Well, if the cameo samples from Maggie, D-Cam and the ghost of future electoral catastrophe, Nick Clegg, in Captain Ska’s Xmas #1 candidate song, Liar Liar, don’t scare Ebeneezer Osborne from his skinflint path, I don’t know what will…

If you haven’t heard the good Captain’s oeuvre yet, check it out in this youtube vid, tell all your friends, and go buy a download of it, to help it storm up the charts.

Imagine if this could make it to the number one spot for Christmas, brandishing two fingers very publically to not only Osborne but chart nasty Simon Cowell as well. Wouldn’t that be the best 79p you ever spent?

This amused me today. Spanish union federation CCOO are hosting a contest for user generated 40 second ads to get the word round about the upcoming General Strike (29 September). Don’t know if this one is from a supporter or CCOO themselves, but it’s jolly, memorable, and slightly surreal. Todo fuera, hermanos!

Last to the party, I know, but I only just stumbled upon Google’s neat-o search stories video maker. It binds together a sort series of searches and answers to make a YouTube vid for you. Very nicely done, and much worth 5 mins fiddle if you’re bored and don’t mind doing Google’s marketing team’s job for them. Here’s my effort.

This will put a smile on your face for Thursday morning! Workers at San Francisco’s Westin St Francis Hotel have been locked in dispute with managment over their contract and healthcare provision, and things have gotten so bad, that they’ve come to the drastic step of calling for a boycott of their own employer until the situation improves.

Here are San Francisco LGBT activist group Havoq & Pride at Work staging a fantastic flashmob in the hotel lobby, aimed at highlighting the boycott to the thousands flocking to SF (and needing a hotel room) for the annual pride march.

This is really interesting stuff. It’s been picked up pretty widely in just 2 days now, and it will be fascinating to watch the stats and see how far it goes. My betting is that a union protest vid like this will have a far greater reach than a more traditional one of a march of thousands of trade unionists – but crucially far more viral potential with the audience it’s aimed at (pride visitors), rather than with those already converted.

All done with 30 people by the look of it. Admittedly 30 people including talented improvvers, musicians and video makers, and who met I guess for a couple of rehearsals, but still much less effort than putting on a march through town. It’s the flip of a union march: thousands (of whoever happens to be passing) see that on the street, but it never gets reported unless there’s a ruck. With this, only a couple of dozen see the actual stunt, but the edited up message goes online to thousands of more revelant eyeballs.

What this does need though is an idea that is this good. For every viral that works, many don’t. What will unions’ fail to win ratio look like? My guess is that this kind of thing will be the preserve of creative collectives like Pride At Work rather than the unions they support like (in this case) UNITE-HERE, for some time. Too often, unions produce something that we think is stretching our boundaries, but we fail to realise that what we think is externally focused is still only speaking to where we hope the audience are, not where they actually are (eg here’s a hotel boycott video from the same union that gets the message over well and helps the workers tell their story, but the SF one is getting the same traffic per half-hour that it’s had in 2 years) . That’ll change though with time, as good practice like this builds up to help us better understand the challenge.

And in the meantime – here’s how you find out which hotels to avoid for San Francisco Pride.

Quick & dirty vid of today’s flashmob at in Westminster, in protest at our favourite media barons’ attempts to swing the election to suit themselves, and get themselves out of the mess a hung parliament might land them in.

Nice to see so many people there (including from Avaaz, 38Degrees, and Liberal Conspiracy), and a chance to meet some new faces, and get thumped by them with a roll of paper. If you weren’t there, don’t forget the 38degrees petition.

Satirical genius from Political Scrapbook, based on the Tories’ current poster campaign. This deserves to win the internet for today, tomorrow, and much of this week!

Hey, did I ever mention I’m a big screen film director?

Well, after making a little lunchbreak video with our office photocopier a couple of months back, it’s now been picked up to feature this month at the Washington DC Labor Film Festival, at the TUC/Philosophy Football’s Rhyme Rhythm & Reason event this Wednesday, and at the Canadian Labour Film Festival next month.

So if you want to check out the Director’s Cut version on the big screen (Disclosure to avoid disappointment: Screen size aside, you may find it hard to spot the difference from this YouTube version, and when I say “feature”, I mean “feature as a sideshow probably whilst people are finding their seats”…), then get your tickets now for London, DC or Toronto.

Now off to practice my acceptance speech for Cannes…

…starring our photocopier, as it can act a whole lot better than me. Thanks to Moby for allowing me to use the splendid track “18″ on this, and to Lianne for clicking repeatedly.

BTW: As Mark Twain would likely have tweeted – had I more time, I would have uploaded a shorter video. If you do, have a go at the TUC 60 second video contest on YouTube, which I’ve missed by a mere 150%.