I had a great weekend. It was the morning. On Sunday morning I had breakfast. For breakfast I had cereal. I had Cheerios in my cereal. After breakfast I brushed my teeth. I did Wii. I also did computer. I ripped some songs in Wire Tap Studio. I put the songs on my iPod shuffle. I listened to Weather Newtwork music in the car. I went to Virginia’s building. Daddy was driving me there. Virginia’s building was on the 11th floor. I had dinner. For dinner I had jerk chicken with rice and salad. After dinner I watched my video. I was watching Super Why. I had a great time at Virginia’s.
(We always encourage Jon to buy real songs off iTunes, or rip songs off CDs we already own. The ripping he’s talking about here is recording the audio of old Weather Network local forecasts on YouTube, using a Mac program called Wire Tap Studio. Over the weeks Jon has, all by himself, amassed a collection of 30 or 40 of these Weather Network recordings.
BTW: We DO see other friends other than Virginia; she’s the only one Jon ever seems to mention in his journals!—L)
To add to our past post about the fabulous mimicry of the lyrebird, here’s another sample from Chook, a male Superb Lyrebird from the Adelaide Zoo in Australia. There had been a lot of construction nearby, and now Chook faithfully reproduces everything from hammers and power drills (having heard a lot of power-driven screws in my home-owning life I find the last few seconds of the clip to be hilarious) to bits of human conversation and workmen whistling.
We always joked that one of the reasons we got a dog was so we wouldn’t have to vacuum as often. As it turned out, Photon does her share of mooching in the park and at the dinner table, but that’s about it. And other than a couple of puppy teething mishaps she’s never really eaten non-food items (unlike a dog-park friend’s pooch, who’s managed to chow down on about four TV remotes; or the dog who ate the car starter fob, featured on the BBC a few years back).
Well, those Brits do love their dog-eats-whatever stories—and so do I—so here’s another one from the BBC about a dog who managed to scarf a $20,000 diamond. That’d buy an awful lot of kibble….
Comment by David "Still Mourning" Barker —
March 17, 2010 @ 3:15 pm
She got one of my knitted slippers that time, remember, right out of my backpack. (To be fair, there was already a hole.)
I had a great weekend. My friend, Virginia came over for dinner. I showed Virginia the Millionaire game. I didn’t show Virginia the YouTube weather. I had dinner. For dinner, I had lemon chicken. After dinner I had dessert. For dessert I had ice cream. After dessert Daddy watched the Oscars. The Oscars were boring. I can’t watch it. I had a great time with Virginia.
Who doesn’t love Rube Goldberg machines? Those improbable contraptions where one moving object sets off another, which then causes another object to move, and on and on until some (usually simple) action is performed. These very silly devices started out as cartoons by Reuben Goldberg in the early 20th century. (The British equivalent were drawn by W. Heath Robinson, and to this day in the UK these devices are known as “Heath Robinson contraptions”.)
Nowadays there are contests to build real-life Rube Goldberg machines, and there’s something fascinating in watching a complicated, creative one perform its tricks. A couple of notable devices have become extremely popular on YouTube:
Honda ad “The Cog”, where parts of a disassembled Honda Accord are used in interesting ways.
Though the ad looks as though it was done in one shot, it was actually done in two separate halves because the studio lacked space to do it in one setup. The halves were stitched together digitally at around the 1:00 min mark (when the muffler is rolling along the floor), but otherwise there is no CG hanky-panky.
Another great example is the brand-new music video “This Too Shall Pass” from the always-creative popsters OK Go (they of the cleverly-choreographed video on treadmills that went viral a couple of years back).
This took three months of preparation and more than 60 takes over two days of filming. The finished video is one single shot using a Steadicam filming a very precisely-timed device (watch how things happen in real time to the music!) covering two floors of a warehouse.
For both the ad and the video, notice how the really fiddly bits that require much delicacy and accuracy are featured up front. This is so if they go wrong (a common occurrence) the filmmakers don’t have to re-set the entire works. Many of those 60+ takes for OK Go’s video were a minute or less.
I think we did that first sequence about 70 times. When we got past the tire, we knew we had a chance. When the piano dropped without triggering the flags or chairs, we started getting excited. If the sledgehammer blew up the TV we were in the home stretch. It was a tense video to film!
3/29/2010
To add to our
She got one of my knitted slippers that time, remember, right out of my backpack. (To be fair, there was already a hole.)