YouTube Stars!

Hello and Happy Halloween! Did you dress up this year? Go to a Party? Scare little children? LoL Have fun and stay safe!

Guest Blogger, Kayleigh Levitt is back! Kayleigh is a creative young lady with a real talent for writing. In her first Guest Blog for YouTubeStars, she wrote about Artist and Filmmaker Andrea Dorfman. We're glad to present the second Guest Blog post from this talented young lady who can sometimes be found in a tree singing and playing guitar! This post reviews three videos; a bipolar person engaged in public speaking about his life, and two music videos about Life and Death. Kayleigh gives beautifully expressed insight, read on!

But first, The News!

This week's Featured Video on our Top 100 and Top 200 Charts is a cute Halloween video from long time friend of YouTubeStar.com, Miss Tiffany Jo Allen! Tiffany is working on her 4th CD and you can download her older material here. Enjoy Tiffany's Halloween video where she is dressed as a Vampire Kitty and her dog Lucky is dressed as a witch! (Watch the video right here)

We have a NEW Featured Video every week on our YouTube Top 100 Chart. If you missed any of our Previously Featured Videos, you can still watch them here.

Check out our Top 100 and Top 200 Charts of the Most Subscribed YouTube Channels every week! Go and Bookmark the Top 100 YouTube Chart at YTChart.com right now!



Now, here is Kayleigh's article about Life and Death.


Joshua Walters (on the Ted Talks channel) is a bipolar comedian who explores language, beat boxing and playwriting. His trademark is his unpredictability on stage. He lives in Berkeley, California and is a National Alliance for Mental Illness state speaker. Humor is his way of bringing light onto the dark side of mental illness.

Bipolar disorder has a lot of societal baggage weighing it down. So often, these miraculously sensitive minds lose their edge to medication. Bipolar people have a choice. They can be numb to all their emotions with medication or oscillate wildly between believing they are Jesus Christ and being suicidal. There is no middle path when it comes to the extremes of Bipolar Disorder.

Joshua Walters encourages us to shift our paradigm. As he says, he “can either deny his mental illness, or embrace his mental skillness.” There is magic in the chaos. There are perks to insanity. There are gifts in the madness. He poses the question: What is the right balance between medicating craziness away and riding the manic edge of creativity and drive?

For bipolar people, they experience a rich life with a wide emotional spectrum that makes them risk-takers in the business world and highly imaginative. They can also experience a deeper sense of empathy and compassion for other people’s emotions. Why does this have to be seen as a disorder? It can be a gift.

We all have a choice. In every moment, we can either accept the way we are or try to suppress it. Everything that may look like a weakness actually makes us who we are. We can turn anything around and make it a gift. Walters took his unpredictable behavior and let it help him create a stage presence. Everyone has roadblocks on their path. We get to use our creative minds and make something great out of ourselves given the life we were given. Life is here for us, it is not against us.






This song is called “Exactly” by Amy Steinberg. Amy Steinberg writes her songs with the intention to empower people to see how magnificent they are. Her intention is to reveal beauty in the world we live in. Her intention is to let her art be a vehicle for a spiritual experience.

In every moment, we are exactly where we need to be.

This statement is relatively hard to accept. I may be in school thinking exactly where I need to be is my bed. Or I may be thinking that I have not accomplished everything I should have in my life. It is even harder to accept when tragedy strikes. Silver linings can only stretch so far.

Except for when it is not a stretch. Seeing the positive aspect of a situation is not a euphemism for the truth. It is seeing the unseen. Silver linings form when the clouds completely mask the sun. It is when you know something greater exists beyond momentary cloud coverage. The sun is always there. The sun is not always in sight. Yet, when we fall asleep every night, we do not cry over the tragedy of the lost sun. We instinctually know the sun will rise the next day. We leave it up to the universe to figure that out.

In every moment, the sun is our truth. The clouds give the illusion that our truth does not exist. We can choose to cry over the tragedy of our lost truth. Alternatively, we can trust that although we cannot see it, it is there.

In every moment, we are exactly where we need to be. Our human minds cannot wrap around the mystery of the universe. The reason why we need to be in a situation may be obscured by clouds. We do not need to try to know the unknowable reasons behind every situation. Amy Steinberg conveys through this song that life works for us, not against us.

She states, “If you look at me just right you will see a kiss.” She dares us to look close enough to see something at its origin. Every little moment becomes apart of this butterfly effect. It can begin with a breeze, a kiss, a glance and end with anything. It can begin with wherever you are, in this moment, because that is exactly where you need to be to live the life you are destined to live.






This song is called At the Bottom of Everything by Bright Eyes. Conner Oberst is the lead singer/songwriter/guitarist. He has a rotating group of multi-instrumentalists and collaborators from the indie music scene.

Death has never seemed so fun.

In the beginning, the airplane has a huge mechanical failure. The girl asks the man next to her, “Where are we going?” he looks at her, and he says, "We're going to a party. It's a birthday party. It's your birthday party. Happy birthday darling. We love you very, very, very, very, very, very, very much."

