I have to give it to my Jamaican people; we know how to take things to another level. The only problem is that half the things we take to a higher level needed to have remained stagnant.

Since last week when I wrote that we had all gone mad, so many things have taken place it's not funny. Where do I begin? Well, the whacking that Dr. Jephthah Ford received has to be pretty near the top. After hearing of the man's injuries, my mind went back to video clips I have seen of South African police beating youths in Soweto and Johannesburg during the days of apartheid. Regardless of what caused the beating, the goodly doctor was whipped like he killed Bob Woolmer!

Then, of course, there was the church incident in Manchester where the residents didn't take kindly to having an allegedly gay fellow being buried there.

Toyota Tercel Commercial

I wanted to post the Top Gear "Killing a Toyota" segment, but all the ones I could find had the embed disabled. Bloody hell! But I did find this video, and while I don't think it's quite as funny as the Aires video Rob posted a while back, it still gave me a laugh. Enjoy. .

Cledus T. Judd: The Essenshul Video Collection

Country music parody artist Cledus T. Judd (real name: Barry Poole) has done the impossible: he's packed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of jokes and visual gags into a 47-minute DVD without making me laugh once. Most people will come up with something funny if they compress this many attempted laughs into such a short time period (which explains why even the lamest Naked Gun knockoff movies, like Spy Hard, have a few genuinely hilarious moments) but not ol' Cledus. The intentional misspelling of "Essential" in the title is as good as it gets.

Judd is inevitably described as a country-and-western answer to "Weird Al" Yankovic, specializing in allegedly funny versions of popular songs (with a few originals thrown in), but he's no Weird Al. Not even close. Whereas Yankovic is clever enough to create a Bob Dylan parody made up entirely of palindromes, Judd settles for jokes about bodily functions, poorly timed slapstick, and Hasselhoffian production values.

Alanis, Fat Kid & Hot Tub

Alanis Morissette has brought new life to my meaning of damn good video. You've most likely seen the brilliance that is Alanis' parody of the Black Eyed Peas “My Humps" video. For those of you who haven't, Morissette wrote a cover of “My Humps" and has made a mocking video to go along with her new rendition. Clad in a ghetto-fab jacket, slick, straight hair with fergilicious bangs, and even baring some cleavage, she does a fabulous job of proving to the world just how ridiculous “My Humps" is. The visual is a requirement for the full effect of Alanis Morissette's humor. If she had released the song as a single for airplay, it wouldn't have had the same impact. Prior to viewing this video, if someone would have asked me to name the next female artist that comes to my mind when Fergie is mentioned, I doubt the neurons in my brain that hold the name ‘Alanis Morissette' would have been stimulated to fire.

Web-only: More Chronicle writers' YouTube favorites

RFK -- Part 1, Last Speech at the Ambassador Hotel (June 5, 1968), 9:40: The one thing that's often lost to history is the way in which history unfolds. A great use of YouTube is that it preserves the original broadcasts of monumental events, making it possible to experience, with great immediacy, historic news reports that you missed, were too young to see, or that happened before your time. This is the first thing I ever watched on YouTube -- the live coverage of the 1968 California primary at Robert Kennedy headquarters. In documentaries, all we ever see is Kennedy speaking the last words of the speech ("Now on to Chicago, and let's win there"). Then there's a quick cut to the kitchen pantry, where he's assassinated. But that selective editing gives the wrong feeling of the event, as though his assassination were somehow predestined.