Internet Vines - 6 Seconds of Fame

I recently discovered something called Internet Vines. These are short amateur videos, usually about 6 seconds in length, that depict everyday occurrences in a humorous way. You can find literally thousands of them on YouTube, some quite good, others headscratchingly bad. I have decided to share a few of my favourites with you:

Taking Selfies

When You Gotta Go

Game Physics in Real Life

Miley Cyrus - Wrecking Ball

Failed Smack Cam

When You Oversleep

All of the Vines above are courtesy of Curtis Lepore. You can find his YouTube channel here.

Blaze of Glory

Who doesn't like a good braai? Standing around the fire, listening to big hunks of meat sizzling on the grill filling the air with a delicious aroma. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it. Now, in our company we have two offices; one in Centurion and one in Gallo Manor. Because most of our technical staff live in Centurion, there is no need for a caretaker at our Centurion offices. Our Gallo Manor offices contain our admin and finance staff and, because no-one resides close to the office, we have employed a caretaker who lives there and makes sure all stays well. I realise at this point that you must be wondering what a braai and our office arrangements have to do with one another, but I shall explain shortly. See, our caretaker developed a hankering for a good piece of meat roasted over a fire. Okay, so far so good. He then lit said fire before realising "Dur....I don't have meat.....hur hur hur" and then leaving to go get some. This is his official story. Whether he really wanted to have a braai or whether he was preparing to make a sacrifice to the gods of stupidity only he knows.

There was a bit of a breeze last night, and in the time it took him to go to the shops to buy some intelligence, the wind blew some sparks from his braai onto a log pile. And not a small log pile. A towering stack that resembles a hacked down forest. Seeing as our spring season has so far been reaching volcano-like temperatures, the ground is dryer than a piece of sandpaper stranded atop a rock in the middle of the desert. Thus a small spark from the braai set the log pile blazing. When our hapless caretaker returned, he found the backyard looking like this....

After presumable wetting himself and maybe crying just a little, he grabbed a garden hose and bravely attempted to put out the inferno. This had about as much effect on the fire as peeing on it. Thankfully a passing police car noticed the towering flames and alerted the fire brigade, who spent quite a significant amount of time trying to put out the blaze. After a few hours of frantic activity the backyard looked like a scene from the apocalypse but at least the fire was out. Thankfully the flames never reached the building so the damage, while looking terrible, wasn't actually that bad. You can be assured that we will have another braai at our offices in the near future. Our main course? The caretaker.....

The Tongue

I don't think I classify as an animal lover. Sure, I appreciate the beauty of nature and the animals that dwell therein. But in general I like cats. And that's pretty much it. I do tolerate dogs, don't get me wrong, and I've even learned to like and appreciate some of the dogs that I have gotten to know. But there are some dogs that I struggle to like. Dogs that seem to go out of their way to annoy me. A prime example of this is the basset hound. My first experience with a basset hound was when I was sitting somewhere, casually working on my laptop, and the sound of scrabbling paws reaches my ears. I look up and there, seemingly suspended in mid-air, was a basset hound on a flying trajectory to my lap.

Now, before I make up my mind about any dog, I have to meet them and get to know them first. Having one the size of a small rhino making an unannounced landing on my lap is definitely not my idea of a first meeting. That encounter already gave me an uneasy feeling about basset hounds. So it was with some trepidation that I found out that my future brother-in-law had acquired one. He called it Bones. And for some reason, known only to him, he loves it dearly. I do not. After my first encounter with it I promptly renamed it The Tongue. It seems to derive a great amount of pleasure chasing you around the house trying to sniff and/or lick you. It once chased me around their kitchen trying desperately to lick my ankles (in retrospect wearing sandals to their home might have been a bad idea). It finds feet and exposed skin irresistible! And for some reason it has a tongue that appears to be longer than the dog itself. How it fits that sizable (drooling) tongue into its mouth remains a mystery. Maybe they should invite over a few scientists in HazMat suits to find out.

To me a basset hound is like a cartoon character that has come to life. It seems impossibly droopy and floppy with a tongue that is longer than the Nile River, and just as wet. And yet it is blessed with an almost inexhaustible level of energy. And does it use this endless supply for the greater good? No! It uses it to chase you around the house in a crazy bid to lubricate your ankles! Or to chew whatever it can find. I'm pretty sure that the stomach lining of the average basset hound consists of die-cast titanium! It will eat rocks, plastic bottles, clothing, yellow-cake uranium and other miscellaneous items and still be perfectly fine! It proves my theory that it is a living cartoon character time and time again.....

A Challenging Task

So I read recently that the mark of a good writer is the ability to write about pretty much anything. A really good writer can take a boring topic like toenails or slightly green moss and turn it into something informative and amusing. That gave me an idea. I selected a few of my more avid readers and sent them a message, asking them to come up with strange and unusual ideas for my next blog post. Obviously topics that were overtly sexual, racist or blasphemous would be discarded. As would anything that has to do with Justin Bieber, and I would probably block the person who suggested him. Soon my inbox was absolutely flooded with a suggestion. Yip, just one. The topic? My future brother-in-law's basset hound. Thankfully I decided not to give up, and received a few verbal suggestions. My original plan was to put all the topics I received in my inbox to a vote, and then pick the most popular one. Seeing as I only received one written suggestion, I have decided to rather take all the suggestions that I have received (written and verbal) and blog about them in the coming weeks. I have also decided to blog about them in the order that they were suggested, so next week Monday you can sit back, relax and read the gripping tale of one man's best friend. Or as I like to call him......The Tongue!

How's the Weather?

What could be easier? You go onto the internet, do a quick search for the weather for your area, and voila! Instant weather forecast! Even most smartphones have weather apps that will tell you what the weather will be like on an hourly basis. How extremely convenient! Too bad that it is always wrong! When you think of people who predict the weather, you think they have access to advanced satellites and weather stations globally that will give them accurate information. I think they just tell us this to put us at ease. Their extremely advanced equipment actually looks something like this.....

Either that or they pull weather conditions out of a large bowl every morning. To give you an example, a while back I checked the app on my phone and found that they were expecting a thunderstorm. In reality it was nothing but sunshine and a light breeze. So the next day they predicted another thunderstorm. Unfortunately for them it was another glorious sunny day. The next day they were so certain that they gave a warning of severe thunderstorms with heavy rainfall. Alas, nothing. The only drops that fell were from my neighbour's sprinkler. After that they gave up on the idea of a thunderstorm and predicted a sunny day with a light breeze. And immediately we had strong winds, dark clouds and thunder was booming.

I recently suggested to a colleague of mine that the guys who designed the weather app should add the words "I guess" in front of every forecast. That way it will be more realistic: "I guess there may be thunderstorms later." The reason I think they should do this is because it seems that guessing is all they do.....