videos

Some amazing videos i've come across lately:

Low flying, lower flying, even lower flying, ok you've got it even lower lower lower flying, lowest flying.

A near miss and a hit.

New music

The music industry is shifting towards internet. That's nothing new.

My guess is that, in some 10 or 20 years, internet radio and digital music services will have replaced most of the radio stations.

Discovering new artists / music already is much easier via internet.
No need to go to a music store to listen to cd's or get recommendations from a salesperson that only knows about the music he/she likes... Go to a site like 3voor12 and listen to new albums.

Online sales, online listening, online artist information and only recommendations.
The internet provides all. And more.
One of my favourite sites of the moment is last.fm.
This site keeps track of what you listen to via your computers' music player. It makes personal charts of most played artist / tracks. It gives recommendations, shows people that have a similar taste in music and gives information about the artists.

Fred told me about this site called songtapper.
Tap along with a song and it shows you artist and song name. It's not working with me, but that's largely due to my lack of rhythm....

I've had better results with Music DNA. Hear a song that you don't know? Call musicDNA via your mobile and it sends back artist and song information in a text message...

Terry Tate the office linebacker

Glad I'm not working in that office...

The big apple

My latest procastrinations on the internet seem to have some similarity:
They're mostly visiting (photo)blogs on everyday life in the U.S.
Two big fascinations on that subject:

- The melancholy of B-roads, remote states and ghost towns.
I love scrolling through Nebraska (whilst listening to Bruce Springsteen's '82 album) and google-ing remote towns like Hyannis... (I love the photo of mainstreet on their homepage)

- New York City.
What I love about NYC is it's roughness. I guess life there is tough; expensive, lonely, violent...
Lots and lots to find and look at on the internet...

Special mention here are the photoblogs of Will and foodblog of Adam (the amateur gourmet)

Pattern

What you see here is yet another example of the 'new world's' land-scaping.
Zoom in on the satellite image.
Scary, isn't it, to have your surroundings rasterized?
No room for error, no diversity. Just simple squares.
Oh there are exceptions: When two grids with different orientation touch each other.
You can even see bends in roads!!

I discovered this weird (at least I think it's weird) piece of earth near London, Paris, Southampton, Cambridge, Zurich, Brussels and Heidelberg. Canada.

cars

Nice commercial for the new Audi RS4.

It costs 86.000 euros full option in Germany.
In the Netherlands however, a staggering 106.000 euros. The starting price that is, without added options like the 570 euro costing RS4 carpet-set...

Ok, if you want a cheaper (I didn't say cheap) way of driving a true supercar, try mr. damon hill's private club. For a mere 11.750 pounds sterling / year (excluding entrance fees and the like) you will be able to drive these.

NICE.

If you want something cheaper, buy one of these.

9/11

So what did happen on 9/11???

A lot of people think there's more involved than just airplanes.

If the pentagon was hit by an aircraft? How come we don't see any wreckage???
Flight 77 and the untold story, as told by the facts

The twin towers we're shot at with a missile fired from the woolworth building...
The untold story of the woolworth building incidents

Me, I think some things are untold. But these two stories, nahhhhhh... Don't think so.

Ok, so there is this documentary of mostly the pentagon attack that makes me wonder what really happened.

And now for something different:
Nice little movie with three ultra-low-flying mirages of the french airforce.

Simcity

One of my first "modern" pc games (we're not talking frogger or commodore 16 here) was simcity.

The thing that bugged me was that the game was based on an orthogonal grid. Everything was rectangular or square.
Living in the Netherlands, that was the strangest thing. In the Roman town of Maastricht nothing is square... City blocks are based on the road/infra structure of historic routes from one city to another, or the landscape.

So scrolling the U.S. on google maps I go from simcity01.savegame to simcity02.sav to ....
The grid makes cities look exactly like the game (or is it the other way around), which gives these stunning pictures of e.g. Minneapolis (as shown above).

European people tend to criticize America for being artificial.
In some ways it is.

I wonder if that's a bad thing though...

paris hilton

Great interview by SNL just after the hilton tapes scandal.

Reminds me of the Ali G interview with the Beckhams...

Fred, this one's for you...

urban formations

This google maps image of, what I believe to be, a future neighbourhood/city is fascinating.

Why?

Roads have already been made. Like a rough sketch you can already see the end-result.

It's esthetic quality can only be seen from the sky, never from the ground.

It's a prelude to a bittersweet era that's about to begin: thousands and thousands of homes being built in record time.
Most of them will look identical.
Imagine what this deserted place will look like in 5 to 10 years?! A beautiful green neighbourhood with parks, ponds and golf courses. That's the complete opposite of what's there now.

It's also fascinating to think of how many people want to live in this place in its present state. Nothing to see or do within miles. Planners will have thought of that though: plenty of malls and leisure-activity in the near future...

Chronic WHAT les of narnia!

This little rapvideo of Saturday Night Live-actors Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell is the newest internet hype...

Intended as a comic rap-video, people love it.
everyone's posting about it, everyone is talking about it, and there are even people trying to make money out of it...

all in all: it's a great clip...

earlier stuff Andy did: www.thelonelyisland.com
other movie Chris did: Turlington's Lower Back Tattoo Remover