I enjoyed this frame-accurate remake of the famous “Bullet Time” scene from the original Matrix. Done in Lego.
As a commenter on YouTube notes, they even included the “no guns” blooper. Ha!
As a side note, I loved Lego as a kid. And I love it now.
BoingBoing pointed me towards a post on the Sweet Juniper blog, called “Streets With No Name.” It’s a lyrical look at the paths that Detroit pedestrians have carved through fields and vacant lots, in the absence of real sidewalks or roads that go precisely where they want to walk.
But I was touched by a couple of comments at Boing Boing which went further into the concept of calling them “Pathways of Desire.”
The third comment, by Zadaz, says, “A very old rule about deciding where to build sidewalks is to plant grass the first year and the second year lay sidewalks where the grass has been worn down.”
That’s something I had never thought of before. But which sounds so wonderfully right in hindsight.
Oddly, I was just thinking about this yesterday, when I walked from Brandon University, where I teach a class, back to my car — several blocks away so that I didn’t have to pay for parking.
BU has a large open grassy area in front of its main buildings, and there were three separate strands of paths walking towards the same crosswalk I was headed to. There was also a sidewalk, but it looked oddly decorative, and it didn’t seem to be placed in the most advantageous position.
So it was serendipitous that I came across these posts. Now I’ll have a phrase for those paths. A pretty phrase, too, if it’s not too fey to say so.
Adam Lambert, the American Idol runner-up from this past season, has been getting a lot of media attention for his performance this weekend at the American Music Awards, where he simulated oral sex and kissed another man.
It was so controversial for some, that his performance on Tuesday on Good Morning America was canceled, with ABC releasing this statement:
Given his controversial American Music Awards performance, we were concerned about airing a similar concert so early in the morning.
Lambert himself has addressed the controversy, saying that if he were a female performer, there would be little to no problems with the performance.
There’s a big double standard, female pop artists have been doing things provocative like that for years, and the fact that I’m a male, and I’ll be edited and discriminated against could be a problem,” he explained.
Added Lambert, “People are scared and it’s really sad, I just wish people could open their minds up and enjoy things, it’s all for a laugh, it’s really not that big of a deal.
Just think of the kiss between Madonna, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. There may have been some controversy there, but more in a “oh look how hot that was” kind of way; they certainly wouldn’t have had any future performances canceled.
I agree with Lambert that a double standard exists, but not simply between men and women. I think his performance was controversial because he is a gay man expressing his sexuality, and people are uncomfortable with that.
Not that people are uncomfortable with male sexuality, though. You just have to look at the recent fervor over Taylor Lautner, the 17 year old star of New Moon:
Girls (and grown women) everywhere are drooling over Lautner’s pecs, abs, and biceps. He can’t even drink yet, and he’s on the cover of a magazine with a wet t-shirt. This kind of overt (straight) male sexuality is okay, but having an adult gay man do basically the same things Britney Spears did 10 years ago is considered lewd and offensive.
Lainey Gossip put it pretty well:
I don’t think the problem is the alleged lewdness. The problem is the factual gayness.
Gays are supposed to be adorable best friends like Stanford Blatch who tell you to buy those Jimmy Choos. Gays are not supposed to be put their gayness on tv.
Adam Lambert acted no more sexually provocative than Britney Spears did in her prime, and no more sexually provocative than Taylor Lautner dripping wet on the cover of a magazine, and appearing in a movie with his shirt off most of the time. Good for Lambert for trying to make it more acceptable for a gay man to be sexual on TV.
For the past several months, new Muppets videos have been appearing online, usually focusing on a single character or two — such as Beaker’s “Ode to Joy” video (awesome) and some clips of Stadler and Waldorf watching online videos (also awesome).
Now, however, the Muppets have reached a new level of awesomeness and have included all sorts of characters that are often overlooked. I’m thinking of the B-listers such as Lew Zealand and Beauregard.
So it really makes me happy to introduce to you… the amazing, the incredible, the incomparable Bohemian Rhapsody! Yaaaaaaaaaaay!
But who has seen bits and pieces, mind you!
She’s got the basic story and plot elements down, but it’s all mixed up. I hope that directly after this, her friend (the guy who made the video) sat her down to watch the entire thing.
I have been enthralled by something I stumbled on completely by accident. Henley’s Twentieth Century Formulas, Recipes And Processes was published in 1916 and contains “ten thousand selected household and workshop formulas, recipes, processes and money-saving methods for the practical use of manufacturers, mechanics, housekeepers and home workers.”
I haven’t gone through all of the recipes and formulas yet, but I did scroll through the list. Some of them look completely beyond me. I just have no use for dental cements, for example.
But some of the things sound amazing and I’d love to give them a try:
Make Your Own Worchestershire Sauce
And, are five Substitutes For Coffee enough? (Henley warns to watch out for too much chicory in your coffee, too: “the continual use of roasted chicory, or highly chicorized coffee, seldom fails to weaken the powers of digestion and derange the bowels.”)
I’m seriously considering making some of the beverages or the confections that are in the book. I will keep you posted!
It’s a little bit tough to make out in the four-second video above, but that’s actually the slow version.
Essentially, it shows that moguls — those bumps on a ski hill that I avoid — slowly make their way uphill. It sounds counter-intuitive, but if you think about it, the explanation is clear: Skiers will push snow onto the uphill side of the mogul, and wear it away from the downhill side.
This article, where I got the video, says that they calculated a movement of approximately 8 cm per day.
Of course, I would expect that to depend on the number of skiers.
There’s nothing wrong with science-related jokes, except that most people don’t get them.
