Editor's Note: This is a long post. I highly, strongly encourage you to stick around for all three videos.

One of my favorite pasttimes is sitting around with Toad and Joey and surfing the Web. We'll watch the big game (Sooners) together and then immediately trade in the boob tube for the YouTube.

Toad has a laptop set up to work on a beautiful flat screen HDTV, and on the big soundsystem, we can listen to Rhapsody, Real Networks' subscription-based music service. For $13 a month, I can listen to anything I want when I want.

Honestly, between YouTube and Rhapsody, combined with regular Internet, I could pretty much live without conventional television.

So, this past weekend, we discussed some pop culture musical oddities. Specifically, there is a 2003 CD called "When Pigs Fly (Songs You Never Thought You'd Hear)," on which singers, conventional and unconventional alike, recorded tunes dissonant to their style.

For example, Ani Difranco and Jackie Chan sing Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable."

Devo sings "Ohio," made popular by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

And Don Ho sings "Shock the Monkey."

This was a wildly enjoyable CD.

Well, as I was doing a little home research this week for my newest online venture, blogging about what I know best -- pop culture from the 1970s and 1980s -- I stumbled upon some old Barney Miller clips. If you are unfamiliar with this 1970s television sitcom gem, it was a police comedy based in New York, centered on officers of the 12th Precinct.

Personally, I think it's the best police comedy ever made and one of the five or six best and smartest sitcoms ever done. And, it has THE coolest theme song of all time. Listen:

I remember vividly that my dad's favorite character on Barney Miller was the intellectual Det. Dietrich, played by Steve Landesberg. Well, I was doing a little research on my favorite character from the show -- Nick Yemana, played by Jack Soo.

Soo's schtick on the show was that he made the coffee for the boys. And, his coffee sucked. Thick, brown, foul. Nick Yemana and Jack Soo were so alike in that their humor was so dry.

Unfortunately, Soo lost a brief battle with esophageal cancer in 1979, three years before the show ended.

True story: Hal Linden was at the hospital where Soo was when he was being taken to an operating room, literally hours or days before his death, and from a wheelchair, Soo quipped to Linden, "It must've been the coffee."

During my online research, I learned that Soo had been interned with other Japanese people during World War II and was actually somewhat of a comedian in his camp. I am not making light of what must have been a terrible experience, but Soo honed his comedic skills there.

He also starred in a film version of "Flower Drum Song," a 1961 adaptation of a play by Oscar Hammerstein II and Joseph Fields. According to this site, the play was about "the generation gap between the old world Chinese who cling to traditional values, and the new world Chinese who see themselves as Americans who should adopt Western values and lifestyles. The ending, in the tradition of all comedies, is happy with all the protagonists finding their true loves."

In it, Soo sings a standard called "Don't Marry Me," and dare I say that, like most of the tunes on the Pigs Fly CD, I was pretty well stunned by Soo's performance.

Alas, that bit of research led me to the greatness of comedian Ron Carey, who played the only uniformed cop in the joint: Carl Leavitt. His character was sycophantic. His goal in life was to become one of those detectives, even though he was really but a wee tike at 5 feet 6 ... and a half (as he'd say).

Actually, in real life, Carey was about 5 feet 4 inches tall. But the men on Barney Miller were also very tall. Carey originally considered priesthood but became a comedian, focusing a ton of his stand-up routine on being a small Catholic kid.

He got a huge break in Mel Brooks' 1978 classic, "High Anxiety," playing Brooks' chauffer and sidekick. In fact, at about the 6:10 mark of this clip, Carey utters one of the most famous lines in the movie when he tries to pick up a giant locker.

"I got it. I got it. I got it. ... I ain't got it."

Enjoy this second clip:

Unfortunately, Carey died of a stroke this year at the age of 71.

As I continued perusing YouTube though, I stumbled upon a vignette from an obscure early 1970s movie called "Dynamite Chicken," a series of pieces featuring Richard Pryor, John Lennon, Lenny Bruce, Allen Ginsburg, etc. etc.

I've never seen it, so I don't claim to know much about it except for having found Ron Carey's contribution to the movie. In it, filmed with nobody around in front of New York's famous St. Patrick's Cathedral, Carey steps out of a limo and sidesteps Fred Astaire style to a bluesy tune from Lionel Goldbart called "God Loves Rock & Roll."

Carey's wearing a priest's outfit with Blues Brothers shades and a smoke in his mouth.

Dare I say this is one of THE singular coolest finds I've made on YouTube. It lasts about two minutes, but it's thoroughly enjoyable. Enjoy.

That gem comes courtesy of sonofclipophilic, and he's got some other obscure 1970s gems on his YouTube channel.