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Actor Dick Van Dyke sings Mary Poppins tune "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious."

At 99 years old, actor Dick Van Dyke isn't slowing down. The Hollywood icon proved he is still sharp as a tack and extremely talented at an event in Malibu, California, over the weekend where he belted out a perfect version of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from the movie Mary Poppins.

Van Dyke reprised his role as chimney sweep Bert for the special performance, which made its debut in 1964. To no one's surprise, his spectacular rendition wowed the crowd.

In a video captured by attendee Katie Bonaccorso (@katieb1013), Van Dyke's talent was on full display. "Actual dream come true today seeing @official_dick_van_dyke in person 🥹," she captioned the post.

In the video, Van Dyke is seated next to his wife, Arlene Silver. Together, they sing the tongue-twisting tune that delighted the audience.

"Attending Sunday's Vandy Camp was one of the coolest experiences of my life!" Bonaccorso tells Upworthy. "As a lifelong Dick Van Dyke fan, it was amazing to see him live and listen to him sing without missing a single word! To be 99 years old and performing at a charity event raising money for the firefighters in LA is so unbelievably selfless. That man is a national treasure and should be protected at all costs."

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Viewers cannot get enough of seeing him perform the sentimental hit. "Seeing Mary Poppins at Radio City Music Hall in 1964 was one of the most magical memories of my childhood," one viewer commented. Another added, "Bless him! 99 years young!!" Another viewer shared, "Perhaps my best click of the week. An energetic spirit-lifter from one of the last legends of a generation’s childhood."

The video was taken at a monthly event hosted by Van Dyke and his wife called Vandy Camp, which was hosted at Aviator Nation Dreamland. One hundred percent of the event's proceeds went to the Los Angeles Emergency Preparedness Foundation (LAEPF) Community Brigade, an organization that helps residents of Los Angeles prepare for natural disasters.

It's a cause near and dear to the couple, whose home was impacted in the recent fires in Southern California. "We just love being home. We love Malibu, and it's our favorite place, our house especially. So this is like our, you're at our house," Silver told PEOPLE. "We're so grateful. Our house did get hit by the Franklin fire, but in the scheme of things, we got very lucky.”

During the performance, Van Dyke also sang another hit from Mary Poppins, "Let's Go Fly a Kite."

Van Dyke sang a number of other songs during the show, including "Everybody Loves a Lover," and the theme song to “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

"And I'm seven months from a hundred," he told PEOPLE. Clearly, Van Dyke's talent and passion are more alive than ever.

Humor

"How to use a printer" satire perfectly captures our frustration with modern technology

There's a word for why everything that should be awesome by now seems to be getting worse.

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Home printers are incredibly frustrating to use, and they aren't getting better.

Anyone who has ever printed a document at home knows the inevitable rage of dealing with your standard home-office inkjet printer. They're clunky, unreliable, and prone to a litany of problems—everything from drivers to ink cartridges to the WIFI is bound to malfunction at some point. And without a usable interface, they're extremely difficult to troubleshoot on your own.

The problem with printers is that they have been around since at least the 80s. And while the technology has improved in some ways, they remain incredibly buggy and difficult, and printer manufacturers have found infuriating ways to make them even more annoying and expensive to use. (Ink cartridge subscriptions, anyone?)

office space, printer, printers, home office, technology, profitsThe boys from Office Space knew how to handle wayward printers.Giphy

But YouTuber Gus Johnson is here to help. He's created a perfectly simple guide for anyone who wants to get their printer set up and begin printing documents. Let's go!

First, Johnson walks us through how to make sure our printer is turned on. It's on? OK, great! Now we're ready to print—well, after the printer installs the 18 mandatory driver updates.

Once those are all done, it's time to print. Except it turns out the ink is low—well, not low, but low-ish, which means the printer won't print until you replace all of the cartridges. And no, you are not allowed to print in black and white if your magenta is low, just so you know.

The cartridges, by the way, are not compatible between printers and often not reliably sold in stores. So, Johnson shows us how to order them online and then wait. Days later, now we're ready to print! Well, after one more new cartridge update installs, and of course given that you can figure out how to get your supposedly "wireless printer" to talk to your laptop.

Johnson's video is a gut-busting watch for anyone who's grappled with a home printer and been tempted to pull an Office Space on it with a hefty baseball bat. Watch the whole thing here:

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Printers are a really complicated piece of technology. But that shouldn't let them off the hook. Most of the problems spoofed in Johnson's video are solvable. And that's exactly the larger issue.

