While you check on that, here’s this week’s Rebecca Black update.

A firm called Visual Measures has developed an algorithm for determining a video’s, um, virulence; “Friday,” they say, is the third most successful viral video ever, beaten out only by Susan Boyle’s appearance on Britain’s Got Talent and the “Kony 2012″ promotion.

Seemingly tangential: In 1997, I put up the very first Web fan page for singer/songwriter Carolyne Mas, now retired and living in Arizona. She’s still communicating with the fanbase, though, and recently she turned up a box of tapes, which she’s busily sending up to her YouTube channel. Recently, she reported on a batch:

These are demos I did in 1987 with Charlton Pettus who is currently with Tears for Fears, and who went on to produce Reason Street in 1992, while he was playing with Sinead O’Connor. He was the acoustic guitar player who sat behind her when she was booed off the stage at MSG … remember that? He flew to Germany to meet me right after that.

Which gave me an excuse to dig out Reason Street myself. Like all her European recordings, it’s worth hunting down. Inexplicably, Pettus doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, though I will tell you here that he produced the “My Moment” and “Person of Interest” singles — he also cowrote “POI” — for Rebecca Black. The fellow’s tastes evidently run fairly close to my own.

In case you’d like to hear some Friday-related songs besides the one we promote here seemingly every week, Delaney McDonough of Ravena-Coeymans-Selkirk High School, south of Albany, New York, has a small playlist for you, complete with videos.

The one song she mentions I hadn’t heard before was NSYNC’s “Just Got Paid,” from their album No Strings Attached, which opens with this line: “Thank God it’s Friday night and I just-just-just-just-juuuuuuust got paid!” Things evidently were happening faster in 2000 than in, say, 1956, when Little Richard announced that it was Saturday night and he just got paid.

Of course, the only person who ever got all his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe:

Perhaps we should leave it at that.

Well, so much for my capacity for prediction. Last week in this space I speculated that the new Rebecca Black video, being shot that week in Malibu, was for the oft-rumored remake of “Friday.”

BZZZZZZZT! Wrong. I managed to overlook this tweet which identifies the new song as “Sing It.” The video has wrapped and will be up, she says, “pretty soon.” And while I don’t have the key to the Wikipedia lock, someone’s already updated her Wiki page with the new title.

The last Rebecca Black report of 2011 mentioned that she was planning a remake — a re-imaging, if you prefer — of “Friday,” the very song that made her semi-famous, and said that she wanted it “to sound we’re on the beach with friends, someone’s got a guitar, there’s drums.”

So when the above shot of Malibu showed up in her tweetstream with a reference to “filming the new video,” well, I can put two and Tuesday together. Maybe.

Outside of, um, work, she reports that she tried her hand at archery, and, “well, let’s just say Katniss would be disappointed.”

Along those lines, there exists a Hunger Games District 12 Bow, probably not suitable for actual archery, and bearing a California Prop 65 warning. Evidently it causes cancer or something.

“Everybody in the world really hates my ringtone,” sang Weird Al, and I of course have no idea what that’s like.

Maybe. I was at Target last night picking up a couple of prescriptions — $4 generics plus cute pharmacists, so don’t judge me — and as I slid the trusty Amex through the reader, a random Seattle-area (maybe) cold-calling clod dialed in, and out pops, at 8 out of 10 volume, “It’s Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday…”

Now I’ve admitted to having this as a ringtone before, though I don’t get so many phone calls that it’s an issue or anything. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the stares of disbelief from behind the counter. Finally, someone broke through with a variation on Minnesota Nice: “Well, that’s certainly different.”

I probably ought to supplement it with some of the unearthly shrieks RB emits during this impromptu video. As for whoever that was from the 425, he/she/it left a blank voicemail.

Addendum: From the Rebecca Black Kitchens:

[M]y favorite burger is on a brioche bun with a beef patty, with 1000 island dressing, sauerkraut, grilled onion, and dill pickles.

