The Infamous Leekspin
For those of you who are not yet aware of this entertaining little internet gem, I will have to introduce you to a very neat little site called leekspin, or “Loituma Girl”.
Go ahead and click HERE to open it so that it’s running while you read this. Got it? Cool. So what you’re listening to is a funny little song while watching an anime character spin a leek. Immediately, you will notice that this song is extremely catchy and that there’s a little timer at the bottom of the page to help you tell all your friends about just HOW addictive it is.
Since I know that some of my readers will be curious, I have done a little searching and discovered the origins of this cute little apparition. Apparently, it popped onto the internet in April of 2006 and almost immediately became among the most popular videos on the net, drawing over a million viewers.
The melody is a Finnish polka called the “Ievan Polkka”, written by Eino Kettunen in the early 1930s. Specifically, it’s the arranged a capella performance of it by the popular Finnish quartet known as “Loituma”. The section used in this animation is the second half of the fifth stanza and the sixth stanza. Obviously, this section features gibberish as the text, as opposed to the rest of the piece which is sung in Finnish. It’s actually a fairly nice story, for those of you who know Finnish, so you may want to also watch the video HERE where you can see the entire performance.
Also, just to prove that some people have far too much time on their hands, you can find a link to a Flash clock which features the song and the familiar leek theme HERE, where you can conceivably set it to full screen and use it as an extremely aggravating time telling device.
Anyways, enjoy and try not to stay up all night!
October 30th, 2006 at 11:48 pm
Alright, it’s official. My writing career (fledgling as it was) is now over. I will never be able to extract this song from my head…I have found the ultimate distraction.
October 30th, 2006 at 11:51 pm
October 31st, 2006 at 12:00 am
WAIT! I pulled hubby into this…he thinks you’re a slacker because you didn’t find the translated lyrics!!!
October 31st, 2006 at 12:03 am
You drive a hard bargain Christina…to Finland I go!
October 31st, 2006 at 12:11 am
Alrighy, I got it. The lyrics of this song are here:
http://www.noside.com/nsd6010note.html
It’s the last song on the page.
QED.
October 31st, 2006 at 12:23 am
I bow in virtual homage…
November 3rd, 2006 at 10:44 pm
Update: My 11-month thinks this is the funniest thing on the planet…he actually cries from laughing so hard…
February 22nd, 2008 at 1:56 pm
That site has been down for awhile. I have a mirror at leekspin.info