In 1970-ish, “The Italian Elvis” Adriano Celentano recorded a song called “Prisencolinensinainciusol”. To the Italian ear it sounds like English, but to the English ear it sounds like gibberish, which is what it is. If the Joycean slurry of near-meanings wasn’t awesome enough on its own, it’s set to a stripped down, crazy-funky droning four-on-the-floor arrangement so that the whole setup prefigures both rap and disco. (That said, I think James Brown and Bob Dylan are the real influences, and there’s nothing magical about the song’s foreknowledge, but that doesn’t make it any less thrilling). Add to that the boss dancing, and you have a timeless classic on your hands.

I tried to figure out how the internets learned about this, but I can only trace back so far. There’s this, announcing an edit of the song, and giving a bit of history. (Here’s the mp3 of Greg Wilson’s edit BTW.) There’s this, which gives us the black and white original:

Which is then picked up by Sasha Frere Jones, then Metafilter, then BoingBoing, and then years later, your unreliable narrator stumbles into the whole mess via an Easter egg in the game Glitch. Anyway, the important part is when you search Youtube for Prisencolinensinainciusol and uncover gems like these versions with different sets of subtitles, all set to a mashup of the two videos:

Precinct Calling Ace Vantuso / Prison Colon ends in I choose all / Freezing culmination I choose all.
hope something / poke something / awesome babe!

It’s amazing to see how we project meanings onto sounds. It’s worth adding that in Celentano’s words, from the intro to the TV show staging, the theme of the song is incommunicability, that “we don’t understand anything anymore”, and prisencolinensinainciusol means “universal love”. I also love this karaoke staging of the song for drunken Portlandians, which seems to sum it all up.

Let me just say that when I added the song to iTunes, I chose the genre “heaven”.

So if I see something online I want to watch, it gets saved somewhere so I can load it up on my TV. Or possibly my portable device.

That would be nice.

I use Plex, so a plugin for that would be great. But I’m flexible. The important part is, I’d mostly rather not sit at my computer to watch things – it’s best to watch things in the best place for watching things, my couch & TV. As instapaper is to reading…

This post is brought to you by the alternate reality where the internet is standing by to take my stupid ideas and make them happen.

Say, I made this promo that I like. You may like it too, if you like shooting. The movie airs tomorrow night on Space.

That fat, old clown is fuckin’ right, yo.

From the creators of the 90 minute Phantom Menace review

Development of my media center app of choice, Plex, has seemed stagnant of late, with their blog only updated with new plugins for Danish sports channels and the like. But all was not as it seemed. Deep in the dark, there were rumblings. And lo!

At the end, we decided, just like with our plug-in framework, to throw out the existing code and rewrite it from scratch… The ground up rewrite not only results in an extremely powerful library for personal content, but also sets the stage for providing many benefits beyond just the library itself.

Plex’s new Library, Alexandria, is thus teased. Hopefully it won’t be burned down by the Christians and blamed on the Romans, like the real one.

You can watch our 12 Days of SPACE-mas spot featuring Star Wars characters here. It got mentioned on starwars.com, which is dopeness! I have a ton of great pictures from the set – I’ll try and post them soon.

I’m a little late posting this as I put it up on the SPACE site last week but anyway:

We did a couple Space promos about zombies. The post on spacecast contains some behind-the-scenes pics and commentary, plus the videos.

For the viewer’s convenience the spots are embedded here:

Vimeo link

Vimeo link

A brief note: this was a very low-budget shoot by our standards, so we shot it on my GH1. I’ll post more GH1 details later, as I’ve now had a fair bit of time with the camera and it’s worth reporting back in about that.

Video, from Hardcore Nerdity.

He can speak Elvish – in Klingon.
(via the King of Canadian sci-fi Mark Askwith)

Saw this for the first time on YouTube today:

My copywriting mind went immediately to how police state/patronizing this sounds, and how it could be rewritten to sound less so. “This audio track violates copyright laws, so it has been disabled” seems slightly better, but there’s no way around it seeming like a dick move by YouTube. Because it is. A better mechanism might be to disable copyright-breaking works* only once they breach a certain viewership, say 100,000 views. This video has only 450 views – why bother messing with that?

*At that point, it seems like everyone is better served if an ad-revenue sharing deal is worked out, and the work kept intact.

Sometimes I wonder if life isn’t procedurally generated.

I was just doing some camera research and stumbled upon some interesting stuff.

I’m what you call prosumer when it comes to cameras, both video and still. I’ve set up my own darkroom and processed my own film, and used a film SLR for many years. On the motion side I’ve worked in film and TV for many years. However, in a still camera, I tend to prefer small and portable to an SLR, as I can’t take pictures if I don’t bring it with me. And on the video side, until extremely recently, it was impossible for an individual to own something close to pro quality, as pro film and HD cameras tend to cost half a million dollars. That has obviously changed, and now with the Red camera, HD camcorders, and video-enabled SLRs, it’s a different world.

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Klingon Night School

Do yourself a favour and check out my friend Gord’s masterful Klingon Night School spot. And give him a vote in the showdown – I hope you’ll agree he deserves it.

Full disclosure: I may or may not be a klingon in the above video.

Ah, Mr. Show. (via)

Without all that rap, courtesy Mr. Show.

I just rented a film off iTunes for the first time. The service only became available in Canada in June, and when it first started the selection was far from compelling, so it’s taken me until now to give it a shot. I chose the middling spy thriller Spy Game.

The iTunes movie experience has some good points. I liked that my download was watchable fairly quickly, which compares favourably to either bittorrenting or actually getting off my ass and going and renting a flick. The quality is decent (let’s say slightly below DVD quality). The price was good, too – $4. And at 48 hours, the rental period is more reasonable than Rogers on Demand’s 24. The ease of getting the flick onto the iPhone is a plus, too.

But other than that it’s all bad.

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Oh, shit. This beta NFB site is too much. 400+ films so far, more being added, free to stream.

Would still like the ability to download, but [this is good]. Hit options and choose “extreme” (no “gnarly” option?) to get maximum resolution. (via 3rdparty)

Here’s Cosmic Zoom, one of my faves:

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The Star Wars Fan Film contest is in full swing and I would like to direct your attention towards this excellent submission:

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