Musical genius, feline edition

Musical Genius IV

This guy "Red" deserves a record deal and a long and prosperous career.

Here's the one good remix I found:

Nerina Pallot

Negerboll

Erik Vildes inlägg i negerbolldebatten.

Coriolis

Speaking of Coriolis, it has the best trailer I've ever seen for a pen and paper table-top role-playing game. Way to promote an original concept, guys!

Musical genius III

Presenting Julia Nunes, winner of the 2007 Bushman World Ukulele Video Contest.

Musical genius, cont'd

Remember the norwegian guy who made a beatbox video by editing together different sounds he made in front of his webcam? It was very goofy, he even had a sneeze in there somewhere. Anyway, check out this other video he made.

Tesla rocks

A tesla coil playing music, huh? Counting David Bowie's appearence as Nikola Tesla in The Prestige, this is the second time Tesla rocks. =)

Musical genius

More animals

No need to take a stroll in the forest to see small animals anymore; the squirrel is visiting us now.

Eurovision Song Contest Winners

In case you missed it:

Quite simply the best winners ever.

Edit: I found the video, and I'm still wiping away tears of joy after watching it.

"Par-tay!"

This is a nice wholesome video I remember fondly from my misspent youth. If you've seen it before, prepare for some nostalgia. If you haven't, prepare to be shocked. Either way, it's brilliant.

Guest Starring

Here are a few video clips I've collected, where some of my favourite stars make surprise appearences in some of my favourite TV shows. The first one is Marilyn Manson in Clone High. The second and third shows are the Colbert Report and Leno, but I'm not spoiling the guest star surprises. Either you'll recognize them, or you won't care.

On a side note, I'm experimenting with Photobucket's new video player. I'm hoping it'll work better in Opera than YouTube's now overly cluttered player. Blech.

Yo!

Whoops, I see now that I haven't updated this blog for over a month. Bad!

Let's kick this off with another toy commercial. I discovered one that is "in tune" with the younger population. I'm picturing a board meeting with a self-proclaimed expert informing white old men about a new and exciting music genre called "hip hop".

The toy does seem cool though, and the chick is hot. I'm sold.

Indatwa

Yesterday was the International Women's day, which usually means there are a number of interesting events (plus some boring stuff) at the library. Ah yes, I was at the library again; the hub of cultural activities in this town. I watched an all-female band called Kraa perform, but I didn't dare take any photos because I was sitting dead-centre in the front row. It would have been disruptive just getting my phone out of my pants. (In case you're new here; all these photos were taken with my mobile phone.) However, I do have some photos of the african dance troupe Indatwa. They were kind enough to perform dances indigenous to Rwanda and Burundi.

This was apparently a girls' dance, although I'm pretty sure there's a guy with long hair in there too. He seemed to have a prominent role in the arrangements, so I can only assume that he's a choreographer/teacher.

At the end, two of the girls had a dance-off! Cute and awesome!

This children's dance had the most action and dialogue of all the dances that the troupe performed. It certainly seemed like a fun dance. Kind of reminded me of Mora Träsk's Tigerjakt, a children's song about hunting tigers. I'm not sure that's what this song is about (maybe I just didn't listen to the announcer), but I'm picturing a tribe teaching their young ones to hunt by using song and dance, the ultimate teaching tool! I use it all the time to teach programming. Jokes aside, I'm pretty sure passing on wisdom is what culture and religion is all about. Feel free to flame me all the same.

Olympic singers

I'm usually not interested in sports at all. Football is boring, be it European soccer or American football. Indoor bandy is too frantic. Outdoor bandy is too cold. Handball is stupid.

However, the Olympic Games this year were kind of interesting, even to me, although the skiing was boring as usual. The curling, however. That was riveting. I like watching people excel at a certain skill, using weird tactics that I don't understand and strategizing about stuff that I don't have a clue about. Team sports usually seem to boil down to either chance, stamina or violence, none of which excite me in the least.

I watched the Swedish women's team win their gold because I thought it was actually fun to watch. That's a first for me, even though I have sat down to watch ice hockey before and found it only mildly boring. (Actually, ice hockey can be fun too, but also tends to have too much violence and chance for my tastes.)

