Don’t quit your day jobs
Look at how prolific I am this week! And despite all my tennis watching! Not to mention the need to work for a living. I know only three people will be interested in this, but I ask you, how many people will be interested in staring at yesterday’s post for another day? If you are, by all means go ahead. And should you have anything else to say about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, feel free to go back and comment on the last post. But for anyone interested in either tennis or people making fools of themselves, I present you with the Worst of Roland Garros Karaoke. Actually, it was all the worst. Believe me, I sat through fifteen videos so you wouldn’t have to. It was a lot like the Gong Show. Some players got the “next” button hit fairly quickly. I left out the ones you’ve never heard of (I liked Novak Djokovic best but, although he’s in the semi-finals, there will only be those three of you who care).
Naturally, French players got a lot of space but only one of their karaoke vids was J-Ball worthy. And although there was a fun parody of the movie “Amelie” with Amelie Mauresmo, it’s all in French so I could only snicker and not guffaw. I hate when I just know something’s funny but can’t really be sure what.
OK, on to the videos! Keep in mind that several of these people seem to have no clue as to the words – did they not provide them with lyrics? And the two goofy guys in white are the back-up singers. They come with the karaoke machine, I guess. (Sorry the videos aren’t available on RSS feed but I’m not dealing with YouTube here. Come on over!)
Here’s Rafael Nadal doing La Bamba. I’m thinking he heard this song for the first time ten minutes earlier.
And here’s Lleyton Hewitt, just like I like him, looking stupid. I think they made everything in the room white, including everyone’s clothes, to make Lleyton look less albino.
Here’s Serena Williams. She only seemed to want to dance. Poorly.
Without a doubt, the most fun guy on the tour is Fabrice Santoro. I’m bizarrely mesmerized by his rendition of this song.
And here’s my favorite, Sweet Kim Clijsters who is now retired. I wish I could have retired at 23. This is from last year.
Honorable mention goes to Roger Federer doing “Simply the Best” (very appropriate but too slow to load what with all our short attention spans) and John McEnroe’s “Born in the USA.” I guess “I’m an Obnoxious Blowhard” wasn’t available. You can see all these, Novak Djokovik’s bare chest, Gaël Monfils and the Jackson Two, and lots more at France3’s Un jour à Roland.
I can not believe you didn’t post the Roger Federerer one. He is number one on your Google list isn’t he?
Poor Roger. It’s okay, I’ll comfort him.
Please explain the presence of the washing machine.
Or, at least explain to me why, after watching these people lip synch and gyrate and generally make idiots of themselves for the camera, my only question is why they did so in a closet with a washing machine.
It’s sad that Roger Federer doesn’t get more attention, yes.
Oh Sarpon, as if I could explain anything in those videos!
This is, beyond a doubt, the most surreal tennis/video/blogging experience I’ve ever had.
I think I suffered a small stroke watching Rafael.
I was totally amused by the background dudes opening the door at exactly the right part of “My Heart Will Go On.”
Excellent, Arjewtino, my work here is done.
Soxy, yes! I think that was the most brilliant moment in any of the videos.
yeah I’m sure you don’t care about this but I logged onto your page at 12:40 am (CST) the night you posted this and half of the page came up, then I hit refresh and it all went away. I must have clicked at the moment you were uploading or something.
Well, *I* thought it was interesting.
Well, I know this won’t surprise a lot of people, but I care a lot! As a matter of fact, I saw you. Well, I saw someone was there and I hoped they hadn’t seen it because I knew it would be confusing. Oops.
Warning, this is way more info than you or anyone will need, but here’s a little insight on how this place is run:
I test my posts on multiple browsers. At home I have Firefox for Mac and Safari. At work I have Firefox for Windows and Internet Explorer. Between the two computers and their browsers, I get a handle on how my posts will appear. This design is liquid, which means that it will look different based on a million things. You can resize your browser and see how the boxes and the text and pictures within them shift. When a post is very long, as this one is, it’s especially important, because the post containers can only stretch to a certain size and will break into two parts if the text & graphics take up too much space. Make this window very narrow and you’ll be able to see that for yourself.
So this post looked fine on FF, but Safari uses a different method of embedding the videos into the posts and so they were too large and “broke” the container. Once I saw that, I had to quickly take the post down to figure out how to fix it. (Hint to other bloggers: FF uses the “object” tag and Safari uses the “embed” tag.) Oh, and once I got into work that morning I saw that IE had just one extra line which also broke the container. But that took just a second to fix.
To sum up, once I publish a post I usually catch something that has gone wrong, either in the formatting or a typo I missed or that I use the word “really” way too much. So the post you see as soon as I publish it will often change 4 or 5 times in the next half hour. Which is why it’s good that I tend to write in the middle of the night and bad that you’re in a different time zone than I am.
“As a matter of fact, I saw you.”
(covering built-in camera with a little piece of paper) 😀
Well, I think it’s neat that you care and that you provided an explanation. It shows that you are 1) a good person, and 2) that you are dedicated to this blog! Thank you for both.
Actually, it just shows that I am utterly obsessed with the way this place looks. It’s a sickness, I tell you.
PS, that outfit looks good on you.
Also, your comment from the Amazon post ended up in my spam bin, I don’t know why, but I released it from purgatory.
Thanks. Yeah, pajamas have a way of flattering my figure and highlighting my skin tone …
😉
P.S. My oldest son has taken to updating me about Roger Federererer like two or three times a day. Do you think he’s seen my comments on the JBall?
I think now that the French Open is over, the updates will stop. But it’s only a couple of weeks till Wimbledon, so there’s that.