Gratitude Monday: Shaking it off

Here’s what I’m grateful for today: a dash-cam video that’s gone viral, as they say: a Dover, Delaware, cop on patrol, getting jiggy with Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”. He's now #DashCamDiva.

I was a little worried about the parts where Officer Jeff Davis has both hands off the wheel, but apparently no animals or anyone else was harmed in the making of this video.

What particularly appealed to me was when Davis went all “cool-cop pro” when he motioned someone to cross in front of him, and then got back into the groove when the coast was clear. This is indeed a man who knows his Swift—he doesn’t bungle one syllable that I can tell, and he’s got all the music-appropriate hand gestures that anyone can have behind the wheel.

Yeah, it was staged, and yeah, I hope to God perps or other passengers are not subject to that sort of thing in the normal course of events, because if they are, I see lawsuits in Dover’s future. But what fun.

Seriously—if you can watch this without a gigantic grin on your face, I do not want to be riding with you anywhere.

Light matters

On this Gratitude Monday before Christmas, I’m really grateful for the people who go a little cuckoo in the holiday lights/yard decoration department.

No, I’m not talking about the ones who spend tens of thousands of dollars to have professional light-decorators come in or any of that nonsense. I mean the folks who put up their grazing deer and inflated snowmen in their yards and run strings of lights along the eaves of their houses.

Well, okay—some of them are a little OTT, but I think those represent year-on-year accumulation of the Grinch, Mickey, Yoda and Muppets. And Christmas is definitely the season where you get a free pass from the aesthetics police.

Here are some of my favorites from this year from here in the Valley They Call Silicon.

You may recall my surprise at finding Target selling a Christmas Pig, wondering who might find them worthy of purchase. Well, I found out: someone in Palo Alto:

But if you look closely, you’ll discover that this pig has already been partying pretty hard; he’s lost one of his ears. Oh, dear.

Then there’s the ever popular Christmas pink flamingo:

Not far from me, there are several houses on a street that have their lights flashing in synch with a local FM radio station. I don’t know that I find all that flash all that attractive, but one yard had a tree that cycled through several color iterations, and I quite liked that:

Well, you get the drift.

On another of my walking routes, I got a kick out of this snowman listing a bit. Maybe he was at the same party as the Palo Alto pig.

Snowflakes are apparently trending this year. I found strings of them in both LED and regular lights

Well, you can see that there’s a lot to keep someone like me amused, and I’m grateful for that.

I’m also grateful that—so far—no one’s called the cops on me as I prowl their neighborhoods, taking photos like I’m casing the joint.

Sunny side of unemployment

Y’all know what a sucker I am for a flash mob. Here’s one at an unemployment office in Madrid:

Trying to picture anything like this in a red state…

Idiocy is as idiocy does

Well, I don’t know about the creative sentencing involved in this story, but I have to agree that Shena Hardin is an idiot. An arrogant, self-absorbed, reckless SUV-driving cretin.

But I suppose all that wouldn’t fit on a sign, unless she’s an exceptionally large arrogant, self-absorbed reckless SUV-driving cretin.

Drama in the town square

Here’s a different sort of flash mob for your entertainment, courtesy of my friend the Pundit's Apprentice.

Well—more street theatre than flash mob. But still—mixing it up for the Belgians, who don’t ordinarily get a whole lot of excitement in their town squares.

Ritz à la Russe

If I had a bucket list, I believe I’d have “be part of a flash mob” in the top third. I recently received links to a couple, via my friend the Pundit’s Apprentice. Here’s the first: “Puttin’ on the Ritz”, in Moscow.

Now, leaving aside the fact that the video editing on this sucks, there are a couple of things I find interesting about this.

The number & variety of digital devices that are being used to record the event. Even a few tablets. I'm thinking that the recording is an integral part of these things.

Then there's he curious incident of the bride & groom. Hard to determine whether or not they were intended to be part of it—the two of them left standing at the end tends to indicate that they weren’t.

But I bet they’ll remember this day for a long, long time.

Also, if this video goes viral, I’m betting that bridezillas all over the country are going to demand a flash mob at their receptions.