Jennifer Dikes

I’ve never liked Jay-Z, but combine him with New York and Alicia Keys (who I want to be when I grow up), well, it’s a winner:

Luckily others agree with me and have made this song even better. To wit: Alicia Keys and Stephen Colbert performed a suburban version of “Empire State of Mind” on his show a few months back: (03:

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Alicia Keys – Empire State of Mind (Part II) Broken Down
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And then the folks at College Humor went even better with “Galactic Empire State of Mind” where Stormtroopers and Rebels dance off to MC Vader’s lyrical memories of the Trilogy, while giant video screens show key scenes from the films. The Leia/Alicia Keys character’s keyboard is inspired, and the lyrics, along with the video, are here at College Humor. (Found this at Neatorama)

Jan 19th: The Illinois Inaugural Gala

So my friends in Maryland and I got tickets to this event the evening before the inauguration, on the hopes that the Obamas would show. They didn’t, but we had fun anyway. Here’s the dress…

On inauguration morning, I got up at 5.30am (after 2.5 hours of sleep) and headed down to the mall. Getting there around 7am meant I got to see the end of sunrise:

This is me by 10.30am. Cold, tired, and not too cheery:

This is me at noon – he’s the president!

Woohoo!

When I hear about an internet meme, it usually means that it is beyond over. So when I hear about Rickrolling, it was long finished as a phenomenon.

(In case you’re more behind the times than me, according to MentalFloss:’ “to Rickroll” someone is to sucker them into clicking on a particularly tempting link, which then turns out to be the music video for Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. Hit counts for the Astley video online indicate that between 13 and 18 million people have been Rickrolled thus far — and in an amazing twist, the phenomenon has begun to spread (virally?) to the real world. Public events like basketball games, local newscasts, even Scientologists have been Rickrolled. On April Fool’s Day 2008, YouTube Rickrolled the world by making every one of their front page videos a link to “Never Gonna Give You Up”.)

So, this old meme has been updated and gone political. Barack Obama…like you’ve never heard him before! Welcome to the BarackRoll. And watch John McCain get BarackRoll’d!!. I assume that this is totally done since I know about it.

I love this show. If you don’t know it, you’ll get the spirit by taking this Halloween quiz.