It will take you literally hours to
It will take you literally hours to get through this list of the 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of All Time (video often included). (thx, miguel)
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kottke.org posts about video
This video makes me irrationally happy…I
This video makes me irrationally happy…I watched it four times in a row just now.
It was the freshest move I’ve ever seen, like he was floating on air.
And yeah, that’s Kanye West’s Vimeo account. His blog is entertaining as well; a recent favorite post is YOU CAN’T MAKE ME STOP POSTING YAGHTS!!!
Update: Vimeo erased the video because it was not original content so I pointed to one on YouTube. They also erased all but one video on Kanye’s account…I guess they were all videos by other people.
Flickr users can now upload video to
Flickr users can now upload video to their accounts. I uploaded a video during the beta test but since I’m not a pro user, I can’t show it to anyone now that Flickr’s gone public with the video uploading. :(
Update: Ok, Flickr Pro is back in effect. Still can’t mark the video unprivate. Maybe the video stuff isn’t truly live yet? (thx, heather & adam)
Update: Yep, the video stuff goes live “starting late Tuesday or early Wednesday”.
Update: The video stuff looks like it’s live now. Here’s a video of Ollie crawling that we took a couple of months ago. Videos are limited to 90 seconds…they’re calling them “long photos”. Love that.
Video of the top 50 soccer goals. A
Video of the top 50 soccer goals. A dubbed-from-VCR YouTube video is probably not the best way to watch these, but that’s the hand we’ve been dealt.
Video of Charlie Rose’s conversation with chef
Video of Charlie Rose’s conversation with chef Thomas Keller the other night. Good stuff as always, although I’m disappointed about how completely he’s embraced the idea of the chef as empire-tender rather than as a person who cooks.
I realized the other day that I prefer eating at places where the person that owns the place is in the kitchen because no one else is going to care as much about your meal and experience as that person. Which doesn’t mean that you can’t find excellent food and experiences at Per Se or the diner around the corner, but the increasingly prevalent fine dining empires feel like, in the words of Bilbo Baggins, “too little butter spread over too much toast”. (via eater)
Anders Weberg makes true P2P art.
Anders Weberg makes true P2P art. Weberg shares his videos on Bittorrent until a single other user downloads them. Then he stops sharing it and…
After that the artwork will be available for as long as other users share it. The original file and all the material used to create it are deleted by the artist. […] Feel free to don’t or download the film, watch it and share it for as long as you like. Or delete it immediately.
Leopard slugs get busy
David Attenborough narrates a sexual encounter between two leopard slugs. I know slug sex probably isn’t your thing, but this is worth a look. Beautiful.
(thx, alex)
Awesome trippy video made in 1971 that demonstrates
Awesome trippy video made in 1971 that demonstrates through dance the process of amino acids linking to form protein. Skip ahead to ~3:30 for the dance itself. This film is still being shown in class at MIT. (thx, jeff)
Ok, this is the last one of
Ok, this is the last one of these, I promise. This is the most elaborate Line Rider track ever created. Dear god, how much time did that take to make?
Steve Nash directed his own Nike commercial.
Steve Nash directed his own Nike commercial. Nash’s original concept for the commercial is clever:
At first, the idea was to shoot on different mediums — camera phone, 8-millimeter, 16-millimeter (the eventual choice), security footage. My idea was the city was watching me. The genesis was a lot of people film me or take a picture of me in the city on cellphones. If it’s such an appetite to see me do normal things, it was an idea to do something people like.
(via truehoop)
There Will Be Vader, a mashup of
There Will Be Vader, a mashup of There Will Be Blood and Star Wars, with Daniel Plainview playing the part of Vader.
(via house next door)
Andy Baio has digitized and put online
Andy Baio has digitized and put online a VHS tape from 1995 called “Internet Power!” Gape in wonder at its mid-90s-ness.
The Big Dog robot
Robots are getting better…the Big Dog robot can recover itself from slipping on ice, walk in the deep snow, and keep its balance when kicked hard in the side.
Great video. (via mouser)
This talk by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor
This talk by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor was universally considered the best talk at the TED conference last month. In it, she describes the lessons she learned from studying her stroke from inside her own head as it was happening.
And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. And I realized, “Oh my gosh! I’m having a stroke! I’m having a stroke!” And the next thing my brain says to me is, “Wow! This is so cool. This is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?”
A video stream of yesterday’s iPhone SDK
A video stream of yesterday’s iPhone SDK presentation.
