Nomad Challenge

I have a special treat for you today!  This is a fun conclusion to the Nomad Challenge Dance Week.  You may be familiar with the Hammer Dance, made famous in MC Hammer’s video “U Can’t Touch This” back in the day.  Well, this also just happens to be one of my favorite songs to do on karaoke night!

I first did this song during a karaoke contest at my university during my sophomore year, complete with my attempt to break it down to the Hammer Dance.  My friend who came to watch nearly fell on the floor laughing and said he’d never laughed so hard in his life!

Every now and then I will perform the song again, and once I got it caught on video!  It was a little over a year ago and my roommate at the time and his girlfriend (now fiance) were having a gathering at the local pub with friends as sort of a going away party since they were moving to New Orleans the next day.  My roommate used my camera phone to record the performance and it was a huge hit.  The girl dancing with me in the video was one of his fiance’s friends.  I didn’t know her but she asked to be a background dancer, which I was OK with.  Everyone who was there or who has seen the video on my phone has loved it!

I apologize that there is no sound on this video.  Two reasons, first being the recording industry doesn’t seem to like karaoke videos (BOOOOOOOOOO!) and two, I couldn’t get the sound to convert to a proper YouTube format anyway.

As a solution, I have provided another link to the “U Can’t Touch This” video on YouTube so you can follow along appropriately, although it won’t be my voice rapping (I’m probably doing you a favor in that regard!).

Instructions:

First play the top music video (the MC Hammer one).

My dancing video (the bottom one) starts at the part of the song that is 1:08 into this MC Hammer video (or 1:03 into the actual song since there was a 5 second intro to this video), so make sure you sync so that the video on the bottom starts when the video on the top is at 1:08.

An easy way to sync this is to actually start both videos (since there is a few seconds lag after clicking), then pause my video right away and play again when the top one reaches the 1:08 mark.

Then enjoy!  The first of three “Break it Down: Hammer Time” parts comes at about the 38 second mark of my video (the bottom one).  Clearly the best part!  I know the video quality is quite poor, but you can get a good sense of what’s going on anyway.

Play this first

Sync so this starts when the above video is at 1:08

OK, alright.  Before you start making fun of me, I get it… I can’t dance!  Perhaps I should take some lessons from this video below (thanks to reader DJ for the suggestion to include this for Nomad Challenge Dance Week!):

OK, now go ahead and make fun of me in the comments!

On this third day of dance craziness, I am grateful to offer, The Gratitude Dance.

I first saw this video in an email I received some time ago.  Like our first video of the week, Matt Harding’s dancing around the world, this dance doesn’t require much skill.  It’s simple, after writing down what you are grateful for, you watch the video and proceed to move your feet and cross your arms in front of you a bunch of times!  There really is no trick to it.  And like the previous two dances, this is excellent cardio -- especially for your arms! (I’m noticing a pattern to this dance thing, I guess it is great exercise for the mind and body!)

Even though the dance is a little crazy, the message is fantastic.  In today’s world we often are led to believe that there is all this negativity around us, so it is easy to forget about the wonderful things we do have and we end up taking them for granted.

I can’t stress enough how important implementing an attitude of gratitude is for all of us.  Our health, body and everything that goes on in our lives is a reflection of our thoughts and feelings in our mind.

So with that, I give you today’s video from Junior Attractors (aka the “Gratidudes”).  They may aim their message to a younger audience, but as you can see in this video, “The Gratitude Dance” is for everyone.  Please enjoy!

“Now this is a story all about how, my life got flipped, turned upside down…”

Well, no.  Not exactly!  That is actually the first line of the theme song by Will Smith to the hit 90s TV show, “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”.  Rather, this post is a story about me re-discovering a wicked funny dance by a character from that show, Carlton Banks.

Sometimes when I am out and about, people will ask me to show off my dancing skills, or lack thereof (I know they are just looking to laugh at me which I am perfectly OK with!).  Once in a while when I am asked this, I’ll try to pull out some of Carlton’s moves.  I mean, look at the video below, it’s awesome!

So one day last week I was “chillin out maxin, relaxin all cool” but really having a somewhat boring afternoon just doing some work on the computer, when all of a sudden I saw a Twitter update from Stephanie Quilao, who runs the Back in Skinny Jeans blog, which said this,”2 minute cardio quickie: Dance “The Carlton” It’s Not Unusual” along with a link this post.

“HA”, I exclaimed!!!

What did I do?  That’s right, I clicked on the link!  I then watched and proceeded to… ehhem… I mean, attempted to do “The Carlton” along with the video!  Yes, it definitely gave me an enormous energy boost for what had been a dull day up to that point.  Thanks Stephanie!!!

