Breaking videos tend to come in two flavours:
- Footage of a battle, shot on a single camera, generally from within the crowd,
- Compilations of clips, taken from battles and cyphers, or occasionally shot specifically for the video, edited together with no real theme or context.
So a video like this one, which not only has a theme but also some concept of cinematography, sticks out like a sore thumb.
In that sense, this is the best b-boy trailer I have ever seen.
This is what I aspire to in my dancing.
Outside of the move at 3:37, everything in this video is something you could conceivably learn in a beginners’ breaking class. These guys are doing simple, basic steps, but the execution is just sublime. Their grace and fluency of movements, the tempo changes, the cadences — I love it all.
Now admittedly this is a choreographed routine, but the best breakers can achieve similar interplay with the music when they’re dancing in an impromptu situation. Peep this battle between Machine and Ata (which I cannot believe I haven’t posted before) for a supreme example.
I’m all for charity, but the wording of these checkboxes is so confusing it’s verging on dishonesty.
I’m not sure if it’s JustGiving or Cancer Research UK that’s responsible for this tomfoolery, but either way: not cool, guys. Tricking people into signing up for your mailing lists when they’re making a donation is not a good way to build trust in your organisation.
I Made a Quiz
Inspired by this quiz about short NBA players, I created my own quiz on sporcle:
Can you name the NBA players who have scored 50 points or more in a game?
The answer, so far, seems to be “no”, as no-one that has attempted it has managed to name more than 80 of the 106 players who have achieved the feat.
Yes, my quiz is ridiculously difficult.
The ampersand
Adobe’s history of the ampersand.
The term ampersand, as Geoffrey Glaister writes in his “Glossary of the Book,” is a corruption of and (&) per se and, which literally means “(the character) & by itself (is the word) and.” The symbol & is derived from the ligature of ET or et, which is the Latin word for “and.”
(Previously, on While You Were Ampersand)
(via nostrich)
“ Jeffery Steingarten’s Vogue essay Playing Ketchup, collected in The Man Who Ate Everything, describes how he discovered and cooked some of the earliest recipes for tomato ketchup and showed in a careful scientific test that they were quite delicious. ”
—Dan Jurafsky, in a, frankly, fascinating essay on where tomato ketchup came from*, how it developed, and why the “tomato” in the name isn’t redundant.
* Hint: Who invented basically everything?
(via @thatwhichmatter)
Excellent shot-from-above stop motion animation. Makes those “I’m cycling on this no-cycling sign on the ground” photos you sometimes see look rather unambitious.
The credits are accompanied by a time lapse animation of part of the shoot, which I found amusing.
There is also a making of, if you’re interested.
(via zefrank)
How to Start a Dance Party
(via Ze Frank: “very fun and oddly heartwarming footage”)
Utterly inspirational. The message, of course, is love what you do, and never give up. (Advice which could also be applied to watching this vid. Don’t stop it before the end. It just keeps getting better.)
A roomba’s path.
My Roomba doesn’t get much use for actual cleaning these days, but he is a member of the family. I could not recommend him more, both as a household utility and as a friend.
(via both ub14 and dalasverdugo)
Piano Stairs
“We believe that the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better is by making it fun to do. We call it The fun theory.”
rolighetsteorin.se
I love this graphic from the British Basketball Federation’s homepage. It’s just so brazen. We don’t care where you’re really from, just so long as you’re over six foot five.
Returning briefly to the theme of British basketball, check out this video of Guy Dupuy’s new dunk at Midnight Madness a few weeks back.
As J.E. Skeets put it on Ball Don’t Lie “Never before has someone done an off-the-bounce, over someone standing, between the legs dunk. Well, at least not on camera. I do it every other Thursday — barefoot. Whatever. No big deal.”
Jason Kottke discovers the Best Flag in The World.
It is the flag of the Benin Empire, 1440-1897.
(via Daring Fireball)
A Delta 4-Heavy rocket launches.
Photo taken by a sound-activated camera which was only semi-destroyed by the power of the launch.
