Month: February 2005

music

Dance Party Europa

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This video has been around for a while now – its a kid lip-syncing and rocking out in front of his web cam. I saw it back in 12/04 when Chris posted it to Blah Blah Blog. Since then, I forgot about it until someone else sent it to me last week when we were looking for the old hit “The Super Bowl Is Gay.”
So, please watch and enjoy. It helps if you make you window smaller as the flash file will shrink/expand based on the window size.

If you are wondering, the song is called “Dragsotea Din Tei” and its by a Romanian group called O-Zone. You can even buy it on iTunes if you want to thoroughly annoy your friends and neighbors. After the jump you can even read the lyrics.

Thanks Chris as the comments to your post provided the extra info

UPDATE (2/26):

Today there is an article in the NY Times about this kid. He’s actually from NJ. After the jump, you can read the entire NY Times article. Also, I found a link to the actual music video as well. There are many other versions floating around as well but I don’t think they are that good.

Translated Lyrics:

Hello [on a cellphone], greetings, it’s me, an outlaw,
I ask you, my love, to accept happiness.
Hello, hello, it’s me, Picasso,
I sent you a beep [cellphone signal], and I’m brave [or strong],
But you should know that I’m not asking for anything from you.
You want to leave but you don’t want don’t want to take me, don’t want don’t want to take me, don’t want don’t want don’t want to take me.
Your face and the love from the linden trees,
And I remember your eyes.
I call you [over the phone], to tell you what I feel right now,
Hello, my love, it’s me, your happiness.
Hello, hello, it’s me again, Picasso,
I sent you a beep [cellphone signal] and I’m brave [or strong],
But you should know that I’m not asking for anything from you.

Internet Fame Is Cruel Mistress for a Dancer of the Numa Numa

By ALAN FEUER and JASON GEORGE

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 Quebecois, 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.”

ramblings

The Real Little Mermaid

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I thought I had seen it all and then a friend sent me a link. Straight from South America, I present to you a a real live baby “mermaid”:

Her name is not Ariel, it is Milagros Cerron and she does not live “under the sea, under the sea, darling it’s better, down where it’s wetter, take it from me, up on the shore they work all day, out in the sun they slave away, while we devotin’ full time to floatin’, under the sea!” She lives in Peru.
After the jump, read the entire story about her from Reuters. It’s fascinating.

Thanks Phyl!

Peru’s Rare ‘Mermaid’ Baby to Have Risky Surgery

2/2/2005 by Jude Webber

Nine-month-old Milagros Cerron — her name means miracles in Spanish — is one of only a handful of the estimated 1-in-60,000 to 100,000 people born with sirenomelia, or mermaid syndrome, to have lived more than a few hours, experts say.

For Luis Rubio, the doctor leading the Peruvian team that will cut her legs apart in Lima on Feb. 24, the past year has been a crash course in tackling a condition he had read about in textbooks but never expected to have to treat.

Doctors believe there may only be one other surviving “mermaid” — 16-year-old American Tiffany Yorks, whose legs were separated when she was a few months old.

Experts say sirenomelia is about as rare as conjoined twins but is nearly always fatal because most sufferers lack kidneys or have other complications.

“It is very, very rare,” said Prof. Pierpaolo Mastroiacovo, director of the Rome-based International Center of Birth Defects. “The presence of renal agenesis (absence or imperfect development) makes survival very rare and improbable.”

From the waist up, Milagros smiles and babbles like any healthy infant. Below the waist, her stomach merges seamlessly into her legs, which are joined all the way to her heels.

With her tiny feet splayed in a ‘V’, the impression of a mermaid’s forked tail is complete.

The bones of both legs are visible and move separately, “as if she wanted to get free of this sack,” Rubio said.

He took on Milagros’ case when she was two days old and is treating her in a City Hall-funded mobile “solidarity hospital” run out of old buses in a poor northern district of Lima.

‘TOTAL DESPAIR’

Milagros’ father, Ricardo Cerron, 24, appealed for aid when she was born on April 27, 2004, in the Andean town of Huancayo, around 200 miles east of Lima.

“I thought it was something horrifying” he said, recalling his reaction on seeing his daughter. “I was in total despair.”

Her legs have separate cartilage, bones and blood supplies, and she has one good kidney. Her heart and lungs are fine.

Milagros, who weighs 17 lbs (7.5 kg) and is 24 inches (60 cm) long, has a rudimentary anus, urethra and genitalia all located together.

Doctors will insert three silicone bags filled with saline solution between her legs on Feb. 9 and gradually add liquid to stretch the skin to cover exposed wounds once they are cut apart, centimeter by centimeter.

“I have faith it will all go well,” said Milagros’ mother, Sara Arauco, 19.

But Mutaz Habal, the doctor who began treating Tiffany Yorks when she was one hour old and helped pioneer the separation technique, said it was hugely risky.

“My only desire is to have another survivor,” he told Reuters. He said he did not know of any besides Tiffany.

Tiffany, who lives in New Port Richey, Florida, walked for six years after her separation surgery but is currently wheelchair-bound after an accident. “I have the highest hopes that (Milagros) is going to go on for a long time,” she said.

“We want to dream that she could one day run or ride a bike,” Rubio said. “But if we could just give her the ability to be independent, that’s enough.”