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In 2002, Canadian artist Melanie Coles won a trip to the U.S. with her high school courtesy of NASA, and, in a stadium filled with students, they watched a live photo of themselves beamed onto a big screen from a satellite camera in space. Now, though, those cameras won’t be looking for Melanie, but for Waldo, known here in the UK as the literary legend Wally of considerable Where’s Wally fame. From vinyl sheet, and with the help of her little team, she’s created a giant Wally that, when the Google cameras update, will show up on Google Earth. And so the whole planet becomes the latest update to the Wally books: Where’s Wally for the 21st Century.
Read more about it here or follow the link below for an interview with Wally himself.
Some people are really bad at table football. So bad, in fact, that they can barely muster enough power in their goalkeeper’s clearance to reach the opponent’s back line, let alone breach it. I know one such man. I came face to face with him not along ago and it was embarrassing to say the least. Mostly, though, people can play a bit. They partake once in a while and occasionally do something half decent on the pitch - a pass, say, or even a pass followed by a goal. There are also those who can play with their left hand only and still beat you hands down. They are few and far between, a rare breed indeed.
More rare, though, are those who love the game so dearly that they set out to design and build the most glorious ode to table football you could possibly imagine. That, dear friend, is what you see here.
Read more about it here.
What if you took a bunch of famous films, condensed them down into thirty seconds, and reenacted them with animated bunnies? Why, you’d get ANGRY ALIEN PRODUCTIONS.
Prepare to waste the rest of today. Favourites include The Exorcist, Titanic, Brokeback Mountain, Jaws, March of the Penguins - all of them dammit.
There's another one below right in the thumbnails. Such lovely family pics these...
Then I took a closer look at the label. The company is 'Trekking Mahlzeiten'. Trekking you say. That puts a different spin on things. My wilderness experience stretches to a few walking expeditions in Scotland and the Lake District. So I'm no Sir Edmund Hillary but I feel qualified enough to comment. And let me tell you, If I was stocking up for an expedition and had the option of a tinned cheeseburger that I just throw into boiling water for a couple of minutes, then I'm not embarrased to say I'd take it, at least to try the thing out.
It ticks that intangible box associated with excursions into the wild - morale. Ray Mears would rather I made some pine neddle tea, I'm sure, but I think the trepidation as I open the tin to reveal steamed squidge would be a morale booster itself. Plus if it somehow manages to quell my hunger while tasting ok, then job done.
So I say well done to the Trekking Mahlzeiten crew. They dared to imagine that a cheeseburger could go in a tin, and they made it so.
PS - If it looks like that when it comes out the tin then my name's Ronald Macdonald.
I came across a simple yet imaginative little widget for iTunes today, Moody, that lets you add tags to your songs according to their mood. It’s based on a grid of colour squares ranging from calm to intense and sad to happy on the two axis. When a song is playing in iTunes you just click on the square that best represents that song’s mood. Once you’ve done this with enough songs you’re all set...
So, next time you’ve got someone special at home, you’ve whipped out the wine and things are getting just a little bit steamny, you don’t need to go fumbling around making a new playlist to ensure the moment isn’t lost. You just create a shuffle according to which colour square best represents the kind of mood you’re aiming for. The red square top left, for instance: intense and sad. Good luck with that.
Anyway, it’s a cool idea so check out the Moody site and download the application for free. And if you don't quite understand, there’s a short movie tutorial here.
Where beach sport meets pure artistry look out for the latest waterfront craze of Bossaball. Combining the skills of football, volleyball, gymnastics and capoeira is no mean feat, and these guys do it whilst adding in a bit of dance and drama for creative flair.
Bossaball is possibly one of the most random sports in the world but damn it's impressive. To summarise, it involves a volleyball shaped court, made out of inflatables. The part of the inflatable nearest the net is furnished with a small trampoline, and the forward players for each team bounce around on them looking to make the ultimate smash…which can include some pretty spectacular 20ft high overhead kicks. The players at the back, meanwhile, boing around, maintaining the ball in play with a combination of keepy ups, headers, and volleyball style punches. Whilst all this is going on the referee, who also acts as MC and DJ, compares, spins samba tracks and sometimes throws in percussion for good measure, forming a rhythm to the whole play.
