Helsinki Complaint Choir

[nancylebov]

No one took me up on the challenge of remembering the source for "My dreams are boring"-- here it is. That's one of the best lines, but the whole thing is brilliant. The lyrics, in Finnish and English, and some pleasant chat about the language, and cwhy there are no third world complaint choirs, and the beauty of the full moon in a dark sky in the morning in really cold weather.

Comments

[terriwells.livejournal.com]

This is the first time I've seen this.

[thette.livejournal.com]

My favourite parts are "ring tones are all irritating" to the Nokia standard ring tone and "the Finnish language is bloody difficult to learn".

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

WONDERFUL! I want to figure out how to embed the actual video in my LJ; otherwise, I'll link to this.

Re third-world complaint choirs-- Sadly true. Yet I think this particular song is a careful and apparently self-aware combination of deadly serious issues and trivial ones, ones that can be fixed and ones that can't. An American one might be, "People die from no access to health care, and busses always run late when I have an appointment." For one thing, that strategy allows individual listeners to take any given complaint seriously or not. (Yes, I've been reading theory of humor, including as social criticism.)

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked it. I'm thinking about putting web classics on a two or three year rotation, since neither you nor terri caught the complaint choir the first time around.

And I don't think everyone's seen the "neurotypicality, threat or menace" essay, either.

I suspect a third-world complaint choir would be a mixture of deadly serious problems and trivial but persistent annoyances. This would be educational for anyone who thinks third-world life is nothing but disasters.

Any recommendations on theory of humor?

How to embed: Hit the flash button in the middle of the video.

Then the triangle pointing up in the lower right corner of the screen. (I can sympathize with supergee's hatred of unlabeled icons.) This will shrink the video inside its frame so that you can see more options.

There's a slot on the upper right labeled embed. Copy the text in there. Your "create post" page has an "embed media" at the top left of the box you're typing your article into.

Click on "embed media", and a window will appear to paste the video url into.

Hit "insert" after you've pasted the url, and the url will appear in the box. I have no idea why copy-and-paste directly doesn't work.

There are some annoying features I don't understand. You can't choose where the embed media will insert relative to your text (or at least I don't know how to), and editing if I have several videos in one post can be a pain, frequently involving starting over more than once until the videos and the text are in the right order.

[sodyera.livejournal.com]

I absolutely love this! We need someone to write a domestic version.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Complaint choirs are an international project.

Good news! No one's done one for NYC yet.

Otherwise, the Tokyo choir is much more polished than Philadelphia, and Jerusalem choir's subtitles are unreadable half the time.