The Wirecutter writes that "there is some amazingly complicated technology in your printer, including the printheads, the ink, and the mapping software. You take your printer for granted, but that box can cover a piece of paper in millions of dots of precisely located, color-matched ink in a few seconds," and that most manufacturers take a loss on the actual machinery of a printer, hoping to recoup the earnings via ink sales later down the road.

If printers were the only piece of technology that seem to get worse and worse, bleeding us for more and more money while offering a rapidly deteriorating product, maybe we'd be willing to spare a few tears for the poor manufacturers. But this is a global problem affecting practically everything we touch—from social media, streaming content, journalism, and even restaurants. We pay more or the same for something that doesn't ever get any better, and often gets worse!

There's a term for this phenomenon. It's officially called "enshittification," or platform decay.

Writer Cory Doctrow, who coined the term, describes the pattern like this: "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."

Bill Maher described Silicon Valley's approach to technology as, "If it ain't broke, f*ck with it."

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Doctrow even mentioned printers specifically in a recent Medium post:

"They make printer-scanners that won’t scan unless all four ink cartridges are installed and haven’t reached their best-before dates. They make printers that won’t print black and white if your $50 magenta cartridge is low. They sell you printers with special half-full cartridges that need to be replaced pretty much as soon as the printer has run off its mandatory 'calibration' pages. The full-serving ink you buy to replace those special demitasse cartridges is also booby-trapped — HP reports them as empty when they’re still 20% full. ... HP tricks customers into signing up for irrevocable subscriptions where you have to pay every month, whether or not you print, and if you exceed your subscription cap, the printer refuses to work, no matter how much ink is left."

Ink is outrageously expensive, but the printer companies exploit copyright laws to make sure you can't buy third party cartridges. When that fails, they push out security updates that break compatibility with anything but their own ink cartridges. These kinds of offenses go on and on.

In other words, long ago it was very exciting that we were able to print our own documents at home. Initial innovations focused on making that process better and better. But we're long past that now and the problems with most home printers will probably remain forever, or as long as manufacturers think they can keep squeezing our wallets. They're not really incentivized to make a printer that actually uses 100% of an ink cartridge or reliably connects to WIFI—they just want to make sure we buy the next one.

Johnson's YouTube rant is so funny precisely because it's true, but also because it finds humor in the frustration we all share at this cycle of enshittification. If we can't get our $300 printer to reliably spit out a basic black and white document, at least we can all laugh at our shared misery.

Kids

A 4th state just passed laws protecting 'child influencers' from their own parents

A former 'Youtube star' had brutal words for these parents in her testimony.

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New laws aim to protect teen and child influencers' money. It's a start.

In recent years, some big questions have popped up about the kids you see on social media. When an influencer posts a photo with their children or an adorable candid family video, it might not ring many alarm bells. But what if their kids are constantly an integral part of their every day content? What if those influencers rely on the cuteness of their kids, or the hilarious things they say, to drive engagement of their content? Content they earn money for?

In the worst cases, teens and even toddlers are not just a prop in their parents' videos, but they are positioned as the "stars" of their own social media accounts. Child influencers. I remember once seeing a shocking post about a 3-year-old girl who was "excited" to tour the country and meet all of her fans. My own daughter is that age and only cares about cartoons and mac and cheese, so it's ridiculously easy to see the parents pulling the strings behind the scenes. But social media is big business, and big money.

Finally, something is being done to protect these kids. Utah just became the 4th state to pass simple legislation designed to ensure children are at least being fairly compensated for their work online.


influencers, social media, screentime, youtube, tiktok, instagram, children, families, parentsUtah is letting kids delete content they appeared in when they turn 18. Photo by Ethan De Long on Unsplash

The new law dictates that any family earning more than $150,000 per year from online content that includes their children set up a trust fund for them, and offers guidance via a formula to calculate how much the kids are owed for their appearances. It may not end up being much, but at least the kids will be compensated somewhat for their own likeness.

Most fascinatingly, the Utah law also gives kids the right to have any content they appeared in deleted when they turn 18. That is a major win, and it gives kids some agency back when they become adults capable of making their own informed decisions.

