07.11.2010

OK Go turns 12 dogs and a goat into YouTube stars

LOS ANGELES – OK Go has gone and done it: turned the band's "White Knuckles" video into a dog fest of a YouTube sensation with a little help from a goat.

The video received a million hits in a day after it debuted on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and was posted online Sept. 20.

Sure, the band's popular, but this time its owes a debt to Riot, Spike, Justice, Jury, Sequel, Zuni, Kash, Bunny, Peanut, Tin Tin, Kobie and Dazzle. And Ranger, a feisty goat who makes a cameo pulling at a leash in the 3 1/2 minutes of bouncy music, frantic stacking of plastic buckets and canine tricks.

Fame came faster for "White Knuckles" than OK Go's Grammy-winning "Here It Goes Again" treadmill video, which has over 50 million hits in five years, said Bobbie Gale, the band's publicist.

Playing stagehands to the dogs are the band's Damian Kulash, Tim Nordwind, Dan Konopka and Andy Ross. Dressed in white from head to toe, they sing "White Knuckles" from their album "Of the Blue Colour of the Sky" as they twirl dogs in chairs and hoist them on planks, tables and into moveable cubby holes by twos and threes.

The band didn't want a bunch of stupid pet tricks or one amazing dog, but a lot of dogs doing basic things together, said Kulash, the guitarist and lead singer.

"You take any two simple things and make them move in sync and suddenly they have personality. Something comes out of it. There is a gut emotional response to having things moving that way," he said.

OK Go should know.

The band's goofy treadmill routine is one of the most watched videos ever. OK Go has also collected nearly 20 million hits on a Rube Goldbergesque video featuring tumbling dominoes, nearly 5 million hits on its first one, a backyard dance, and over 3.5 million hits on January's Notre Dame Marching Band swamp thing video. The animal video has been viewed by more than 6 million people so far.

The backyard, treadmill and animal dances were choreographed by Trish Sie, Kulash's sister. She and the band won a best short form music video Grammy as co-directors of the treadmill piece.

"We were in New York eating sushi and drinking sake at a restaurant across the street from Radio City Music Hall, getting ready to perform this thing (the treadmill dance) in front of Beyonce, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera at MTV's Video Music Awards, saying, 'What has happened? What universe are we in?' But it begged the question, what are we going to do now?" Sie said.

That's the night they decided whatever it was, it would involve dogs. When the time came, she said the dogs were the biggest challenge and the greatest reward. "Dogs don't understand the concept of a beat or an eight-count. It's all one big game to them," Sie said.

For example, Kobie does a high five in the video, she said. "The problem was getting him to do it just once. He would run out and do it 20 times." They couldn't change his behavior so they had to change their timing, she said.

The blueprint was drawn up a year ago during two weeks spent around a table in a Los Angeles warehouse. The band and Sie met with Lauren Henry and Roland Sonnenburg of Talented Animals, playing with dogs and brainstorming. They decided to shoot in Corvallis, Ore., because Talented Animals has an office there, dogs and trainers were available and they had donated warehouse space. Kulash's own pet, a brown dog named Bunny, mixed it up with the four-pawed pros.

The dogs underwent two weeks of training. In the warehouse, humans used stuffed animals to rehearse. They built tables and furniture, painted 2-inch-by-8-inch boards and practiced bucket building. The choreography included the trainers moving around the room to guide the dogs through each trick with hand or voice signals, clickers, toys and treats.

On the first 48 tries, mistakes by dogs or humans stopped the work short. They got all the way through take 49, but they wanted to improve it so forged ead to shoot 124 takes over four days. Around the 50th try, the dogs were so used to their parts they sped up and trainers had to spend time correcting them. The group decided on take 72 for the video.

"Some takes felt more joyful and less focused and stressed but I liked the stress. It communicated how difficult it was to do this. You could see the tension in the guys' faces. The dogs look playful and carefree, they are having a good time. But the guys kind of look like overworked stagehands hauling stuff around to make the dogs look good," Sie said.