Sounds plausible enough.

This may be the only time in history I get to combine a Rebecca Black update with My Little Pony shtick, and I’m not about to pass up that opportunity:

Especially, you know, since it’s Derpy.

(Via Equestria Daily.)

What have we here? It’s time for the weekly Rebecca Black sampler, and we open with, well, a sampler:

The original has actually been sold, but you can get the pattern from Etsy. (Via Steotch.)

Not everyone, however, is having fun, fun, fun, fun:

Students at Kingsville District High School are trying to keep Rebecca Black’s lyrics out of their head by raising funds for the pediatric ward at Leamington Hospital. Every day between classes, and non-stop during lunch, Black’s pop-song “Friday” plays throughout the school. The only way to make it stop is for the student body to hit $1,000 in their fundraising. The money will be used to buy toys for children undergoing surgical procedures at the hospital.

Oh, those wacky Canadians.

One year has gone by since “Friday” was first sneaked onto YouTube, eleven months since its transition from Just Another Video to cultural buzzword. Not the least bit in response to the chronology of it all, Virgin Mobile Live sent an interviewer to talk to Rebecca Black, and the following High Truths were revealed:

• “Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal”: What cereal? She prefers Cocoa Pebbles;
• She hopes to be in the studio in a couple of weeks to cut the next single.

And oh, she gets tongue-tied, even today, when you bring up the Biebs.

Meanwhile, this week’s nominee for The Next Rebecca Black is Lexi Sullivan, who’s recorded a track for Patrice Wilson, whose name you’ll remember from the credits for “Friday.” “Hot Stuff,” despite its so-Seventies title, isn’t particularly awful, and Lexi can sing, but I don’t see it becoming an anthem.

Bill Genereux of TechIntersect put together this little montage of the short (so far) history of Rebecca Black:

YouTube, however, apparently found nothing to laugh at in Genereux’s video compilation:

It includes around a minute of Rebecca’s famous “Friday” song before moving into the parodies & spoofs and the YouTube copyright algorithms tagged it as infringing. I filed a counter-claim that it was an educational fair-use, it doesn’t use the entire video, and provides a commentary on the work. Ultimately, they restored my video online.

Note that this was an automated takedown, not a DMCA request from a copyright owner. Still:

In the digital world, you are already presumed guilty until proven innocent.

Expect things not to improve after the election.

Of late, the best thing about The Village Voice has been the annual Pazz & Jopp poll of critics, which has been going on since the Seventies, for most of that time presided over by the eminent Robert Christgau. Singles are ranked by number of mentions by the 700 contributors; hop of the teep — um, top of the heap — was Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” and deservedly so. (She probably couldn’t have had them all, but she did get 116.)

A total of 604 singles from 2011 rated at least one mention. Today being Friday, you know where this is going, so: yes, Rebecca Black’s debut single did make the poll. In fact, it tied for 51st with 11 mentions, alongside Beyoncé’s “Love On Top” and Drake’s “Take Care.” One of the mentioners was Marc Gilman, who opined: “Never mind the kitsch factor. ‘Friday’ had a hook that stuck like a talon.” Exactly so.

Although I must mention this singular mention, for “Anything but ‘Friday’” by “Anyone but Rebecca Black”:

Fun Is Fun (Fun Fun Fun), but Enough Is Also Enough. Let This Serve As A -1 Vote to Counteract Somebody’s Winking Support of It.

As Eric Hilliard Nelson would say, “You can’t please everyone.”

Once in a while, I will answer Rebecca Black-related questions on Yahoo! Answers, on the (mostly) honorable basis that I’ve already looked all this stuff up myself, and hey, why shouldn’t I share? Besides, the amount of misinformation being circulated is positively (or negatively) staggering; there was a brief flurry of suicide references earlier this month.

I was not, however, prepared for this: What does God think of Rebecca Black?