These aren’t exactly knee-slappers, but I appreciate his cleverness.
(via BB)
You can learn a new factoid every single day at LearnSomethingEveryDay.co.uk. And then, if you like, you can have that factoid printed on a T-shirt.
I thouroughly enjoyed pretty much every aspect of this video: the totally awesome 80s lead, the meta-concept, and of course, the great remix by Justice of Let Love Rule by Lenny Kravitz.
I was kind of jazzed to see the Manitoba provincial logo from my childhood profiled on the Draplin blog. In a post entitled “Getting our butts kicked by those provinces,” he calls it a “Manitoba gem.”
Draplin noticed it via SlantSixCreative, who posted it on their blog with the simple note: “This one just stepped into the running for my top ten logos of all time.”
Should anyone tell them that we changed it? Raise your hand if you think that anyone will ever say that the current logo is a “top ten” effort. And let’s not EVEN talk about “Spirited Energy.”
Parenting isn’t easy. I’ll just put that out there and leave it at that. This post isn’t going to be about arguing with emotionally retarded teenagers or dealing with overtired 9 year olds who are all hopped up on sugar. Nor is it about those moments where they make you proud with their achievements or watching them grow into their own people or about the miracle of life or unconditional love or any of that touchy-feely crap I don’t have the stomach for.
This post is about those moments where something small happens and you go “Wow. I made that.”
Case in point: my youngest, 9 years old, was kicking around the house this morning singing a snippet of a song I’d never heard before. As he usually sings 80′s pop and rock (really), I thought maybe it was a song for a school event or something. Thus, as a good father, I ignored it until he asked if he could go on YouTube. Sure, I said, because that’s how I roll.
A few minutes later he calls me in and says, “Look. I found that song.”
“What song?”
“Dad. The one I was singing.”
And be damned if he doesn’t like good music. Maybe I’m behind the times on hearing this song, but that’s not the point. The song could be 20 years old and I’d still be impressed — he’s found a song he likes and I like, as well. Maybe this is about him becoming his own person after all.
Like I said, a little thing. But I said “wow.”
The song, by the way, is Fireflies by Owl City:
Justin is what you might call a devotee of thrift stores. Now, I like a good bargain as much as the next guy, but Justin runs a blog called “Things I Found At The Thrift Store” where he documents his thrifty finds.
But of course, if you just go buy bargains, pretty soon you’ll end up with too much stuff. And just because it’s a bargain doesn’t mean you need it. So what does Justin do with all his good scores?
Answer: He sells them, online. He pays his rent that way, and has for six months. Of course, he doesn’t recommend it:
You have to have a keen eye for items that you know will sell. “Don’t sell what you don’t know.” A bus driver wouldn’t apply for a job as an Army helicopter pilot would he? You have to know what you’re looking at or you’ll waste a lot of money on stuff you can’t liquidate and end up looking like a hoarder with a garage full of junk. My item of choice was art, because that’s what I’m comfortable in. Having a fine art and design background I was able to find rare prints that had probably been turned in by someone who didn’t know any better. I found real screen prints by David Weidman, hand-colored etchings by UK artist Jo Barry, and ORIGINAL impasto oil paintings by Italian artist P.G. Tiele (which still blows my mind!) I also found art objects such as original McCoy pottery and vintage little sculptures and plant holders from various artists & eras that sold for amounts that still surprise me to this day. America is a nation of collectors and when they see an item they want or don’t have – you bet your ass they’ll pay for it. What happens is when someone passes, all of their stuff has to be dealt with by their spouse or relatives. Most of the time it’s in hasty fashion and a lot of the items get put in a box and donated to thrift stores – that’s just my guess. Whereby, I heroically pluck them from their dusty shelves and find a better venue for them to be noticed and subsequently sold. In some ways I’m helping keep these works of art from the trash or thrift store purgatory. In a way I’m helping to connect the items with someone who collects or genuinely cherishes that artists’ work.
The blog’s a pretty fun read. And it makes me want to go scour some second-hand stores.
From BuckinghamStudio.com:
David Buckingham roams the windblown alleys, abandoned factories, gritty industrial areas, dodgy neighborhoods, and low deserts of Southern California in search of the cast away, the discarded, the forgotten: old 55-gallon barrels, wheelbarrows, tool boxes, road signs, tractor parts, car doors, gas cans, etc. These battered relics are carted to a dusty studio in downtown Los Angeles where they are muscled into works of art with a bewildering array of power tools and sheer force of will. All colors are original as found; David Buckingham is no painter.
I think I like “Charlie Don’t Surf” — one of a selection of movie quotes that he’s done. But there are loads of others.
He’s even got a video, if you poke around a bit.
Temporary.cc sounds like an html version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Basically, it’s a webpage that, with each unique visitor, deletes a bit of itself. When I visited, it was about 3/4 malformed code, with some chunky blocks of colour at the very bottom. As more and more people visit, it will eventually disappear entirely.
But, the questions that it raises live on. Am I partially responsible for the demise of this webpage? Should I feel guilty? Is it really a static webpage at all? Or should it be more properly thought-of as a slow-motion animation, where you can only see one frame at a time, and which requires collaboration to advance.
The designers say:
These deletions change the way browsers understand the website’s code and create a unique (de)generative piece after each new user. Because each unique visit produces a new composition through self-destruction, Temporary.cc can never be truly indexed, as any subsequent act of viewing could irreparably modifiy it.
Eventually, like tangible media, Temporary.cc will fall apart entirely, becoming a blank white website. Its existence will be remembered only by those who saw or heard about it.