The video reminds people to support animal rescue, and the band will do just that by donating net proceeds from website sales to the ASPCA's Rural Rescue Dog Fund, set up to help smaller rescue operations and shelters around the country. The video can be bought for $2, $2,000 or $2 million at okgo.net.

Michael Barrett, senior director of grants management for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said the organization was grateful to the band for "showing younger generations that there's more than one way to help animals in their community."

Now that the video is a success, the dogs and trainers are all home, the band is on tour and getting ready to release another video (involving food and animation).

Sequel, a red and white Australian shepherd who's one of the stars, was Sie's favorite because he most embodied the spirit of the video.

"He could go and go. He didn't need to be given his cues. He picks up the bucket. Even when we'd be eating lunch, he'd be out there doing his part by himself with a big, happy, goofy grin on his face."

She also liked Ranger the goat and tried to bond.

"I spent time with him every day. After 10 days, I was determined to make him love me," she said. "He was polite but he wouldn't bond with anybody. He was playing hard to get. He was enigmatic, inscrutable. I guess I was drawn to his mystique."

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Comet and Spacecraft: A Fleeting Meeting

Would you travel 23 million miles to visit a rock? Probably not, but you're not NASA. Rocks are exactly the kinds of things that get the space agency going, and after today's extraordinary flyby of a very particular rock - known as Comet Hartley 2 - the scientists are awfully glad they made the trip.

For all their visual flair, comets are extraordinarily mundane things - clusters of rock and ice left over from the primordial days of the solar system. There is a vast belt of the ancient objects beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto and every now and then one of them gets knocked onto an irregular trajectory, falling in towards the sun and soaring back out again in orbits that can play out over decades or centuries. When one of these rogues whizzes by, it is visiting not just from the farthest reaches of the solar system, but from the furthest reaches of time - a 4.5 billion-year-old scrap of the solar system's original raw material. For that reason, scientists have always been interested in getting as close to comets as they possibly could.

Today's flyby, executed by NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft - an SUV-sized vehicle launched from Earth in January 2005 - is not the first time a probe has encountered a comet. In fact it's the sixth. Other comets, including Borrelly, Tempel 1, Wild 2 and the true cometary superstar - Halley - have all been approached by ships. But Deep Impact is special, and not just because of the extraordinarily crispit's returned.

The ship was not originally intended to visit Hartley 2 at all. Instead, its prime target was Tempel 1, which it reached in July 2005 after its launch. Once there, it fired what amounted to a cosmic cannon ball into the comet's core, then analyzed the plume of ice and other debris that flew up into space. When the last stream of data had been transmitted home, the mission was done, but the spacecraft was still fit. Mission directors thus decided to point its prow another way and send it off for an encounter with comet Boethin in 2008. Nice plan, but by 2007, Boethin was nowhere to be found - scientists speculated that it disintegrated - so NASA aimed farther, for Hartley 2 instead.

"We went to our backup," said project manager Tom Duxbury at the time the decision was made, "which is every bit as interesting, but about two years farther down the road."

It was worth the wait, though it took some pinpoint piloting to get there. Hartley 2 is a peanut-shaped rock only 1.4 mi. (2.2 km) long - about one-seventh the size of the target Tempel 1 presented. What's more, it rarely holds still. A comet's signature tail is the result of volatile materials like water streaming away from the nucleus as it approaches the heat and light of the sun. Small comets may have small plumes caused by ice deposits at various points on their surface, and that can make things awfully unstable.

"These jets can act as thrusters and actually make small changes to the comet's orbit around the sun," said principal investigator Mike A'Hearn. That required a final 6.8-sec. burn of the spacecraft's engines on Tuesday to refine the trajectory and change its speed by just 1.4 meters per second (3 mph). Whether the scientists could pull things off just right was never a sure thing. "I have never seen a comet flit around the sky like this one," said a relieved mission navigator, Shyam Bhaskaran, after the burn was completed successfully.

