Flour Power

It’s often said that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”. And for people like Weird Al Yankovic and Richard Cheese, it’s also a hell of a good way to make loads of money and have a good laugh. Anyway, every once in a while I come across a great cover of a song I love, or a song that I like and only later find out that it’s a cover of some terribly (and sometimes also terrible) old song. So I decided to put together a list of some great covers found on Youtube. I focused on covers done by relatively well-known artists and the great covers made by the “average Joes” will possibly be featured in a future post.

So, without further ado, enjoy this list of 12 awesome music covers:

Korn – Creep (originally by Radiohead). If there is a song that has been “covered” a lot of times, that’s “Creep”. And this Korn acoustic version is amazing!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CREPw8Fl0qg

Nelly Furtado – Crazy (originally by Gnarls Barkley). Also try this video, you might not get the dreadful “This video is not available in your country.” message.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MuWXd_N_-s

Travis – Baby One More Time (originally by Britney Spears). It’s cool to see how a terrible song turns into something decent just by being playing differently.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NwqN-xj9Xs

KT Tunstall – I Want You Back (originally by The Jackson 5). KT Tunstall is like one-girl band.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xANiW9yWvGE

David Fonseca – Rocket Man (originally by Elton John). A great song (and also an impressive video) by this Portuguese artist.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icB6yOkphz8

John Frusciante – How Deep is Your Love (originally by Bee Gees).

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkqOPGXgkEk

Amnesiac Quartet – I Might Be Wrong (originally by Radiohead). And, as always, Radiohead’s video is sooo weird.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-790ehxSs20

Manic Street Preachers – Umbrella (originally by Rihanna). There’s a huge number of covers for this song. Take a look at this Youtube playlist.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JohzXpM-vkU

Alanis Morisette – My Humps (originally by Black Eyed Peas). Now this is a big change… And by the way, the video is a parody done as part of some Estonian video competition.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W91sqAs-_-g

Natasha Bedingfield – This Love (originally by Maroon 5).

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-LjlEyyjl4

The Kooks – Kids (originally by MGMT). Does anyone else think that MGMT’s videoclip is just… creepy?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBLT_Fxu6rk

Nouvelle Vague – Blue Monday (originally by New Order)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SpZXU61hCI

PS: Sorry for the low quality on some of the videos, but I keep being hit by the ”This video is not available in your country.” message.

I was going to write a whole post about the recent launches of Academic Earth and Youtube Edu, which aggregate thousands of free lectures from over a hundred universities (including MIT, Yale, Harvard and Stanford), but stumbled upon Lifehacker’s Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education, which mentions them along with a few more tools to get free online education:

• Teach yourself programming
• Get a personal MBA
• Learn to actually use Ubuntu
• Get started on a new language
• Trade your skills, find an instructor
• Academic Earth and Google EDU
• Teach yourself all kinds of photography
• Get an unofficial liberal arts major
• Learn an instrument
• Learn from actual college courses online

It turns out the internet is not only for tweets, quizzes, porn and lolcats, and there’s actually a lot of useful stuff around. I had no idea…

@ the Cliffs of Moher, Ireland

During St. Patrick’s Day @ Dublin.

Finally!

It sure took some time, but Facebook finally provides a way to hide applications from the News Feed. That means no more “Your ideal job”, “What color are you?”, “The True Age Test” or ”Who is your celebrity twin?”. No more ”Who would be your celebrity boyfriend?”, “What Kind of Woman Are You?” or “What Disney Princess Are You?”. My homepage will look much cleaner from now on.

All you need to do is click the “Hide” button on the top right corner of each “news story” to hide said application. You can also choose to hide all the stories from that person.

To get the hidden applications (and people) back to the news feed, just click the “Edit Options” on the bottom right of the News Feed.