I love this: The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything:
That’s your moment of understanding that you’ll miss most of the music and the dancing and the art and the books and the films that there have ever been and ever will be, and right now, there’s something being performed somewhere in the world that you’re not seeing that you would love.
It’s sad, but it’s also … great, really. Imagine if you’d seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good. Imagine if you really got to all the recordings and books and movies you’re “supposed to see.” Imagine you got through everybody’s list, until everything you hadn’t read didn’t really need reading. That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think.
Even for the Mythbusters, this has to go pretty high on the “do not try this at home, kids” list: you can stick your hand into molten lead and not get burned!
Various directors have their say on widescreen vs. pan and scan. I really thought this was a dead issue until learning that HBO pushes for it. Bastards. (via kottke)
Goddammit, I thought we were done with this shit.
Some details on David Simon’s next project, Treme, which will treat Hurricane Katrina as an allegory for the suckiness of the past year or so:
“The fact is that the levees on the canals were substandard, and done on the cheap at an immense profit. Ultimately that becomes a metaphor,” he said. “New Orleans was relying on things that were believed to be genuine bulwarks against tragedy and disaster. People felt that there were similar bulwarks protecting our financial institutions and foreign policy. Now, two years on, we are all essentially in the same boat as New Orleans. Katrina was an outlyer of where we are today.”
(via tmn)
Check out the amazing performance this guy turns in on what has to be a ridiculously challenging obstacle course. It looks like the video is spliced to get under the YouTube 10 minute limit, so I don't know what his total elapsed time was, but damn, the challenges keep getting harder. The video's nine minutes long, but it's worth sticking it out to the end. What a display of pulling strength and endurance.
Does it get any better than Japanese game shows? « via RT forums »
UPDATE: Wikipedia says the guy is Makoto Nagano and the show is "Ninja Warrior", and that only he and another guy (Kazuhiko Akiyama) have ever successfully completed all four stages.
On 9/10 and 9/11 ABC will air a docudrama called The Path to 9/11. In it you will "learn" that the CIA had bin Laden in a house, literally surrounded, called the White House for authorization to take him out, and the Clinton administration refused to grant the authorization. Complete fabrication, "Straight Out of Disney and Fantasyland." I wouldn't expect anything factual from something labelled a "docudrama", but c'mon...
