Jason Segel and NPH sing Les Mis.

Enjoy. That is all.

I hope and I pray for Hester to get just one more A

I spent half of last week trying to finish "The Music Man" on DVD -- yes, I own it on DVD -- and as a result I had the Music Man on the brain. I had a serious moment where I serenaded Ace with "Sadder but Wiser" and realized how totally effing bizarre that song is. Sort of scandalous or maybe sexist except that the whole movie is a satire, at least parts of it are, and so I take all that in stride. I happen to think that it's one of the best musicals ever, although I admit I'm not a huge fan of musicals in general, but apparently it won the Tony over "West Side Story" back in the day. It's highly cheesy but I love it to pieces, I suspect because it feels somehow familial. My grandparents taped it off of channel 13 when I was a kid (channel 13 became, and maybe was at the time, UPN, imagine that), and one of the kids in the movie (the little blond boy who dances and pushes the library cart around) apparently lived down the street from my parents. Plus, my grandpa was from Iowa, so somehow I imagined that this gave me some kind of personal stake in the movie. Either way, I had a grand old time watching it the other day and was just struck, not surprisingly, with the urge to watch "Sadder but Wiser" again on YouTube, an urge primarily stemming from my wondering whether it was actually on YouTube, which it is, and which in retrospect is not surprising. Enjoy.

YouTube Views of Obama's Speech

More!
Do you ever think to yourself, what would the 60s or whatever be like if we'd had YouTube back then? How many mashups would there have been of the "I am not a crook" Nixon thing? How many views would JFK's assassination have gotten, or videos of protests and police beatings? It's an interesting metric that we are used to using now, but I wonder how it would have applied back then.