Staff Picks of the Week

Sublinx:
So I'm not quite sure if Steven Beacon and the Beaconaters are the best or worst band ever. All I know is that I can't stop watching this video. Is it the fact that I can't quite identify the song? Is it the harmonica player who has no idea what he's doing? Could it be the guitarist that plays the same three unidentifiable chords over and over again? Or maybe it's the drummer who looks like he could be a reject from a New York subway. Whatever it is, I love it. Well done, Beaconaters, well done.

"Susie" isn't really Susie, however. She's part of a very creative ad campaign by the Children's Defense Fund's Healthy Child Campaign to raise awareness around the millions of uninsured children in the U.S. You can go to her YouTube channel and see a series of videos in which she takes her campaign to the streets -- and even to the White House. I like seeing a creative use of YouTube like this to raise awareness for political goals, and I think "Susie" has the kind of pluck that just could win her the White House...some day.

TheStoryboard:
One of the first amazing short films I came across after joining YouTube was Hardcore Bingo. Beyond providing me with 2 minutes and 47 seconds of top quality entertainment, it introduced me to SCADshorts, a collective of filmmakers from the Savannah College of Art and Design who also post videos under the name DandyDwarves -- which, in turn, brought me to Taxi Love, one of my favorite videos on the site. Not only is the film shot with the same expert technique demonstrated in Hardcore Bingo, but beneath its quirky humor, it also seems to celebrate the many ways we individuals are able to connect with one another, whether through sight, sound, smell or touch. Maybe if we all paid this much attention to our senses, we too could get lucky with strangers in the back of a cab.

Happy Monday,
YouTube Programming Team