[Spycouple]

So here's a nice little amusing tale (in two parts) for all you hipbasers who have a perverse appreciation of the infamous Weird Al Yankovic. True story!!!

PART I: "Stick it up your pasta"

So my wife and I had our 5 year anniversary yesterday, and to celebrate the occasion I wanted to cook her a nice traditional dinner. So being of Irish descent, I decided to cook up some homemade gnocchi ("Gnocchi?" you say, "That's not Irish!" Okay. Sure it's an Italian staple, but it's got potatoes dammit!). Anyhow I was working from home yesterday so I got up in the morning trying to get the gnocchi prepared and I had flour and mashed potatoes and sticky dough all over the place (I've never made it before and it was a bit of a mess). So as my wife was on her way out the door to go to work she says , "Good luck with the gnocchi", to which I replied with the first thing that came to mind... accompanied by a certain tune by the once relevant band Limp Bizkit...

"I did it all for the gnocchi, the gnocchi, the gnocchi..."

Well that gave her a good laugh on the way to work, meanwhile I'm stuck with sticky goopy dough all over my hands and unable to put anything on my stereo. Result? The damn songs sticks in my head like the dough on my hands.

After a while of this madness, including having worked out some alternate lyrics to the Bizkit song, I realized that "hey, this could've been a Weird Al tune!" I then proceed, having finished Round 1 of the gnocchi battle, to get on a Weird Al kick. Now I'm the first to admit that he can be tremendously annoying, but he's also brilliant. How he manages to consistently pop up with a wicked parody of whatever's relevant in pop culture at the time - and with that hair and mustache and accordion - I mean, you've got to give the guy credit. Believe it or not, I even use some of his stuff (such as THIS and THIS ) in a class I teach on deconstructing popular culture... well... I it's a class that I used to teach, since it's been shelved for the time being. NOTE: Maybe it's been shelved because I was using Weird Al in academic curriculum, but I digress...

So anyway... my Weird Al kick yesterday obviously involved as the very first step a quick search on YouTube where I proceeded to find some clips of various Weird Al bits. This included some of the the legendary "Al Music" sessions from the early '90s... you know... back when they actually played music on the station known as MuchMusic. Now I used to have an old VHS tape of a recording of one of the Al Music specials but it long ago disappeared. I was delighted however to find the following clips which brought back a few good laughs. Anyone remember these gems???

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcMkndsTMpQ">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcMkndsTMpQ</a><!-- m -->

and

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfVErioCklE">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfVErioCklE</a><!-- m -->

and

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LsFmtJsyZk">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LsFmtJsyZk</a><!-- m -->


ahhh... the good ol' days. Go ahead. Watch'em again. You know you want to. But to wrap up PART 1 let me just say that after the doughy mess was finally cleaned up, the gnocchi was excellent (with a nice salmon dill and garlic sauce... mmm mmm mmm) though a little on the heavy side, as you could imagine when eating balls of solid dough. The Weird Al clips thankfully helped lighten things up a bit. As it turns out, the esteemed Mr. Yankovic's work will come back to play a key role in the second installment of our program, which I'll try to get to if I can beat traffic home in a reasonable time.

So stayed tuned to this channel for... PART II: Taco Libre!

[Spycouple]

Resuming with our tale, let's pick up where we left off...

PART II: Taco Libre

The gnocchi was good but filling, and after a couple glasses of wine to add to the lethargy, we were kind of left to wait things out while digestion worked away on the heavy potato dumplings. In a situation like this, YouTube comes in handy to waste a bit of time.

I proceeded to "entertain" (and yes the term's used loosely here) the lady with some of the Weird Al clips on YouTube (my wife's anniversary present to me is apparently putting up with my odd sense of humor). I also found Weird Al's famous re-edited celebrity interviews on the MuchMusic AXS archives:

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://axs.muchmusic.com/?fr_chl=8781146d5f5b2639299c31d4193eac7075d89c22&rf=sitemap">http://axs.muchmusic.com/?fr_chl=878114 ... rf=sitemap</a><!-- m -->

WARNING: the REAL commercials that preceed each clip are particularly annoying.

So after a few guffaws from these clips, I 'm still searching for a particular Al Music clip that was on my old VHS tape but is nowhere to be found on YouTube, MuchAXS, or anywhere on the 'net. And what was this clip???

Anyone remember this guy?

Yes, it's THE Gerardo of "Rico Suave" fame. You may feel tempted right now to do a search for the "Rico Suave" video, but hold on... There's more!!! You see, back in the Al Music days, Weird Al had released an album featuring a satire of "Rico Suave" called "Taco Grande". Further, on one of the Al Music segments he played his video that went along with the song.

But here's the thing.... It was the exact same video as Gerardo's, no changes at all. Essentially a mashup of Weird Al's satire of the song + the real video to the song. The net result of this remix is spectacularly and awesomely AWFUL in an incredibly entertaining way. It was great, I loved it, but I hadn't seen it since losing my VHS copy with it. All I could do was explain it to people, because according to the interweb, it may as well not exist.

After again failing to find any trace of the video on the web, I tried to explain it to my wife, but finally resorted to playing the YouTube version of the original Gerardo video simultaneously with Weird Al's "Taco Grande" song. The effect produced was reasonable, as we had a few laughs at this, but I wasn't satisfied in this day and age of iPod Video players to not have a better way of demonstrating this fantastic "mashup".

Then I got to thinking.... Since I'm in the habit of mixing digital media pieces together fairly regularly (long, long story), I got to thinking that "hey, why don't I just make a version out of what I have on hand".

Indeed.

So using a few tricks of the trade I was able to gather the audio and video together in my editing program, and with some amount of fiddling with the clip speeds to get the two pieces to work (Gerardo and Weird Al's versions are different length), I was able to produce the following reenactment of the infamous Al Music clip, free at last, free at last...

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://download.yousendit.com/01D8DCA2067C96C1">http://download.yousendit.com/01D8DCA2067C96C1</a><!-- m -->


Enjoy!!!

[chris]

Free at last indeed... that was just as bad as I remember it.

[Tthip]

Spycouple - thanx for that - freaking hilarious!

Free at last indeed... that was just as bad as I remember it.

Oh Chris, I cannot believe you went there - thanx for the laugh.

[Spycouple]

Spycouple - thanx for that - freaking hilarious!

Free at last indeed... that was just as bad as I remember it.

Oh Chris, I cannot believe you went there - thanx for the laugh.

Yo... Ding Dong... Ding Dong Yo