July 2008

There were 13 posts published in July 2008 (this is page 2 of 2).

Fred: Another Sign That I Am Old

For the past few days, I’ve been telling everybody about Fred. Instead of repeating myself, I thought I’d make a blog entry out of it.

Last week, Andy pointed to a series of YouTube videos about a character named Fred, writing:

LA Times on YouTube’s Fred — insanely popular with tweens, he has 242k subscribers and a sponsorship deal; here’s an interview.

Because I follow all of Andy’s links, I followed these. The LA Times article is fascinating because it describes how Fred may portend the arrival of truly egalitarian media. (This is a theme I explored in an interview yesterday with Scott Burns, a long-time newspaper columnist. We discussed how newspapers are dying and the web is allowing a sort of democratization of information providers. Though I interviewed Burns for my personal finance blog, there are vast portions of the conversation that aren’t about money. I may post them here.)

But the amazing thing about Fred isn’t that a random fourteen-year-old from Nebraska (Lucas Cruikshank) can rocket to internet celebrity with no traditional media coverage. No, the amazing thing about Fred is that he clearly illustrates some sort of generational divide. Here’s a recent episode:

Do you think that’s funny? Neither do I. But apparently kids love him. Seriously. They think he’s hilarious.

We were talking with Mike and Rhonda last night, and the women were expressing their bafflement over Italian Spider-Man. “It’s funny,” I said. Mike agreed. But Kris and Rhonda were unconvinced. This led to a discussion of humor, and how different people perceive it.

“I can usually see why something might be considered funny, even if I don’t think it is myself,” I said. “But this Fred thing. I don’t get it. There’s nothing funny about it at all.” Because my companions had never seen Fred, they didn’t get my meaning.

From the LA Times article:

If you’re past a certain age, Fred’s appeal is essentially inscrutable. His antics are Kryptonite for grown-ups, repelling any but the most vigorous attempts to watch an entire episode and keeping us in the dark about why kids seem to love him so much.

“They just think he’s the funniest thing ever,” said Valerie Moizel of the L.A.-based WOO ad agency, which found out about Fred after it conducted kid-centered focus groups for its ZipIt instant messaging product — which later showed up in Fred’s videos. “We watched them watch him — they fall on the floor hysterically laughing. They’re just mesmerized.”

And more than just the zaniness, it’s possible that kids are connecting to Fred on other levels too. He has parental, behavior and girl problems, so there’s a little something for everyone.

“The biggest draw is the subject matter,” Moizel added. “He really knows how to touch on things that are current and that teenagers deal with.”

What do I know? I’m just a middle-aged man. I wonder if my father felt the same way about Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

Curiously, I actually like some of the videos from JKL Productions, which features Lucas Cruikshank (a.k.a. Fred) and his twin cousins, John and Katie. This video of the trio dancing and lip-syncing to Hannah Montana is exactly the sort of thing I used to do with my friend Heather when I was in high school. It’s fun.

But Fred? I just don’t get Fred…

The Thunder Rolls

Ah, the Fourth of July. Such a pleasant time in our neighborhood: lots of loud explosions. The early evening is filled with pops and cracks. It sounds like small arms fire, like we’re in some sort of war zone. Of course this is especially pronounced on the Independence Day itself (when the snap, crackle, pop lasts well into the early morning), but it’s also noisy in the days leading up to the event.

Last night was especially bad. It wasn’t just the sound of “gunfire” at 10pm. No, last night we had the boom of “cannons” at three in the morning.

Okay, to be fair, that cacophony wasn’t actually from neighbors with firecrackers. It was from thunder.

The Portland area doesn’t have frequent thunderstorms, but we do get them from time-to-time. All my life, I’ve liked the sound of thunder rolling in the distance. It never occurred to me to think about what it must sound like to have the thunder overhead. Last night, I got to experience it first-hand.

Between 2:30 and 3:30, the thunder and lighting raged all around Rosings Park. It was as if we were in the midst of the Battle of Trafalgar. The lighting sometimes seemed to be a strobe light. And the thunder rolled thick and heavy.

“Crap,” I said when the rain began to fall. “I left the windows down in my car.”

The lightning flashed.

“Well, you’re not going to roll them up now,” Kris said. “But why don’t you go see if you can let Nemo in.” Nemo had been the only cat who refused to come in before bed.

I went downstairs to call for him. All of the other cats were tense. Every time the thunder cracked, Toto froze in fear. Max, his ears back, followed me around, begging to be let outside. But Nemo was nowhere to be found. He wouldn’t come when I called.

If I had been thinking, I would have grabbed my digital camera to record the scene. I don’t know if I’ll ever experience another thunderstorm like that again. But it was 3am and I wasn’t thinking straight.

Now the firecrackers over the next couple nights won’t seem like that a very big deal…