It’s not quite Gangnam Style, but this video by Sister Deborah (her friends call her Derby) is pretty amazing. This is a song about Uncle Obama and his bananas, and her monkey. It’s an entertaining and simple song from the Ghanian artist, briefly featuring the FOKN Bois, whose own video Sexin Islamic Girls is pretty bananarotic.

Nina Paley created Sita Sings The Blues, IMHO the best modern retelling of the Ramayana. She’s been working on something covering Israel/Palestine/Canaan/The Levant, tentatively Seder-Masochism and the short film above is what she’s animated. It’s pretty great, kinda like a more historical Age Of War (the game). Basically a bunch of people killing each other, which becomes more illuminating with the hilarious viewer’s guide she’s written.

Australia are like the Yankees of cricket. Nobody likes them and they always win. Except tonight, wherein the West Indies thrashed them like a bunch of public school kids, Gangam Style. That was a vicious and amazing game with Chris Gayle paddling the Aussies like they were a canoe. The final run rate was an insurmountable 10 for a total of 205. Which, for 20 overs, is pretty insane. As much as I like to see Australia lose, for West Indies to win so dominantly is a bit terrifying. Sri Lanka will face them tomorrow, in the finals.

I just saw this music video by Macklemore, produced by Ryan Lewis. Both the music and video are really engaging and well produced, and deep and honest and true. It’s in support of the Music For Equality campaign, as the right of gay people to marry is spreading across the US. People all over the world are still struggling for the right to be gay at all, but marriage is an integral part of preserving families and relationships. I only hope that this, one of the last civil rights struggles, reaches Sri Lanka soon.

I’ve embedded video of the first US Presidential Debate above, but I can’t even watch it. It’s both painful and dull. Barack Obama is just boring and un-engaging to watch, like he doesn’t want to be there. It looks like he got in a fight with his wife on their anniversary. Seriously, what is going on. Mitt Romney comes off as comparatively more human. It’s honestly been like this since the Democratic convention, where Bill Clinton defended Obama coherently while Obama, again, was boring.

Far too often, people respond self-destructively to real issues. Take Muslims protesting against that film which truly did insult the Prophet Muhammad. The ensuing mob demonstrations gave cover to a terrorist attack in Libya and generally reinforced the Muslim rage illusion among people that were thinking that anyways. The Innocence Of Muslims was a film (trailer) designed to inflame tensions and bring out the worst in people, and it did. Peoples anger, in this immediate case, was actually redirected against the United States, which didn’t produce the film. But the US is racist against Muslims. That is a real issue.

Etisalat has made a quite sweet and engaging interactive video which also advertises their voice, sms and data packages. It’s a basic love story, albeit an extremely hopeful one, about a guy trying to meet a girl. It’s a kinda choose your own adventure, you decide what the fellow should do next. I think I saw Ami Sampath in the back of the bus during one scene. It’s a sweet story and doesn’t feel like marketing, cause it kinda isn’t. It’s a story where people happen to use Etisalat phones.

I would honestly feel bad for US Presidential candidate Mitt Romney if he wasn’t such a dangerous douche. By all accounts he seems to be a smart guy pretending to be dumb to get votes, which points to an underlying lack of character which is frankly a dark and evil abyss to look into. The US Republican party is actually insane, completely backwards on social issues and clinging to this weird elitist economic policy that crashed their economy in the first place. The result is that Mitt Romney gets distorted into a contradictory idiot of a human being, because this modern Republican theology isn’t correlated to reality, or even internally consisted. I’ve enjoyed watching him get pilloried for a while, but now it’s actually getting painful. I mean, nobody likes him.

Ever since the IPL introduced cheerleaders it has boggled the Janusian sub-continental male mind. Like Indian MPs watching Sunny Leone in Parliament, they like but don’t like. In Sri Lanka we briefly resolved this tension by having cheerleaders in semi-normal outfits with spandex tights underneath. Which looks insanely bad. Honestly, it would be much better if they just danced in sari.

Sri Lanka has a lot of entertainment personalities become politicians but few that went the other way. Mervyn Silva excluded, I guess. One politician that became a singer is MP Dayasiri Jayasekera. I’ve heard him speak and he seems like a capable lawyer and MP (UNP), and he’s also a pretty good singer, coming second place on the Mega Star show (bit of an odd ending, he probably should have been first). Above is his first music video, Sansare, via Lanka Help Magazine, via Kottu.