School Lunch From Around the World

This collection has 26 different school lunches from six countries.

Korea: Kimchi, a fish, some seaweed looking thing, and some colorful mystery items.

Link

TEXTSFROMLASTNIGHT.COM – The New Yorker has rated this site as the most brilliant of the not so clever things around - hmmm...

(215): I just woke up and i'm wearing a cape and it says sup slut on my ass

(248): apparently i tried to put my coat in the microwave.

(305): alone in the kitchen at 4 am eating a hotdog.

(302): I woke up this morning with my shirt on upside down.
(1-302): You mean inside out.
(302): No, upside down. I ripped the neck hole in the process of getting it around my waist.

check out more at textsfromlastnight.com

they get really wrong - love it.

so sweet

Cutest Chorus Ever: PS22 Chorus Sings “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac

Now this is cute: New York City PS22 elementary school chorus singing "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac. I’d say they did just as good a job as Stevie Nicks. Great job, PS22 kids and their music teacher Gregg "Mr. B" Breinberg!

Watch it before the goons from RIAA deliver a takedown notice for copyright violation (even though Stevie likes it): Hit play or go to Link

More PS22 Chorus vids here: Link (including my current fave: their cover of Viva La Vida by Coldplay and Eye of the Tiger by Survivor)

Background story from the Brooklyn Rail by Sophie Gilbert:

In a school where more than three quarters of the students are eligible for free lunch, the lyrics of the song have resonance, and the performance is haunting, emotive, and delivered with far more soul than one might expect from a bunch of fifth-graders. As Breinberg plays, he makes eye contact with the kids, coaxing performances from them and letting them enjoy themselves. Later, Davoya, one of the chorus members, explains how he does it. “At first, when I sang, I had no emotion,” she says. “I didn’t move. But Mr. B taught me to sing with feeling. With feeling and heart.”

Link

Crazy Bridges

Dark Roasted Blend has a photo-heavy roundup of interesting bridge construction, 

beginning with views of several bridges being built across huge gorges in China. 

The bridge shown is part of the Jinji Expressway. Also see large, artful, and scary 

bridges from around the world, plus links to earlier posts in the series on bridges. 

Link

I want this for the Mt Vic tunnel!

If David Lynch directed Dirty Dancing

Click here to watch the trailer 

Just came across YouTube user Kaflickastan's 

masterful re-cut of 80s favourite Dirty Dancing, 

whereby he's constructed a new trailer for the film 

as if directed by David Lynch. As with the Diff'rent Strokes titles, the music has an 

important part to play here too...

award winningly good

read a little more...

watch this one too - link here

same company as below

Pretty vid for Tuesday goodness

London-based directing duo Ubik have posted their latest short film, Voxel, up online. It was made for last month's f5 festival in New York and features rippling water, rain showers and various organic shapes made from 3D pixels

youtube vid here

mega awesome home-made stop-motion animation

link here

"A few car-free communities are trying to get off the ground in the US, but not many people live in them so far."

The Car-free Community 

A suburb without cars? It’s happening in Vauban, Germany, an experimental community near Freiburg where there are no garages, street parking, or driveways. If you have a car and move to Vauban, you purchase a space in a parking building at the edge of town when you buy your home. Most residents do not own a car.

Henk Schulz, a scientist who on one afternoon last month was watching his three young children wander around Vauban, remembers his excitement at buying his first car. Now, he said, he is glad to be raising his children away from cars; he does not worry much about their safety in the street.

In the past few years, Vauban has become a well-known niche community, even if it has spawned few imitators in Germany. But whether the concept will work in California is an open question.

A few experimental car-free communities are trying to get off the ground in the US, but not many people live in them so far.

Besides, convincing people to give up their cars is often an uphill run. “People in the U.S. are incredibly suspicious of any idea where people are not going to own cars, or are going to own fewer,” said David Ceaser, co-founder of CarFree City USA, who said no car-free suburban project the size of Vauban had been successful in the United States.

Link

(image credit: Martin Specht for The New York Times)

So the rest of the world must think we are NUTS! Hobbits to Penguin sports... hmmm... happiest place in the world!!