Even then, the closest encounter between spacecraft and comet, which occurred at about 10 AM EST today, was 435 miles (700 km). On a cosmic scale, however, that's just a whisker, and the pictures, captured by two long-range cameras, suggest just such a proximity. On any scale, the visit was fleeting, with the ship moving at 27,000 mph (43,000 kph). In the brief time the two bodies approached each other, however, the ship fired roughly 118,000 pictures.

All of those images and other data will next be studied at the leisurely pace possible when the critical parts of a mission are done. Meantime, Tempel 1 will resume its ancient journey, and Dp Impact its still very young one. Both could survive in the skies for as long as the solar system itself exists.

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Blue Dog Democrat's biggest liability is his party affiliation

He voted for John McCain in 2008 and spoke out against President Obama’s health care bill. Just last week, the coastal Mississippi congressman was endorsed by a Tea Party-backed Republican who placed second in this summer’s GOP primary.

Although he may sound like it, Rep. Gene Taylor is no Republican. And that’s what could end his congressional career on Tuesday.

The southern Democrat representing the most Republican district in the nation still held by a Democrat is facing his toughest re-election race since coming to Congress in 1989. He’s fending off a challenge from Republican Stephen Palazzo. Polls show the race is a tossup, yet Palazzo supporters are confident that Taylor’s party affiliation — and his two votes for Nancy Pelosi as speaker — could finally sink him.

“Nobody’s every mounted a campaign like this against Gene,” said one well-known Mississippi GOP operative of Palazzo.

That operative added: “He’s everything that Gene Taylor is and more. But he’s a Republican. And he’ll vote Republican [for Speaker of the House.]”

Taylor this year announced that he won’t be voting for Pelosi as Speaker of the House again.

So if Taylor’s biggest liability is not his views — which largely reflect his conservative district — but his party affiliation, why isn’t he a Republican?

Taylor’s campaign denied The Daily Caller’s interview request with the candidate. But his campaign forwarded a video of a recent local television interview where the congressman said that “being Democrat gives me the independence to vote the way that I want.”

“I’m a creature of habit,” Taylor explained in the interview. “I live on the same piece of property in Bay St. Louis that I’ve lived on for 30 something years. I’ve been married to the same woman for 30 something years. I belong to the same church that I was born and baptized in. You know, a lot of people, they gotta change their course every time the wind shifts. I don’t. As a sailor, I know you can adjust your sails and continue on that course.”

Brad White, the chairman of the Mississippi GOP, denied that the state party has approached Taylor about switching parties, at least during his tenure. He also denied any knowledge of rumors that Taylor, if he wins re-election, could be open to switching to the GOP after the election. “Nobody has relayed that message me,” he said.

If Taylor wins, could he could successfully defect to the GOP?

Dr. Merle Black, an expert on southern politics at Emory University, that he’s not sure Republicans would welcome former Democrats into their tent with open arms — especially if the GOP is sitting on a comfortable majority in the House.

“I don’t know how serious that would be or how warmly they’d be received by the Republicans in the immediate aftermath of a campaign where they [were] trying to win as Democrats or at least nominal Democrats,” he said.

A reminder of how Taylor is not your typical Democrat, last week Joe Tegerdine, a Tea Party-backed Republican who lost to Palazzo in the primary, endorsed him.

Reached by phone Friday, Tegerdine acknowledged that the idea of Taylor switching parties “makes sense with his voting record.” But Tegredine, no fan of the establishment GOP, pointed to his own negative experiences battling the Mississippi Republican Party to say that he “could see why [Taylor] wouldn’t want to join the GOP.”

“This is completely conjectured, because I don’t have personal knowledge of it. But I have talked to people before who said [Taylor] has been approached to switch parties and... you know, they’ve be a jerk to him and lied about him for so long that he just has no interest,” Tegredine said.

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