Video of a bunch of TV production
Video of a bunch of TV production company logos…you know, the ones that usually follow the shows, “sit Ubu sit, good dog” and the like.
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kottke.org posts about video
A pair of unusual videos starring supermodel Eva Herzigova
Gaspar Noé is an Argentinian-born French filmmaker whose films are notable for their frank depictions of violence and rape, as in 2002’s Irréversible, which features a nine-minute uncut scene of Monica Bellucci’s character being raped and beaten.
Eva Herzigova is a Czech supermodel and actress. She’s appeared on too many magazine covers to count and is fluent in five languages.
No one knows what became of the kitten.
Eva’s son George was born in Italy in the summer of 2007.
Update: Of course the second video is no longer available on YouTube because it showed Eva breastfeeding or is copyrighted or both.
Jessica Lagunas’ Return to Puberty, an artwork
Jessica Lagunas’ Return to Puberty, an artwork consisting of a “video close-up of my pubis in a static single shot, in which I depilate most of my pubic hair with a pair of tweezers continuously for one hour”. It’s like the female version of Empire. NSFW.
Japanese treadmill game show
Video of a Japanese game show where contestants have to clear hurdles while running on treadmills. There’s something Sisyphean about their task. No word on whether any of the contestants were able to take off.
Video of a Charlie Rose interview with
Video of a Charlie Rose interview with Pixar’s John Lasseter and Steve Jobs. This was about a year after Toy Story had been released and a few months before Apple bought Jobs’ NeXT.
Nice video of how a copy and
Nice video of how a copy and paste feature might work on the iPhone. There was a lengthy discussion about how to implement this on kottke.org last month.
An illustration of how insanely effective water
An illustration of how insanely effective water is at absorbing heat: you can hold a water balloon over a candle without popping it. The rest of Robert Krampf’s videos are worth a look as well.
Congrats to the Vimeo team on the
Congrats to the Vimeo team on the launch of the latest version of the site. Here’s the announcement post. The login/signup page is awesome. I also like how Vimeo has found room in the crowded video-on-the-web field, even though YouTube dominates the space. Vimeo is to YouTube as Facebook is to MySpace…not in terms of closed versus open (you do know that Facebook is AOL 2.0, right?) but in terms of being a bit more well thought out and not as, well, ugly (and not just in the aesthetic sense).
Strange musical machines
Who knew you could play the theme song from Super Mario Brothers with a Tesla coil?
So just to explain a little further, yes, it is the actual high voltage sparks that are making the noise. Every cycle of the music is a burst of sparks at 41 KHz, triggered by digital circuitry at the end of a “long” piece of fiber optics. What’s not immediately obvious in this video is how loud this is. Many people were covering their ears, dogs were barking. In the sections where the crowd is cheering and the coils is starting and stopping, you can hear the the crowd is drowned out by the coil when it’s firing.
More about Tesla coils at Wikipedia. (thx, mike)
And I don’t know what rock I’ve been hiding under for the past 33 years, but this Gnarls Barkley cover is the first I’ve heard of the theremin music machine:
In a great illustration of the sometimes odd path that innovation takes, Robert Moog found inspiration in the theremin after it had fallen out of favor in serious musical circles:
After a flurry of interest in America following the end of the Second World War, the theremin soon fell into disuse with serious musicians, mainly because newer electronic instruments were introduced that were easier to play. However, a niche interest in the theremin persisted, mostly among electronics enthusiasts and kit-building hobbyists. One of these electronics enthusiasts, Robert Moog, began building theremins in the 1950s, while he was a high-school student. Moog subsequently published a number of articles about building theremins, and sold theremin kits which were intended to be assembled by the customer. Moog credited what he learned from the experience as leading directly to his groundbreaking synthesizer, the Minimoog.
Update: Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey is a 1994 documentary about the theremin and its inventor. Here’s a trailer, a review by Roger Ebert, and the DVD from Amazon. (thx, jeb & mark)
Video of a binary adding machine made
Video of a binary adding machine made out of wood and operated by marbles.
Update: The adding machine was built by Matthias Wandel, woodworker extraordinaire. Here’s an explanation of how the machine works. Be sure to check out the other projects listed on his home page and what’s new page. (thx, charles)
Video of a bunch of reject Wii
Video of a bunch of reject Wii games, including WiiWhaling, Paperwork Mario, and WiiDriveby. (thx, jeffry)
Don Herbert, also know as TV’s Mr.
