And we can act like we come from out of this world, leave the real one far behind, and we can dance!

The lyric comes from an 80's classic Safety Dance by Men Without Hats. The link (click the title) takes you to the goofy but charming classic video that Peter Jackson clearly saw a few times in the day. Sorry this post is video heavy, especially to people like my mom with crappy computers. Time to invest in the present...

So this week at my youth group we talked about beginnings and here is a video library of snippets of a phenomenon called Numa Numa. Gary Brolsma shot a webcam video and the world caught fire over this obscure Japanese song. This is the original...



From there came many copies, parodies, tributes, remixes, and edits of the original. Here is a version made up of many versions...



Then came parodies of the copies. Here's my favorite...



Soon Gary Brolsma was everywhere-newspapers, magazines, TV news, entertainment shows. So a version of Numa came out commemorating its success...



Soon Gary Brolsma's Numa was a cultural phenomenon, so it was parodied alongside other cultural phenomenons...



According to Wikipedia Gary Brolsma's original video on the originl site he published it has been seen 13 million times. On YouTube, where these clips were found, the keywords Numa Numa recieve 298,837 hits.

A story in The Believer (June/July 2006) explores the song's spread and global homogenization, while arguing that Brolsma's video "singlehandedly justifies the existence of webcams . . . It’s a movie of someone who is having the time of his life, wants to share his joy with everyone, and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks."

Sharing joy with everyone...strangely I can think of no better way to begin to change the world.

The sermon we heard Sunday was about shining our light on this world. Here is this guy in his bedroom dancing and millions have smiled at the sight of it.

While Gary went through a time of being embarassed by his fame, he has now embraced it and just came back with a New Numa video...



May you share your joy with everyone this week.