Shrimp Glockenspiel
Not bad, but needs more shark cowbell.

Cute Explosion
This is kind of like if the first Simple Minds album were made in the age of Nyan Cat

Babies
Ladies, ladies. I know all about makin’ babies.

Russian Dancing Men
Does what it says. Plus, a ballpoint pen.

Owls
The disturbing truth about Simon Cowell is finally revealed.

And you’re probably already familiar with Badgers, but I bet you didn’t know it’s now available in Dubstep:

And for the truly uninitiated when it comes to this peculiar art form, we’ve included SecretAgentBob’s Charlie the Unicorn, as well as Cyriak’s Welcome to Kitty City and cows & cows & cows.

As the old saying goes: “writing about YouTube videos is like dancing about reality shows”, so for this week’s Missing Links, we’ll spare you the excessive highbrow commentary, so you can dig straight in to the YouTubidity of it all. From cradle to CataCombo, we have it all. Clips below.

~PRODUCTS WE MAY NOT NEED~

CataCombo Sound System by Pause

It’s a testament to the success of TheOnion.com and the death of meta-irony that – much like Meat Water – it’s hard to tell if this product is legit or a really elaborate attempt to create viral content. If it IS real, there may be some licensing issues. I can’t imagine the RIAA letting you perform copyrighted music for the rest of eternity without paying royalties, even if only to a dead person.

The Worlds Fastest Baby Stroller

It took a generation of annoyingly self-centered fitness freaks to come up with the Jeep Overland Limited Jogging Stroller with iBaby Sound System, and this merely bumps it up a notch. Personally I think this video is better if you turn down the sound and play Simon & Garfunkel’s Baby Driver while you watch it.

~VEHICULAR VIDIOCY~

Russian Highway Patrol

Just another day on the Russian freeways.

Department of Redneck Transportation Tire Testing

Somehow, this activity is a great metaphor for America too.

Why Drinking at Noon is a Bad Idea

Drinking and driving are a bad combination in more ways than you knew. Thank God this happened in Little Canada, Minnesota, where probably ALL bar owners have a Bobcat Front End Loader parked out back. Now we know why they do. For extra fun, say “Bobcat Front End Loader” in a Fargo accent.

~Sliders~

The People vs Winter

Did you know that in German, there’s a word for people who think it’s fun to watch other people suffering in the snow?  The word is “schneedenfreude”. Actually, I just made that up based on the word Schadenfreuede and the German word for snow, “schnee”. But it works. Engage in some below.

The Pope Connects With A Few Balls

Back when using that phrase wouldn’t have evoked such a creepy image.

POP QUIZ

Which would you think is more likely to be plagued with human parasites of some sort, the Wall Street Journal, or Brazil?

CHOOSY MOTHERS DON’T CHOOSE GIFS

The respective gender’s perception of the other gender’s idea of foreplay, presented as a Sponge Bob animation.

How men perceive women’s idea of foreplay:

How women perceive men’s idea of foreplay:

They’d probably bellyache four times as much if they had two sets of genitals (maybe NSFW) .

GOOGLE STREET VIEW HATES ANIMALS

Did a Googlemobile run over a camel in Botswana ? They tend to clean up these images quickly, so here’s a screen grab:

And, the week in….

The best Russian dashcam video you will see this week:

The best traffic chopper video you will see this week:

The best Frisbee death you will see this week (a little gory):

I’m always searching for ways to bring you interesting content without actually doing any work. For a long time, I achieved this with our Monday Demotivators, but with the incredible growth in the unemployment sector, no one’s at work on Monday these days to avoid it, so we dropped that weekly feature back in December 2009. More recently, I thought I’d sneak by with a weekly “linkdump” (like this one and this one), but quickly realized that this would be almost as much work as actually writing something, so I hope you enjoy this final collection of useless infographics, pointless lists, and YouTubidity. The infographics and videos are first, because the stupid list of 66 stupid lists would take you almost as long to peruse as the hours of suffering all the involved parties endured in the hope that someone would actually take the time to look it over. Oh. But before we move on, my pick for link of the week is the story of how Coach scrubbed their brand clean of all the filthy Snooki.

Weekly WTF

I’ll be eternally grateful if you can explain these two images to me:

Videos You Need…

Brilliantly Cute Video Of The Week
(Thank you Giri & Jordan)

Meanest Video Of The Week
Laughing at this requires a well-developed sense of schadenfreude.

Near-Miss Internet Meme
I want to strangle the creator of this video for going to all the trouble of being almost brilliant and then NOT SYNCHING THE EDITS. Shame.

Infostractions For Graphtards

Finally, a smart infographic. Couldn’t find the original source. Full image here.

