Donald, Where's Your Dignity?

I have many things to be grateful for at this time in my life. I'm grateful that I have a lovely wife and two and a half adorable children. I'm grateful for bacon. I'm grateful for Rifftrax, which allows me to see horrible movies about sparkly vampires without my head imploding. But, most of all, I'm grateful that my childhood wasn't during the YouTube generation.

Back in my day, we didn't have YouTube. We had giant video cameras that rested on our shoulders, causing extreme fatigue, and we had to dedicate entire closets to our stacks and stacks of VHS tapes -- and we liked it! If we wanted to show someone a cute home movie, we had to:

1. Try and find the videocassette among the sea of black plastic
2. Ceaselessly fast-forward and rewind the tape to find the right section on the tape
3. Lug the tape over to a neighbor's house and hope that their VCR was working and wouldn't eat the tape

Needless to say, this process was tedious, which limited the amount of times my parents would actually show our embarrassing home videos to other people. If my brother was here, he would probably say that this was result of supply and demand, or opportunity cost or something like that. All I know is that today, with the invention of the internet, it's much easier to embarrass your children and, sadly, it's much more permanent.

All parents have to do nowadays is pull out their cell phone, press record, hit upload and BOOM, that video of their children going on the potty for the first time is on the interwebs for all to see. And while many parents have mastered the concept of uploading videos to YouTube, not all of them have mastered the art of privacy settings. So even if you decide to delete the public video, someone else may have already downloaded the video and could upload it again at any time.

Yes, it's a good thing I'm not growing up in the YouTube generation, otherwise who knows what kind of embarrassing videos my parents could have uploaded!

Wait. . .

What did you just say?

Are you serious?

Are you implying that people can take these old VHS recordings and upload them to YouTube?

Are you insinuating that my parents may have already done this?

Uh-oh.

Well, I can only pray that they don't upload that video of me all dressed up in a kilt, sporran, white hose and ghillies singing Scottish folk tunes in the Highlands?



Crap.




My thanks to, alert reader, Noelle for sending this video in.