Chuck Klosterman: “I’m bored,” he said. “This is boring.”
“I know,” she replied. “I love it.”
“Why would you love being bored?”
“Because everything that’s boring, if experienced long enough, becomes interesting. Look at the sheep. Stare at the sheep. If you keep staring at them, they don’t look like sheep anymore.”
[pause]
“They are still sheep to me,” he said.
“Then you’re not actually bored. Stare harder. They’re not sheep. Now look at the car. The car is coming at you. But when it finally arrives, it just goes away. You are the thing that doesn’t change. This is how it always is.”
“So this is, like, religious?”
“No,” she said. “Political.”
[pause]
“Oh. The sheep are back.”
David Jacoby: Have a problem with thinking while trying to get a girlfriend? Fear not, Dr. Paul is with this instructive video, “How to Not Think While Trying to Get a Girlfriend.” Once you’ve mastered not thinking, be sure to check out the rest of Dr. Paul’s work. In his series “Dating Tips For Guys,” he covers such topics as “How To Hang Out With Your Girlfriend,” “How To Be Cool,” “How To Be Funny,” and even “How To Make Your Girlfriend Feel Good About Herself.” Dr. Paul’s magnificence lies not just in the wisdom of his message but in its delivery. Each episode in the series follows the same six-step formula:
1. Fade from black into a shot of a champagne bottle surrounded by two glasses. Someone must have company.
2. Pan right to Dr. Paul in a smoking jacket, surrounded by candles, holding a martini glass and sitting on a couch next to a tapestry that’s perfectly positioned perfectly to show the wolf woven into it.
3. Dr. Paul opens with a non sequitur. For example, in the above “How Not To Think When Trying To Get A Girlfriend,” he begins, “Me thinks the man protest too much.” I have no idea why none of the crew ever brought to his attention the fact that his opening sentence in every single video has nothing to do with the topics he’s discussing.
4. He plugs his book and radio show. Warning: If you’re thinking about Googling Dr. Paul to check out the rest of his work — don’t. He is mesmerizing, the next thing you know, you’ve spent three hours listening to his podcasts and you’re entering your credit card information into the e-store on his website.
5. He delivers one minute of clichéd dating advice that is enunciated in such a way that makes it both profound and confusing.
6. Dr. Paul raises his martini glass full of an ambiguous cocktail, winks, and says “May your fantasies of today be your realities of tomorrow.”
Bill Simmons: Can I interest you in Kurt Loder’s 1995 MTV News report about “a worldwide computer network called the Internet” that’s being used by “10 million people,” is “definitely exploding,” and features “a proliferation of special interest truck stops called websites?” What the clip includes: Michael Jackson trying to answer chat questions, Sandra Bullock promoting her new movie The Net about 750 Botox injections ago, Dave Matthews gushing about the Internet helping his band, the guy from Sun Volt telling a story about a conversation at a concert being e-mailed to him the next day and thinking “it was kind of scary,” Ozzy Osbourne babbling incoherently (wait, that’s every YouTube clip), Loder saying the Internet has been a “blessing for music fans,” Newt Gingrich complaining about Internet porn, old-school music clips with wobbly video and tiny pictures, lots of creepy shots of hackers and porn transmitters, vintage shots of Netscape and CompuServe, Loder predicting that virtual reality and homemade computer movies would be the wave of the future, and Coolio happily wondering, “If you ain’t on the information superhighway then where is it?” I knew we should have named our site after Coolio.
Katie Baker: When you’re Walt Frazier, you can get away with things that mere mortals cannot. Like calling out all those dumb broads who won’t stop yakkin’ during the action! They’re blabbin’ and gabbin’, loud and proud, interactin’ and distractin’! When the ball gets tossed up, they just gossip! (Somewhere Rob Dibble is getting fitted for a cow-print suit, just in case.) I think I actually remember hearing this happen live after I snuck out of my little brother’s Chuck E. Cheese birthday party to listen to the Knicks game in the car with my Dad. (What? It was the playoffs.) While this is little more than just a straight audio clip — the Imus promo music totally brings me back — I still highly recommend watching if only for the kickin’ image of a young Mike Breen wearing a sweater. It’s too bad he didn’t go full Cosby.
Sarah Larimer: This is the greatest political video ever made, and not just because it totally rips off Blackstreet’s “Don’t Leave Me” for a local Democratic primary. Is this song some sort of copyright violation? Probably. Is it awesome? Absolutely. The video, the brainchild of a supporter of then-Washington D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty and not produced by his official campaign, manages to combine nineties rap visuals with lyrics about municipal code violations. Here are a few of the things Fenty’s political opponent is slammed for a span of about four minutes: crooked political deals; his response to a fatal shooting; funding cuts for AIDS patients; stealing “a billion dollars” from the District; ignoring dead children. The only thing this video is missing is a cameo from noted Fenty supporter Anwan Glover, of The Wire fame. Honestly, how did this guy lose? Politricks!
Molly Lambert: “Don’t touch my dragon.” — this cat.
Previous inductions into the YouTube Hall of Fame can be found here and here.