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WIRED 'Star Wars Kid' Gets Bucks From Blogs By Leander Kahney May 9, 2003 http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2003/05/58881 UVM: 5,050,000 
A couple of webloggers are raising money for an unfortunate teenager humiliated worldwide after a private video of his energetic lightsaber moves was leaked to the Net. Webloggers Andy Baio and Jish Mukerji launched a fundraiser Friday for the young man they call the "Star Wars Kid," whose home video has been downloaded millions of times and watched by people all over the world. The video shows a lone, overweight teenager fighting a mock battle with a broomstick lightsaber. In the two-minute video, the teenager twirls the broomstick ever more energetically while generating his own lightsaber sound effects. The video, which is obviously not for public consumption, is amusing and excruciating. Video Excerpt from Star Wars Kid Remix by Bryan Dube. Baio and Mukerji, who linked to their video from their weblogs, identify the Star Wars Kid as a 15-year-old French Canadian named Ghyslain. Because Ghyslain is a minor, the pair is protecting his identity. Ghyslain couldn't be reached for comment. By Friday afternoon, the webloggers' fund had received more than 100 individual donations totaling nearly $1,000. The pair also has received donations of software and a T-shirt. They plan to buy Ghyslain an Apple iPod and some accessories. "He's given us a lot of amusement, so we thought we should do something for him," explained Mukerji. "There's been a lot of sympathy donations. A lot of people see a little bit of themselves in him. We've all done the same thing. Maybe it was the Saturday Night Fever thing. We've all done it." According to Baio's website, the video was secretly recorded by Ghyslain at his school's A/V lab, only to be discovered by some kids at school who digitized it and uploaded it to the Kazaa file-sharing network. "It only took two weeks for the video to spread around the world," Baio wrote. In late April, an edited version of the video, which added music, video and sound effects, was created by Raven Software's Bryan Dube, according to Baio. "A week later, both videos were linked on every major gaming- and technology-related website, forum, and chat room online," Baio said. It's impossible to say how many times the videos were downloaded from Kazaa and countless websites, but Baio claims 1.1 million downloads from his site alone, a total of 2.3 terabytes of data. "Most people who had it up on their sites had to take it down rather quickly because their hosts choked," said Mukerji. Mukerji, a biologist who lives in San Francisco, said Ghyslain is well aware that his video was distributed around the world. Mukerji telephoned Ghyslain last week and posted a transcript of the conversation on his site. "He's a young guy," said Mukerji. "He has self-confidence issues. Obviously, the video didn't help, but hopefully the donations will." Mukerji said the fundraiser was prompted partly by guilt at laughing at Ghyslain, partly by geek sympathy. The other weblogger, Baio, said, "I thought he deserved better. This video was uploaded to humiliate an awkward and overweight computer geek. But the truth is, he's not too different than many of us (were) in 10th grade. I was furious at the hypocritical comments being posted to my site ... all these geeks and dorks were trashing one of their own.... I'm hoping he records a sequel." In a comment on Baio's site, someone identifying himself as Kevin wrote, "I just hope that Ghyslain knows that a lot of us laughed at the video because we were just like him in high school, and we turned out okay and now can laugh at ourselves." "He shouldn't feel badly about the video," Kevin continues. "We've all done goofy stuff like that. I'm glad that I was 15 in the pre-Web era, that's for sure -- some stupid thing I'd done would have made it online for sure." As Kevin notes, thousands of people who have done stupid things have been humiliated by material posted online by friends, relatives, co-workers and, especially, ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends. There are myriad examples of photographs on the Net of naked ex-lovers, drunken grooms and passed-out sorority girls. Parodies of MasterCard's "priceless" ads -- which list all the things that can be bought with a credit card but emphasize life's experiences as "priceless" -- have proven to be one of the most popular formats. Most "priceless" parodies feature a picture of some unfortunate person with mock ad copy. For example, a picture of an unconscious, half-naked drunk, reads: "A night out drinking: $50; A porno magazine: $4.95; A roll of tissue paper: $0.50; A picture of yourself on the Internet passed out drunk with your pants down to your knees after having wanked off: Priceless." Many collections of MasterCard parodies, such as those at Rec.Humor.Funny, were forced offline under threat of legal action from the company's lawyers. However, a Google search for MasterCard Parody yields dozens of examples. "Painfully embarrassing behavior is a characteristic component of an entire class of viral media," said Joshua Schachter, editor of the popular Memepool community weblog. "Consider Mahir, psycho ex-girlfriend, MasterCard parody ads, so on and so forth. That kind of thing is pretty much the meat and potatoes of the Everything/Nothing crowd, and there are lots and lots of those." Somewhat akin to weblogs, Everything/Nothing websites are run by individuals and can be about everything or nothing, hence the name. Stileproject, Ernie's House of WhoopAss and ilovebacon.com, are examples. Drew Curtis, who runs the wildly popular Fark website, which has linked to dozens of examples, said embarrassing pictures are constantly posted to the site's forums and are a never-ending source of amusement. Curtis said a fairly recent video titled Terrible Mr. G is the latest "meme" rapidly gaining in popularity. Likely shot without the knowledge of the subject, the video documents the frustration of playing a combat computer game like Counter-Strike. The soundtrack -- a series of groans, foul language and invective -- also has been dubbed to techno. "There's this guy swearing like a sailor," Curtis said. "It's pretty darn funny." 
