A few kind words about Doctor Dinamite, the mad YouTuber

The funny, interesting, and awesome logo for Doctor Dinamite.

The Doctor's online avatar.

There are many, many, many countdown-style videos on YouTube, but there is only one Doctor Dinamite. As you probably already know, the popular site is positively strewn with documentary-style "infotainment" videos that bombard viewers with obscure (sometimes bogus) trivia, crazy (occasionally dubious-looking) clips, and bizarre (often Photoshopped) images, all of it linked together with quippy commentary and eye-assaulting graphics. If grotesque, unsavory trivia is your thing, especially when combined with snarky narration, YouTube has you covered. Thoroughly. Sometimes, it feels like half of YouTube is devoted to one, big, never-ending episode of Ripley's Believe It Or Not.

So how do you stand out from the crowd? In Doctor Dinamite's case, the answer is: be even crazier than the stuff you're counting down. I don't quite know how to explain the Doctor to you, mainly because I know next to nothing about him. He has a sketchy, near-useless blog and a sketchy, near-useless Twitter account, both of which seemingly exist only to publicize his YouTube videos. When it comes to Doctor Dinamite, the videos are all that really matter. I know nothing of the man behind them or why he does what he does. His official YouTube description only says: "Let's bring a bit of originality in the world of countdowns, where information is copied all over and over again."

So what will you find on the Doctor's channel? Just as his own description implies, it's the same stuff you'll find on most of the other countdown videos and at content-aggregating sites across the web: Photoshop fails, tacky tattoos, dubious parenting choices, photos taken at just the right moment, etc., etc. Typical Internet clickbait. It's the Doctor's personality that makes these videos stand out. I'm not sure what nationality this YouTuber is, perhaps Russian, but his accent is fairly heavy and his approach to the English language is, to put it mildly, idiosyncratic.

His caffeine intake must be substantial, too, because he's an incurable motormouth who seems to have rage issues. His videos often seem like a cross between a used car dealer's desperate sales pitch and a psychotic rant by a street corner weirdo. Watching a Doctor Dinamite video -- or, better yet, watching five or six of them in a row -- is like tuning into a weird Twilight Zone version of the Home Shopping Network at three o'clock in the morning.

I don't have any particular recommendations as to where one should "start" with Doctor Dinamite's videos. They're all pretty much the same. I'll semi-arbitrarily pick "20 photos that will make you mad" as it contains the classic Doctor Dinamite quote: "I hate Harry Potter! But now I hate him even more!" His anger at this moment seems genuine.

Jon Arbuckle is one sick mutha...

Jon knows how to keep the flame of love alive.

In recent years, Jim Davis' comic strip Garfield has relented somewhat in its depiction of the character Jon Arbuckle as a friendless, antisocial dweeb by giving him a seemingly-normal girlfriend named Liz, a veterinarian. That convention was taken over to the Garfield movies as well, with Jennifer Love Hewitt playing Liz to Breckin Meyer's Jon. This, to me, feels like a cheat, akin to the "bland nice guy" makeover former hothead David Seville got when the Chipmunks franchise was revived in the 1980s. This, too, was carted over to the live-action Chipmunks movies. So Dave is no longer a truly-scary rageaholic, and Jon doesn't necessarily spend his Saturday nights alone with his cat. Well, I say phooey to all this focus-group, audience-placating nonsense. I'm making these characters off-putting again, and I'm starting with Jon. So there!

The public is the worst part of public transportation

Imagine running into this dude at 6:30 in the morning. Not fun, citizens. Not fun at all.

I hate people. Just flat-out hate 'em. Oh, sure, I can make exceptions for individuals. The person reading this article right now might be a great guy or gal. But a generalized, all-encompassing love for humanity? No way. People are just the worst. Why do I feel that way? Because I've gotten to know them through the miracle of public transportation.

I love watching people fail

An attempted hit goes wonderfully, wonderfully wrong in David Lynch's Mulholland Dr.

I don't know who you are, but I'm probably rooting against you. I realize how that sounds, and it's not something in which I take pride. But it's true nevertheless. If you exist and you're not me, I kinda want you to fail and fail hard. Wow. That sounds so ugly. It's not something I can control about myself. That's just how my brain works. Keep in mind, there are limits. I don't wish disease, death, or dismemberment on anyone. I don't want you to get pancreatic cancer or lose an eye in an explosion. I'm a monster, sure, but I'm not that much of a monster. When I say "fail and fail hard," I mean stuff like unemployment, divorce, and bankruptcy. Oh, and public humiliation's always good if it's happening to someone else. I wouldn't want you to get terminally depressed over it, because then we're getting into "disease and death" territory. But your team losing in the quarter-finals or your son flunking out of college? Oh, hell yeah. Sign me up for some of that.

I cannot tell you how much pleasure I got from the utter collapse of Brazil in the World Cup. I'm far from alone in this. We wouldn't have that marvelous world schadenfreude otherwise. Or Fail Blog. Or most of what's on TV right now. That's pretty much what comedy is: laughing at the other guy's misfortune. Once we enter the realm of fiction, all bets are off. Since the characters don't really exist and aren't truly suffering, it doesn't matter what happens to them. The worse the better, as far as I'm concerned. And that includes disease, death, and dismemberment. Take David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. (2001) as an example. In one of the movie's best scenes, a surfer-dude-looking blonde thug named Joe Messing (Mark Pellegrino) pays a visit on his giggly, long-haired, low-life pal Ed (Vincent Castellanos), who sits behind a cluttered desk in the most pitiful, decrepit office building in Los Angeles. Neither of these guys is very bright, and both are worthless sleazeballs to boot, so what happens to them in this scene is especially delightful.

So much delicious failure in such a short amount of time. And I love how whiny Joe gets. "Oh, maaaannnn...."