Update: Jason at SVN speculates on the implications of yesterday’s announcements.
An (animated (and condensed (and brief (and
An (animated (and condensed (and brief (and truncated)))) history of evil. Almost as interesting for the comments as for the video itself.
Short video as contemporary photography
I’m interested in short video as a contemporary equivalent of the photograph. Here are two examples. My lovely wife talking about her lovely mother. My nephew a few years ago singing his favorite song. I love these moments, not only because they are people I love, but because I think they show, as snapshots do, how spectacular a moment can be.
Trailer for an amazing-looking game called Crayon
Trailer for an amazing-looking game called Crayon Physics Deluxe; it’s part Line Rider, part The Incredible Machine. Deluxe is a sequel to the more rudimentary Crayon Physics (sadly, PC-only). (via clusterflock)
Music video for Orbital’s The Box from 1996.
Music video for Orbital’s The Box from 1996. That’s Oscar winner Tilda Swinton, yo.
Harlem rent parties and Fats Waller
According to Wikipedia, a rent party is:
a social occasion where tenants hire a musician or band to play and pass the hat to raise money to pay their rent. The rent party played a major role in the development of jazz and blues music.
Further reading suggests that rent parties started in Harlem in the 1910s as a way to offset rising rents.
Harlemites soon discovered that meeting these doubled, and sometimes tripled, rents was not so easy. They began to think of someway to meet their ever increasing deficits. Someone evidently got the idea of having a few friends in as paying party guests a few days before the landlord’s scheduled monthly visit. It was a happy; timely thought. The guests had a good time and entered wholeheartedly into the spirit of the party. Besides, it cost each individual very little, probably much less than he would have spent in some public amusement place. Besides, it was a cheap way to help a friend in need. It was such a good, easy way out of one’s difficulties that others decided to make use of it. Thus was the Harlem rent-party born….
Jazz pianist Fats Waller was associated with these parties and lived a short but colorful life.
The ebullient young man with the dazzling jazz style was a big hit at the Sherman Hotel. His nightly audience included men with wide lapels and bulging pockets. One evening Fats felt a revolver poked into his paunchy stomach. He found himself bullied into a black limousine, heard the driver ordered to East Cicero. Sweat pouring down his body, Fats foresaw a premature end to his career, but on arrival at a fancy saloon, he was merely pushed toward a piano and told to play. He played. Loudest in applause was a beefy man with an unmistakable scar: Al Capone was having a birthday, and he, Fats, was a present from “the boys”.
The party lasted three days. Fats exhausted himself and his repertoire, but with every request bills were stuffed into his pockets. He and Capone consumed vast quantities of food and drink. By the time the black limousine headed back to the Sherman, Fats had acquired severeal thousand dollars in cash and a decided taste for vintage champagne.
I was inspired to read about rent parties and Waller by this interview with Michel Gondry, director of Be Kind Rewind. Gondry says about his film:
It’s important in the story that there’s a parallel between what’s happening in the film and what happened in the past with rent parties, which were very real. Fats Waller became the great musician he was through those parties. When someone could not afford the rent for one month, they’d make a party. You’d bring a dollar, and there would be a piano contest all night long. People making their own entertainment, that’s exactly what it is.
Here’s Waller performing one of his most well-known pieces, Ain’t Misbehavin’.
Good music in movies
Jad Abumrad from Radio Lab curates The Morning News’ Video Digest and selects clips from movies with good music.
Interesting explanation of Prince Rupert’s Drops with
Interesting explanation of Prince Rupert’s Drops with accompanying video demonstration.
The very high stress within the drop gives rise to unusual qualities, such as the ability to withstand a blow from a hammer on the bulbous end without breaking, while the drops will disintegrate explosively if the tail end is even slightly damaged. When this happens, the large amount of potential energy stored in the drop’s crystalline structure is released, causing fractures to propagate through the material at very high speed.
I did research on glass back in college but I never heard anything about this.
Kooky video by Chip Kidd in which
Kooky video by Chip Kidd in which he does impressions of people interpreting odd bits of text. The Wicked Witch of the West reciting Psalms 23 is my favorite. The video is in support of Kidd’s new book, The Learners, out today. (via towleroad)
Nice TV ad for the Madrid Metro…
Nice TV ad for the Madrid Metro…a view of the city from underground.
Demo film of the Polaroid SX-70 made
Demo film of the Polaroid SX-70 made by Charles and Ray Eames but set to a soundtrack of The Cramps performing Garbageman. Wot? (via spurgeonblog)
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