DAILY TELEGRAPH Chocolate Rain goes huge By Garth Montgomery August 1, 2007 http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/chocolate-rain-goes-huge/story-fna7dq6e-1111114084723 UVM: 4,750,000 The song Chocolate Rain is a piano driven piece with a cheesy drum loop playing beneath Zonday’s curious vocals that sound like a man much older than the young artist. The YouTube hit has captured the world’s imagination with its home made quality clip that includes Zonday singing and captions to explain that he moves his head away from the mic to breath in. Over four minutes and 52 seconds, the piano riff and drum loop don’t change and retain a hypnotic quality which has put the song on the verge of an Internet Zietgeist shared by luminaries such as Star Wars kid and Mahir. The song has reached such prominence online that it has now created a cottage industry of backlash, tribute and spin offs. There were 4280 YouTube videos related to Chocolate Rain at the time of publishing. See here for more on the best of Chocolate Rain remixes. But Tay Zonday claims to be no joke. His YouTube profile bills him as a “singer-songwriter-vocalist” capable of doing any range of musical styles. “I might do anything. No style is off limits.” The 25 year-old adds that his deep voice is real and not faked, and he has made a number of his songs available in MP3 format and video. Zonday’s recent popularity been so overwhelming that he warns he can “only respond to a small fraction” of the messages he now gets. Here’s the original. Go here for the equally entertaining spin offs. 
THE HUFFINGTON POST Hilarious Hiker Guy FREAKS OUT Over Full Double Rainbow (VIDEO) By Katla McGlynn July 4, 2010 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/04/hilarious-hiker-guy-freak_n_634861.html UVM: 39,130,000 This guy really likes rainbows. I mean REALLY likes them. Then again, if I was some hiker dude (probably on mushrooms) and I saw a FULL DOUBLE rainbow, I'd probably enter crazypants mode as well. Watch as YouTube user Hungrybear9562 (amazing) goes through an intense emotional cycle, starting with "Woahs" and "Oh my Gods" and leading to crying, laughing, and wistfully asking the sky, "WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?" It's so hilariously awkward that by the end of the 3 minutes you'll be laughing and crying along with him. 
