Viral videos of the week: Biz Muppets, blending magnets and funky Obama

30 Jan 2015

This week in viral videos, Biz Markie makes a Muppet-style comeback, what happens when you blend magnets, and US President Barack Obama gets his Uptown Funk on.

About 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, Facebook videos see over 1bn views per day, and more than 700 YouTube videos shared on Twitter each minute, ensuring there is always video trending on the web.

With so much video available for viewing, we take a look at some of the viral videos that have caught our eye this week.

Biz Markie – Just a Friend (Muppets version)

As one of the most underappreciated sing-a-longs of the 1990s, Biz Markie’s Just a Friend gave hope to people everywhere that they too could make it in the music business.

While not particularly talented vocally, the raw, brutal emotion makes it one of the most loved, and covered, songs around.

And now, with the help of some fantastic editing, Rowlf the Dog of the Muppets has got to do his own version.

Seamless, huh?

Uploaded: 25 January 2015

Will it Blend? – Neodymium magnets

After nearly 10 years, you’d think the appeal of putting various items in a blender and recording it for the internet would be a little stale, but oh how wrong you would be.

Starring Tom Dickson and his Oscar-worthy acting prowess, the latest item to get blended is certainly not a new phone or even a broom, but a chain of neodymium magnets.

As Tom points out, the chains which are used to make a variety of structures are to be banned in the US because children, as children do, eat everything they see and when entrered into the human digestion system, tend to perforate the bowel. Ouch.

Regardless, watch an incredible lightshow when they come face-to-face with the blender.

Uploaded: 23 January 2015

Barack Obama singing Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson (ft. Bruno Mars)

You’re probably quite familiar with the song Uptown Funk as that incredibly catchy, funky number you hear on the radio a lot.

And now, soon after featuring in his auto-tuned remix of the State of the Union speech, US President Barack Obama has taken the White House to a funkier place.

So let’s join in on the ‘man of the free world’ to say, “I’m too hot, hot damn…”

Uploaded: 27 January 2015

Babies in tunnels

Babies in cars react strangely to tunnels. Maybe it’s the sudden change in light, maybe it’s their ear pressure, or maybe even it reminds them of going back to where they originally came out of, but either, way they pull some pretty strange faces.

In fact, driving children through tunnels may be the best way to stop them from crying after being kept up all night for five straight hours because they decide that the night before your major presentation is the best time to display their unhappiness at something.

But I digress, look at the funny faces.

Uploaded: 28 January 2015

Weather map goes AWOL during live news

Phoenix, Arizona is a pretty hot place and in the heat of the summer, it might make you not venture outside for fear of melting.

However, from a recent weather report on FOX 10, the local FOX affiliate, their systems appeared to predict, quite literally, weather that would melt you.

For whatever reason, a glitch in their systems suggested that an area called Cave Creek was going to get as hot as 2,960 degrees Fahrenheit, or around 1,626 degrees Celsius which, you can imagine, would probably melt Earth, let alone an ice cream.

Weatherman Cory McCloskey took it in his stride though and offered this wise advice, “I’m not your dad, but I would get out.”

Uploaded: 28 January 2015

Teddy Bear the porcupine predicts Super Bowl XLIX winner

It’s Super Bowl Sunday this weekend and many Americans, and international folk alike, are gearing up for a celebration of woo-ing, commercials and occasionally the game itself and in the run-up, every possible marketable angle is being exploited.

Step up Teddy Bear the porcupine who has followed in the tradition of animals predicting major sporting events by successfully naming the last three Super Bowl winners.

Can Teddy Bear get four in a row?

Uploaded: 27 January 2015

What if humans disappeared?

With 7bn of us roaming the Earth, our sudden disappearance would be the equivalent of turning up to your house to find a college party had come overnight, wrecked the place and left you with the bill to clean up.

At least, that’s what it appears to show from the video posted by AsapSCIENCE showing how man’s creations will eventually be sucked in by nature, except for the tonnes of plastic we’ve left lying around which, in millions of years, will show up as carbon in the planet’s soil.

Unless the universe was to suddenly explode, or something.

Uploaded: 28 January 2015

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Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com