Shocking YouTube Videos

Anyone with a smart phone or a secret agent spy pen or a $10,000 digital camera can shoot a YouTube video these days. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone who is recording your dead cat swinging in order to post it online.

Instead of turning on our 60" 3D plasma TVs and surfing 300 digital channels of entertainment, for some reason we prefer to point our browser at YouTube.com. We peruse 30 second clips of helmetless bikers leading with their face into sewer grates in public parks. We spend countless seconds of our lives sending each other links to shocking and horrifying videos that CBS, NBC, and Fox News cannot hope to compete with.

Here are just a few YouTube videos that will shock you from your keyboard down to your flip-flops. Read on, but be warned: we take no responsibility for what you are about to view. Your well-being, as well as your career path, are in your hands.

Back in 2009 a cadre of well-meaning computer geeks and nerds assembled in Carson California to exchange ideas regarding control systems. They didn't go outside and play. Instead of surfing or Hacky Sack or Nintendo, they spent their time in mind-numbingly boring hotel conference rooms in order to learn more about how computers can be used to control manufacturing processes.

I am as shocked as you are.

One brave soul, in a vain attempt to tell the real world about this activity, managed to record precisely 48 seconds of digital video before collapsing in boredom and being transported to the beach for volleyball therapy. We're not sure about the last part, but we do know that the recording does actually exist. Watch it at your own peril.

Note the intense concentration of the 3 or 4 people who attended the presentation. Watch in horror as the speaker rocks his button down long sleeve engineer shirt including what appears to be a pocket protector. No one will be seated during the References slide.

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People learn in many ways. A cyclist, for example, learns through first-hand experience that jamming his face into a sewer grate after executing a perfect endo over his handlebars tends to hurt for many months beyond the unfortunate incident. Other folks experience pain and education by submitting themselves to Fourier Transform lectures on YouTube.

What's a Fourier Transform, you ask? We know the answer, we answer, but explaining it here would contravene several anti-boredom laws and possibly cause your browser to crash. Suffice it to say that Fourier Transforms are to YouTube what root canals are to Spring Break.

This particular Fourier Transform lecture has been forever immortalized on YouTube, for some incomprehensible reason. Some unfortunate graduate student was obligated to point a video camera at the antics of Dr Chris, probably under threat of being banned from the slide rule table in the cafeteria.

Yes, this is an actual Fourier Transform example solved in real time on a real college whiteboard. You know that your math is higher when it takes over 8 minutes to solve one equation. In the real world, we can't be expected to spend 8 minutes waiting in line at Starbucks, let alone work a math problem.

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Evidently not much is happening in Eugene, Oregon these days. Someone tore themselves away from Oprah long enough to go outside and make a video describing how to harvest grass.

It's grass. It grows everywhere. It pushes up through cracks in the driveway. Does it actually need to be harvested?

Recoil in horror as a monstrous grass-harvesting machine trundles through the frame. Note the toxic cloud of allergens that engulfs unsuspecting motorists who were foolish enough to be driving to Starbucks during grass-harvesting season.

We were only able to watch it one time before our self-respect genes kicked in, but we gather that all 3:27 of the video was self-shot by a grass seed farmer who held his camera arms length. He probably couldn't afford a tripod, because, well, the harvester machine roaring past probably cost several gabillion dollars.

We don't know what a grass seed farmer actually looks like, but if we had to imagine a grass seed farmer, he would be our prototype. Obviously he is well-versed in the art and science of harvesting grass. He takes great pride in explaining every excruciating detail of the process, droning on well after his double-digit audience has keeled over from boredom.

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Sure, we face massive challenges in the post-industrial pre-apocalyptic world, but certainly making a pizza isn't one of them. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone driving past a grass harvest on their way to pick up a pizza that has been thoughtfully prepared for them by a trained professional. Even the bored engineers at Instrumentation 2009 took time out for delicious slices of pizza from the food court at the Carson, California Convention Center.

What, is Pizza Hut out of business? Has Papa John's closed their doors? Does Domino's refuse to deliver any more?

The 'chef' ladles out pizza sauce from a jar and cheese from a bag onto a rectangular bed fashioned from a frozen roll of dough. This is a pizza worthy of over two hundred and eighty thousand views? This is cooking?

We are shocked.

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Somewhere online is a human person who has everything all figured out. His (or her) mortgage is paid off, his garbage is at the curb, his recycling is neatly stacked and segregated. His dishwasher has been emptied and all the stray dogs in his neighborhood have been given pedicures.

We know this is true because no one else would be shockingly silly enough to compose a 28 second video of whatever this is.

Honestly, what time-wasting goofus would point his Motorola Milestone X720 at a bizarre solar-powered tchotchke and then tell the world about it? Doesn't he have some grass to harvest?

We conclude that there's something for everyone on YouTube. If you desire to be shocked and horrified, point your browser to YouTube.com and watch shocking and horrifying videos running the gamut from boring to incredibly boring.