About time advanced beings from another galaxy saved our hind ends. An “Internet Intervention” directed to the citizens of Earth, courtesy BBC Global News.

As someone who has flailed often enough on stage, I present the following with love and affection. To get the true effect (for me, the serial chuckling began about 12.5 seconds into the second video) you need to view the first video of real-life John Dakar (to whom our hearts go out), then the second, animated John Dakar and its most delightful sing-along subtitles.

For those of who who don’t live here and only know the state by the usual barefoot and stupid cliches, West Virginia is a strange and wonderful place. In this book written by my newspaper colleague and the long-time humor columnist Rick Steelhammer, the state’s oddball charm “has found its Boswell,”  as I write in a recent profile of  “West Virginia Curiosities.” I have lived here off and on for the better part of a quarter-century, and almost every page I turn I learn something new.  Such as the following. I really like the shooter’s reaction to how he embarrassed the other team. His reaction is vintage old-school West Virginian:

. . .
“Top Gun,” Burnsville

While Jerry West may be West Virginia’s best-known homegrown basketball legend, a slender hoops star from Burnsville High School has earned a measure of immortality of his own by setting a national single-game scoring record that has endured for more than a half century. Danny Heater of Burnsville scored 135 points in a contest on January 26, 1960 with Widen, an even smaller high school in neighboring Clay County. The feat, certified by the National Federation of State High School Associations, accounts for the highest point tally ever recorded in a high school, collegiate, or professional basketball game. Heater’s score topped Wilt Chamberlain’s NBA record 100-point game against New York by 35 points and topped the next-best high school scorer by 7 points …

In an interview forty years after the 173-43 victory, Heater said he had mixed feelings about setting the record. “I was happy and sad at the same time,” he said, happy for having his team recognized for a scoring record and sad for humiliating the Widen team.

“I wasn’t raised to embarrass people,” he said. “I didn’t know what to say. What do you say when you’ve done that to somebody?”

Read more about the book and a Q-and-A with Rick Steelhammer here.

Just back from an International Film Fest showing of  “Burma VJ” at Huntington’s Keith-Albee Theater, and am quite blown away. I’m still taking in this devastating, searing film, cobbled together from citizen video-journalist footage from concealed cameras, documenting street protests led by Buddhist monks a while back in Rangoon and repressed by that country’s awful, awful regime. With all the effort and hours spent viewing frivolous, brain-candy YouTube video, here is what the camera can do when trained on the heart of human darkness at a moment when courageous souls hold a light up to it.

Honestly, “Burma VJ,” a candidate at tonight’s Oscars for Best Foreign Film, left me both wrung out and asking myself the question: Well, what are you doing with your camera? The film is deeply inspiring in its depiction of defiant courage in the face of overwhelming force. Yet it also left me needing a pick-me-up. Here’s the pick-me-up, courtesy of a goofy elephant and loving dog. This isn’t brain-candy, but soul food. There is always hope, there is always spirit somewhere alive in the world.

“MOST OF LIFE IS SO DULL that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself,” or, “I am horrified,” we are insincere. “As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror” — it’s no more than that really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent.”

~ E.M. Forster from “A Passage to India”

Effective this very moment (it’s wonderful and terrifying being in charge), “The Footloose Flaneur,” a fictional memoir about a momentous year abroad, becomes “The TohuBohu Tales.” It may become something else later. My personal Unicycle Advisor, based in the nation’s capital, advised that he felt the old title was inadequate. I had to agree. He has spent much time unicycling (for a time having held a Guinness World unicycling record while juggling) so this is an esteemed, special individual. I had to take his feedback seriously.

“TohuBohu” you ask? An interesting word, from the Hebrew for a compound word “Tohuwabohu,” signifying  “formlessness” and “emptiness,” and  used in Genesis 1:2. The OED defines “tohu-bohu” as: “That which is empty and formless; chaos; utter confusion.” I will let you draw your own conclusions, my 7 or 8 readers so far of “The TohuBohu Tales,” as to what that might mean for the unspooling of this ball of narrative yarn. Auden (who as usual, gets it best) used the word in a poem which may become the work’s epigraph, from a piece from 1942, titled “Sickness and in Health.” I like that commanding voice, calling out of the confusion:

“Beloved, we are always in the wrong,
Handling so clumsily our stupid lives,
Suffering too little or too long,
Too careful even in our selfish loves:
The decorative manias we obey
Die in grimaces round us every day,
Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice
Which utters an absurd command – Rejoice.”

Here’s more, for wordsmiths, and yet more on the word. Stay tuned to Hundred Mountain for additional “TohuBohu Tales.”And what, you make ask, is a fictional memoir? I borrowed the phrase from a Meridith Sue Willis review of a new book by “Crum” author Lee Maynard, titled “The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life.” As for my own fictional memoir? It may not altogether be factual, it may be fictional. It may also be true, or may try to be true. You can be the judge of that. To keep up, you could subscribe to the blog, you know, via e-mail or RSS. Just cursor up to the upper left-hand corner there, where it says  “subscribe: Posts | Comments | Email “ Or click it right here. Yep, that’s it. You may begin the “The TohuBohu Tales” at the beginning, or anywhere in between.

Some people are crazy. Then…. there are these guys. The must-see video of the week, OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass.” (Don’t be deterred by the opening scene. It isn’t blood). PS ~ And sorry if you’ve seen it already, you and, at last count, 3,467,738 other viewers at YouTube:

“Since the beginning of man, the hours between the coming of night and the coming of sleep have belonged to the tellers of tales and the makers of music.”

~ Performer Walter Craft’s business card
(I recall Walter telling me that some crazy-looking fellow came up to him on the streets of New Orleans and said this to him. It ever after became his signature line. P.S. – His card also says something worthy of note to all singers-songwriters: ‘Serve the Song.’)