Dear Kid,

YouTube was down for a while yesterday. Didn’t know about it? Good, that means you were doing something important like going to class or sleeping.

There were some people (12. I counted) that were extremely upset about the YouTube outage. I say that those people should get over it. We didn’t even have YouTube when I was young. We had to procrastinate the good, old-fashioned way—by watching TV. Not by watching 20 second videos of cats. (Although some of those videos are darn adorable.)

One of the problems with YouTube being down was that people couldn’t see Jean Claude Van Damme’s commercial for Volvo Trucks. It’s pretty awesome. (It was shot in one take. Do not try this at home. Do not try this away from home. Just don’t try this. Ever.)

Apparently it’s not quite as dangerous as it looks (yes, they really drove backward) because Jean Claude was connected to safety lines that don’t show in the video. You still shouldn’t try it.

A little over a year ago, Volvo produced a stunt called the Ballerina in which a woman walked across a high line between two trucks as they were driven along a highway. Forward that time. Look up ‘Volvo Ballerina’ on YouTube if you want to see it. If YouTube is behaving.

Another video that people couldn’t watch while YouTube was down was of the Columbia University (Go Lions!) basketball game against Michigan State (Go Spartans [just to be fair]).

It seems the crowd was able to outsmart the players. With barely 3 ½ minutes left in the game, Columbia (Go Lions!) had the ball. Somehow, the Michigan State crowd coordinated itself to count down the shot clock. A fictitious shot clock. A shot clock that was mysteriously off by a second or two. So that when the Columbia players (Go Lions!) thought they still had 2 seconds left, oops! Shot clock turnover. I thought players weren’t supposed to listen to the crowd. Especially when you don’t have home court advantage. Those boys were just too trusting.

(For the record, I never went to a basketball game when I was at Columbia. We grad school types didn’t do that. We grad school types weren’t always all that bright. So I’m trying to make up for it a little now. As long as I can do it from the comfort of my own home and not at an actual game.)

Love, Mom