Other states with similar protections include California, Illinois, and Minnesota — with legislation currently being drafted and debated in many more places. The monetary protections are a good start, but more will definitely need to be done to reign in parents putting kids on the Internet without their permission. The exposure, fame, and messages can do a lifetime of harm to young people.

The passing of the law hinged on testimony by former child YouTube "star" Shari Franke, who was forced to appear on her family's channel 8 Passengers as a kid. Her mother was later arrested for child abuse.

“I want to be clear: there’s never, ever a good reason for posting your children online for money or fame," Franke said to lawmakers. "There’s no such thing as a moral or ethical family vlogger. ... The only people harmed by child influencer laws are the parents exploiting their children.”

She called being a child influencer "24/7 labor" and has urged for stronger protections that go beyond just setting aside money earned.

"How do we determine how much a child should get paid for appearing in family content?" she said. "What price is worth giving up your childhood?

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The line between using your kids as props to monetize and genuinely sharing moments from your family's life is thin and grey. This area of social media is uncharted territory, and we don't even know the full impact of how growing up in the online spotlight (and not by their own free will) will affect kids. There will always be loopholes in legislation meant to protect kids. Hollywood has been trying to get it right for nearly 100 years, starting with the first law that gave child actors some control of ownership over their own wages.

It's great that Utah is taking a first step, and hopefully many more parts of the country follow suit soon.

Community

High school principal visits hospital so dying mom can see her son graduate

They stood proudly by her side one day before she passed away.

KOCO 5 News/Youtube

Caleb Woodrum graduates high school by his mom Stacey's hospital bed.

Caleb Woodrum's mom, Stacey, had one dying wish: to see her son graduate from high school. Ten years prior, she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Woodrum, a senior at Blanchard High School in Blanchard, Oklahoma, was set to graduate months later in May 2023 when Stacey's health took a turn for the worst.

“The hospital actually contacted me and they said, ‘Listen, things are getting bad and the only thing that she wants is to see her youngest son graduate.’ So I told them, I said, ‘What do I need to do? Let’s get this going,'” Woodrum’s sister-in-law, Cara Harris, told KFOR News.

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Within 24 hours, a ceremony was put together. Southwest Medical Center's intensive care unit agreed to hold a graduation ceremony for Woodrum and his mom. Hospital staff rallied around them, providing food, balloons, personalized signs and music for the ceremony. Blanchard High School Principal, Greg Jackson, handed Woodrum his diploma and ensured Woodrum had a cap and gown.

“A lot of people were supporting me. My school, the Southwest medical staff, but especially my family. That was a moment that really made me proud. I didn’t expect the hospital to go above and beyond, but it was truly amazing what they did, and especially my principal, Mr. Jackson,” Woodrum told KFOR.

Caleb Woodrum, StaceyCaleb Woodrum embraces his mom Stacey following his graduation ceremony.GoFundMe

During the short ceremony, Woodrum and his mom held hands as Mr. Jackson presented Woodrum with his diploma. Stacey applauds as his son accepted it, and they shared an emotional embrace together. Woodrum wiped away tears following the ceremony. Unfortunately, Caleb's mother died the very next day on March 29, 2023, on her 57th birthday.

"I have a really good relationship with her. I took care of her. She was on oxygen, so I had to fill her bottles regularly and stuff like that. Made sure when she needed to go to the doctors, she had a ride to the doctors and stuff like that," said Woodrum. "It was probably one of the greatest moments I’ve actually ever had. Like, she did want to see me graduate. She did want to see me go to college. Unfortunately, she won’t have the chance to do that. But she got to see me graduate high school, which I know is one of the biggest accomplishments for me and her."

The incredible video has experienced a resurgence in popularity, garnering heartfelt responses from new and old viewers. "Very sad and beautiful at the same time," Kaneda1985 commented. VivienneVelvet2 added, "Such a heartfelt gesture shows the true spirit of community and compassion." And donmreddit wrote, "The simple gesture is going to have some positive impact on that young man’s life. Not to mention everybody at the hospital, who observed it. Stellar." Another touched viewer, CapnRaye, responded, "This goes to show you that little things really matter. At most, this man had to take time out of his day to drive to the hospital / hospice / their home, where this kid's mom is. Was it probably effort on his part to do that? Yeah, sure, but it's very easy to do. This kid will remember this for the rest of his life."

A GoFundMe was started by Cara Harris to help with Woodrum's college tuition and expenses.