Maya just send me something too good to leave in the 8hands offices and not pass along... The Wooster Collective recently posted pics of Joshua Allen Harris' inflatable bear, and now they've raised the bar and put up videos.

Harris takes plastic bags, transforms them into animal shapes, and ties them to subway grates in New York City. Just watch what happens when a train passes by (and how few people seem to take notice). Is it just me, or are we living in a golden age of street art? Enjoy...

Here's a true story: Ofer, our beloved product manager was in the room and his phone was ringing. The ringtone was pretty weird. He turned it off before I could understand what exactly I was hearing, but fortunately, our webmaster told me what it was. "This is something you have to see", he said, so I headed over to Youtube and entered "Chocolate Rain".

What I discovered there was a teenage afro-american kid, singing into a microphone with a remarkably deep voice. In the background I heard an electric piano, which could also be seen briefly throughout the video. The first thing I said was, "that's not him that is singing, right?". But Omer, our webmaster, said that it's him and added, "amazing, isn't it?".

Well, when a 15 year old kid sounds like Louie Armstrong, then yeah, it's pretty amazing. Even the fact that the "teenage kid" is actually 25 didn't really ruin my amazement. Some further researching provided the following facts: the video for "Chocolate Rain" by Tay Zonday has been watched more than 7 million since it debuted on April 22; He has more than 12000 friends on MySpace; his biggest hit to date (hint: it's the same song) has already been covered by such big names as John Mayer and Tre Cool (of Green Day).

Another interesting fact is that the song was released under a Creative Commons license. That means you can't buy it in your favorite music store (not even iTunes) but you can download it for free from Youtube or his MySpace page. This song is so big that I'm actually surprised I haven't heard it until now.

This kind of popularity makes me wonder what are the ingredients of a cult song. This is not a proper radio hit. It's quite long (almost 5 minutes) and doesn't really progress at all. The song doesn't have verses and a chorus, and the melody in the background is a never-ending loop. If I didn't see the singer's young appearance I probably wouldn't be so amazed by the song, perhaps even a little annoyed after a minute or two.

I think that the song's charm comes from its video. It's very lo-fi and relies heavily on the artist's visual performance. Tay Zonday has "unique mannerisms while singing" (as Wikipedia calls it), one of them is the way his mouth is turned to the side, which produces a somewhat strange face. This "novelty quality" of the song works great in the virtual environment of the internet, but will it make the challenging cross-over to the real world? That remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Tay Zonday has the biggest viral song of this summer.

As any major hit, "Chocolate Rain" has been parodied and spoofed by almost everyone. My favorite so far is the white comeback entitled "Vanilla Snow". It captures the feel of the original video in the right way, mimicking the weird faces, the low voice, the subtitle about moving away from the mic and the pair of hands playing the piano. You can also find versions by Chad Vader, John Mayer, Tre Cool and some remixes and lots and lots of others.

I got this rather intimidating email a couple of days ago: A friend told me to take 70 minutes of my time and watch a YouTube movie named "Four Eyed Monsters". 70 minutes. Scary. I considered my possibilities:

1. Ignore him.
2. Reply, starting with "Who the hell has 70 minutes for anything these days?!"
3. Watch the first 5 minutes, pretend I saw the whole thing and hope he'll never ask me about it.

Being the lazy ass that I am, I ended up ignoring the email, but leaving it "unread" in my inbox - which would have been great if I didn't have my minor case of OCD. I, personally, just can't stand that "you've got 1 unread email" notification. I need things to be nice and orderly.

And so, after finally giving the local pub a chance the other day, I got back home and decided that even though it's late, there's just no choice but watching those first 5 minutes...

I get easily influenced by the way things are designed, so I was hooked before the movie even started - the movie's logo looks like something out of a sketchbook. In fact, the whole movie sort of feels like it was taken out of someone's sketchbook, and so I watched the whole thing, and didn't even take any snack breaks.

I'm not very sure how much of an autobiography this movie is, but it generally is the story of this guy who meets this girl online, who are both that-good-kind-of-artistic geeks. I'm not really into spoilers, so I'll just tell you they have a very interesting, different beginning of a relationship, and they end up turning their whole story into this movie.

Sorry for sounding like a 12 year old girl, but the story's Beautiful. I'm actually sort of sorry I watched their relationship in a movie - now I can't try anything like it in real life without feeling like I'm copying someone else's... erm, ideas.

The Happy Couple

As for the movie's design, acting, and all that - well - I could tell this didn't cost the millions it took to make Titanic, But I really preferred it this way. The movie sometimes feels a little more like an art project than a feature, but that really just made it feel more real. The sets, the compositions, the writing, animation, music - they all feel like these guys dove deep into their minds (or guts) to show us exactly how it was for them.

So, why not take 70 minutes of your time and watch a good movie? It's definitely 70 minutes you'll enjoy more than, well, wasting time in front of cable TV - and you all know you do it.

One more note, while I'm here: Four Eyed Monsters actually participated in festivals and all that, but the creators spent so much money on making it, that they've sort of turned to the internet for help. They've added the movie to YouTube so that more people could watch it, and have somehow gotten a cool deal from this new movie-related social network site called Spout - Spout agreed to pay them a shiny dollar for every Four Eyed Monsters viewer that follows a link to join the network. Personally, I think they really deserve this money, so follow the instructions at the beginning of their movie, and help them out.