EmailWhen the Queen’s away her guards will play. Our top video this week – filmed while the Queen was on holiday – shows a guardsman outside Buckingham Palace injecting some fun into his two-hour shift by pirouetting and performing comic walks for giggling tourists. The laugh-a-minute Ministry of Defence is apparently taking the incident very seriously and launching an investigation into the unruly Grenadier Guard.
It’s a prank well known to hackers – ‘swatting’ involves anonymously calling the police to report a shooting or hostage situation at a rival’s address, eliciting a heavy-handed, armed response from authorities. Jordan Mathewson, an American gamer who uses the name Kootra online, was streaming himself playing a video game when a SWAT team burst into his office and forced him to the ground at gun point. “Terrorists win”, the game’s audio track can be heard to say with perfect timing.
Amid the gloom, a very happy moment was caught on camera this week. Kelly Gunderson filmed the moment her 87-year-old mother, Daphne Tresher, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, had a rare moment of clarity and remembered her daughter’s name. It has had over 4m views since it was posted on 29 August.
Former child star Jonathan Lipnicki used to be cute, but, like most children who grow into adults, isn’t particularly cute anymore. In a video posted to YouTube, Lipnicki paints a picture of what life is like for a formerly-adorable actor.
It’s a selfie to rival Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscar effort and it was taken on top of the Centre skyscraper, Hong Kong’s fifth-tallest building. In it, photographer Daniel Lau uses a “selfie stick” to record himself and his friends (who are nonchalantly snacking on bananas) hanging out 346m (1,135ft) above the ground.
In other viral video-related news, an artist usefully demonstrates how to draw an astonishingly lifelike cracked egg, some elephants dance gracefully to classical music and New Zealand’s basketball team perform the traditional haka dance to the bewilderment of their USA opponents – who they proceeded to lose to.
Elsewhere on the internet, two swimmers narrowly miss a meeting with a hammerhead shark and, to finish things off with possibly the worst thing you’ll see all day, a YouTube user called Katrina Dewees allows a golden huntsman spider to hide in her mouth.
Over and out.
Guardian Viral Video Chart. Compiled by Unruly Media and mashed by Frances.
1, Buckingham Palace guard shows off
Guarding the queen
Terrorists win
3. Gods Gift
“Well, I love Kelly”
“I’m just a normal white kid from the suburbs”
5. Crazy Selfie From Hong Kong Skyscraper
Snacks at 1,135 feet
6. How I draw a crazy realistic egg
Cracking skills
7. Elephants Dancing to Violin
Jungle music
Game on
9. Large Hammerhead Shark near miss
Get out the water
10. Anybody Afraid of Spiders?
Erm, yes
Source: Viral Video Chart. Compiled from data gathered at 14:00 on 4 September 2014. The Viral Video Chart is currently based on a count of the embedded videos and links on approximately 2m blogs, as well as Facebook and Twitter.
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