Several answers came in, but I seemed to be wandering in the desert. Then, just as I was about to give up in despair, a book arrived at my desk. The Last Testament: A Memoir by God [with David Javerbaum] (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) actually addresses the question. From 1,400 Years of Sanctitude 22:14:

I have gleaned much from Numa Numa Guy; I have rolled my eyes at “Double Rainbow” (though I appreciated its numerous shout-outs); I have reeled in horror at 2 Girls 1 Cup, and I have seen Rebecca Black do her level best to help remove the phrase “Thank God It’s Friday” from the popular lexicon.

Which, you may be certain, He approves. Same book, 3:8-9:

The worst is Friday, for that is the day I am forced to hear myself endlessly and mistakenly thanked. Thank not me; thank Frigg, the Norse goddess of love, ye unwitting pagans.

It’s official: Rebecca Black is doing the Lord’s work. Expect a harp arrangement of “Friday” some time in the next millennium.

And by “the next millennium,” I mean last year sometime:

A seriously wonderful headline: Samoa Skips Over Last Friday of 2011, Rebecca Black Not Pleased. I have to admit, it was funny when she tweeted that.

And somewhere between home and 30 Rock — she appeared on NBC’s Today Show on, of all days, Thursday — she got to meet Zooey Deschanel. If you thought for a moment there was a chance I wasn’t going to notice something like that, you haven’t been reading this stuff for very long. I have no idea what brought those two together, but obviously it did happen, despite the total absence of, um, pictures.

As for “Friday,” if you couldn’t stand the original, perhaps you’ll like the remake:

“When we re-recorded it, I talked to my producer and said, ‘I want this to sound like we’re on the beach with friends, someone’s got a guitar, there’s drums’ … I love it.”

Wait, what? Oh, don’t be silly. All beaches have drums, don’t they?

For a few seconds there, I was wondering why YouTube brought in Rebecca Black for its Rewind 2011 video, and then of course it hit me:

With a total of 180 million views during its two periods of availability, the original “Friday” video dwarfs all competition: Number Two “Ultimate Dog Tease” came in with about 77 million. Then again, YouTube reports one trillion views this year, of which “Friday” accounted for only 0.018 percent.

Or you could look at it this way: the video, squoze down to YouTube size, runs a hair over 19 MB, which means that something like 3500 terabytes of the world’s presumably limited bandwidth went into watching “Friday” this year.

(The two later singles, “My Moment” and “Person of Interest,” have rolled up 35 million views in their own right.)

And I have to admit to one bit of puzzlement: if, say, Nyan Cat (55 million views, #5) had finished at the top, who would have introduced the Rewind?

In the meantime, RB refuses to take any of this too seriously. Consider this Monday tweet:

“Christmas is Sunday” is trending…come on guys I already taught you all the days of the week, but now holidays?! too much pressure.

Which pressure she evidently didn’t feel when AOL invited her to their executive party in Chicago.

From Know Your Meme’s year-end roundup:

The Californian teenage girl Rebecca Black’s rise to national fame with her autotuned pop single “Friday” was a moment of realization for many aspiring singers and producers: you don’t necessarily have to be the best at what you do to be famous. Originally uploaded in early February, the video began receiving massive exposure on hubsites like YouTube, Twitter and Tumblr after coverage by The Daily What on March 11th, 2011. Within a week, the video gained over 10 million views and the digital single entered the top 100 on iTunes. Following a round of Black’s news media appearances, “Friday” was endorsed by several celebrities, including Nick Jonas, Justin Bieber, Stephen Colbert and Snoop Dogg.

Rebecca herself tends to credit Tosh.0 for the breakout, though TDW certainly was a factor, and the fact that TDW is under common ownership with Know Your Meme is purely a coincidence, right? (Nope. Chuck Testa.)

This, however, perplexes me:

Yeah. You remember J. Robert “Robby” Montana, don’t you?

