"Shtuff People Say to Photographers"

Jolene

Yet another different side to Miley Cyrus.




Update:
Same song, thanks to Russ, in a duet with the writer of it, Dolly Parton.

Small Red Horse In The Rain

I was looking on YouTube on the slim chance that somebody might have uploaded a favorite song from my childhood, The Horse Is Green In Rainy Weather (Hesten Er Grøn I Regnvejr). No such luck, sadly. But instead I found this little artistic gem. ("Det regner" means "it rains".)
Wow. And somebody said there are no great artists anymore...

Gorgeous ceramics

This video shows the making of the most spectacular and beautiful ceramics vases I've ever seen. I just cannot believe the skill and the patience it must take to make these. Don't miss it. 
[The video will not play in Safari on my Mac or iPad. It does play in Chrome, though.]

As you can see in the next picture, the patterns are *not* painted in the glaze, they are made by *inlaying* different shades of clay! How the glaze enhances that, I have no clue. 

The artisan is scraping off the superflous colored clay to reveal the clay he has put into the grooves which makes the patterns. A delicate task, ending with a brush. 

I'm fascinated by this one, I wonder how it's made. 

----

Funny enough, at the same time as my huge admiration for this, I get a tiny bit of empty feeling about the idea of owning one of them. I think because while it's amazing craft, it is not actually art. Every single pattern is simple in its basics and is passed on from master to apprentice. While it has great depth of care and quality, it does not have the depth of creation and beauty that art has.
(Don't get me wrong, craft is awesome, and I have vases, bowls, and old cameras on display which give me pleasure.)

Original muppets mana-mana song

I didn't even know there was an earlier one:



And here is the justifiably famous one (in my opinion, it's a few things like this which made the show so great):



And not to miss anything, they made one with the world's most beautiful comedienne, Sandra Bullock. (I don't know why they renamed it "Phenomena" though.)

Support drones stopping elephant poachers

Drones to stop elephant and rhino poachers, campaign.

40,000 elephants killed every year by poachers, this is insane.
This is one of the instances where drones are a great tool: cheap, quiet, can monitor large areas.

Diamonds Are Bullshit

Diamonds Are Bullshit, article.

"American males enter adulthood through a peculiar rite of passage - they spend most of their savings on a shiny piece of rock. They could invest the money in assets that will compound over time and someday provide a nest egg. Instead, they trade that money for a diamond ring, which isn’t much of an asset at all. As soon as you leave the jeweler with a diamond, it loses over 50% of its value. Americans exchange diamond rings as part of the engagement process, because in 1938 De Beers decided that they would like us to. Prior to a stunningly successful marketing campaign 1938, Americans occasionally exchanged engagement rings, but wasn’t a pervasive occurrence. Not only is the demand for diamonds a marketing invention, but diamonds aren’t actually that rare. Only by carefully restricting the supply has De Beers kept the price of a diamond high."

Ivor Tymchak said:
A great article, however, he forgot to mention the recent development of manufactured diamonds that makes the situation even crazier. I wrote about it years ago.

A thought experiment gives us a clue: Say we made diamond rings from factories, which nobody could tell from the slavery-produced ones, and told people what they were, and sold them at 20% of the price? Would anybody buy them? Nooo! And most of them would not stop buying the "real" ones either.
Which tells us: they know they are only buying status. And 2: they will rather buy very expensive status symbols than they will have food on the table. 

Being able to kick sand in their neighbor's face is more important to people than an easy life. 

Taking landscape photos

Here is a nice article for relative beginners about how to photograph landscapes.

Sun up, sun down

Here are two nice Danish songs, one about the sun rising, one about the sun going down.

Happiness is

"You can't imagine how happy it makes a man to see a woman like you. Just to look at her." 

-- Once Upon A Time In the West


----
I was never a big western fan, but that one is one outstanding film.

"On a Chinese Highway"

... is one of of my favorite obscure Danish songs. To be honest I did not think that there would be very much of the kind. But it turns out there is, and rather better than many would expect. (Download slide show.)

Third-longest span in the world. (I think Denmark has no. 1.)

Can Google decide Truth?

Google is making a lot of people nervous by studying possible ways of ranking links by the truthfulness of the sites linked to.

It's just a study, and would be too wildly controversial to be likely to be implemented. But it makes me think:

Who would decide what is true?
Who and how would they decide if it's true that there is a god? Or isn't one? Or is many?

Even more earthly facts may change radically. Just consider this: if this was done, and if it also was done a hundred years ago, how different wouldn't the results be!
There are innumerable things which then were believed broadly to be Facts, which turned out not to be, or which we simply decided we no longer believed was so. Even the most learned scientists disagree wildly about the most basic things. And since it continually has been so in history, it surely is still so, we have not suddenly become omniscient that I have noticed.
And if a superpower like Google back then had put its might behind all those things believed to be facts, how many of them would we have been able to revise?