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Some years ago, Joaquin Phoenix was in a car accident. Werner Herzog happened to be driving right behind him, stopped, and pulled him from the wreakage. Herzog tells the story:
Funny how you never see Superman and Werner Herzog together. I wonder… (via buzzfeed)
Khoi also has an interesting travel packing tip to share. (via swissmiss)
This compilation of people dodging out of the way of cars, trains, etc. is a bit American’s Funniest Videos1, but my heart is still pounding…I couldn’t even watch the whole thing.
(via @dunstan)
[1] Or rather, America’s Most Harrowing Videos. Or Unintended Jackass with Johnny Knoxville. ↩
The Canon 7D and 5D Mark II can shoot HD video at 60 fps. But with an After Effects plug-in called Twixtor, you can slow the action down to 1000 fps, no expensive camera equipment required. Here’s a sample:
Obviously if you’re shooting footage of bullets going through playing cards, this isn’t going to work for you, but the results look great for slower moving objects like BMX bikes.
If you are at first lonely, be patient. If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren’t okay with it, then just wait. You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it.
We could start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library. Where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse the stacks and smell the books. You’re not supposed to talk much anyway so it’s safe there.
A short documentary about a grocery store in LA that sells only soda…500 different kinds and very little high fructose corn syrup.
And the store’s inventory seems to be mostly (or completely) glass bottles. (via @dunstan)
If you’ve never seen the excellent Oscar-winning short film Logorama, it’s available in its entirety on Vimeo:
The uploading party did the music and sound design for the film, so hopefully it won’t get yanked down. (thx, @matthiasrascher)
You give it a year and YouTube Time Machine will show you videos of events from that year. For instance: 1894, 1943, and 1991. A super idea. (thx, alice)
A collection by Roger Ebert from 1995. The moments include:
Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta discuss what they call Quarter Pounders in France, in “Pulp Fiction.”
Jack Nicholson trying to order a chicken salad sandwich in “Five Easy Pieces.”
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” dialogue by Robert Duvall, in “Apocalypse Now.”
From an extensive Flickr collection of microorganism photography and videos, a video of an Amoeba proteus hanging out, digesting some food, etc.
From 1949, a video explanation of how the innards of a mechanical wristwatch function.
Ingenious. It’s difficult to take the complexity of technology for granted after watching that. (via paul)
Here’s what the communication between a web browser and YouTube looks like when the browser requests a video, slowed down 12X so you can actually see what happens.
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs talk about their short career building illegal telephone equipment, aka blue boxes.
Interesting how their two stories differ…the engineer and the marketer.
This series of videos from the NY Times is called The Beauty of the Power Game and I can’t tell if they are cheap & exploitive or beautiful & revealing. They show women tennis players hitting shots in slow motion. The one of Victoria Azarenka is the best by far…the camera pans up her body slowly, showing first her footwork, then the pivot, backswing, intense focus of the eyes, swing, and finally the followthrough.
What blind soccer players lack in sight, they more than make up for in footwork.
Some lovely skill there. From a Wired article on the sport:
In blind soccer, there are five on each side, a goalie and four outfield players. The goalie can be sighted or visually impaired and must stay in his designated goalie box. His teammates, meanwhile, wear eye shields so as to take away any competitive advantage from those players that may have limited vision over those who have no sight whatsoever. There are no throw-ins, as there is a wall surrounding the shrunken (at least, by typical soccer standards) playing field, and each team has someone calling out instructions from behind one of the goals. The players can call each other either by name or by shouting “Yeah!” And when you’re approaching to engage another player to steal the ball, you must shout “Voy!” — Spanish for I’m here! That means that you’ve got to discern the voice of your teammates — since everyone on the pitch is yelling “Yeah!” — and have a sense of where you are with the ball (which contains ball bearings, to help with tactility on the foot) in relation to the goal.
And the thing is spinning the whole time? What I don’t understand is how he manages to suspend the laws of physics only within his personal space…it’s not like audience members are floating away or anything. (via mathowie)
The Dallas Observer has collected a few clips from movies where the music has been replaced by Cee-Lo’s Fuck You. The Dirty Dancing one is probably the best:
I wonder how the slow-dance scene at the end of Rushmore would work. Or the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance in Back to the Future. Audio NSFW. (via @erikmal)
Great song by Cee-Lo, who you may know as one half of Gnarls Barkley.
NSFW in both the visual and audio departments for extensive use of the phrase “fuck you”.
I love Anil’s comment that the video is “a little bit Tobias, and a little bit Sasha”. And indeed the typeface in the video is Champion Gothic, designed by Tobias Frere-Jones’ partner, Jonathan Hoefler.
Ok, so it’s not Gaga (and certainly not Christopher Walken), but she does work “object oriented” into the lyrics.
This is possibly the best production of the worst idea I’ve ever seen.
Nirvana mashed up with Michael Jackson? Surprisingly awesome.
Comedian and entertainer Victor Borge used to do a bit where he’d muse about the application of economic inflation to language.
See, we have hidden numbers in the words like “wonderful,” “before,” “create,” “tenderly.” All these numbers can be inflated and meet the economy, you know, by rising to the occcassion. I suggest we add one to each of these numbers to be prepared. For example “wonderful” would be “two-derful.” Before would be Be-five. Create, cre-nine. Tenderly should be eleven-derly. A Leiutenant would be a Leiut-eleven-ant. A sentance like, “I ate a tenderloin with my fork” would be “I nine an elevenderloin with my five-k.”
Here’s the whole routine:
(via bobulate)
You wouldn’t think a Korean man teaching his class how to swear in English would be so funny.
I love his mannerisms when he says the swears in English; he channels Goodfellas-era Joe Pesci a little bit during his discussion of “fucking”. (via mike industries)
A lightning strike recorded at 9000 frames per second.
The action across time scales displayed in this video is amazing. One strike hovers in the frame almost the entire time while other hundreds of other strikes flicker in and out in single frames.
Turf dancing is similar to krumping and poppin’ & lockin’ in that they’re all basically break dancing 2.0. This is a particularly fine exhibition of the form:
Every time I see someone glide around, from Michael Jackson’s 1983 Motown Moonwalk on up to David Elsewhere, I think no one can get any better at skimming around on their feet like they’re weightless. Then four kids dancing on a rainy street corner up the ante and once more shift what Stuart Kauffman calls the adjacent possible. (via snarkmarket)
No idea if this is an actual thing outside of advertising New Zealand energy drinks; this article indicates that a few circus folk dreamt it up (hello, red flag). Welcome to 2010, when you can’t sort the ads from everything else. (thx, wade)
Video of a Valley Girl contest that took place in Encino, CA in 1982.
The footage is from a show called Real People, which was a big hit with adolescent Jason (although I loved That’s Incredible more). If you want to learn more about Valley Girls — sure you do! — Wikipedia has almost too much info. (via lowindustrial)
This video of a robotic arm learning how to flip pancakes is surprisingly funny.
(via eater)
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