RB responds:

I see tweets like this, and it makes me so frustrated. I really like Miley, so it’s frustrating that people would make up things like this to make someone look bad. Please don’t believe all of the rumors about anyone. 99.9% of the time it’s gossip, and is created to eliminate boredom and give people something to talk about.

If you hear a rumor about me, and you don’t see it come out of my mouth, see it written by me here on tumblr or on my twitter (@MsRebeccaBlack) it most likely isn’t true.

Incidentally, there was a story earlier in the year about how Miley had dissed Rebecca — but apparently that didn’t happen either.

Okay, they haven’t actually slain anyone, but their list of the 50 worst music videos ever is filled with, shall we say, some fairly harsh language.

This is what they had to say about “Friday”:

Perhaps it was the £5 budget special effects or maybe the fact that there were dental braces everywhere we looked or even the bratty stage school kids pretending to drive around in a car. Black herself came across as kind of sweet and naive, but the sense of an evil puppet master behind the scenes controlling everything couldn’t be escaped. In the end, there was so much to dislike it was quite overwhelming. This was the equivalent of repeatedly getting bitten on the ankles by a yappy dog.

This not-especially-kind review is not, of course, the circumstance that led Rebecca Black to pose for the photograph at left. (This is.) And I’m reasonably certain that if she’s crying at all, it’s in the classic Liberace fashion: all the way to the bank. However, I note with some amusement that of NME’s three least favorite videos, two involve songs mentioned on this very site: “Friday,” of course, and Susan Boyle’s cover of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” which wasn’t necessarily a Friday at all. (I have not heard the Kings of Leon track they disparaged, but then I figure if I need to, I would have no trouble coming up with reasons to disparage Kings of Leon on my own.)

Kohl’s apparently found the composite “Rebecca Black Friday” too hard to resist, and conjured up a commercial that rewrites “Friday” from the point of view of one of those Industrial Strength shoppers who goes straight from the Thanksgiving table to the parking lot outside the store. (They’ve since pulled the video, so this is a Non-Official Copy, for those of you who are concerned about such things.)

The response from the media (and on my Facebook wall) was generally not enthusiastic, though the International Business Times picked it as one of their five best Black Friday ads. And someone landed on Rebecca’s blog asking “OMG CAN THEY ACTUALLY DO THAT?” Um, yes, they can.

Two weeks ago, RB herself dropped in at Google HQ to face an audience of YouTube staff, where she answered questions and generally acted like the bubbly teenaged girl she is. Revelations therein:

• The main reason she did the “Friday” video in the first place was to get one more item on her CV before eventually going to college.
• Yes, she does have “Friday” on her iPod, plus a couple of remixes and covers thereof.
• She’s doing a small voice appearance in an animated film.
• “Friday” views, even today, spike every Friday:

For the latter, I blame people like this:

And with the ritual playing of “Friday” by @MsRebeccaBlack, I pronounce this week Over and Done With. #wesoexcited

Meanwhile, tomorrow is Saturday.

It’s Friday, after all, and this is the new Rebecca Black single, which was released, like all proper pop records these days, on Tuesday:

Groundbreaking it is not. That buzzy synth noise is right out of “Friday,” although I appreciated the almost-power-pop guitar. (Which may also have been a synth, but what the hey.) This could almost have been an Avril Lavigne song, except that Avril would have insisted on being in your face the whole time: she’s almost always singing at top volume. And Avril, now twenty-one, might have choked on that line about “There’s a chalk line on the dance floor / In the shape of my heart”; you probably have to be fourteen (or me) to appreciate that. And there’s the Justin Bieber lookalike who plays the P. of I., which might be just a bit much. Still, a worthy effort, and I clanged down my 99 cents with enthusiasm.

I admit to having had a peripheral frustration here: I couldn’t find any actual credits on the Web. “Surely somebody wrote this, and somebody else directed the video,” I reasoned. Through Thursday — yesterday was Thursday, you’ll remember — all I’d found was the standard legalese: “℗ 2011 RB Friday, Inc.” (Obviously Rebecca knows on which day of the week her bread is buttered.) I left a message for her manager, who was kind enough to reveal the details: “Person of Interest” was written by Rebecca Black, Charlton Pettus and Wendy Page — Pettus had also produced “My Moment” — and Mazik directed the video, shot right there in Orange County.

The war on “haters,” first undertaken in “My Moment,” has picked up an unexpected ally: CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who added “all of Rebecca Black’s critics” to his ongoing RidicuList.

As for that promised album — well, someday. I can wait. Consider it an Item of Interest.

When Rebecca Black walked into ARK Music Factory, they offered her two songs. One of them, she said, was “about adult love,” and she turned it down because “I haven’t experienced that yet.” The other one, of course, was “Friday.”

The follow-up to “Friday,” “My Moment,” was based almost entirely on her experiences. So what do we make of the third single, “Person of Interest,” due out next week? She’s already spilled the beans — and apparently not refried beans, either — in an English-language interview with a mostly-Spanish TV network:

“It’s a love song but it’s not a love song. It’s about almost teenage crushes — when you’re not in love yet but you really like a guy — which I’m really excited about because I don’t think there are too many out like that.”

We have to assume that she’s been there and done that. Incidentally, there’s already a Wikipedia disambiguation page for the term “person of interest,” though the song isn’t officially listed thereupon; a query to “Person of Interest (Rebecca Black song)” tosses you onto the main Rebecca Black page. Of course, nine months ago nobody could have imagined a main Rebecca Black page on Wikipedia, let alone that some aging goob in the flyover zone would do a weekly news report about her — or that a corporate cousin to Consumer Reports would help solicit lyrics for yet another parody of “Friday.” Household-word status is at hand.

Even fans of Rebecca Black’s “Friday” might grouse about the generally low production values and lack of polish in the original video. (What do you want for four grand, anyway?) Her third single, “Person of Interest,” due later this month, apparently will offer no such unpretentiousness:

Hey, at least it isn’t “O Fortuna.”

And this “Friday”-related item is too weird not to pass on:

The Facebook text affixed thereto:

This picture is from a music video. Do you see what’s circled? I bet you didn’t before I told you. The government went into deep investigation on this picture. That girl died in that house in 1887. This picture has been cursed. Now that you have seen that girl, she will visit you. Repost to save your life. Don’t take any chances.

At least fifteen thousand people did exactly that.

Says Rebecca in response:

LOL I’M SO SCARED MY MOM IS GOING TO VISIT ME.

And I’m pretty sure Anaheim Hills as we know it didn’t exist in 1887.

This week’s Rebecca Black update is brought to you by Maxim, and yes, I mean the lad mag. In the November issue, there’s a one-page factoid cluster devoted to Black Friday, “America’s favorite shopping day,” which of course falls in November; and one of the numbers bandied about therein is $24,900, which is, says Maxim, the “cash Rebecca Black banks a week thanks to her song ‘Friday’.”

I reacted to this revelation with a very Rebecca-esque “LOL NO,” but hey, they had to have gotten that number from somewhere, right? And that somewhere is Billboard, which calculated:

Here’s the math: 43,000 tracks at 70 cents to the artist minus a 9% distribution fee, minus 0.91 cents apiece for mechanical royalties equals $24,900.

“Mechanical royalties,” in case you just walked in and/or are jargon-resistant, are due to the composer(s) and publisher. (Black didn’t write “Friday,” after all.) The catch here is that this article is dated March 22, near the crest of the sales curve; while she may have been banking 25k a week then, sales presumably have since subsided a bit.

Then again, perhaps it’s not just sales anymore:

Rolling to a stop one afternoon in my car, I flipped on the radio to hear the familiar chorus of “Friday” by Rebecca Black. I really wanted to hate that song, but somewhere in the middle I found myself singing along.

The startling news here, of course, is that somewhere an actual radio station is playing “Friday.” That’s a whole different revenue stream.