Numa numa!

After watching the CNN YouTube Democratic candidates debate, I need something sweet to get the bitter taste of all that ambitious foolishness out of my mouth. So: Dragostea Din Tei!

Darn, I love this song! I love it even better in the original Romanian. Because I don't understand Romanian.

Here's the original Romanian language video. Way cool airplane! (Link may not last, Warner is on a campaign to keep you from appreciating their products. I have had to change two of these links in the last couple of days.)

A live performance at the Star Academy. This includes a dancing dinosaur, a "zero-g" spaceman, and plenty of bouncy audience members who join in the dance.

Another live performance by Buffy, with Spike on drums, and Willow dancing in the red-and-black striped top. [That link doesn't work any more, try this. Not as good video quality, but the same live performance.] Oh, no, sorry, that's not Buffy, it's Paula Mitrache. Another by Paula Mitrache and her group Haiducii [Outlaws], with lyrics in Romanian and English in the sidebar.

Here it is in English. Kind of loses a little of the mystery. Update: Now that I have found the transcriptions and translation of the original lyrics, I see that this is a completely different song, to the same tune. The original has much more depth and poignancy.

A couple of versions using World of Warcraft characters: In this one, a character does the Macarena; this one has a lot of babes in bikinis, with swords.

Wikipedia has a an article on the song that seems pretty thorough, with some interesting ideas for possible variant translations of the title. The repeated "nu ma, nu ma" seems to mean, "don't want, don't want." So is the song related to LOLcats in some way? Were LOLcats involved in this? No wonder it's so popular.