Penguin Sports

The Penguathlon is a sporting event for penguins at the Kelly Tarlton Arctic Encounter in Orakei, New Zealand. Penguins compete in five events: football, Frisbee, surfing, swing ball, and waddle races. This is no joke! New Zealand is home to nine of the 16 penguin species, and the colony at the Arctic Encounter has 80 King and Gentoo penguins in its colony. The sports are showcased as an enrichment exercise for the birds.

“New Zealand has the greatest diversity of penguin species and is arguably the best place in the world to see them. As well as being great fun, the Penguathlon gives people a fantastic chance to get up close with them as well as gaining a better understanding about their welfare”, said Gregg Anderson, Tourism New Zealand’s Regional Manager for UK and Europe.

The Penguathlon, which will run the rest of this month, may become an annual event.Link (with video)

Vegetarian restaurant

Happy and poor! We laugh at you, Mr Recession

The World’s Happiest Places

The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development released a new study ranking the world’s nations by the happiness levels of their citizens. According to the published results, northern Europeans are the happiest people in the world. The top ten are:

1. Denmark
2. Finland
3. The Netherlands
4. Sweden
5. Ireland
6. Canada
7. Switzerland
8. New Zealand
9. Norway
10. Belgium

The US ranked above average. Link to article. Link to slideshow.

Tit bit: Wealth alone does not bring the greatest degree of happiness. ... New Zealand's happiness level is 76.7 out of 100 on the OECD list, but its 2009 GDP per capita is just $30,556.

World Superhero Registry

Ever wanted to be a superhero? What’s stopping you? Here’s a list of real life superheroes - 

people who don costumes and fight crime/do good as listed in the World Superhero Registry 

(yes, a website dedicated to finding these people).

Take, for instance, the Red Arrow, a 20-year-old guy in Hong Kong who tries to "bring happiness

 to people and become the salt and light of the world" by handing out toys to poor children.

… or Superbarrio Gómez, a Mexican "real-life superhero" who wears red tights and a Lucha Libre 

wrestler’s mask to organize rallies and protests and file petitions against forced evictions in Mexico:

For more real-life superheroes, check out the World Superhero Registry 

There are exactly one hundred million billion new viral marketing campaigns seeded every 10 minutes

A great sum up of viral vid themes that work - i love the human tetris, brains, bmw and carlton vids.... so make sure you at least check out those ones.... 

i'm sure there are lots you would have seen before too.

the link of all links - it takes a bit to download so be patient

Volcano Boarding

Sliding down a mountain on a snowboard is a completely different experience when the mountain is an active volcano! The new sport is drawing snowboarders and surfers to the foothills of Nicaragua’s Cerro Negro mountain.

Surfers, dressed in protective jump suits, knee-pads and helmets, can reach speeds of up to 80 km/h (50mph) on their specially-constructed plywood boards.

Phillip Southan, owner and manager of Bigfoot Hostel and Green Pathways Tours, said the unique trip is a world first.

‘We started offering this trip on 2005 and its has become so popular,’ the 26-year-old from Barbados said. ‘This is a unique tour as nowhere else in the world can you board down an active volcano.

‘This is the fourth year and to date we have taken over 10,000 people on this tour,’ said Mr Southan. ‘It is a 45 minute hike of easy to moderate difficulty.

Cerro Negro last erupted in 1999, and the crater is still smoking. Link -via Unique Daily

Redneck DIY Tank Top

From the "Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should" file, here’s the DIY Tank Top made from men’s briefs: Link - via BuzzFeed

If only I could do that...

Sharing with you the latest clip of my idols.

Click here

50 Cars = 1 Bus

Every day thousands of Swedes drive to the airport. In an effort to get them to take a Flygbussarna bus instead, Acne created this, somewhat literal, manifestation of some basic arithmetic. Traffic chaos ensued....

This sculpture of a Flygbussarna coach was built from 50 cars by the side of the main road to Stockholm airport.

link here

lets redesign the office

link here

This is the office of the Selgas Cano architects in Madrid, I guess it’s not downtown Madrid.

While we all work...

Rene update