The "Youb Tube"

I think that it is safe to say that I have elevated wasting time to an art form. If I am meant to be working hard at school, I will check my email or go to the staff room to get a coffee. If I am meant to be working at home, I will clean my condo, do dishes, play with the cats or watch television. I spend too much time watching the boob tube, and the "watching" is just the beginning. For example, here is is how my time commitment to "Lost" breaks down over an average week:

Watch an episode of "Lost": One hour

Discuss episode of "Lost" at work the next day with various coworkers over lunch, in office, at coffeemaker, etc.: One hour

Nurture crushes on several of the main characters in "Lost" and contemplate which man I would rather be lost on an island with:
Five hours (approximately one hour per cast member crush.)

As you can see, "Lost" can take up SCADS of time. Don't even get me started on "Prison Break," which requires just as much commitment and inspires just as many crushes, even though it jumps a new shark before each commercial break. And as if the boob tube wasn't bad enough, I have recently been dealing with another insidious time-sucker.

Youtube.

Up until recently, I could faff around on Youtube for ages, looking up movie clips, music videos, stand up comedy, newscaster bloopers, and hours and hours of videos of kittens falling asleep, batting at strings or diving into paper bags. Whenever I clicked on a video, a bar of "related videos" was displayed on the right of my screen, leading me down the rabbit hole and into the kind of "lost time" usually only experienced by UFO abductees.

Like everything on the internet (or indeed, in life), there is some great stuff on Youtube. There is also abysmal crap, and worse. As far as I can tell, there are five "levels" of Youtube:

Level One: Useful and/or Informative:

I have been amazed at what I can find on Youtube. For example, I have recently been doing some research on Guan Hanquing, the "Shakespeare of 13th century China," and, lo and behold, there is a clip of a performance of the Hanquing play "Snow in Midsummer" on Youtube. You can see news reports you have missed or clips from documentaries. There are clips from the Royal Albert Hall Proms! Actual sophisticated, informative content.

Level Two: Original and Fun:

There are some very creative film projects and excellent music that I would not otherwise get to experience. I have really enjoyed the reedited movie trailers that put a whole new spin on the films they are parodying ("The Shining" recut is particularly good.) I can't stop watching "Ok Go's" video "Here it Goes Again," which is entirely choreographed using treadmills. Videos like this inspire me to be creative.

Level 3: Useless

I would venture to say that the majority of clips on Youtube are purely pointless crap. There are a disordinate number of videos of people reenacting famous movie scenes in their living rooms. Not for purposes of satire mind you ... just ... reenacting. There are angst-ridden whackos wailing into the camera about the plights of their favourite celebrities. There are clips of "ALF" on Youtube. I mean, really. ALF? Really? Is someone REALLY fulfilling their destiny as an ALF archivist? Anyway.

Level 4: Humiliating:

This is where Youtube begins to turn my stomach. I'm no angel; I have laughed at some of the "pratfall" videos before. But some of the images captured on Youtube are truly awful. There are several clips of teachers yelling at their students, after being deliberately provoked for cinematic purposes. Miss South Carolina will never live down her disasterous answer to why 1/5 of Americans cannot locate the US on a world map. And there are all kinds of videos with names like "Fat kid falls into water."

WARNING ... THE REST OF THIS BLOG IS SO GROSS THAT YOU SHOULD PROBABLY JUST SKIP OVER IT. I'M GOING TO BE PITHY ABOUT MY BAD DATING LUCK AND THEN WRITE ABOUT SOME AWFUL STUFF. I'M NOT KIDDING.

I was introduced to a particularly humiliating video against my will. I was on perhaps the most ill-fated date of my life, and keep in mind when I say that that I have been on some STAGGARINGLY bad dates. At the end of a truly dreadful evening, after several "Whooo! I'm TIRED!" hints, he finally agreed to go only after he showed me a "hilarious" clip on Youtube. In the clip, a group of people are sitting in an outdoor hot tub. One woman suddenly stands up and says "I have to get out" and then ... I am not making this up ... has massive diarrhea into the water. My date laughed and laughed, and then when I told him that I was disgusted as I handed him his jacket and held the door open, he accused me of being "uptight."

I think that one of the things that really bothered me about that clip (besides the copious diarrhea, of course) was that it appeared that that woman was among friends at the time the footage was shot. I guess she wasn't, because that video is now on the internet for the world to see (although I can't imagine who would want to ... except for one damn person. Please, even if you have a sick sense of humour, don't go and look at it because you read about it here.) Maybe I am "uptight," but it breaks my heart to think about how embarrassed that woman must be, and how cruel her "friends" must be.

Level 5: Criminal:

I'm not going to dwell on this one, but this category exists, and none of us should forget it. Those of you who read about the marine/puppy video last week know what I am talking about. If you didn't - don't look it up. Trust me.

When I reflect on this, I wonder if Youtube is the modern equivalent of the Roman Gladatorial Games. There was a great deal of pageantry and bloody mayhem in the games, and it all fell under the umbrella of entertainment. It may seem like a ridiculous comparison, but the fact remains that with a simple mouse click on Youtube you can navigate back and forth between clips of the London Symphony Orchestra and Saddam Hussein's execution. That's entertainment, I guess. Ain't it cool that we're so much more evolved than those Roman types?

When I think about it in these terms, I get a bit queasy.

Huh. Maybe I should just stick to watching "Lost." Or maybe ... just maybe ... I should stop wasting my time altogether.

A

(P.S. Wait, wait, wait ... okay ... how's this? I'm going to waste LESS time in general but keep watching "Lost." Okay? Okay? *breathes sigh of relief *)