And Now, for Something Completely Different: A Walrus Tango

"walrus"

olsem1980, YouTube (February 10, 2008)
video, 1:01

"walrus Sarah"

A walrus. Dancing. The tango.

Not for very long, and the Lemming has seen more intricate choreography. But still -

A walrus.

Dancing.

The tango.

Super Junior's Sorry Sorry: One Song, Two Music Videos, Lots of Dancers

"Philippine Prison (Super Junior) -Sorry Sorry"

KarlFultonMorantte, YouTube (September 30, 2009)
video, 3:57

"Prisoners in the Philippines dancing to the beat of the song Sorry Sorry from Super Junior."

Okay: If group choreography was an Olympic sport, these guys might not get the gold medal.

On the other hand, they're good! In my opinion, anyway. It doesn't hurt that I like the music and the style of dance.

Here's a more 'original' music video with that song:

"안무Full영상_SuperJunior-SORRYSORRY_ Only댄스Ver"

sment, YouTube (June 08, 2009)
video, 3:52

"안무Full영상_SuperJunior-SORRYSORR Y_ Only댄스Ver"

Another well-done music video. More conventional execution, of course. I wonder in kids (for me, that's anyone under about 35) realize how long this general sort of thing has been done? Styles have changed a bit over the decades, of course.

Penguin Robot? Roller Skates? You Decide

"Penguin Robot Dances on Roller Skates"

humanoido, YouTube (August 25, 2007)
video, 4:57

"Tiny Penguin robot dances on roller skates! The skates are made from little tablet boxes with wheels made from furniture skid protectors."

This tiny dancing robot is not serious competition for Honda's Asimo.

It also doesn't look all that much like a penguin.

On the other hand, it's a whole lot more than that dancing cactus you may have brought back from your last vacation.

There's an impressive list of credits at the end of the video: right after a rapid succession of stills from old-time skating ads and articles.

Viewed strictly as entertainment, at 4:57 this video is too long.

On the other hand, that's a cute little robot. Emphasis on little. And watch its moves: there's some fairly serious programming here. Or, maybe dumb luck. My guess is that it's programming skills.

Bottom line? This is an impressive home movie - made by quite an impressive number of people - about a seriously undersized dancing robot that - with a bit of work and a penguin suit - could be even cuter than it is.

Related posts:

• "Visit Japan's 'Robot Mecha' - Redundant Title, Fun Article"
  (December 16, 2009)
• "Asimo Robots: We'd Better Get Used to This"
  (November 12, 2009)
• "The Robots are Coming! The Robots are Coming!"
  (November 4, 2009)
• "Sudoku-Solving Robot: with Video"
  (September 8, 2009)
• "Asimov's 3 Laws, Real Robots, and Common Sense"
  (August 20, 2009)
• "Japanese Dwarf Flying Squirrels: And Dancing Robots"
  (August 18, 2009)

Chevy Volt Dancers: Come On, It Wasn't That Bad!

"Presenting the Chevy Volt Dancers"
FOXNews (December 15, 2009)

" How quickly dreams can become nightmares.

"Just a few days after the engineering team behind the Chevrolet Volt triumphantly rolled out the production version of its much-anticipated car for journalists to test, the folks in marketing followed it up with folk music, break dancing, and what looks like a few rejects from a 1986 high school production of the 'Pirates of Penzance'.

"Click here for VIDEO of the Chevy Volt Dancers

"Word that General Motors had commissioned a theme song for the car called 'Chevy Volt and Me' first turned up last week on gm-volt.com, an independent blog dedicated to the development of the car...."

"...Although it looks more like a 'Saturday Night Live' skit, the dance routine that was performed on the Volt display at the Los Angeles Auto Show is all too real. ... Often out of sync. Reportedly, the cringe-inducing interpretation of an electric-powered future took place every hour during the ten days of the show...."

That review got me interested. It's not often that we get to see genuinely awful marketing.

I checked out the video. It starts with these words on the screen: "THE FUTURE IS ELECTRIFYING".

"The Chevy Volt Dance"

GMVolt, YouTube (December 13, 2009)
video, 2:22

"GM's official choreographed dance routine performed at he LA Auto Show and set to the official song 'Chevy Volt and Me'"

A Nit-Picking Point or Two, About the Review

The reviewer described the non-break-dancing dancers as "a few rejects from a 1986 high school production of the 'Pirates of Penzance'." Their costumes? Yeah. I can see that. The dancers? Only if the reviewer had high school seniors in mind. Those are full-grown women. And, good dancers. Same goes for the man who did the break dancing.

