Category: Because it’s Friday

If you haven’t seen this video yet you probably fit into one of two camps:

• You’ve spent the last week in a cave, up a mountain, on holiday or similar such activity that kept you away from internet access.
• You don’t spend a high proportion of your life on conference calls and hence it doesn’t relate to you.

Neither of these two things apply to me.  Just about every mechanism that people could use to highlight this video to me was used. I had emails, Facebook messages, Tweets, instant messages galore; particularly from my fellow conference call slaves. As an example of the captivity of the conference call, I spent about 60% of my working day yesterday in exactly the experience shown by this video.

The most compelling comedy is embedded in real events, much like this:

This week seems to have been one characterised by flying videos:

How about a cockpit view from an RAF Typhoon as it flies across Wales and  England. The commentary on this one gives a scary perspective on what is going on:

Through the valley, 3G, speed 420, height 250 ft.

That 3G isn’t talking about the mobile signal available and the 420 is knots or 480 miles-per-hour, at 250 ft. As a comparison Elizabeth Tower (Big Ben) is 315 ft high and the London Eye is 443 ft high. As further comparison it would take less than a third of a second to travel the 250 ft at 420 knots, that’s the margin of error!

Plenty of Para-glider skill required to get to this level of agility. One thing I want to know though, how do you pluck up the courage to do some of those manoeuvres for the first time?

This video gives a fascinating insight into the flight paths of birds moving in and out of a perch. It’s amazing to see how they coordinate themselves without any master coordinator:

There are lots of these videos uploaded by Dennis Hlynsky using the same technique in all sorts of situations. I really liked the way that snow creates a changing abstract drawing:

(May I apologise now for the somewhat tenuous alliteration of perches in the title of this post, I stumbled upon planes and para-gliders and needed something to go with them)

As a child I would go out into the garden and raid my mum’s peg bag. I’d then go back into the house and find a piece of cardboard.

The cardboard would be folded over to make it stronger and then pegged to the rear forks of my bike with a small portion of it poking into the spokes of the wheel.

We’d then cycle around pretending to be motorbikes as the cardboard rasped against the spokes.

That’s the inspiration for composer Johnnyrandom’s composition Bespoked in which he uses a cycle as his musical instrument.

There are no synthesisers, samplers or drum machines used, just the cycle, if you want proof then each of the elements is available on SoundCloud.

Children these days are, of course, far too sophisticated for such simple pleasures:

In tribute to French inventor André Cassagnes who died in January 2013 here’s a lovely illustrated tribute to his masterful invention Etch a Sketch.

I am from a generation to whom the Etch a Sketch was both an object of wonder and a frustration in equal measures.

We’ve also enjoyed the famous Dilbert cartoon, it’s incredible to think that it was drawn back in 1995.

As this is the last Friday (in 2013) that I’m going to publish a Because it’s Friday post I thought I would cheat and highlight the previous posts that have had the most visitors in 2013.

The purpose of these posts is primarily to cover things that I wouldn’t normally cover.

1. OLED Audi
2. Danny Macaskill
3. Optical Illusions (apologies that some of these links now seem to be broken)
4. Flying like a bird (which is now known to be a hoax)
5. Remixing ‘Call Me Maybe’
6. Contact Juggling with Akihiro Yanai
7. Huge Pile of Leaves
8. Huge Water Balloon and a Slow Motion Camera
9. First-Person Perspectives
10. Google Street View Animations
11. Preston Bus Station in LEGO (which was due to be demolished, but has now been given a reprieve)
12. Humorous Sign Graffiti
13. Funny (scary) 999 Calls
14. Land Art
15. The History of LEGO
16. Dilbert and the PowerPoint Summary
17. Internet Party – Why Nobody Gets Anything Done On the Web
18. Visual Illusions
19. Michael Jackson Moves in LEGO
20. Parkour Eye Level View
21. Massive Rope Swing
22. Time-Lapsed Changing Nature
23. Aerial 3D Panoramas
24. This is Water
25. Moonwalking

We’ve had some interesting weather in the UK recently including some early snow in places.

From childhood I’ve been fascinated by the intricacies of snow flakes; when I recently came across this set of pictures on flickr I was delighted. They’re all taken with the most basic of photographic equipment too, more information on how these pictures were taken can be found here:

 

A lovely little time-lapse video showing the constantly changing face of nature:

Today’s video is brought to you by the most wonderful Open University.

A Short History of the English Language.

This video does a great job of communicating the promiscuous mongrel nature of the language that I use every day. Personally, I think that this is a wonderful thing.

Over recent weeks the team at Improv Everywhere have been staging scenes from movies in real life locations.

It’s great to see how people react when they realise what’s going on. My personal favourites are Jurassic Park and The Matrix:

Jurassic Park

Back to the Future

The Matrix

Lord of the Rings

Indiana Jones

Rocky

I love to see adults having fun being kids.

In this parody of a Ken Block Gymkhana video (of which there are a number), Ken Box does very similar things on a cart in a box:

A bit of silliness to make you smile on a Friday morning.

The Improv Everywhere team have got together to host the famous Running of the Bulls – at Venice Beach, California, with inflatable bulls:

A bit of silliness to make you smile on a Friday morning.

The Improv Everywhere team have got together to host the famous Running of the Bulls – at Venice Beach, California, with inflatable bulls: