these sites can survive very long without facing these two issues."
Both sites were still working Thursday. It wasn't clear what Chinese authorities would do with them, if anything.
China's National Copyright Administration has been cracking down on illegally run Web sites and this month issued a code of ethics, but no statement was posted on its Web site Thursday about the Google and YouTube imitations.
Google had little comment. "The only comment I can give you right now is just to confirm that we're not affiliated," spokeswoman Jessica Powell said in an e-mail.
China is famous for its fake products, but this is the first time such prominent sites have been copied in this way, Xiao said.
The creators of the two sites could not be reached Thursday.
"I did this as a public service," the founder of the YouTube knockoff, Li Senhe, told The Christian Science Monitor in an instant message conversation. Videos on social unrest in China can be found on the site, which is in English.
The real YouTube was blocked in China in 2008 after videos related to Tibetan unrest were posted there.
Some Chinese quickly welcomed the knockoff YouTube site. "I don't know if it will last long," wrote blogger Jia Zhengjing, who has written posts against censorship.
The other site, Goojje, is a working search engine that looks like a combination of Google and its top China competitor, Baidu.
"Exactly speaking, Goojje is not a search engine but a platform for finding friends," one of the founders, Xiao Xuan, told the Henan Business Daily on Wednesday.
Xiao said the site didn't have the level of sensitive material of the copycat YouTube site and that it probably was based on the Google China site instead of the version used in the United States.
"It's quite clean by Chinese censorship standards," he said.
He guessed that based on the amount of time and work needed to build such a site on top of Google's data, Goojje had already been ready before the Google-China showdown started -- and that the founder or founders chose the name "Goojje" to get attention.
The names are a play on words. The second syllable of "Google" sounds like "older brother," and the second syllable of "Goojje" sounds like "older sister" in Mandarin.
Copycat companies are nothing new in China. "Baidu included," Xiao said of China's most popular search engine. "The whole idea is following Google."
Xiao said if another copycat site like these emerges, it probably would be of Facebook -- which is also blocked in China.
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Associated Press researcher Zhao Liang contributed to this report.
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On the 'Net:
Naked in the snow. Pornography or art?
The United Federation of Google?
I Have An Autistic Son