This week’s winner of the useless infographics award is Deflation Education: Secrets of the Death Spiral:

While there are 24 hours worth of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, there are other things happening in that minute too. The image below is from Tosh.0, a Comedy Central show that I’ve never seen because I don’t have hard drive space to store torrents of it. The original graphic can be found here. That means there are for sure at least three copies of it somewhere.

The research staff at Dissociated Press did some further studies, and made the alarming discovery that with the current rate of growth and distribution of unnecessary and confusing infographics, they will comprise 87.3% of the data created worldwide by the end of 2010, causing the entire Internet to grind to a halt by June, 2011. Here are some infographics to help you understand why:

Although this Evolution of Storage infographic goes into mind-numbing detail, it fails to explain where it plans to store itself:

Likewise with this infographic about cloud storage that makes its point with iPads and elephants. Neither one has USB ports, so how will we transfer all our infographics to them?

First of all, the two links that I’m most surprised haven’t been shared more:

InstantOilSpill.com and WhatTheF***IsMySocialMediaStrategy.com

Last week’s internet superstar was clearly Basil Marceaux, the Tennessee gubernatorial candidate who put the “goober” back in gubernatorial. We immediately did a roundup of Basil and other unusual candidates across the country, but guess what? Basil’s back, and he’s badder than ever. And he’s really got his message together this time. Check out his thoughts on gun control. He’s firm in his belief that we can’t NOT let nutcases have guns. Cuz the government has Patriot Missiles, and we have slingshots. And rocks. And stuff.

If you find Basil’s slant on politics interesting, you should really visit the site of one of his mentors, PLENIPOTENTIARY-JUDGE: David-Wynn:Miller. If you have trouble understanding what he says, he provides some guidance on Sentence Structure.

Personally, I find this box more interesting:

Another fun thing to link to are Flash-based doodads that require mind-numbing math and programming skills to be pretty and make noise but otherwise have no intrinsic value for the human race. Like the Andre Michelle Laboratory, which has a lot of cool things like pulsate and tone matrix. And one of the most bizarrely authentic synthesized acoustic guitar sounds you’ll ever hear. I say “bizarrely authentic” because it sounds sort of like acoustic guitar for the uncanny valley.

Sorry. Are you yawning? Perhaps it’s not my fault.

Perhaps you need to see some ants on a scanner. Five years of ants on a scanner, to be exact:

That is probably the greatest thing since the long-defunct Cat-Scan.com. Remember? When that guy ran that site where people put their cats on scanners? We’ve come a long way since then. Now we have…

The Internet Animal Orchestra. With autotune, of course.

Perhaps someone has pointed you toward that amazing web site devoted to MRI scans of food. I just want to point out this was done back in 2007, with a Big Mac. And the Big Mac MRI has a soundtrack. And is on YouTube. Can someone please tell that “Inside insides” guy about streaming video? There’s something a little Geocities about 20 megabytes of GIF’s on the same page. Anyway, here’s your Big Mac:

And if you find fruit so interesting, here are 16 cool things you can do with watermelons

The fact is, what people love most is stupid YouTube videos, so here’s last week’s roundup of…..

Airplane Prank – Pilot pretends to faint

New Method of Mass Transit Discovered in the Philippines

Washing Machine Self Destructs

Flushing 32 glowsticks down the toilet.

*The headline is a reference to the long-forgotten You Bitch! You Stole My HTML, c. 1999

Al Green-Lets Stay Together

*There are plenty of Alvin & The Chipmunks Green Day clips to work with.

If you saw the video at left on its own, you might just think “Aw, what a silly sappy little fangirl with a sweet voice”, or, if you’re a weepy little crybaby like me, you might actually tear up a bit. She does have a lovely little voice, and she seems like she’s on the verge of crying as she does her introduction and then sings an a capella piece. But what makes the whole thing more touching is that her simple, unsolicited video clip inspired American choral composer Eric Whitacre to assemble his Virtual Choir (clips below), which is a project that uses 285 singers from 12 countries to perform his work. So what’s so inspiring about that? Well, it’s all done through YouTube! On his how we did it page, he describes how a friend sent him the Britlin Losee clip, which inspired the rest. Although the inclusion of Whitacre “virtually conducting” a couple hundred YouTube clips floating in darkness detracts a bit from the video production (it lends a slightly “John Tesch” vibe), the resulting music is gorgeous, and embodies the sort of thing that’s rarely achieved but always hoped for via the web: international sharing of creativity, passion, harmony, and beauty. It also proves something that I’ve always believed but am willing to ascribe to my perceptual disorders, which is that everyone has a song in them. I am almost always hearing a choir in my head, and this music sounds like part of it. Now I know what some of the people look like! More clips below.

Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir – ‘Lux Aurumque’

Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir – ‘Sleep’

The Britlin Losee clip that started it all

It would just be too meta even for my tastes to review a preview of a review of a movie, so I’ll let you decide for yourself:

Attack of the Clones Review Trailer

The one that started it all – Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review (Part 1 of 7)