Geoffrey H Wood

I mentioned my late night TV host preferences in the last post and failed to mention Jimmy Fallon. I've never watched one of his shows all the way through but some of the skits he pushes out to the internet are hilarious. Apparently he has a knack for reunion shows, as he's done a Saved by the Bell reunion, a California Dreams reunion, and now a reunion of Saturday Night Live (SNL) alumnus Chris Parnell and current SNL player Andy Samberg for their classic "Chronic-what?-cles of Narnia" rap - the first of many great SNL Digital Shorts (which are accompanied by many more not-so-great ones).

By the way, it's funny that Jimmy references this video and YouTube at the beginning of the skit. NBC goes out of their way to keep their material off of YouTube and back when the original SNL skit aired (December 2005) they weren't even putting clips up at their own site.

Apparently bands still make videos and this one is pretty cool. I wonder how many takes it took? Honda claims this was done in one (not pieced together from several takes):

My personal Twitter stream erupted, yesterday, with references to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody(1) and The Muppets. The Muppets, of course, are known primarily for their broadcast television hits The Muppet Show and Sesame Street from a time before we all had cable and from Fraggle Rock (the HBO show that we would catch whenever we would be at that rare friends house who not only had cable but also pay-movie channels). That, and they also had some sweet movies in 1980s.

However, they've been largely irrelevant to me for the past couple of decades with two notable exceptions: the irreverent and hilarious musical Avenue Q and their appearance in the story-within-the-story(2) Dracula puppet musical in the underrated Jason Segel movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

After the fifth or sixth tweet on the subject, I followed a link to Kt McBratney's blog and was blessed by this new creation from The Muppet Studio:

I'm not sure why they put this together but it's a lot of fun, especially for those of us who remember the original Queen video.

In related news, the aforementioned Jason Segel (who can do no wrong in my eyes) is writing a new Muppet movie: The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made (due out in 2012).

(1)As middle school aged kids at the time of it's release, we didn't necessarily understand Wayne's World but we sure loved that movie and this song. (2)Or more appropriately, the musical-within-the-movie

Here's a quick post with a couple videos of the team celebrating the streak-breaking win yesterday in Lincoln. While I'm sure that Husker fans are not the least bit happy, hopefully, they look at the Cyclones behavior in Memorial Stadium as respectful.

The team celebrated briefly on the field, then sand the fight song to the visitor (Iowa State) section, then moved into the locker room.

The next video was taken by a fan at the impromptu rally that took place in Ames when the team arrived back home. You see Coach Rhoads and two players who are standing in a pickup truck inside the Bergstrom ITF (football training facility). After the behavior by Gene Chizik just about a year ago in disrespect of this program, it's players, and the fans that bought into him, it's great to see a Coach that so visibly wants to be a part of it.

Update on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 4:17PM by Geoff Wood

The top video is blowing up! It's had nearly 47,000 views on YouTube and is virally spreading around the internet, popping up in news articles and blogs around the theme: "this is why America loves college football".

It's also been slated to be featured as part of a segment on an ESPN college football show later today!

I don't fly Southwest very often but I do respect how they do business (see my post on seeing founder, Herb Kelleher present in Bloomington) and apparently that includes rapping the pre-flight address.

I spent the weekend in Chicago with the old CampusAuthority boys - Nick, Travis, and Yezek. Since we're a bunch of internet-tech nerds, we filled a lot of the weekend showing each other recent YouTube favorites that I'd like to keep track of, so I'm posting them here.