It is a visual delight to observe, and exhilarating to play.. if you’ve got the balls to throw yourself in the air and pray that is. Clubs are popping up all over the world with Brazil, Belgium, Spain, Singapore and England all getting involved.. Check out this YouTube video to see the real deal in practice and watch out for it at the festivals this summer!
A record + a camera + a short period with nothing else to do + a little imagination = a hilarious collection of photos...
Check out more of them here.
It’s 1974. You’re strapped into a makeshift rocket pointed directly upwards. You’re staring straight at the sky. Pretty much all you can see is blue, although you can just about make out the canyon somewhere beneath you - the one you’re about to jump. On a bike. You can see nothing else below you or beside you. The only way is up. Don’t fancy it? Tough. You’re on national television, you’re Evel Knievel, and there’s no going back.
Although he witnessed death defying stunts at a young age, Robert Craig Jnr. Knievel didn't set out on a single-minded mission to become the greatest ever daredevil of all time. In fact, you’d almost say 'daredevilism' came as a kind of last resort for a man who, for the life of him, couldn’t find a way to maintain a regular income. And he was forever getting into trouble. During his younger years, Knievel was thrown into jail for all manner of things, from reckless driving and burglary, to leading poachers into Yellowstone National Park to guarantee game. No surprise, then, that Knievel acquired ‘Evel’ as a name precisely because he regularly hopped and skipped on the wrong side of good. At one point he tried selling insurance to mental patients and, having invited the Czechoslovakian ice hockey team over to play in the US prior to the Olympics, proceeded to rob them after the game. From the off, then, Knievel was far from the all action, do no wrong American hero as history would have us believe.
But the political climate of the 60s and 70s meant that America needed someone to cheer for, something to cling on to, a hero to promote. Step forward a man trying to make ends meet, a man desperate to turn his back on the crime, misfortune and failure that had dogged his life thus far. In 1960, Evel turned to motorcycles and founded his own bike shop, and it was here that, through a single stunt designed to inflate interest around an average shop, his eager entrepreneurial radar discovered people’s insatiable appetite for danger. He jumped 40 feet on a motorcycle over 100 rattle snakes and a pair of mountain lions, as you do - his back wheel landing on the very edge of the landing strip - and so begun one of the strangest celebrity careers of the 20th Century. (Imagine the route his life might have taken had that wheel landed the wrong side).
On New Year’s Eve, 1967, Knievel cleared the fountains outside Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas in front of 25,000 people and television cameras broadcasting the event across the nation but suffered horrendous injuries and spent the next month in a coma (see clip in the film below). He awoke a hero. But, while the words ‘Evel’ and ‘Knievel’ have become synonymous with heroism, danger and determination, his was a life wedged between periods of extreme failure, drug abuse and alcoholism. Eight years of success post-1967 were followed by a gradual decline, beginning with the jump over shark infested waters that culminated in a badly injured photographer, and then his assault on Sheldon Saltman after the biographer had revealed Evel’s drug taking habits and neglect for his family. He is said to have had an accomplice hold Saltman down while he beat him so hard with a baseball bat that the bone in the writer’s arm broke through the skin. Evel was predictably reacquainted with prison as a result - six months no less - and Saltman sued him for a whopping $13 million. From that moment on, the American public’s love affair with their hero was on the wane. He was no longer their defiant champion - a latter day American idol - but rather a sad and delirious social misfit, soon to be forgotten, just as quickly as he’d been catapulted into the public’s collective consciousness; on his way into prison he boasted, in all seriousness, that once out, he would jump from the underside of an aeroplane at 30,000 feet - with no parachute - and land on a giant haystack in a Las Vegas car park. Imagine the mess had he got his bearings even slightly wrong.
Despite his failings, though, there was undoubtedly a period in his life when Knievel had the imaginations of a loving public gripped like wet trunks in a mangle. He did something about the things he saw in his head - motorcycles flying high over snapping sharks and hungry lions - and he actually made it happen. Strap yourself to a rocket-like motorcycle in a bid to clear Snake River Canyon? Why the hell not. Even the crimes he committed owe something to an overly active imagination. But he came up short precisely, it seems, because he lacked the one thing many people presume he had in abundance: the determination to endure. “A man can fall many, many times in life,” he said, “but he is not a failure until he refuses to get up.”
Lunatic, yes, but determined? Perhaps not.
