The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

If you’ve been on the internet this week, chances are that you’ve seen the fantastic run through American Ninja Warrior’s famously difficult obstacle course by a competitor in an inflatable tyrannosaurus rex suit, getting a lot farther than many others wearing less cumbersome clothing. If you haven’t seen it yet, click on the video above before you read any further.

You shouldn’t be all too surprised that the person inside the T-rex suit is from Florida. He’s Reko “DKRekon” Rivera, who works as an actor and entertainer at the Universal theme park in Orlando and is also a DJ. He lives in Oldsmar, a city in the Tampa Bay area about a half hour’s drive from my place, named after Ransom E. Olds of Oldsmobile fame.

Here’s what Rivera looks like when he’s running the course and not wearing a dinosaur outfit:

Here’s his 2015 audition video for American Ninja Warrior, where he shows off his many skills and interests, which range from DJing, fire-breathing, dancing, parkour, and stuntwork:

You know what’s even better? His 2016 audition video for American Ninja Warrior, which is as over-the-top as Kung Fury, and features a finale with him in a lightsaber duel against a guy in a t-rex suit and a Chuck Norris lookalike:

Around the same time, he also appeared in this video, Jurassic Parkour, where he’s doing ninja warrior training in a t-rex suit:

Reko placed in the top 15 in the Atlanta Qualifiers round, and will advance to the regional finals. Well done, sir!

Now that he’s Pied Piper’s chief evangelist, Erlich Bachman is my spirit animal.

In the most recent episode of Silicon Valley (season 3, episode 8, titled Bachman’s Earning’s Over-Ride), there are a couple of scenes that feature the made-up dietary restriction “pesca-pescatarian”, which is someone who eats only fish that eat other fish:

It’s a cute little evangelism trick — doing something that’s offbeat enough that no one else will do it, but palatable enough that once they see you doing it, people will want to follow suit. It works in the episode, and from experience, I can attest that it also works in real life.

The “pesca-pescatarian” bit got me wondering: which fish would be on the pesca-pescatarian menu? Aside from really tiny fish, clams, and oysters, what fish would a pesca-pescatarian not eat?

There’s at least one good thing to come out of a Trump candidacy: discovering the work of director/VFX artist Mike Diva. Here’s his latest creation, titled Japanese Donald Trump Commercialトランプ２０１６:

Some of you have asked if the accordion with rainbow bellows and sharp/flat keys from my previous post on Orlando was Photoshopped or was actually made. I’m pleased to report that it exists: it’s a Weltmeister Juwel LMM 72. I’d love to have one, and if I had $2000 burning a hole in my pocket, I’d order one from Liberty Bellows in Philadephia, and play George Michael’s Freedom ’90 on it all the time.

Here’s the Juwel in action:

I’m sending love, support, and yes, cash to the city next door, where I’ve honeymooned, Disneyed, taken my sweetie for her birthday, geeked out, and done fun stuff in the place that’s all about doing fun stuff.

I’ll close with the best musical tribute to Orlando that I’m aware of: the song Two by Two from the musical The Book of Mormon:

At this point, any teachers might suffice.

It should have been a dreadful keynote for a dreadful conference: the Turner Emerging Consumers Summit, which also went by the name “Deep Shift” and had the tagline “Dealing with disruption and the younger media consumer” (that should be your first warning). It was a one-day get-together of television marketers (second warning ahoy) to discuss approaches to reach millennials and “plurals” (and there’s your third warning).

💩  Don’t worry if you went “huh?” in response to plurals. It’s a term that Turner Broadcasting is trying to make happen, and it refers to people born after 1997. If you’re unimpressed with that term, other broadcasting people have come up with even lamer ones: MTV calls this demographic “Founders”, and ABC Family is leading the race to the neologistic bottom with their term, “Becomers”.

As I was saying, it should have been a dreadful keynote for a dreadful conference, but it wasn’t, thanks to keynote speaker Adam Conover, star of the CollegeHumor video series turned TV series Adam Ruins Everything. Adam took his Adam Ruins Everything schtick — debunking commonly-held misconceptions with facts and comedy — and applied it to his keynote, titled Millennials Don’t Exist (and with the alternate title Adam Ruins Millennials).

Here’s the video of his keynote:

The main points of Adam’s presentation, which you really should watch because he’s quite entertaining, are:

• Older people having been saying “they don’t make young people like they used to” throughout history, from the story of Cain and Abel (about 1400 BCE) to that quote commonly misattributed to Hesiod (700 BCE) to more recent pieces in Time about the Me Generation (1970s) and Generation X (1990s).
• Thinking about generations has always been reductive and condescending to the people being described. It’s no different from how we see “the other” — our group is made of individuals, each with a combination of characteristics and experiences that make him or her unique, while that other group are a monolithic “you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all” type.
• It’s odd saying that the current group of American twentysomethings are lazy when they’re also the group with the largest percentage ever who are working as unpaid interns who are “benefiting” from “experience”.
• Thinking about the cohort of people living in the U.S. who were born between 1980 and 2000 as a single, monolithic group is especially useless as they’re the most diverse 20-year group that the country has ever had.
• And finally, the “how to sell to / deal with a particular generation” is largely snake oil sold by William Strauss and Neil Howe, a sketch comedian and an economist who came together to invent a whole management theory and a pricey consulting business to fleece that most gullible business department: HR.

Additional material

Why Millennials suck (okay, not really): A more in-depth look at the made-up phenomenon of Millennials and its creators, Strauss and Howe. What they’re really selling are expensive employee horoscopes tarted up in management-fad drag.

Adam Ruins Everything. This show’s good fun. It’s just had its first season, with a second one coming up in August. The video above is from the “Adam Ruins Sex” episode and explains the real reason you’re circumcised.

And finally, the Millennials in the Workplace video (shown above), which I’m including because it’s fun to annoy twenty-somethings.