Don Herbert, also know as TV’s Mr. Wizard, died today aged 89. Here’s part one of a 4-part interview with Herbert from the Archive of American Television.
Did President Bush get his watch stolen
Did President Bush get his watch stolen in Albania while shaking hands with people in the crowd? Bruce Schneier: “At 0.50 minutes into the clip, Bush has a watch. At 1.04 minutes into the clip, he had a watch.”
Update: Tony Snow is saying that Bush put the watch in his pocket. (thx, hal)
A rerun, because it came up at
A rerun, because it came up at dinner the other night: EPIC 2014, the recent history of technology and the media as told from the vantage point of 7 years in the future. “2008 sees the alliance that will challenge Microsoft’s ambitions. Google and Amazon join forces to form Googlezon. Google supplies the Google Grid and unparalled search technology. Amazon supplies the social recommendation engine and its huge commercial infrastructure.”
Video of women depicted in Western art
Video of women depicted in Western art morphing into one another. Belongs in the seamless mesmerization category of videos along with Noah Kalina’s everyday and 787 Cliparts. (thx, robin)
A Star Wars / Boogie Nights trailer mashup. (via cyn-c)
A Star Wars / Boogie Nights trailer mashup. (via cyn-c)
Video of a recent interview of Al
Video of a recent interview of Al Gore by Charlie Rose at the 92nd St. Y. 57 minutes.
Video segment of photographer Garry Winogrand talking
Video segment of photographer Garry Winogrand talking about how he works from a Bill Moyers show in 1982. Here’s a transcript of the video. “Photographing something changes it.”
Closeup videos of the sun. The bottom
Closeup videos of the sun. The bottom one is especially mesmerizing.
Video from 1960 of Joseph Kittinger jumping from
Video from 1960 of Joseph Kittinger jumping from a helium balloon at an altitude of 102,800 feet. Kittinger freefell for 4.5 minutes, reached a speed of 714 mph, and endured temperatures as low as -94 degrees F. His jump was immortalized on the cover of Life magazine in August 1960. (via o’reilly radar)
Update: I knew I’d seen this footage somewhere before…it’s featured in the video for Boards of Canada’s Dayvan Cowboy. (thx, marco)
Timelapse video of a map showing Civil
Timelapse video of a map showing Civil War battles and movements…four years of war in four minutes. The video was produced by Harvest Moon Studio for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
100 quotes from 100 movies featuring the numbers 1 through 100.
100 quotes from 100 movies featuring the numbers 1 through 100. A list of the movies is available here.
The sport of cheese rolling. A wheel
The sport of cheese rolling. A wheel of cheese rolls down a hill (at 70 mph), contestants race after it, and whoever crosses the finish line first wins the cheese. Here’s a video of the madness.
Video of the last 10 seconds of every
Video of the last 10 seconds of every season 1 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Holy crap, the ottoman humping video made
Holy crap, the ottoman humping video made it on to The Daily Show. (via waxy)
A list of film’s most impressive and
A list of film’s most impressive and famous long takes, including those from Boogie Nights, Touch of Evil, Children of Men, and The Player. Featuring the now-standard YouTube clips of each long take.
Remember the guys humping the ottoman video
Remember the guys humping the ottoman video from Friday? There’s a sequel of sorts: how to blog. (via dens)
There are almost no words for this
There are almost no words for this video. “When that stool pops out an ottoman 9 months from now, there is no way in hell y’all are gonna be able to tell who the baby daddy is….” Potentially NSFW. (via todd at bingbong.com, who says that he “would be totally happy if this video was the World Wide Web’s grand finale, and then the Internet just went dark and we all went back to making candles and reading the bible and stuff.”)
Update: The video was made for a contest held by Pretty Ricky, a hip-hop group. Here’s the contest announcement. That still doesn’t explain why those young men were having outercourse with that ottoman. (thx, travis)
Update: This one’s good too. Furniture sex + rubber gloves and surgical masks.
Update: One last word on this…the video is not an entry in Push It contest, it’s just set to a Pretty Ricky song. (thx, todd)
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