You know how they say that natural disasters are nature’s way of taking care of over-population? I think jackassing has becoming the new way of doing the same. Except by choice. Which could qualify as a “natural disasterâ€? if you think about it…

It kills me that the number one movie last weekend was literally a result of extreme boredom. I’m not sure if Johnny Knoxville and friends were really just bored out of their wits when they decided to create the “Jackass� series, but the extreme success of their TV show – and subsequent release of their first (surprise) box office hit and now the (not so surprising) second hit – literally changed the look of online videos.

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My sister makes fun of me all the time. I think she’s jealous. I definitely have one of the coolest jobs in the world. I actually get paid to watch funny video clips online all day. Okay, officially I get paid to do a bunch of other stuff too, but it doesn’t sound as cool and appealing. To top it all off, before I worked at Metacafe I got paid to watch television all day. My family says that my next job should be as a talk show host – then I’ll get paid to talk all day.  

But I think I’ll stick around here for a while. I’m really into this whole new video community thing. I know all about virtual communities, but they all have a certain common factor, be it a medical issue, support forum, or a common love for 80s cartoons (By the power of Greyskull, I have the power!) But I never thought that millions of random people from all around the world could form a community until I discovered Metacafe. 

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When I was nine I went to school camp. It was weird seeing all my teachers in jeans or shorts, playing in swingball tournaments in a field in Eype, Dorset. Most evenings we would gather in one of the big tents for hot chocolate and a singalong. You know the kind of stuff… “On top of Old Smoky…”, “She’ll be coming round the mountain…”. But my favourite of all was The Hippopotamus Song, not the Flanders and Swann song, but an entirely different poem by Patrick Barrington set to music.

The Hippopotamus Song combines two of my favourite things: Funny animals and silly words. It’s the story of a lonely chap who keeps a hippopotamus in his shed.  The hippo can be a melancholy sort with a weak constitution often “afflicted by depression or the dumps, by hippopota-measles or by hippopota-mumps”.

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There’s nothing wrong in being shallow. At some point everyone chooses either consciously or otherwise simply based on the way something looks. When you make a decision, you use all the data available to you to inform that decision. If that data comes nicely packaged then that’s going to influence your decision. It’s natural, or, at least, it’s human.

We choose books based on their covers and publishers spend thousands making sure the cover sends the right message. You’d have to be either a fool or a genius to ban your publishers from putting any kind of image on your books.

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