Take a movie scene, add a completely inappropriate soundtrack, and ruin the scene:

Well, ripersnifler might have just turned 2001 into the greatest music video, but you get the idea. It started on Something Awful, Kottke has a few more, and YouTube has them all.

The Mets are having a contest to see what song should play during the 8th inning in the final season at Shea Stadium. It is your duty as an internet denizen to write-in Never Gonna Give You Up - Rick Astley. Voting ends at noon on April 7th, so act quickly and be part of history in the making.

Until recently, Arnel Pineda was best known as the lead singer of Filipino band The Zoo. Their first album, Zoology released last month in the United States, but the video of the band started popping up on YouTube almost a year ago.

Most notable are the band’s faithful covers of classic rock band Journey. So notable, in fact, that Journey guitarist and founder Neil Schon was so struck by the performances that he immediately contacted Pineda to audition for the band.

Happy ending? On December 5, 2007, Pineda was announced as the lead singer of Journey.

Neil Schon says:

We feel reborn. I think there’s a lot of chemistry between the five of us. At first we were going to go into the studio and just write 4 songs, but now it’s escalated to a lot of great new and diverse material. The stuff sounds tremendous. Everyone’s so stoked about it. We feel very fortunate to have found Arnel.

Can anyone say Rock Star?

Wired.com reports:

Earlier this week, YouTube pulled the plug on funnyman and media artist Santeri Ojala, whose hilarious and popular “shredding” videos poke fun at the world’s great guitar players.

Three complaints of copyright infringement were reported, and as per how YouTube deems a “repeat offender”, YouTube took the videos down. Intrepid businessmen that they are, Wired is now hosting all the videos on its Wired Video site.

Anyway, Ojala poked fun by dubbing his own bad guitar playing over videos of the guitar greats, from Yngwie Malmsteen with Japan’s Philharmonic to Steve Vai live in Denver. Somehow, that loses its oomph after the first one or two examples; popular these “Shredded to a Pulp” videos may have been, but their deletion is not such a loss for humor lovers.

Luckily, has yet to yell at YouTube to take down the John Petrucci Psycho Exercises:

A year ago (I don’t know how I missed this), a few videos made their way onto YouTube of Michael Cera and Ellen Page improvising on guitar and vocals. The inspiration for this was, of course, the film Juno, in which the two end the show with a lovely rendition of “Anyone Else But You” by The Moldy Peaches. I was going to write about the decline of modern civilization as a result of Microsoft’s inevitable buyout of Yahoo!, but that can wait.

In descending order of Ellen Page cuteness (she’s tied with Erin McKean for #1 Star Crush):

“Anyone Else But You” from Juno:

Singing about director Jason Reitman:

Singing about writer Diablo Cody (“you’re so effin’ cool, wish I was like you in school, I would have won most likely to conquer the world while being the hottest girl”):

And lastly, Ellen singing about Michael, and Michael…saying a line about Ellen:

I mean, it’s really Ellen on lyrical improv while Michael chops it up on guitar. Which is fine by me.

Internet meme of the moment: Dramatic prairie dog

Runner up:

(Yes, anything that keeps me from having to post about the iPhone is a good thing. Go to every single other blog on the internet for that.)

There is no better way to describe this: Amazing Japanese Kids Horrify Johnny Depp with Nightmarish Pirate Circus Techno Performance. (via reddit)

For those who have not heard, the big news in this arena is that the RIAA is suing YouTube. Probably not true, but they are at least taking action to have content removed from YouTUbe. Afterdawn.com reports the reasoning behind this as YouTube’s harboring of “unlicensed music videos, much of which is coming from MTV broadcasts…posted onto the site.” (example of letter sent by YouTube after removal of content at the RIAA’s behest).

I know this post is beating a dead horse, but I feel inclined to make it; some people are passionate about politics, I’m passionate about the stupidity of failing music associations.

This marks another in a long line of irrational moves by the RIAA. As much as their previous actions have been public relations nightmares, this in particular is an immense blunder. The music video is an object of pure advertising. A music video’s sole purpose of existing is to be viewed by as many people as possible in an attempt to instill within those people to buy music by the artist. Perhaps a few music videos are shot for artistic reasons, but given the financial and temporal investments, the overwhelming majority are there to make money. (Thus, MTV is generally just a collection of advertisements in one form of another; a rather good business plan if you asked me.) The only difference I can imagine between regular advertisements and music videos is that television stations like MTV and VH1 buy the rights to play the videos from the record labels. If this is true, then the RIAA is potentially losing money by having the videos on YouTube without any rights being bought.

Still, I have to wonder how much money could be made by the buying of such rights. Is it really reasonable to assume the videos are made to be sold to television channels? No, of course not. That would require exorbitant prices, since some videos are shown only a few times on one channel, or not even at all, and I don’t see this all working itself out like it does in the movie business (failed movies are acceptable since successful movies are so profitable). However, that does not eliminate the possibility of even a small charge to buy the rights. This may amount to a substantial number, but is it significant compared to the money the record label hopes to make by having the video viewed? I bet not.

So, if all my reasoning works is backed by real life, then why ask YouTube to remove music videos? Sure, the content is technically copyrighted and posting that content without permission infringes on those copyrights, but who cares? Interesting commercials find their way onto YouTube all the time without any uproar from the respective product’s companies. Shouldn’t the RIAA be happy for the free publicity its artists are gaining? If anyone should be upset, it is the music video channels who are being relegated to “just another way to see these videos” status. Maybe Viacom (owner of MTV, BET, VH1, and CMT) is in cahoots with the RIAA, forcing them to force YouTube to remove the videos, but I’m not going to get into conspiracy theories.

The bottom line is this move by the RIAA isn’t even arguably an almost, somewhat, kinda okay move. One could argue the RIAA’s never ending string of suits brought against unsuspecting downloaders has some sort of scare-tactic logic behind it, but this YouTube business is just nonsensical. I hope the RIAA realizes it might be better not to spend all its time inventing new ways to alienate its consumer base before it’s too late.