The break dancer "also plays air guitar", according to the reviewer. The review links to a YouTube video posted by GMVolt: There's a real guitar in the man's hands. Granted, he's obviously not playing it - the guitar music goes on after he sets it down.

The "milquetoast tune"? Well, maybe. It's catchy, though: my brain had it on 'replay' after I stopped watching the video. The lyrics sounded like rough-draft material to me, but they may have been chosen for being memorable: not polished.

Pirates? Where Have We Seen That Before?

The pirate theme may have been chosen in the spirit of 'me too!' Remember the long-running "pirate" commercials for FreeCreditReport.com?

"Free Credit Report Commercial - Singing Pirates"

bigcouchpotato, YouTube (October 24, 2007)
video, 0:29

"Because of Identity theft, a man is forced to work in fish food restaurant and...."

Back to That Volt Dance

I think the reviewer missed a vital point: The dancers were doing their job just fine. Unless they also did the choreography, they shouldn't be blamed for the - familiar? - routines they performed.

And, come on: This is a commercial, not some long-hair dance recital. The idea is to get people's attention, and then direct it toward the product.

Come to think of it, those dance routines may not have been the best choice, after all. I was in marketing for a decade or so, and learned why you don't see all that many bikini babes in ads high-end advertising these days.

Marketing research uncovered an obvious-in-20-20-hindsight point: the 18-24 male demographic being targeted noticed the ads, all right. More specifically, they noticed that lusciously nubile young woman in the bikini. Product? Nope, they didn't remember that - sometimes they didn't remember there was a product near the woman. The woman: Her, they remembered.

The Lyrics? Simon and Garfunkel They're Not

On the other hand, I remember that the Volt is (allegedly) "cleaner" and "cheaper" - and something about its not making as much pollution for us to breathe. Not that vehicular pollution is a big problem, here in Sauk Centre. Manure pits being turned - - - but that's another topic.

The lyrics won't win any poetry contests, but they're a pretty good recitation of what appear to be the Chevy Volt's selling points.

Bottom line? Let's remember that "The Chevy Volt Dance" is part of a commercial. The idea is to get people remembering the Chevy Volt, at least until next November, when it's supposed to be available. I think it achieves that goal.

And, I like it. But then, I like Crazy Frog videos, "I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas," and the old Hamms Bear commercials. ("Yogi Yorgesson's "I Yust Go Nuts At Christmas" and the Hamms Bear" (December 15, 2009), "Crazy Frog, Trapped Santa, Daft Factory: the Video" (December 14, 2009))

More-or-less-related posts:

• "Power Stations in Space: No Panacea; But No Kidding, Either"
  (December 2, 2009)
• "This Electric Motorcycle is No Wimpmobile"
  (September 15, 2009)
• "Solar Trees Top (Some) California Parking Lots"
  (August 29, 2009)
• "Techie Trellises: Really Green Buildings"
  (August 29, 2009)
• "NASA Builds Cool Green Building: Uber-Efficient and All That"
  (August 5, 2009)
• "Electric Cars Recharging While Driving? Could Happen"
  (May 19, 2009)
• "Electric Cars: Those Things Actually Work!"
  (June 22, 2008)

Review of the Chevy Volt:

• "Quick Spin: 2011 Chevrolet Volt"
  FOXNews (December 10, 2009)
  • "Sometimes, dreams actually come true. Even for one of the automotive world’s most beleaguered companies...."

The Incredible Dancing Parrot, Frostie

"Frostie Dancing To Shake Your Tail Feather! Bird Loves Ray Charles!"

"Frostie The Funniest Dancing Bird On This Planet jives to the Blues Brothers & Ray Charles hit from their Difinitive [!] Collection Album! Frostie is a 20-year-old Bare-Eyed Cockatoo, otherwise...."



OnePickieChickie, YouTube (February 01, 2009)
video 2:42

This 'dancing bird' video is actually rather good. I think the "Funniest Dancing Bird On This Planet" has to be taken as a subjective statement.

On the other hand, this bird is good. I don't know how Frostie learned to dance: but I've seen worse choreography.

Enjoy.

And Now, for Something Completely Different: a South Korean Girl Group Music Video

This is, by my standards, fun, cheerful, with pretty good music and choreography. As someone said, 'it brings a smile.' Or something like that.

"GIRL'S GENERATION-Into The New World(HQ)WITH MP3/MV DL"

jazzin09, YouTube (April 27, 2008)
video 4:51

I'd never heard of Girls' Generation before - possibly because my command of Korean is extremely sketchy at best - and consists of terms used in Soo Bahk Do. One of my kids was watching this video, I started asking questions, and found this (higher-quality) copy on YouTube.

I gather that Girls' Generation has fans and unfans: the latter regarding the group as a girl-group copy of some specific boy-group. That may be true, but I don't see the problem.

My guess is that it's not all that hard to tell the difference between the two groups: After a certain age, it's hard to not notice the difference between boys and girls.

And, although I'm a bit more interesting in people who develop styles, I'm also interested in people who take what others have developed and put their own spin on it.

For newbies like me, who are clueless about Girls Generation, or SNSD, or So Nyeo Shi Dae, or 少女时代 - there's nine of them: Taeyeon~태연; Tiffany 티파니; Sooyoung 수영; Yuri~유리; Hyoyeon 효연; Seohyun~서현; Jessica 제시카; Sunny 써니; and YoonA 윤아.

Girls' Generation website: girlsgeneration.smtown.com

About the apostrophe (') - They call themselves Girls' Generation on their website, the YouTube account with the video spelled it "GIRL'S" in the title. As is my custom, I quoted the title exactly as written, using what appears to be the correct usage elsewhere.

Bee Communication and Non-Human Intelligence; And a Dying Planet

A quick look at two not-quite-related articles.

"Bee Celestial Navigation and Non-Human Intelligence"
Space.com (August 27, 2009)

"Millions of years ago a group of wasps 'decided to' become vegetarians and so today we have the bee. Some of their cousins 'decided to' quit flying and so became the ants, but that is another story. Although only about 20% of bees are social, honey bees are very social indeed. It has been stated by several biologists that, if it were not for the honey bee pollinating plants, humans would only last 3 or 4 years as our food supply would disappear.

"The female honey bees are the workers of the hive. First, they learn to babysit, then they learn the construction trade...."

"...Bees are the only other species, to date, that have been shown to communicate with symbolic language—that is, they can 'talk' about details of something that is not present. (We note that psychologists dispute the use of the terms 'symbolic' being applied to any non-human communication systems, but bee scientists regularly apply this term to describe bee language.)..."

The bee dances have been known for decades, and we're still learning more about them. I was quite interested in this article, as a pretty good look at one part of the study of bees.

And, bees and how they communicate opens fascinating - if vague - possibilities about how non-human intelligence might work.

"Newfound Planet Might Be Near Death"
Space.com (August 26, 2009)

"A newly discovered planet that whips around its star in less than a day may have been found mere cosmic moments before its demise.

"The planet, WASP-18b, is one of the 'hot Jupiter' class of planets that are huge in size (10 times the mass of Jupiter in this case), but orbit very close to their stars. Their very existence was surprising to astronomers when the first of them were found a few years back. Now they've become common discoveries.

But this scorched, gaseous world is only one of two known exoplanets that orbits its star in less than one Earth day (0.94 days to be exact). Coupled with its hefty mass, this leads to strong gravitational tugs between the planet and its star, WASP-18. (WASP stands for the Wide Angle Search for Planets, run by several universities in Britain.)..."

WASP-18b is likely to fall into its sun quite soon - assuming that our current mathematical models for gravitation, hydrodynamics, and other factors are spot-on. Or, maybe something weird is holding the planet up.

Either way, there's a lot to be learned from observing it.

Somewhat-related posts:

• "Death Rays From Space - No, Really"
  (August 28, 2009)
• "Life on Other Worlds: Evolution, Orbits, and the Galactic Environment"
  (August 13, 2009)
• "Really Old Dust Grains, a Galactic Collision, and a Lively Interest in God's Creation"
  A Catholic Citizen in America (August 10, 2009)
• "Dinosaurs, Mutant Chickens, Evolution, and Faith in God"
  A Catholic Citizen in America (June 29, 2009)
• "A Serious Search for Other Worlds, Life, and - Maybe - Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence"
  (May 29, 2009)
• "Faith and Reason, Religion and Science"
  A Catholic Citizen in America (March 20, 2009)
• "Catholic Church, Creationism, Evolution, Facts and Faith"
  A Catholic Citizen in America (March 5, 2009)

---

Related posts, at

• "A Serious Search for Other Worlds, Life, and - Maybe - Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence"

This Bird's Got the Beat: Snowball and the Backstreet Boys

"Birds show off their dance moves"
BBC Science (April 30, 2009)

"Snowball dances in time to his favourite Backstreet Boys song played at three different tempos"

"Some birds have a remarkable talent for dancing, two studies published in Current Biology suggest.

