My YouTube playlist
With a lockdown stretching well into its second year, I came to the crushing conclusion some time ago that I had practically exhausted everything I wanted to watch on Netflix, at least until Season 5 of The Crown and Season 3 of New Amsterdam show up.
I’ve even signed up with other streaming services like Curiosity Stream (a great trove of fascinating documentaries, for a small fee) and Tubi (free, but basically B-movies with stars you never heard of). But even there, as with Netflix, I’m close to hitting “Watch it again.”
That’s when I rediscovered YouTube, which had been there all along — it was founded in 2005 — but which I’d always looked upon as a depository for mostly juvenile and silly or funny videos.
Youtube's stock of 800 million videos gets one billion views per day. That’s an awful lot of things to watch, and we’d have died of old age before we finished exploring even one percent of this platform.
Five years ago, I uploaded a video I took of the aftermath of the Faculty Center fire in UP, but most often, I’ve gone to YouTube with our apu-apuhan Buboy to find his favorite Mr. Bean or Spiderman cartoons. (A digital native, this tyke can’t even read yet, but knows his way around buttons and icons; “Tatay, press X!” he’d tell me.)
It’s estimated that 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube per minute. Its stock of 800 million videos gets one billion views per day. That’s an awful lot of things to watch, and we’d have died of old age before we finished exploring even one percent of this platform.
My fascination with YouTube began when I discovered that Beng and I could watch hours and hours of Broadway musicals and old movies on it. I guess that’s what old folks like us think of as “entertainment,” especially in these dreadful times — a sing-along marathon that ends with an uplifting tune like Somewhere or You’ll Never Walk Alone. (Think of it as 1950s TikTok, only 360 times longer.)
I also realized that YouTube’s a good place to exorcise your worst fears — such as when I had to have my gall bladder taken out; watching the whole procedure first on YouTube calmed me down.
But certainly there have to be more pleasant subjects than a cholecystectomy to enjoy on your big TV. Over the past few months of YouTubing, I’ve settled on a few favorites — my YouTube playlist, shall we say — that fill up my bedtime hours while I’m working on my laptop, until I actually shut my eyes around midnight. In no particular order, they are:
Crime and punishment
It’s a horrible truth, but few things are more absorbing than why people go bad — very bad. Real-crime and forensics shows indulge our curiosity about evil and its discovery—which, let’s admit, can be strangely satisfying. (A Pinoy version of Unsolved Mysteries can go on forever.)
Mudlarking
Beng and I have had this longstanding fantasy of foraging for coins, bottles and Churchill’s pen on the banks of the Thames, but a plethora of mudlarking channels will do for now. (We’d probably die of sepsis if we did that on the Pasig.)
Car restoration
This includes barn finds, car auctions, junkyards, and the perennial question: “Will it run again after 50 years in the mud?” I’m convinced that in some old bodega on some southern island, a dusty Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost or Bugatti Atalante lies waiting — if it hasn’t been converted to a jeep yet.
Antiquing
I could spend another year in lockdown just watching Antiques Roadshow and Salvage Hunters, guessing at the prices of lamps, vases, oil cans, and trinkets. So far, I haven’t spotted any “Weapons of Moroland” or oversize spoons and forks.
Art forgeries
Repeat these names after me: John Myatt, Tom Keating, Han van Meegeren, Elmyr de Hory and Walter Beltracchi. You may never have heard of them before, but you won’t forget them once you see what they were able to do, which is what we all secretly dream of: fool the experts.
Military excavations
Must be the boy in me that can’t help gawking at helmets, medals, machine guns, ammunition belts, and yes, human skulls and bones coming out of the mud in some corner of Latvia or Poland. War is terrible — and mesmerizing.
Royalty
Q: We all know they’re flawed human beings and probably an unhappier lot than us — so why do we keep following the travails of the royals? A: Because we want to be sure they’re flawed human beings and probably an unhappier lot than us.
Gemstones
Seeing all those fist-sized opals and emeralds makes me want to rush out to our backyard with a shovel, but all we ever get there is dog and chicken poo.
Old Manila
You can feast on many videos showing Manila at its prewar prime and in the postwar ‘50s — with clean, wide streets, graceful architecture, and well-dressed, well-behaved people — and weep.
Abandoned houses
They call it “urban archeology,” presumably a semi-legal form of housebreaking, as long as you don’t take anything but pictures. Beng and I are always astounded by what people leave behind — knowing that if our akyat-bahay experts went through the place, they’d leave it clean as a whistle.
