In the last 20 months or so the world has been remarkably chaotic. The US Presidential election and the Covid 19 pandemic and subsequent politicizing of it, as well as the wars around the world there was a lot of news and little good. In the before times I would spend a couple hours each evening watching news and/or opinion shows. But by April of 2020 the anxiety it produced was too much. At the time we also had lockdowns so sports shut down for a while (I actually spent time watching marble racing and NASCAR drivers doing E-racing) but the savior was YouTube. While Dianne and I did catch up on some movies we missed and a few released to streaming services YouTube became a bit of a savior. In part because there were show length programs but also a few minute videos that could serve as a slight bit of entertainment without an investment of lots of time. This came in handy while working at home, after a particularly bad or tense meeting or phone call it was great to walk into the other room and be mindless for 5-7 minutes of escape and get back. What I found was a world of wonderful things I was surprisingly ignorant of and wanted to know. So here are a few.
The first thing you learn about YouTube is just how long 5 seconds is...you know or you don't.
Herons: Our pond near the house is home to a number of herons at various times. I love those majestic birds and so does Dianne. It is always cool to watch them pull small fish out of the pond to eat. Well there is a whole category on YouTube of Herons eating and small fish are just an appetizer. I had no idea that that they eat fish up to 20% of their body weight. But also rats, gophers, chipmunks, baby ducks, (sometimes not so baby baby ducks) snakes, frogs, alligator babies, and all kinds of other things. They are skilled hunters on water or land and will snatch animals out of their underground lairs. It is amazing. Watching them swallow a large rodent is remarkable and could be the stuff of art or nightmares.
Cows: There is a man in southwest Scotland named Graeme Parker known as the Hoof GP who travels the area in Scotland and England visiting farms and trimming cow hoofs. I didn't know that was a thing. His videos are remarkably educational about the care of the animals he trims and sometimes attempts to heal of damage or disease of the hoofs. While I guess it makes sense that cows, especially on large farms where cows are kept indoors a lot, that cows aren't going to naturally keep their hoof horn trimmed and cleaned properly but it was amazing to me how much you can learn from him. His love of the job, the countryside, the act of farming and the animals comes out strong and he hit 1 million subscribers today after about 5 years of posting.
Sovereign Citizens: I can't post a link for these guys because I don't want to give them traffic. There are people, in the US and other Western Democracies, that declare themselves sovereign and the law of the land doesn't apply to them. They use misinterpretations of court cases and historical documents to declare themselves not under the authority of the legal system. They have even in some cases created their own language and declare their legal names are not theirs. It is amazing what these people believe and they spend a great deal of time taunting legal authority from police and sheriff personnel to judges and DAs when they are finally arrested and brought to trial. In some cases they pretend to have legal documents from their friends claiming they have legal authority. Often they pretend to be lawyers saying that they don't have to be admitted to the bar to practice on behalf of someone else. FYI: Judges don't put up with that.
1st Amendment Auditors: Closely related to the sovereign citizen movement are so-called first amendment auditors. These are people who seem to chosen a vocation of trying to provoke people by filming in public from what they would say is a public property. Filming in public is legal in many places but they do it in a way to provoke fear. Like filming outside a corrections facility or government office or filming inside a courthouse or other municipal building. When approached by police they often are rude and insulting and sometimes belligerent. While testing the 1st amendment could be an admirable thing most of these YouTube heroes don't understand the limits of the amendment and often run afoul of the law by crossing the line. Their intent is to provoke in the hopes of suing.
YouTube Itself: Ann Reardon is an Australian food scientist and dessert making with a popular YouTube channel called How to Cook That. She will teach on the channel how to make funky cakes and such but what I was interested in was her debunking videos. She spends a great deal of time debunking wild viral videos about cooking. Many of these videos show fantastic results from simple things you can do. The heavily edited videos, for example showing adding Skittles to popcorn as it pops will make rainbow popcorn, will not work and while entertaining to watch can even be dangerous. People have been seriously hurt following some of the video ideas. Reardon shows how these are made by massive operations that post same or similar videos across several platforms and accounts to gain revenue. While YouTube has rules against some of this behavior the click bait generated has gain them awards from YouTube. This often leads to real individual content providers with innovative and instructive videos are often pushed off the platform as the algorithms promote the fake stuff over them.
These are a few of the things that caught my attention over the course of the last 20 months or so. I am sure there are much more. What is great for me is learning there are things I knew almost nothing about and finding out more has been a delight. I will never trim a cow's hoof nor likely create a content rich YouTube channel but I love learning about the inner workings of those things. It is amazing the vast amount of stuff I don't know and rarely encounter. So I am glad to have stumbled into what at first was a mindless endeavor to be truly educated and perhaps the connections will take me to new places.
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