A bunch of people doing amazing things on bikes, on skates, on skis, in wheelchairs, on skateboards, throwing balls, kicking balls, hitting balls, flipping over, and sliding around.
Maybe you’ve figured this out much quicker than I have, but I realized recently that one of the “topics” I cover here on kottke.org is “people are awesome” and “look at all the amazing things we can do that we’ve never done before”. And it’s not just videos like the one above where people perform physical feats of obvious novelty and amazement. It’s also kids from the projects making the cover of Fortune magazine, scientists building a tiny sun in California, inventing 3-D printers for human tissue, making wonderfully creative design and objects, drilling through entire mountain ranges with massive drills, quietly but completely changing how people think about space and time, writing books that inspire people to be more awesome, landing on the Moon, and so on and so on. (via devour, which is also awesome)
Mesmerizing Zapruder-esque footage that seems to show a woman talking on a mobile phone at the 1928 premiere of a Charlie Chaplin film at Mann’s Chinese Theatre.
According to this guy, the simplest explanation is that the woman is a time traveller. Stick that in your Occam’s razor and shave it! (via geekologie)
Ok, not quite, and Richie Jackson doesn’t look much like a typical skateboarder — more like a hippie hipster pirate — but his skills on a board are amazing.
Watch at least until he goes over the rail while the board goes under it. This reminds me a bit of the stuff that Danny MacAskill does on a bicycle. (thx, ross)
2. For more than 14 years, Big Bird was the only character on Seasame Street who could see Snuffy…he was BB’s imaginary friend.
3. Some of the grownups on the show came to believe Big Bird about the existence of Mr. Snuffleupagus and he was revealed to them in November 1985 (full episode here):
In an interview on a Canadian telethon that was hosted by Bob McGrath, Snuffy’s performer, Martin P. Robinson, revealed that Snuffy was finally introduced to the main human cast mainly due to a string of high profile and sometimes graphic stories of pedophilia and sexual abuse of children that had been aired on shows such as 60 Minutes and 20/20. The writers felt that by having the adults refuse to believe Big Bird despite the fact that he was telling the truth, they were scaring children into thinking that their parents would not believe them if they had been sexually abused and that they would just be better off remaining silent.
There’s finally a stable copy of Charles and Ray Eames’ seminal Powers of Ten video available online, courtesy of the Eames Office YouTube account.
Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only a s a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward — into the hand of the sleeping picnicker — with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell.
The movie Secretariat opens today, but I think you’ll agree that however good the movie is, Secretariat the horse was far better. Here’s his famous Usain Bolt-like victory in the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths.
It’s unbelievable how far ahead he is at the end of the race.
Earlier this year, Craigslist started an online TV program about the users of the their site. For each episode, they choose an interesting CL post and basically tape the results. The newest episode is about a woman who wanted to give away an accordian…but each prospective taker had to audition in front of the whole group at dinner.
This is one of those ideas that seems so obvious in retrospect that you wonder why it took so long to happen.
We talked to experts Alice Twemlow, Eric Abrahamson, Massimo Vignelli, David Miller, Kurt Andersen, Soren Kjaer, Alfred Stadler, Jennifer Lai, and Ben Bajorek and creates an historical and relevant film about the relationship between the worker and the desk and how this reflects on personality and habits.
The video is 17 minutes long; the first 6 minutes is a long drive during which you don’t see a whole lot of intact buildings…and many stretches with no buildings at all. See also a 1905 streetcar trip down Market Street. (via devour)
This is Ken Block practicing a sport called gymkhana, which is sort of the Mario Kart version of rodeo barrel racing.
The build-up is way too long…the good stuff starts at about 1:10 and the crazy-ass shit starts at 3:00. The move right at three minutes in is just absolutely fantastic as is the 360 sliding thing he does through a building. (via clusterflock)
This might not sound like much, but you need to watch this video of the 1997 Royal Navy Field Gun Competition. In it, two teams compete to navigate themselves and a cannon through an obstacle course: over walls, across chasms, and through small gaps in walls.
The strength and coordination displayed here is amazing…it’s like watching NFL linemen do ballet. (via migurski)
This is footage from a camera on board a cruise ship from when some rough weather hit.
On August 1, the Pacific Sun ran into a heavy storm 400 miles north of New Zealand, hitting 25-foot-tall waves and 50-knot winds. Its 1732 passengers weren’t prepared to endure the madness that ensued. Absolutely crazy.
Roger Ebert recently sat down with Errol Morris to talk about his new movie, Tabloid, and a bunch of other stuff. The interview is presented as a series of eight YouTube videos. In this one, he talks about how he got started writing his blog for The NY Times and how that helped him get over his 30-year struggle with writer’s block:
He’s working on a seventeen-part article about a murder case for the blog. Seventeen parts!
Errol Morris and Werner Herzog both had films premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. To mark the occasion, they sat down and had a conversation with each other.
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