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On Bouncing Babies And The Difficult (And Excessively Prolonged) Birth Of The New Alexandria

So, having nothing of interest to say, I was going to post the video of the Boogie Pimps' second mix of their cover of Jefferson Airplane's classic (that is, nearly as old as I am) song, Somebody to Love, the one that presents us with the vision of an Alice-sized (i.e. nearly two miles high), lingerie-clad Natasha Mealey writhing picturesquely about on the English countryside (literally, as it happens), all the while being peppered with gleeful skydiving infants, to wit, this:



Except that, people being what they are, which is to say, complete idiots, all the copies of which video were uploads of the same letterboxed 352 x 264 AVI file, post-processed by Youtube's patented video-dequalitiser, and were, to put it succinctly, crap, not least when you consider that, viewed in Youtube's new standard widescreen format, this provides the viewer with large friendly black bars on all four sides of the video. 

So I did what any blogger would do in this day and age (2009, in case you hadn't ventured outside recently, for which I would not blame you one iota) and Googled it in association with the magic word ("torrent"), downloaded the results, and squirtled it back up to Youtube, who, with the promptness and efficiency we have come to associate with their common corporate parent, presented me with a Terms of Use violation.

Notwithstanding the fact that Youtube, and, arguably, Google itself, are permanent floating Terms of Use violations, they are within their rights (and perhaps even their contractual obligations) to do so.  That doesn't actually help me get the file uploaded to Youtube, but in the course of searching more carefully through the one hundred and fifteen copies already present thereupon I did by chance espy one that didn't suck, which the reader shall find hitherto embedded.

For some reason the sound is clearer on the crap version, but my guess is that it's because someone twisted the treble knob thirty degrees past the stop, so it's not actually better.

The point of which is this: An obscure musical group produced an interesting take on a classic song, and a clever (if a trifle outré) promotional video to accompany it, and by the miracle of modern (that is, early 1970's) technology that is the Internet, I am able to share it with you, my audience and friends, to the enrichment and betterment of all (including, at a guess, Grace Slick, copyright terms being what they are), except that I can't, Youtube's Terms of Use being what they are, except that I can, Youtube's retrograde as opposed to anterograde enforcement of which being what it is, hence the presence of the heretofore mentioned video above.

By the way, the milk symbolises milk.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:55 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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