"When he gets back to the White House on Thursday, [Obama] will reinforce that theme of youth engagement when he sits for his interviews with three YouTube stars..."

"... [Bethany] Mota, the anti-bullying fashionista, who is Hispanic and has a homeschooling background; Hank Green, a video engagement entrepreneur who also does educational programming and has a friendly nerd-next-door persona; and GloZell, a pioneering 52-year-old comedian with a big audience...."

From a Bloomberg column by Margaret Talev titled "Obama's Social State of the Union/In the age of new media, the president and his team are trying to innovate to keep one of the country's oldest traditions relevant." I'm not going to embed any videos from the links above, but I strongly encourage you to go check them out to see the route these characters took to achieve YouTube popularity so you can form an accurate opinion of what it means for the President of the United States to be using them to boost his own popularity.

“The mainstream media still matters a great deal, but you can’t just do that anymore,” said White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri. “You have to work harder to reach a larger audience. It’s so disaggregated that you have to put more effort into it. The good news is there’s ways to reach people who really care about a particular issue.”

Discussions about how to reach a broader and deeper audience this year through non-traditional and social media began six months ago, Palmieri said. “We’re trying to make sure as many Americans know about his proposals as possible,” she said. “And you have to make sure that people who really care about a particular issue know what his proposals are and what he’s done."...

Palmieri summed up their collective appeal to the president... “These people have a huge following.”

Brandon Hardesty plays "Goodfellas" as Jimmy Stewart and Stephen Hawking.

It's #2 in a series that is up to #56. Why haven't I noticed this YouTube channel before? This adorable reenactment is quite brilliant (with the familiar "Goodfellas" language):



The video that got my attention is Hardesty's reenactment of the famous bunker scene from the movie "Downfall." This was embedded at BoingBoing a few days ago and linked in the NYT last night. There's that annoying German production company that got YouTube to take down all the "Downfall" parodies that used the original footage from their movie. I hope they don't come after this use of the script.

I'm not going to watch the other 54 videos all at once, but I'm going to get to all of them. I was going to watch the "Fight Club" one, but I see that it's the scene that reveals the key secret, and I can't play it while Meade is in the room. He's never watched "Fight Club," though we've started the DVD a couple times.

(How long is it supposed to take to get your new lover/spouse to get through all of the DVDs you deem essential? I don't think we're going to live that long.)

"Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe."

The whole "egg salad sandwich challenge" got me thinking about "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe":



If you don't know what the egg salad sandwich challenge is, watch the last part of last night's vlog... and check the sidebar.

You'll say Herzog does it for art, but Althouse is doing it for commerce. And also, it's much harder to eat a shoe than an egg salad sandwich. I concede that it's harder to eat a shoe, but not that I'm doing it for the money rather than art. It was for art that I made that list of 10 Things I've Never Done. And it was for art that I put a price tag on doing various things that I don't want to do. That's for art both because: 1. it's a writing riff and 2. the first thing I wrote about needing a particular amount of money to do was to go see some awful theatrical production. #1 is doing art -- not necessarily the high quality art. #2 is taking a firm stand against low quality art. Now that people are actually offering me the money, it's true that I'm taking the money, but I do see the acceptance of the money as performance art. And, of course, eating the egg salad sandwich -- on YouTube -- will be performance art.

And remember: "Our civilization doesn't have adequate images."

Bonus images:



So Charlie Chaplin ate a shoe for art.... or made art out of our feelings about eating a shoe. In fact, he was eating a prop made of licorice. But I won't cheat. I won't cheat because: 1. I'm taking real money, 2. I can't think of anything that would look like egg salad and not be more disgusting, and 3. any art that may come from this depends on my reacting to actual egg salad.