Saturday, September 14, 2013

Weekend Viewing: The Irish Dance Edition

It has been a sort of tough week, what with the TechCrunch stuff, and then Pax Dickinson and the fall out, and Hanna Rosin declaring the patriarchy dead (sorry, I can't bring myself to link to that one) and all. I may come back and write about it all, but right now I'm still stuck in the spluttering indignantly phase, probably because there seems to be a never-ending parade of white men wringing their digital hands about how Pax Dickinson has been "ruined" (an outcome that is not at all certain, by the way- I suspect he'll eventually find someone to fund his start up) without even giving a nod of recognition to the scores of women and people of color Dickinson and others like him prevent from even getting a toehold on the ladder of success in the tech world. I guess since they never got any success, they can't be ruined, so it is all OK.

And then there were the Colorado recalls and all the pundits declaring the effort to reform our gun laws dead, even while George Zimmerman is in the news again for an incident that allegedly involved a gun, thereby continuing his accidental one man campaign to highlight the weaknesses with our current laws. After all, even his defenders have said the man has shown poor judgement. But by all means, lets keep him armed.

So, let's turn to something that's just fun, shall we? For reasons involving a Sesame Street segment about Irish Dance school and a school multicultural dance in which the Kindergartners performed an Irish dance, Pumpkin is weirdly into Irish dancing. There is a high probability that we will eventually need to find her Irish dance lessons, although the last time she could have chosen to take said lessons she chose gymnastics instead.

Regardless, she and Petunia have been asking to watch Irish dancing on the Roku lately. That is 100% my fault, because back during the last Irish dance obsession, I decided to show Pumpkin Riverdance on the Roku (via YouTube). The Riverdance videos are too low quality to be really good on our TV, so I've been looking for other Irish dance videos to show them. We've found plenty of videos of competitions, and a couple of fun flash mobs (Sydney and Essex), but my favorites have been the videos that fuse Irish dance with other things, such as:

Hip Hop:



Dub Step:



Gagnam style:



And humor (this is my favorite, and if you will only watch one is probably the one you should watch):




Happy weekend, everyone.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:00 AM

    That last video is very cute.

    I'm struck by this whole Pax thing about how when a white male asshole gets the same thing done to him that he's been doing to women and minorities all along, all of a sudden people in power think it's a problem. It happens to women or blacks or Hispanics, no biggie, it's somehow all their fault. I hate the patriarchy.

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  2. Anonymous7:32 AM

    My almost-4yo has been taking Irish Step Dancing classes for 2 years now. Basically it started out as just a music/movement class set to Irish music. She's graduating to beginner classes this year. She really enjoys it.

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