Welcome to another edition of Free-for-all Friday here on Another Flavor! Friday is the day I let my mind (and eyes) wander to any subject (or open window) I choose.

I used to be a boy scout. In the boy scouts I won the Zero Hero award twice. This reward is very easy to earn. All you need to do is sleep outside when it is below zero degrees. In case you are reading this from a foreign (i.e. non- US, i.e. bad) location, yes, I mean below zero degrees Fahrenheit. So, based on my handy converter that is about -18 degrees Celsius, 255 degrees Kelvin, or 42 degrees Canadian. You could say I have an affinity for winter weather. I don’t think it’s true, but you could say it. No one is stopping you.

Anyway, I mention this because I live in Chicago and due to tropical storm Hercules we have been having some very wintry weather. I would estimate that, since Wednesday, we have received 10 inches of snow. For those of you not familiar with winter or snow, that isn’t hyperbole. Saying we got 58 inches of snow is hyperbole. Also, wouldn’t it be great if they changed the name of the Super Bowl to the Hyper Bowl? Write your congress-person to let them know.

It hasn’t been crazy cold (I believe it is 9 degrees right now. The real cold is coming Monday where the high is supposed to be -8 degrees.) but there is just so much snow! Why do I mention all this? Because I hate it! Snow is such a drag. I can deal with an inch or two, but this amount of snow has a real psychological effect on me. I think it affects all of us.

We can see these effects in music videos. Another Flavor is a blog about music videos! This is great!

Snow can cloud our judgment. (It also apparently makes me think that there should be an “e” between the “g” and “m” in judgment, but shouldn’t there be?) Look at this video for We Got Snow:

Leah Daniels apparently thinks of herself as a white Zooey Deschanel. She doesn’t have such a deep, distinctive voice though. She also has picked a real clunker to perform. Why, when doing old timey jazz stuff, does it seem appropriate to dress in old fashioned clothing? Do classical musicians wear powdered wigs? Do baroque harpsichordists poop dangerously close to their own drinking water supply? If not, then why do people doing 1920s-style music wear 1920s-style clothes?

Also, I don’t find this song very interesting. Do you think the director kept telling the background musicians to pretend to be happy and excited? They aren’t very good actors. I think their brains have all been addled by snow. Even to the point where they aren’t wearing particularly warm clothing. Crazy.

Snow can also make you lazy. I am reluctant to go outside unless absolutely necessary. Many people put off chores, and sometimes don’t even go into work just because of snow. The Red Hot Chili Peppers got extremely lazy when it came to their song Snow (Hey Oh):

It seems like this video just consists of some rehearsal/sound check shots, a few shots of a single live performance, and many shots of death row prison inmates just before their executions.

Those poor bastards.

This video seems to have been made entirely incidentally. I guess it shows the current (when I say current read it as 2006) attitude towards music videos. Apparently they aren’t very important and don’t need to be remotely interesting. If you are feeling lazy you can just hire a couple of college kids to film you for a day and edit it into a music video. The results just make me angry. Snow!

Also, did you know that song was called snow? I didn’t. I am amazed that Red Hot Chili Peppers had a repopularitying over 10 years after their original popularityness. It seems like every time John Frusciante is their guitar player they are super popular and every time their guitar player is Dave Navarro or some dead guy they have no hits. They need to do everything they can to keep that guy around. Otherwise they are just lazy people with bad songs. That’s a recipe for Trouble (yes, with a capital “T” that rhymes with “p” that stands for “pool”).

Finally, snow can make us extremely racist. Just ask a man so racist that he named himself Snow. Here’s his monster hit from his album hilariously named “12 Inches of Snow”:

There is nothing racist about being a white person playing reggae. Seriously, go for it! Be the second coming of UB40 for all I care. The problem comes from his use of the Jamacain accent/patois. This is just linguistic black face. Why would this ever be considered acceptable? This song was big in 1993! Just 21 years ago! Unbelievable.

On a non-snow-related, but black-face-related side note, check this out:

Specifically, this:

Man, what is wrong with people? Why can’t people just be themselves instead of pretending to be black, no matter how inherently hilarious all black people are? Terrible.

I’ll see you next week with more music video fun and hopefully less racism here on Another Flavor!

-PTD