I had a life-changing experience this morning. I was watching VH1 Classic's request hour, and I saw, for the first time, the video for the Weather Girls' "It's Raining Men." I am delighted to report that it's cheesalicious!

Where to begin? The video for this disco-era anthem was apparently shot on a soundstage about the size of my living room. In the opening chorus, the precipitate males are dancing around a cityscape of four-foot-high apartment buildings. The camera zooms in on a window in one of the towers. What is that? I guess it's supposed to be a red curtain billowing in the wind, but it looks like the building is sticking out a tongue. The little scrap of cloth, stiffened with sizing, is blowing straight out of the room.

The boys are executing some nice hitch kicks in short trenchcoats, lurid red underpants, and nothing else. The oversaturation is even stronger if your TV set's color and contrast are adjusted for sports, but the creepy feeling that you're watching a Broadway-trained troupe of flashers is even stronger. The "ewww... my eyes" factor is turned up for a sequence where we see the guys from below as they drop from the chyronned sky. One of them adopts a weird crablegged posture, I guess so that he could stay in the frame.

The budget for this production was clearly negligible by today's standards. This is a one-take shoot: we see players fumble props on more than one occasion, and an unmotivated jump cut that must have papered over some flaw. There are some girl dancers in the clip, but they are dressed almost modestly so as not to upstage the well-endowed featured artists. And they are limited to a couple of "Niagara Falls... slowly I turned..." dance moves.

The silliest passage spells out for us the verse in which Mother Nature goes to heaven to collect men for all the girls. One of the WG's dons a glittery jacket with an appropriate legend on her back (as near as we can tell, as the whole sequence is distorted with some video effect that the kids in the A-V club dreamed up) and tosses stars to the boy angels so that they can return to earth as sperm-laden hailstones. Only, there are only three man-cherubs (she's ignoring the girls) and there are more counts in the song than this action will cover, so she gives out a second round of stars. Whoops, fella! Don't drop your celestial train ticket!

Nevertheless, some of the guys are really buffed. And I love the song. Really. Heck, I want them to play it at my funeral. Geri Halliwell covered it, so you know it's good.

posted: 10:34:50 AM  

Jeff Rice talks to the Smithsonian's Carla Dove about bird strikes involving aircraft and the problem of species identification when all you have left is "snarge." The point of view of the story is mostly that of the aviator. Still, we learn that the most damage is caused by large birds like vultures, geese, and pelicans, while the most frequent collisions involve Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura) and Horned Lark (Eremophila alpestris).

posted: 9:34:39 AM