THE NEW YORK TIMES Internet Fame Is Cruel Mistress for a Dancer of the Numa Numa By ALAN FEUER and JASON GEORGE February 26, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/26/nyregion/26video.html UVM: 25,110,000 
There was a time when embarrassing talents were a purely private matter. If you could sing "The Star Spangled Banner" in the voice of Daffy Duck, no one but your friends and family would ever have to know. But with the Internet, humiliation - like everything else - has now gone public. Upload a video of yourself playing flute with your nose or dancing in your underwear, and people from Toledo to Turkmenistan can watch. Here, then, is the cautionary tale of Gary Brolsma, 19, amateur videographer and guy from New Jersey, who made the grave mistake of placing on the Internet a brief clip of himself dancing along to a Romanian pop song. Even in the bathroom mirror, Mr. Brolsma's performance could only be described as earnest but painful. His story suggests that the quaint days when cultural trinkets, like celebrity sex tapes, were passed around like novels in Soviet Russia are over. It says a little something of the lightning speed at which fame is made these days. To begin at the beginning: Mr. Brolsma, a pudgy guy from Saddle Brook, made a video of himself this fall performing a lip-synced version of "Dragostea Din Tei," a Romanian pop tune, which roughly translates to "Love From the Linden Trees." He not only mouthed the words, he bounced along in what he called the "Numa Numa Dance" - an arm-flailing, eyebrow-cocked performance executed without ever once leaving the chair. In December, the Web site newgrounds.com, a clearinghouse for online videos and animation, placed a link to Mr. Brolsma on its home page and, soon, there was a river of attention. "Good Morning America" came calling and he appeared. CNN and VH1 broadcast the clip. Parodists tried their own Numa Numa dances online. By yesterday, the Brolsma rendition of "Love From the Linden Trees" had attracted nearly two million hits on the original Web site alone. The video can be seen here. It was just as Diane Sawyer said on her television program: "Who knows where this will lead?" Nowhere, apparently. For, in Mr. Brolsma's case, the river became a flood. He has now sought refuge from his fame in his family's small house on a gritty street in Saddle Brook. He has stopped taking phone calls from the news media, including The New York Times. He canceled an appearance on NBC's "Today." According to his relatives, he mopes around the house. What's worse is that no one seems to understand. "I said, 'Gary this is your one chance to be famous - embrace it,' " said Corey Dzielinski, who has known Mr. Brolsma since the fifth grade. Gary Brolsma is not the first guy to rocket out of anonymity on a starship of embarrassment. There was William Hung, the Hong Kong-born "American Idol" reject, who sang and danced so poorly he became a household name. There was Ghyslain Raza, the teenage Québécois, who taped himself in a mock light-saber duel and is now known as the Star Wars Kid. In July 2003, Mr. Raza's parents went so far as to sue four of his classmates, claiming they had placed the clip of him online without permission. "Ghyslain had to endure and still endures today, harassment and derision," according to the lawsuit, first reported in The Globe and Mail of Toronto. Mr. Brolsma has no plans to sue, his family said - mainly because he would have to sue himself. In fact, they wish he would bask a little in his celebrity. "I don't know what's wrong with him," his grandfather, Kalman Telkes, a Hungarian immigrant, said the other day while taking out the trash. The question remains why two million people would want to watch a doughy guy in glasses wave his arms around online to a Romanian pop song. "It definitely has to be something different," said Tom Fulp, president and Webmaster of newgrounds.com. "It's really time and place." "The Numa Numa dance," he said, sounding impressed. "You see it and you kind of impulsively have to send it to your friends." There is no way to pinpoint the fancy of the Internet, but in an effort to gauge Mr. Brolsma's allure, the Numa Numa dance was shown to a classroom of eighth graders at Saddle Brook Middle School - the same middle school that he attended, in fact. The students' reactions ranged from envious to unimpressed. "That's stupid," one of them said. "What else does he do?" a second asked. A third was a bit more generous: "I should make a video and become famous." The teacher, Susan Sommer, remembered Mr. Brolsma. He was a quiet kid, she said, with a good sense of humor and a flair for technology. "Whenever there were computer problems, Gary and Corey would fix them for the school," she said. His friends say Mr. Brolsma has always had a creative side. He used to make satirical Prozac commercials on cassette tapes, for instance. He used to publish a newspaper with print so small you couldn't read it with the naked eye. "He was always very out there - he's always been ambitious," said Frank Gallo, a former classmate. "And he's a big guy, but he's never been ashamed." Another friend, Randal Reiman, said: "I've heard a lot of people say it's not that impressive - it doesn't have talent. But I say, Who cares?" These days, Mr. Brolsma shuttles between the house and his job at Staples, his family said. He is distraught, embarrassed. His grandmother, Margaret Telkes, quoted him as saying, just the other day, "I want this to end." And yet the work lives on. Mr. Fulp, the Webmaster, continues to receive online homages to the Numa Numa dance. The most recent showed what seemed to be a class of computer students singing in Romanian and, in unison, waving their hands. Mr. Reiman figures the larger world has finally caught on to Gary Brolsma. "He's been entertaining us for years," he said, "so it's kind of like the rest of the world is realizing that Gary can make you smile." Gangnam Style 
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