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!

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Nouvelle Vague - Blue Monday (originally by New Order)

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.

And a real chick in the middle.

During St. Patrick’s Day @ Dublin.

I mentioned in this blog how to make green beer a few days ago. And then while we were wandering around Dublin during St. Patrick’s Day we happened to enter The Church where they were actually selling it. So of course I had to try, right?

A €15 single ticket and about €20 return ticket from Galway to Dublin was quite a good deal already. Quite cheap for a trip of more than 200Km. The worst part was the huge amount of time it took. Since the bus stopped in a lot of small towns, it took it at least 3 and a half hours, and it could be as long as 5 hours.

Well, just recently (9th of March, apparently) Gobus started offering a new non-stop service that's supposed to take only 2h45m. That would be good news in itself, but to make it even better this new service includes free Wifi! The trips just became a lot less boring! And to make it even better, the price came down as well: only €10 (it's a flat rate, though). I haven't used the service yet (I didn't know about it when I went to Dublin for St. Patrick's), but I'll surely try it the next time I go to the capital.

And what happens when such a compelling service comes into the market? The competitors have to respond to it in order not to lose all their customers. And that's what Citylink did by starting a campaign with €5 tickets to both Dublin City and Dublin Airport. It's an offer with limited availability and bookings have to be made in advance and on their website. Only 5€ for a 200Km trip? That's insanely cheap!

Hooray for competition!

This past weekend I had the first of what I hope to be many visitors while I’m in this rainy land full of beer and short skirts. Said visitor was my neighbor and childhood friend, Ricardo, who can actually confirm the existence of lots of beer and short skirts. He can’t testify about the rainy part though, as he was lucky enough to find a fairly mild weather (although if you ask him he’ll say it was really cold and quite unpleasant…).

As the visit was quite short (just the weekend, plus Monday), the initial plan was staying in Galway and doing a couple of those tourist trips to the main attractions this side of Ireland has to offer, namely the Cliffs of Moher, the Aran Islands and Connemara. And the nights would be spent in the numerous pubs and nightclubs around here. Sounds like a good plan, right?

I now realize that the plan had a flaw: not a lot of time to sleep was scheduled… Add that to the fact that the trips start at 10am, and what you get is 2 missed trips, Saturday and Sunday.

Friday night we started with The King’s Head (for some live music) and then headed to Halo (which is supposed to be the fancier nightclub around here) and that made it impossible to wake up early.

Saturday was then spent basically by sleeping in the morning, then going for a stroll around town for an hour or two (enough to see most of it), and heading for the pub at 5pm to watch Ireland’s match for the 6 Nations tournament, which ended with an historic win for Ireland. Dinner at home and then another nightclub, CP.

Sunday: waking up late. Again! Crap! Just had time to wander around the house like a zombie for some time and then starting to prepare the Portuguese dinner. For dinner the other Portuguese people I know in Galway were invited and we enjoyed a few delicacies brought by Ricardo from Portugal. After dinner? Pubs, of course. This time we decided to do a bit of a pub-crawling: The Quays, Busker Brownes, Front Door and Róisín Dubh. No more, because Monday was the last chance to go for a trip, and we really didn’t want to miss it.

The chosen trip was the one to the Cliffs of Moher and the Burren. A 10am-to-5pm tour that took us through a few nice places, and also managed to irreversibly damage our backs, due to all the bumping around the crappy countryside roads. But more details and pictures will come in another post. At night, and despite Ricardo’s complaints that he was very tired, I insisted we visited some more pubs. So we went to Taaffe’s for some live Irish music and the night ended at The King’s Head, where we listened to the same guys I saw there some time ago.

That was about it. A quite intense weekend, that was balanced by the fact that there’s not a lot to see in Galway city and so we could just stay at home and sleep on those days that we missed the tours.

I’m now waiting for the next visitors.

This should be very interesting for those who have the fetish of hooking up with a flight attendant (every single guy?). Edita Schindlerova, who works from Ryanair’s base in Stansted, has an unusual hobby. The 22 year old from Czech Republic is a movie star in her free time. Her screen name is Edita Bente and she participates in adult movies. As an actress. True story!

According to The Sun (watch out for some NSFW content), a Ryanair spokesman said that what she does after hours has nothing to do with when she’s thousands of feet above the ground: “What people do before or after they work for us is their business”.

I bet that from now on a lot of people will be really excited whenever they fly through Stansted. I would like to see statistics on the new bookings on the Stansted – Brno route…

Anyway, if you’re expecting some pictures or videos, I won’t post them here. This is a serious blog after all. (Hint: just Google her name…)

Edita is also part of Ryanair’s 2009 Calendar, as the face (and everything else) for February: