Zombies in a small world

Today I ended up sitting next to a young Japanese guy who I had never met before. It turns out I am Facebook friends with his father, though. That was a somewhat surprising coincidence.

Next, someone swallowed a two meter long balloon (because that is just the kind of thing that people in Japan do). The explanation given was: "You just have to learn self-control while swallowing", and people started talking about just brute endurance stunts. It was mentioned that I sometimes hammer a nail into my nose. This guy sitting next to me then said that he had stumbled upon a YouTube clip of someone looking like a zombie doing just that. That is my YouTube clip showing me hammering a nail into my nose. Small world. He did not say how he happened to stumble upon my clip.

So naturally, I also showed a photo of my Halloween outfit this year. He was surprised again, and showed me a photo in his cell phone. The photo shows me and his girlfriend. Who I also do not know, but who apparently attended the same Halloween party that I went to, and was one of many people there taking a photo with me. Which she had sent to her boyfriend, who sent it to me tonight when we ended up sitting next to each other. Sapporo feels small, but actually has a higher population than the capital of Sweden... where things like this never happened to me.

Not so much to blog about

Recently I have a) had too much work to do, and b) have a cold, so I have not really done anything interesting in two weeks or so. When at home and sick, I did watch a lot of YouTube clips though. So here are two that fit together and are both very nice:

The first shows Jean-Claude Van Damme doing his famous split, between two moving trucks (and Volvo used to be a Swedish company, so there's that too!).

The second is a parody of the first, starring Channing Tatum.

OK, back to work...

Extreme Ping-Pong in Sweden

I recently found some funny clips on YouTube with the Tumba Ping Pong Show, which seems to be a Swedish group performing "extreme ping-pong". They are really funny, and the videos are well made (good looking special effects). They also have the Tumba Ping Pong Show Web site. Their YouTube videos are highly recommended! :-)

Sweden actually used to be very strong in "normal" ping-pong, and managed to take lots of medals in various sport events. Nowadays I do not think there are any world class players, but Asian people still talk to me about Jan-Ove Waldner. Another strong player was Jörgen Persson.

YouTube transcripts are funny

I recently noticed that YouTube automatically creates transcripts for uploaded videos. If you click on the transcript button, you get a box with text that highlights in real time the sentence that you are (possibly) saying at each time. This is pretty cool, though the speech recognition is automatic so there are some mistakes.

I recently uploaded a video where I do a magic trick while talking Japanese and noticed the transcript button. The transcription is almost complete nonsense, haha. But I guess this could be because I am not a native speaker, so my Japanese pronunciation and my use (abuse?) of the language could be too weird for the system to handle.「好きかなぁ」（"suki kanaa", "that I like") became 「スキーカバー」("sukii kabaa", "a cover for your pair of skis").

I checked a video with one of my Japanese friends speaking Japanese. His Japanese should be good enough. There are lots and lots of weird things there too, haha. 「安値は約14万円を要しました」

This made me check lots of my other YouTube videos. They are all full of strangeness. One of them is mistakenly transcribed as if it was English, despite almost all of it being Japanese.