"Footage revealed that some parrots have a near-perfect sense of rhythm; swaying their bodies, bobbing their heads and tapping their feet in time to a beat...."

video 1:09 (footage shown on BBC, courtesy Current Biology: Patel, Iverson, Bergman, and Schulz)

When I first viewed the video, I assumed I was looking at a well-done bit of camera trickery - running a loop forward, backward, and forward again to simulate repetitive actions. Then, I noticed a plant in the background, either being jiggled - or, more likely, getting blown on by the room's ventilation system. The plant didn't loop with the bird.

"...Dr Aniruddh Patel, from The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, said: 'We found out that the previous owner usually listened to easy listening music, but he did have this one album, and he noticed Snowball bobbing his head to the Backstreet Boys.'..."

The article is a good read - and, yes: the bird's got the beat.

Mostly, though: this BBC article comes with a fun, cute, video. Enjoy.

---

Hats off to SiuilARuin, on BlogCatalog, for starting a discussion thread about this video:

• "Dancing Birds"
  BlogCatalog discussion thread (started May 1, 2009)

Evolution of Dance: Six Minutes, Lots of Dance

"Evolution of Dance"
YouTube (April 6, 2006)
video (6:00)

"The funniest 6 minutes you will ever see! Remember how many of these you have done! Judson Laipply is dancing -...."

I'm not sure about that "...you will ever see!...." I've seen some pretty funny things, and hope to live for a couple more decades, at least.

Hats off Judson Laipply, though, for the smorgasbord of dance: from steps made famous by Elvis the Pelvis through the Village People's contributions to global culture, to quite a few moves I don't recognize.

Weird Video of Riverdancing Chimps

"River dance as you've never seen it"

video (0:32)

Actually, I have seen it: as part of a television commercial.

The Inspiration Room Daily identifies the video as part of an Arby's commercial, and describes some of what went into making the "chimps" dance ("Arbys Sandwich or Dancing Chimps?" Inspiration Room Daily (May 19, 2007)).

Update (September 7, 2008)
Thanks to Duncan, of Duncan's TV Ad Land, for giving me an updated URL for "Arby's Sandwich or Dancing Chimps."

Ten Kittens, a Couch, and Dance Moves

"Technokittens"

A short video of ten kittens, on a couch, doing some contemporary dance.

I liked it, but then I like cats.

"Dancing With the Stars" 2008 Season Finale

"Kristi Yamaguchi takes lead going into 'Dancing with the Stars' finale"
Reality TV World (May 20, 2008)

"Olympic gold medalist figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi and her professional partner Mark Ballas cemented their standing as the couple to beat during last night's final Dancing with the Stars sixth-season performance episode on ABC.

"Kristi and Mark -- who have been atop the judges leaderboard throughout most of the competition and never found themselves in the bottom two -- received a perfect combined score of 60 out of 60 possible points for their two Monday night routines. Injured telenovela actor Cristian de la Fuente and his partner Cheryl Burke received a combined score of 52, and NFL star Jason Taylor and his partner Edyta Sliwinska received a 51. ..."

"Yamaguchi bests the boys in 'Dancing' finale"
CNN (May 20, 2008)

"LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Kristi Yamaguchi couldn't have done any better at the "Dancing With the Stars" finals Monday. The figure-skating champ earned a perfect score of 60 for her two dances Monday, putting her far ahead of fellow finalists Cristian de la Fuente, who scored 52, and Jason Taylor, who finished with 51.

"Each performed a freestyle routine, and the three finalists shared the floor for a group dance dubbed "the cha-cha face-off." Yamaguchi came out on top both times."

My wife and one of our daughters have been following this season's "Dancing with the Stars:" and then missed last night's airing. Now, at least they'll be able to read what happened.

---

Update May 21, 2008

Well, duh! I should have linked to ABC's "Dancing with the Stars" own page. Where they say you can see the final episode online.