In their rush to air exclusive photos of Flight 447’s destruction, no one in this newsroom stopped to ask the logical questions, such as: 1) How did the camera survive? and 2) Why are the photos in wide-screen format?
The answers, of course, are: 1) Because the footage is from Lost. And, 2) because the footage is from Lost.
As a follow-up to the excellent Band of Brothers, HBO, Steven Speilberg, and Tom Hanks have teamed up to make The Pacific, a 10-part miniseries about the fighting in the Pacific during WWII from the perspective of a group of US Marines. The first trailer for the series has been released:
Update: So of course HBO made YouTube remove the video of the trailer. But they put up a smaller crappier version on their own site so it’s all ok, right? (Why do media companies not like people spreading their advertising around? That’s the fucking goal, yes?) Anyway, in the meantime I changed the link to the video above with a new one that hasn’t been removed yet. And if that one gets removed, you can probably find the newest ones here. (thx, greg)
In a film of startling power and unsettling intimacy — produced exclusively for wallpaper.com — video artist and photographer Robbie Cooper shoots back at active porn aficionados lost in ecstatic release and hears how their passion developed. Be aware that this is not easy titillation and some of you may find the footage shocking. But the film does throw up any number of questions about voyeurism and exhibitionism and makes clear the incredible nakedness of the solo sex act.
NSFW because it turns out that watching people watching porn at the office is no easier to explain to your boss/co-workers than actually watching porn at the office.
And he’s got several pairs of them. In this video, the noted writer shows off his suits and talks about “dressing up for the story” as a young reporter.
In a piece from 1979 called Big Wheel, artist Chris Burden took a massive 19th century iron flywheel and set it spinning with the rear wheel of a small motorcycle. The flywheel spins for *three hours* on a single charge.
Several of his larger works present a characteristic blend of purity, violence and monumentality now aimed at demonstrating simple principles of motion or mass in breathtakingly sculptural ways. In “The Big Wheel,” Burden uses a motorcycle’s rear wheel to set a three-ton iron flywheel, the survivor of a 19th-century factory, into a fast and furious spin that lasts about three hours. The contrast is wonderful: this old, simple Goliath of a wheel, man’s first “machine,” powered by a modern David — small, complex and delicate.
Update: The score to beat is 1,050,200 points. (Oops, Wiebe just died as I was typing this. He’s got two guys left.) Wiebe owns the second highest score with 1,049,100 points.
Update: He just died again. He’s at ~370,000 with one guy left. Not looking good.
Update: Last guy. 457,000. Not looking good.
Update: He finally got it going but ended up short of the record with 923,400. Word is he’s got two more chances to break it today.
Update: No dice…didn’t break the score with any of his games.
You’ll notice the crowd gets quiet after the first few seconds. It draws you in, forces you to pay attention, even if it’s just staring at the back and forth eye tics on Shatner’s face for a minute at a time. “In that moment everyone responds to it,” Martinico says. There’s laughing at first, but then people get into the rhythm of it and study the various little muscles as they pull and twitch on Kirk’s face. “It’s a phenomenal range in just a few seconds.”
The Kobe/Shaq clip is worth a closer look because although the NBA picked this clip because it represents a dramatic moment in the NBA playoffs involving two of the best players in history on a storied team, what it actually shows is how dysfunctional Shaq and Kobe’s relationship was even then, in their first championship season.
Bryant creates 95% of the offense here by crossing Pippen over and throwing a perfect lob to O’Neal. O’Neal throws it down and the camera follows him as he heads down the court yelling in celebration, totally blowing right past Kobe, who has his hand out to high-five Shaq. Kobe half-heartedly grabs at O’Neal’s forearm as he passes; Shaq doesn’t even notice. From his celebration, you’d think Shaq had made an amazing play, but Kobe made that whole thing happen. And if you look at the box score for the game, it was clearly Bryant’s game: he had 25 points, 11 rebounds, 7 assists, and 4 blocks to O’Neal’s 18/9/5/1.
The unedited clip of the play1 shows an awkward ending to this awkward moment. After celebrating with the Laker bench, Shaq looks for Kobe and the two finally acknowledge the play together. But it’s a brief moment; they slap hands and go their separate ways, foreshadowing Shaq’s departure four years later.
[1] What’s also striking about the clip is that it shows just how much Kobe has improved the mechanics of his game since then. Even though he makes a great play here, he’s still got those jittery feet that characterized his early career, at times looking like a dog skittering around on freshly polished linoleum. Any stuttering footwork is now long gone, replaced by the silkiest and smoothest of movement. ↩
Yesterday, Usain Bolt broke the unofficial record at the rarely contested distance of 150 meters, running it in 14.35 seconds on a temporary surface set up in Manchester’s city center. This sounds made up, but here’s the video.
The levitation trick works because giant magnetic fields slightly distort the orbits of electrons in the frog’s atoms. The resulting electric current generates a magnetic field in the opposite direction to that of the magnet. A field of 16 teslas created an attractive force strong enough to make the frog float until it made its escape.
In this video, the NY Times profiles a pair of Pakistani brothers who run a business in Karachi designing and manufacturing bondage and fetish wear. As you’ll see in the video, many of the firm’s employees are unaware of what they’re making. (thx, andrew)
Supertrain was a massively promoted and extremely expensive 1979 NBC adventure drama that lasted only a few episodes before being cancelled. Along with the US boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics, the superflop nearly bankrupted the network.
The show featured an “atom powered steam turbine” train that could travel from NYC to LA in 36 hours. Infrastructurist has posted links to the awful and campy pilot episode of the show. Here’s part one to get you started. I love that the train’s crew is right out of a 1970s disco and the board of directors are bona fide 1890s railroad magnates. This thing is a train wreck. (Layered narrative again! Bam! (Again!))
The Baseball Card Movie is a nice nine-minute film that introduces the viewer to a world where adults pay up to $500 for a pack of cards (aka cardboard crack) and act very superstitiously about opening them.
He once made it a practice to buy his own autographed baseball cards on eBay; when asked why he bought them at auction for high prices rather than acquiring unsigned cards and signing them himself, Zito replied, “Because they’re authenticated.”
Possibly apocryphal but Zito would likely have a difficult time selling self-signed cards because they’re not authenticated.
Noodling is the practice of catching catfish by letting them latch onto your arm.
To begin, a noodler goes underwater to depths ranging from only a few feet to up to twenty feet, placing his hand inside a discovered catfish hole. If all goes as planned, the catfish will swim forward and latch onto the fisherman’s hand, usually as a defensive maneuver in order to try to escape the hole. If the fish is particularly large, the noodler can hook the head around its gills.
This video captures some noodling fishermen in action.
Live on NASA TV right now: the launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, tasked to repair the Hubble telescope. Looks like if the weather holds, lift-off is around 2:01pm. (via @noahkalina)
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