Video Sunday: Unhappiness, Madness, Mortality, and Inconvenience

A man so nice I’ve blogged him twice.  This is a pretty little reposting of a video I put up earlier this week.  There may be some amongst you who missed it the first time.  Who were previously unaware of the awesome power of chicken puppets and cloning.  Just in case, here it is again. 

Had I not interviewed Dan this week, I would have opened with this video instead.  I think you’ll see why.  It’s called Can You Robot Zot?

I think the important thing to take away from this is the fact that Kadir Nelson does a fantastic robot.  Kadir Nelson biographers of the future, I expect you to mention this fact.  Thanks to Tony DiTerlizzi for the link.

Now what I love about this next video is that at the National Book Awards, Galleycat asked different folks what they thought about Twilight.  And the responses weren’t snarky in the least.  Authors like it when kids read.  Of special note are the folks asked here too.  Laini Taylor, Deborah Heiligman, and Rita Williams-Garcia all have their say.  So too do adult folks like Bonnie Jo Campbell. 

It seems a bit trite to just post whatever famous person happens to be talking about children’s literature at a given moment.  But I really rather like this interview with Jason Schwartzman, who is talking about learning to read and the books he loved as a kid.  Plus I think that maybe the person doing the interview is Judy Freeman whom I adore.

To my delight, I recently discovered that the blog @ your library has a regular two week feature where they present all the great library-related videos found.  Which means, by extension, that I can steal the best of their stuff from them and post it here.  Woo-hoo!  Less work for me!

As a result this week are two library videos I like.  The first involves a University of Kentucky library prank that works because it is entirely and completely silent.

Lemony Snicket advises you not to read his books.  I think he is losing this battle, if not the war itself.  Perhaps he’ll have better luck at Little, Brown.

Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn’t the most original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating.

I sent the music to the photographer, Paulo Pinto, who I Googled on the internet. He told his editor, who told a reporter and the story ended up as an interview in the very same newspaper.

Here I’ve posted a short video made with the photo, the music and the score (composed by the birds).

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.