As humans, we fight death for as long as we can. Our natural lifespan is now 85 years thanks to improvements in medicine. It used to be 45 years. With all this extra time we borrowed, what are we doing? What could we be doing that we are not?

Their impending doom initiated the greatest birthday party ever thrown. Every moment in their lives led up to up to this grand finale. They realized in that moment how fragile their mortality was. What does that call for? A birthday party! It suddenly was time to celebrate life.

We convince ourselves that the future is a promise life intends to keep. The truth is no one gets out of this life alive. At every moment, our mortality is just as fragile as it is seconds before our death. Every moment could be our grand finale.

The lyrics of a verse in the song go, “We must stare into a crystal ball and only see the past, And in the caverns of tomorrow, With just our flashlights and our love, We must plunge, we must plunge, we must plunge.”

When we look into the future, more often than not, we think we know. We make goals. We make plans. We make promises to live our dreams later. It is easier to do that than to plunge with our flashlights and our love into the unknown.

The past no longer exists and the future has not started. All we have is right now. In moments closest to our death is when we feel most alive. It is when the mind is present with the body. Instead of waiting for that split second to realize life starts here and now, let us make today our birthday party.

Labels: "Amy Steinberg", "Bright Eyes", "Kayleigh Levitt", Kayleigh Levitt, tedtalksdirector, TiffanyJoAllen

posted by KennyCrane at 10/30/2011 09:25:00 PM 3 Comments

We usually report here on videomakers who make music, skits or comedy bits. Today, we present a collection of more serious videos on topics that you may want to ponder. If you're looking for YouTubeStars who sing, do skits or funny bits - don't worry! We'll contintine to bring you those vids in the future, as we have for the last two and a half years! Check back often, or better yet, Subscribe to our RSS feed!

First, The News! I hear from my friends at the TubeRavers Forum that over a dozen people have visited the site from the link I gave in the last post. I've been asked to help boost membership on TubeRavers, where people go to talk about YouTube videos and related subjects. So please continue to follow this link and check out TubeRavers!

Are you a fan of the Twilight series of books? The movie opens in 2 weeks! Connect with other Twilight fans at the TeamTwilighter website. It has the New Movie Trailer on the Homepage and 4 other Twilight clips too. Team Twilighter is a YouTube Vlogging channel where 8 fans of the Twilight saga create their videos for their day. Right now, TeamTwilighter has 73,158 Total Video Views and 796 Subscribers on YouTube! Visit their Video page to watch their 10 most recent videos. Also, check out Their Store to get some Shirts, Bags and other gear, all with their cool logo on it!

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Barack Obama was elected President of the US on November 4th. Congrats and Best Wishes! The job will not be easy but the good will of the people of the world goes out to him. This is the speech he made in Chicago, the night of the election. Watch it; it's a good one!




The world economy is not doing as well as it was just a few years ago. You might not feel as Rich as you once did. However, in one sense, Richness is a state of mind. Watch this video and consider that if you have a computer and internet service, you are much better off than most people today and almost every person who lived in older days. lorax2013 says it better than I can; just watch!




Here's a video from a year and a half ago that didn't get noticed much. It is about Vlogging and proffers a Vloggers' Code: "It's about responsibility and respect. It's about honor and integrity. It's about entertaining and enlightening." This applies also to commenting on any video on YouTube, and being a member of the videomaking and video watching community. Watch this excellent collaboration vid!




In my opinion, Steven Pinker is one of the greatest thinkers alive today! He has written several excellent books that provide insight into the most magnificent object in the world, the Human Brain. Pinker gives us insight into Human Nature and why we observe some of the behavior we see everyday. In his book, "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature," Pinker, a Psychology Professor, "attacks the notion that an infant's mind is a blank slate, arguing instead that human beings have an inherited universal structure shaped by the demands made upon the species for survival, albeit with plenty of room for cultural and individual variation. For those who have been following the sciences in question including cognitive science, neuroscience, behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology much of the evidence will be familiar, yet Pinker's clear and witty presentation, complete with comic strips and allusions to writers from Woody Allen to Emily Dickinson, keeps the material fresh. What might amaze is the persistent, often vitriolic resistance to these findings Pinker presents and systematically takes apart, decrying the hold of the "blank slate" and other orthodoxies on intellectual life. He goes on to tour what science currently claims to know about human nature, including its cognitive, intuitive and emotional faculties, and shows what light this research can shed on such thorny topics as gender inequality, child-rearing and modern art."

In this video, Pinker talks about some of the reaction his book caused. This book is a "must read" for anyone interested in Human Nature. Along with his earlier book, "How the Mind Works," provide an Owner's Manual to the Human Brain!



Books by Steven Pinker that you should check out, at Amazon.com:

Labels: barackobamadotcom, lorax2013, steven pinker, teamtwilighter, tedtalksdirector, thefrozenghost, Twilight

posted by KennyCrane at 11/07/2008 04:48:00 AM 1 Comments