One Direction get animated

If you’re a One Direction fanatic, their sole album really isn’t enough to keep you satisfied. A pro animator has filled the gap — but it’s with a video you might not care for.

“The Adventurous Adventures of One Direction,” apparently created by Mark Parsons, the lead animator of the TV series Archer, features the five lads in the Anglo-Irish boy band fighting evil in quasi-superheroic garb, taking orders from a remote and possibly artificial Simon Cowell, their real-life manager. Along the way, they dress in drag, engage in slap fights among themselves and generally look slightly foolish.

It’s far from savage satire; the cartoon everything from the band to their songs to cartoon heroics in general are taken rather lightly, which may explain why an 18-minute video has nonetheless garnered a quarter-million views in a day.

Toddlers fight at ballet recital

Going to the ballet used to be such a refined affair. But that wasn't the case for the parents and spectators at a recent recital, who were forced to witness violence onstage as a fight erupted between two ballerinas. OK, so the "violence" consisted of a few pokes and pushes, and the fighters were both toddlers. And it didn't seem to disrupt the other dancers, who carried on jumping and twirling to the strains of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." According to the YouTube user who posted the clip online, this was the first recital for the 2-year-old diva, identified as Freya. (She's the smaller of the two pint-size pugilists.)

After wandering around onstage during the recital, Freya strays a little too close to a fellow dancer. A fight of sorts ensues, and eventually a couple of the teachers have to separate them. The video has been viewed nearly 600,000 times and counting. Check it out for yourself: Mean Girls in the making?

Neil Gaiman and Laurie Anderson, class acts in the arts

It’s about that time of year, where students — if they’ve taken care of their end of the bargain — get to hear convocation speakers. At University of Toronto, former mayor David Miller and MLSE chair Larry Tanenbaum are among those getting honours and a podium. In less fortunate places, students had to settle for the likes of Neil Gaiman and Laurie Anderson.

Clips of the latter duo are both gaining attention online. Gaiman, who never attended university, advises London’s University of the Arts graduates of the importance of persevering and continuing to create, ignoring the distractions of both successes and failures. He also passed along a lesson he says he learned in comics, about the real standards for freelancers:

“You get work however you get work, but people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of today’s world is freelance), because their work is good, because they are easy to get along with and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three! Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. People will forgive the lateness of your work if it is good and they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.”

Gaiman confessed to lying to comics editors to get his earliest writing gigs in that field, and Anderson tells a comparable story to graduates of Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts (her alma mater) about teaching Egyptian architecture in night classes and just making up facts when unfamiliar slides showed up. She quotes Karl Rove, and recounts working for NASA, among other patrons, but warns: “No one will ever ask you to do the thing you really want to do . . .  just think of what you’d like to do, what you dream of doing, and just start doing it.”

Anchorman 2's second "teaser" feeds the hype

For a movie that's still more theoretical than real, the excitement about Anchorman 2 is remarkable. And it's been carefully fed by Will Ferrell with moves like Monday's release of the second “teaser” for the film, which got half a million views on Funnyordie.com within hours.

The clip is little more than four lead actors from the original Anchorman — David Koechner, Paul Rudd, Ferrell and Steve Carell — explaining, in character, that the new movie will be great. This is empty (and possibly risky) talk, of course; no script is thought to exist yet for Anchorman 2, not one scene has been filmed and, while the teaser has those four actors and the original film's narrator, Bill Kurtis, Christina Applegate is absent.

Maybe the real creativity here is Ferrell's stoking of the hype, first by announcing the sequel in character on Conan and now with these clips.

Exclusive Anchorman 2 Teaser from Will Ferrell

Nirvana and a natural

The grunge generation grew up and started raising kids eventually (Kurt Cobain notably excepted, of course). So maybe this child (who has gotten the attention of Alan Cross among others) is just one of thousands whose parents use Nirvana songs to wake them. What’s amusing is how he reacts.

As a European couple drives through the countryside they turn a camera on their son, 3, asleep in the backseat. Then, they put a song on the stereo: not moppet music, but Nirvana’s “Breed,” track four from Nevermind. He responds not just by waking but launching into a reasonably thunderous air-drumming session before he even opens his eyes.

Within rock bands the phrase “a born drummer” isn’t always a term of praise, but it’s clearly positive and applicable here. It’s like “David After Dentist” with a better backbeat.

 

Little Grace busts a move

This toddler can really groove. Sitting in a carseat on a trip, little Grace gets into the music as Gotye's "Somebody that I Used to Know" plays in the vehicle. As a parent records, the little girl closes her eyes, waves her arms and shimmies to the break-up ballad. Her little blond ponytails bounces as she bops and shakes her head to the music. She seems completely into it, until, in typical toddler fashion, her attention is diverted by something she spots out the window. Grace's moves have already captivated Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb on the Today show. Gotye's hit song has been covered by the likes of the Glee cast and closer to home by Burlington band Walk off the Earth

.

Harvard baseball team covers 'Call Me Maybe'

Here’s a team-building exercise that has really taken off: A Harvard baseball team has joined the ranks of lip-synchers of Carly Rae Jepsen’s catchy single “Call me Maybe.”

The video, shot from the front seat of a passenger van, starts out slow. One teammate is fast asleep in the back row as his friends begin doing a co-ordinated dance. Keep watching, as the entire team gets in the act (except for the sleeping player, who seems oblivious to the whole thing).

The guys are having fun but you can’t tell by their serious expressions. Maybe they’re concentrating on the moves?

This video, viewed 866,000 times and counting, can be added to a long list of covers, lipdubs and homages to Canadian crooner Jepsen’s single, which has overtaken Justin Bieber's "Boyfriend" song on the U.K. charts.

Fellow Canadian Bieber has been instrumental to her success and his own cover version of her single certainly didn't hurt.

Coldplay's nod to MCA

The audience at Friday’s Coldplay concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles seems befuddled at first, if the crowd noise is any indication. Frontman Chris Martin begins a song with  alone, playing a simple, bittersweet piano line, but no one recognizes it. Then, a few seconds into the YouTube clip, Martin begins to sing:

“When you wake up late for school and you don’t want to go/ And you ask your mom ‘Please?’ and she still says ‘No’ . . . ” 

The audience’s audibly warm reception begins around then, as they realize that the superstar British band is paying tribute to late Beastie Boy Adam Yauch by making “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)” their own — as a melancholy, midtempo, but ultimately affecting song.

Coldplay weren’t alone Friday in remembering Yauch (alias MCA), who died that day. In Newark, N.J., the Red Hot Chili Peppers performed a snippet of the Beasties’ “So What’cha Want” and fun., in Washington, D.C., did a bit of “Sabotage.”

 

It wasn't limited to music: the New York Mets’ batters picked nothing but Beastie Boys songs for their walk-up music on Saturday (though, curiously, no one selected "Sure Shot"). Even better, perhaps, Yauch’s beloved New York Knicks put a memorial image of Yauch on the Madison Square Gardens Jumbotron on Sunday and proceeded to win their first playoff game in 11 years.