The year: 1968
The show: Bewitched
The episode: Hippie, Hippie, Hooray
The performer: Samantha’s mischievious cousin Serina
The performance: The Iffin’ Song
The reason: Who knows
The result: The greatest musical moment of the 60s

Here it is… Just listen for yourself.

I try to avoid robotically spreading the viral clip of the moment, but this rendition of “My Generation” by a group of seniors is simply too good to pass up. Be sure to watch it through to the end.

Over a year ago I bought a nifty little gizmo through Make Magazine: a small box that upon detecting a sudden noise triggers an external flash. The most common use for this seems to be catching balloons as they are in the process of popping, and truth be told, that is kind of fun. But for whatever reason, I tossed it in the cupboard and didn’t get around to playing with it until yesterday. Why I waited, I have no idea.

The kit comes with a small disposable camera, which you are instructed to tear apart so you can tap into the built-in flash. In my neverending desire to complicate things, I decided to toss the disposable in the trash and jury-rig the system to control my Alien Bee strobes. After all, wouldn’t it be much better to use my powerful fancy lights rather than that silly little disposable?

Well, no. Turns out my strobes have too long of a flash duration and my initial attempts at capturing pops resulted in scenes of blurry latex flying about. Hey, I can do that on my own, thankyouverymuch, so obviously this setup wasn’t working for me. Grudgingly, I dug the disposable camera out of the garbage and tore into it as originally instructed. An what do you know, it made all the difference! That tiny little flash, though woefully underpowered, is actually quick enough to freeze details that the Alien Bees let slip right on past.

So anyway, I spent an afternoon popping ballons and smashing light bulbs. [Edited: This is where I used to have a link to a gallery of images, but you'll notice that it's gone. I'm killing my gallery on PetermanDotNet and moving things to flickr, and well, these photos aren't there yet. Sorry.]