So now, when the team came to visit their hometown (where I happen to live) to play in the Swedish curling tournament, I was at the town square to greet them and sing along in Hammerfall's Hearts on fire. Fun for the whole family!

Now, why in the world are they singing a heavy metal song? What does that have to do with curling? The short answer is: Everything!

With a video like that, how would they not win?

"Earthquake! Look out!"

Yes, it's another toy commercial! I can't get enough, and really -- who doesn't love toy commercials?

Each Cube World has a motion sensor and buttons that let you play with the stick person living in the cube. The really cool feature is that you can connect cubes and let the stick people interact with each other. Apparently, they can cross the Cube World boundaries by their own volition. Could have been a nice setup for teaching kids a wholesome message of world peace, if it weren't for the constant fighting (as featured in the commercial). I know I'm not kidding anyone, of course fighting is fun!

I bet that if you connect enough of these together, they'll develop a hive mind and start disobeying you and ultimately take over the world. Well, one can only hope.

Pixel Chix

I'm fascinated by toy commercials; they're happy and funny, and of course the only interesting commercials out there. Now I think I need one of these Pixel Chix toys, and apparently a friend with his/her own Pixel Chix to play with.

Look! A crystal LCD embedded in a toy house! It's genius.

Cyril Takayama

I've discovered some excellent Japanese magicians thanks to the internet. One example is the Yamagami brothers (山上兄弟) who currently hold the Guinness world record for youngest magicians. The age thing is kind of gimmicky, but they're just so cute and great at what they do that you can't help but adore them. (In contrast, there's an extremely gimmicky magician who insists on pretending to be French, manhandling the language in the process: "Torés biaan!") My favourite so far is probably Fujii Akira, a skilled magician with a very amusing and entertaining act, who works almost exclusively with playing cards.

However, my latest discovery in japanese magic is Cyril Takayama, who strictly speaking is an American of japanese descent, born and raised in Hollywood. Despite only being Japanese on his father's side, his Japanese is perfect, which apparently made him eligible to appear on several japanese TV shows, where he goes by the nickname Zero (セロ), since Cyril is probably the least pronounceable name ever. His image is somewhere between David Blaine and David Copperfield, and he does a good job of adapting his tricks to the japanese audience by conjuring up food out of thin air. (I don't know about you, but at least I get the impression that japanese TV shows are always about food.)

Luckily for you, dear reader, a lot of his tricks are available for easy watching on YouTube, a service you might recognize since I use it myself to post videos here. The following is a list of clips I found, from which I've excluded one or two repetitions of the same trick.

• Making coins
• Tea ceremony
• Ice coffee
• Cafe latte
• Hamburger trick (you may have seen this one; I saw this and the following one quite a while ago, before I knew who he was)
• Masquerading as old man
• Cards, kisses and candy
• More candy
• Bird and fruit in Chinatown
• Chewing gum and torn-up yen bill
• Card in water
• Ambitious card with a great twist
• Flying yen bill
• Levitating girl
• Bottle cap
• Glass table
• Card and window 1 (subway)
• Card and window 2 (cafe)
• Card and window 3 (under water)
• Card prediction
• Darts prediction (with Yaguchi Mari, yay!)
• Rubberband (old trick)
• Supermarket (he's made of money!)
• Matches and coin
• Bungee jump
• Shadows and chopsticks
• Shadows, cards and food (w/ japanese celebrity)
• Knife and cards (w/ japanese TV drama cast)
• Broken watch (w/ japanese comic duo)
• Popcorn (w/ korean star)
• Disappearing/reappearing stuff (w/ japanese actor)
• Will do magic for food
• Prediction with a twist
• Disappearing act

That's all folks!

Powerball Techno

I have one of these. It's awesome. :)

This is just the demo message ("new nsd power ball"), which is the easiest one to get and thus the one we used for demonstration purposes. If you rev up the powerball to higher speeds, it shows the RPM you achieved as it winds down. In short... Best. Toy. Ever.

P.S. Managed to get a nice shot of the RPM display. Enjoy!