A crow snowboarding...

This new sport already has a name: crowboarding.



(This page has a few more time-waste videos which may entertain.)

Update:
Strum the Sky said:
I'll never forget sleeping in a hut, backpacking the snowy mountains of New Zealand, and waking up early in the morning to hear a ruckus on the roof and cackling laughter and a carrying-on that got me up out of my warm sleeping bag in a good mood to check out what idiots outside were doing... Turned out it was a flock of kakapo (mountain parrots) on the roof... sliding on their backsides down the snowy corrugated tin roof from its peak, and then adroitly rolling over just at the edge of the lip and marching back up to the top to do it all over again, all of them cackling like kids and taking turns. Amazing. Watched it for half an hour.

Make emergency candle

How to make an emergency candle out of a can of Crisco vegetable fat and a strip of paper. Works great and lasts for several weeks.

Photos of the unusual

46 Unusual Photos.

This is apparently from nature:

Glass melted in a fire: 

Carved eggshell: 

No, not a digital glitch, it's carved like that: 

Marlon Brando Before and After His Makeup Was Done for His Role in the Godfather

(I'm often amazed at what actors are permitting themselves to be made up to look like, given that most audiences will assume that "that's how he looks now!")

Cross-section of undersea cable. Dang. 

Anne Dorte Michelsen

This is too weird. Again I searched on Youtube for an old Danish song, "Fortrolighed" (closeness or secrecy) and again was it posted only a month ago... and again I was the first one to play it!
(Despite this song being apparently very big in Japan.)


(If this video won't show, TCG found this.)


This one, also with Anne Dorte Michelsen, "En Lykkelig familie" (A Happy Family) is more lively. Despite a samurai-sword-sharp tone of sarcasm about the perfect family. (You can see all the women in the audience really getting with it.)




Here's another one of my favorites. (I don't really know her oeuvre that well I must confess.) It's a song about the strange and unsettling "magnets" which seem to glue us to the sofa in front of the TV.

Human pictures

Humans of New York, a surprisingly captivating site. The short quotes make the pictures much deeper and more interesting, and sort of gives sample images of the world you don't get elsewhere.

That it should become such a big success I would not have predicted, but as we've learned, most people are interested in people more than they are in events or ideas. 

The World Is Not Falling Apart

The World Is Not Falling Apart, Article.
Never mind the headlines. We’ve never lived in such peaceful times.
Last year Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before a Senate committee that the world is “more dangerous than it has ever been.” This past fall, Michael Ignatieff wrote of “the tectonic plates of a world order that are being pushed apart by the volcanic upward pressure of violence and hatred.” [...]
How can we get a less hyperbolic assessment of the state of the world? Certainly not from daily journalism. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a reporter saying to the camera, “Here we are, live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as violence has not vanished from the world, there will always be enough incidents to fill the evening news. And since the human mind estimates probability by the ease with which it can recall examples, newsreaders will always perceive that they live in dangerous times. All the more so when billions of smartphones turn a fifth of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.
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Too many blogging problems...

I keep having all kinds of problems with Blogger. Time-outs, formatting problems, just bugs all over the place. And I've tried all the browsers and apps I have.
It's such a headache, maybe I'll just give it up.

Spring Breakers

Just watched most of Spring Breakers. Hot girls and guns, what can go wrong? Apparently everything. They should have given the girls, script (if any) and camera to a freshman film student, would have been as good, and cheaper. Maybe it would have been better, because probably there’d be boobies instead of one long tease and a few B/W glimpses.

Not even talent like the nubile-looking Selena Gomez (who was actually quite good) could save this movie. 

It seems to me that stories about normal people who fall into the dark side almost never are any good, despite the big potential.
Mmmm, Falling Down was a good one.

Francoise Hardy repetite

Warning, the first video is a bit risqué for its time.






I wonder how many men over the years have fallen hopelessly for Francoise? Scary numbers.
Her voice alone. Uniquely sweet, which is something else, considering the number of girl singers in the world. And then her face, especially French-beautiful.

Update:
Ah, I just knew there was something unique about her voice. Bert tells us:
She was indeed incredibly beautiful, and almost as popular for a while. I do recall a summer when Tous les garçons was playing non-stop on the radio. Those were fun years, music-wise - perhaps not the best music or songs ever, but all about having light-hearted fun, t'was nice. Her distinctive voice is what the French call une voix de gorge, or a throat voice, if you wish.
You may have noticed how, as a language, French is mostly spoken in the front of the mouth. If you curl the middle of your tongue upward (e.g. form an arch with your tongue) -- almost all of the sounds that compose the language originate ahead of said arch, very far forward compared to most languages. Now, listen carefully to her singing and you might be able to hear two distinct voices: the one I just described, coming from the front of the mouth, and another one from her throat.
While this is not all that uncommon for singers, what sets Françoise apart is how she retains her crystal-clear elocution, that's somewhat uncommon for voices like hers. And what's even more rare is how she manages this without the least appearance of effort -- this tells me that it is really her natural voice, not a learned technique. And she speaks with the loveliest accent too (or absence thereof, depending on one's point of view, I suppose).

Happy Holidays

I am thankful for the wonderful and thoughtful readers I have, and I want to wish you all a really happy Christmas, or whatever you celebrate, and a fruitful new year!   :-)
Eolake

I have seen things you humans wouldn't believe...

Bert said: it's a true-color shot of the earth as seen by a new Japanese weather satellite. The ultra-high res version is quite stunning. It is 120 MegaBytes!

The Sun's activity as recorded by NASA'a NuSTAR experiment.

Bigger picture

Ice Sculptures That Formed After a Windy Mountain Storm

Ice Sculptures That Formed After a Windy Mountain Storm, article/photos.
This is going all over the net, so I may as well show them too.
Horizontal icicles up to three meters!