It also gave me the inspiration to do this Nomad Challenge Dance Week.  I’d already been planning on blogging about the WhereTheHellIsMatt videos for a while now, and once I saw “The Carlton” I realized that there are a couple other videos I would also like to share, so why not make it a week-long event!

Who says Twitter is a waste of time?!

Without further adieu, I give you part two of Dance Week, The Carlton!

Matt Harding’s “Dancing 2006″ (The 2nd video)

I think this is really the natural choice to lead off Dance Week here at Nomad Challenge.  Many of you are perhaps already familiar with Matt Harding and his worldwide dancing videos on his website Where The Hell Is Matt?.  Simply genius stuff!  Here’s my perspective.

Ironically, I first heard of his videos a couple years ago while traveling.  I was sitting at an airport terminal waiting for a flight and Matt was being interviewed on the television that was at the gate shortly after his second trip around the world, this time paid for by his sponsor, Stride Gum.  Well, since I enjoy travel and have been known on occasion (read: all the time) to be a really bad dancer (and not afraid to show it), this really caught my eye.  I kept note of the interview in my mind and as soon as I got back home that night, I went to the website to check it out.

Instantly it became my favorite video on the internet (still is).  I remember telling my roommate about it the next day and saying, “this guy beat me to it!” because this definitely seemed like something I would do!

Many people throughout the world have been inspired by Matt’s videos for all sorts of reasons.  And you can see many of his fans in his latest video he just completed this year.  Here are three ways in which I have drawn inspiration and put Matt’s website and his videos to good use:

1) I tend to do my best work early in the morning, so I would get up at around 5 am and watch this before I went for a run, worked out at the gym, or if I had some work or reading I wanted to do.  Watching this would help me wake up and get me pumped up to start the day.  (Honestly, I’ve since gotten out of the routine of doing this and I want to get back in the habit because it was really good!)

2) Similar to No. 1, if you dance along with the video, it is a good warmup to exercise and is quite fun too.  And if you are a bit strapped for time, you can dance to two of his videos back-to-back for a decent all-around quickie exercise!

3) When I first went to his website, took in the videos, read his story and the FAQs, this was really the first time I realized that seeing the world wasn’t so much of a far-fetched fantasy that I previously believed.  This really helped to get the ball rolling for me, so thanks, Matt!

While these are good, there are many other ways in which people find inspiration in Matt’s videos.  What are some of yours?

Please feel free to share your thoughts about the videos in the comments below.

Question: Did anybody in Australia notice a sudden dramatic climate change overnight?

I always considered geography to be one of my strongest subjects, but last time I checked, Australia was in the southwest Pacific, and there was no large land mass in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean (let’s put aside those Atlantis and pole shifting theories here for the moment).  I know there is a lot of talk about global warming, shifting weather patterns and climate change, but seeing this on Google Earth this afternoon made me think, albeit momentarily, that perhaps we need to update the Plate Tectonic Theory?

The first imagery that appeared after upgrading to the latest version of Google Earth.

OK, no need to be alarmed. I’ll explain.

Here’s the situation: I noticed a Tweet this afternoon from a new Twitter follower @AngelWickenberg that mentioned how to track Hurricane Gustav on Google Earth.  It peaked my interest so I decided to open up the program and check it out.

Since I was on my older desktop PC that I don’t use as often, I had to upgrade to the latest version of Google Earth.  After the upgrade was complete and I opened the program, that image above shows what came up.  Zooming in a little bit, sure enough, that was Australia sitting there in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean!

A closer view of Australia in the middle of the Atlantic

Eventually when you zoom in further, it became normal again.

My first thought was, this could be a funny thing to blog about.  Now that Australia is in the middle of the Atlantic, that would cut down my travel costs back and forth to the East Coast of the U.S. considerably!  Yay lower fares!

Quickly I realized, however, that this was a transparent view of the Earth, and that what looked like Australia sitting in the middle of the Atlantic, was actually the “bottom” of the Land Down Under.  Notice Tasmania is on the left of Oz, as if we were looking at a mirror or transposed image.  Still pretty cool though if you ever wanted to find out where one would end up if they drilled a hole all the way through the center of the Earth!

Back to normal!

OK, I know I am making a bigger deal out of this than is probably warranted, but I thought it would be fun to blog about!  Afterall, this is the start of a fun week here at Nomad Challenge.  That’s right, I have officially proclaimed this week as “Dance Week” on this website.  Be sure to come back often or you will miss out on all the fun!

—

P.S. On a more serious note, the people of Louisiana and everyone else that has been affected by Hurricane Gustav are in my thoughts today.  I know quite a few people in the New Orleans and Lafayette areas of Louisiana so I hope they are all safe.  It looks like the eye may have gone right through Lafayette, one of my favorite regular travel stops during my previous job.  Here is a picture of that Google Earth imagery with the Gustav data and radar.

Hurricane Gustav in Google Earth