Wednesday, February 24, 2010

A Catastrophic Parenting Error

Last night, OhCountess and I were playing with the kids after dinner. Light fare, nothing out of the ordinary. One of the kids was kinda humming/singing/making cute tones when all of the sudden, the tones reminded us of a really funny website.

Before there was the Rickrolling, there was this website. My friends and I used to send it too each other in so many fun and clever ways.

Last night, out of stupidity, we showed the kids this video. "Won't that be fun?" we mistakenly thought. Now, I hope you are clicking through these links. I haven't rickrolled anyone in a while, so hopefully that one gets hit at least once...Oh, wait! The point of this post!

You see, now our kids can't stop singing the Hampster Dance. They won't stop begging me to play it. When we turn our backs, they are at YouTube playing this God forsaken song. They have even taken to begging me to download that song so they can play it on their MP3 players. So I'm warning you, never, and I mean NEVER play this song for your kids. I would have embedded the video for you but alas, it's not embeddable. Friggin' lawyers. In it's place, a reasonable alternative so you might accidentally click it and listen to it's beauty. It even shows the lovely animated GIF :)



WAIT! Before you go, have you seen this video?


Classic. While I'm not a fan of Bud Light, this series has been hilarious. Of course, if you haven't seen their best ever...here's Swear Jar.



Hope you have a good laugh today! Cheers!

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

For those of you not on Twitter: It's the Muppets

I shared this on Twitter just a little bit ago. It's too funny to keep bottled up. For your viewing pleasure, it's Beaker:

I'm doing what I can to spread quality viral videos. And while I'm at it, Bohemian Rhapsody, as performed by Gonzo and the chickens. This kind of entertainment is just so hard to come by:

Simple genius.


Have a great day!

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Bad language

Today, I've got another Words of Wisdom shared at my girl's school. It has to do with bad language. I thought I might share with you a little tid bit about OhCaptain to let you in my mind, just a little bit.

Strap on your helmets and step into the wayback machine. We are taking back to when grunge was king and I was but a 20 something in search of a path.

After my first trip the gates of a college, I was out of school but careerless. I worked several part-time and one full time job at the same time. Kinda like how I blog, ya know?

One of these jobs was working at one of the local bars. Let's not mince words here, it was your typical local meat market bar. Lots of 20 somethings in search of, you know. Beer. ;) I did some bar tending and table waiting here, those tips were nice, I also helped out at the door on occasion checking out kids fake ID's, but my primary role was the Saturday night DJ. Wow. What a job for a aimless 20 single 20 something male. They job paid cash, got tips, allowed the consumption of beer, the beer was free and I got to pick the tunes.

Early on at this job, I had heard some wise man that I can't remember who, said

Using bad words means you aren't smart enough to say something better.
Now, being the cocky ass that I was, I took that as a challenge to never go blue. For the most part, there's no way my DJ show was G rated. You are trying to entertain a bunch of drunk people, there's no unicorns and bunnies here. It's grown up time. But for me, the challenge was to make the grown up time fun, entertaining and never use bad words. For the most part, I succeeded.

This came in my email yesterday, it the Words of Wisdom as read by one of the schools students over the PA. It made me think back to that first quote, about not being smart enough to say something better. Here's what they read:


Have you noticed how much bad language there is in the movies, in videos, and in music? Back in the olden days, when your parents and teachers were young people, you never heard bad language on TV or on the radio or in the movies. It was thought to be hurtful and disrespectful. In other words, hearing a lot of cursing and bad language upset most people.

Now listed to these ancient words of wisdom:
Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a person speaks, so is that person. – Publilius Syrus
In other words, the words we speak are a mirror of who we are. The words we speak show our reflection, like a mirror.

Today, if you hear bad language, think about what the words are really saying about the person using them. And if you catch yourself using bad language, ask yourself this: Am I the words I speak?

Good words to think about. Don't get me wrong, I'm no saint. I use bad words. My kids have a policy of telling mom every time I do it, but I too am not a big fan. They have their usefulness, but it's more fun to find other ways of saying the same thing. Here's some of my favorite swearing substitutes:
  • Holy Schmidt Big Mouth! (Might be a Minnesota thing...)
  • For the love of Pete! (Thank you Shrek!)
  • Farfignugen
  • Gosh darn it. (It makes me laugh...)
Do you have any favorite substitutes? I'm always on the prowl for new one.