Celebration and Explosive Sledgehammers

Filed Under Fire, Video | 2009-02-12, 15:53

Unfortunately we missed it this year, but next year you should grab your Thor costume and head down to San Juan de la Vega, Mexico in February for some explosive celebrations.

Every year on the Tuesday of Carnival (which fell on Feb 5th this year), the residents of San Juan de la Vega get together to “recreate” the great battle of their patron saint (San Juan de la Vega of cours) and the government. The story is that this Juan was a bit of a Robin Hood character and stole from the rich to give to the poor. During Carnival, there is a little bit of a recreation of the story of some thieves stealing gold, but not all making it out. The captured thieves are then offered up for a ransom that exceeds the amount of gold stolen. Money is collected, but apparently not all goes according to plan and there is the resulting battle with the government. This isn’t a small recreation though. Tons of potassium chloride and sulphur along with many thousands of people gather to set off these explosive hammers.

The explosive recreation of the “battle” used to take place in the main square of the city, but due to damage to buildings (I can imagine!) it has since been moved to a soccer field where there aren’t any windows to break. Surprisingly with this large number of explosives and close proximity of exploders, there are very few injuries. In 2007 there were 17 reported minor injuries, and 50 in 2008.

There’s a translated article (thanks Babelfish) about the 2007 celebration if you want to read more about the reason behind it all. There is also the original article for those fluent in Spanish. And an article on last year’s celebration: English / Spanish.

The above video is from a previous year, and here’s a video from 2008:

And thanks to avidd, there’s also a humorous Instructables based on the top video entitled “Physics experiement with exploding sledgehammer”.

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Streaming Qik from the Inauguration

Filed Under News, Video | 2009-01-20, 17:03

I was surprisingly able to stream a couple of Qik videos while waiting in line for and during the Inauguration of Barack Obama. I’m amazed that the cell networks held up, let alone allowed me to stream video. Here they are:
Walking down the loooong line for the Purple ticket holders:

Still waiting in line:

Catching part of Obama’s speech:

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Wingsuits and the Crazy BASE Jumpers That Love Them

Filed Under Video | 2009-01-05, 16:38

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

There aren’t many videos online that give me goosebumps in a good way. This is one of them. I can watch this over and over and over and still my jaw drops. The clip above is from Matchstick Production’s ski film, “Seven Sunny Days” (trailer). There are a ton of videos out there of people who are BASE jumping with wingsuits. It’s nothing new, but still awe-inspiring. They may not be as fast as a guy with a jet strapped to him, but I’m sure they’re having a ton of fun out there.

Buzzing tourists:

Wingsuit jumping in Switzerland:

And we’ll leave you with the trailer for ‘Learning To Fly’, a film about Chris McNamara’s first year learning to BASE jump:
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A Night of Scrabble in Time Lapse

Filed Under Video | 2008-12-03, 01:12

Vimeo is being weird so you may have to hit play, pause, and then replay or else it zooms through the video way too fast

We’ve been playing a lot of Scrabble lately. Surprisingly it’s the old school board game style and not some online Facebook app. I saw on Laughing Squid that this year is the 60th (or 70th depending on who you ask) anniversary of Scrabble. They’ve even released a Scrabble Diamond Anniversary Edition of the game. (Call me old fashioned, but I believe there’s only one true Scrabble board… and it’s this one) In honor of so many decades I figured we’d sit down this evening and make a time lapse of our games. I also tossed in a bit of stop motion fun. Watch my tiles on the right at around the 1 minute mark. The first game was a win for Heather (playing on the left), but I came back and reclaimed my crown in the second game!

There were a few words that we let each other slide with. One of these days we’ll go out and pick up a Scrabble Dictionary, but in the meantime it’s house rules which allows for more interesting words.

The video was made using my Pentax K100D DSLR + TI-85 calculator intervalometer setup and compiled using Quicktime.

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Top 10 Ways to Stop a Ceiling Fan With Your Head

Filed Under Funny, Video | 2008-11-20, 18:31

I’m not sure how I stumbled across this, but I’ve discovered a trove of “ceiling fan meets head” videos on YouTube. I’m not sure what it means, but the very fact that these are not isolated clips implies something is going on across the world. It’s not just one country, or one age group. Although it does seem to be primarily male participants. Can anyone explain this? I guess the more times you do it, the more it seems like a good idea?

You know that time that you were going to use to go and do something productive? Prepare to waste it:

1. “Put yer ‘ead in it!”
2. Why is he still smiling?
3. “Go go power rangers!!”
4. Born to be wild
5. “Bah bah bah bah”
6. “Doitagaindoitagain”
7. You’re doing it wrong
8. A Coca-Cola fan?!
9. Gotta love shields
10. Steve-O shows how it’s done

Click for embedded videos

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The Blue Angels in San Francisco

Filed Under SF Bay Area, Video | 2008-10-09, 17:29

Yep, it’s Fleet Week and the Blue Angels are out practicing. If you ask San Francisco residents what they think of these jets ~~buzzing~~ rumbling overhead, you’ll get mixed reactions. I’m sure most of my friends have a few words to say based on their Twitters. Personally I’m on the fence. The constant sound of them passing back and forth over the city when you can’t seem them used to drive me nuts while I was stuck inside at work. But now that I’m at home and I can run to a window to see them up close as they scream by, it’s actually kind of cool to watch them practice. I know, I know I lose San Francisco resident “cool points” for saying that. But the very fact that a) we as humans can create technology that allows us to do this, and b) that there are humans talented enough to fly these plans is impressive. The video above is one I was able to quickly capture as they blasted over our neighborhood.

UPDATE (2008-10-10): Went up on the roof to watch them practice a bit today and snagged this video:

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Flying over the English Channel with a JetPack

Filed Under Geek, Video | 2008-09-25, 16:07

The future is here. Swiss adventurer/pilot Yves Rossy will be testing your jetpack tomorrow morning. He’s going to attempt to fly over the English channel (a 23mile journey) with nothing but a pair of jets strapped to a wing on his back. He controls the throttle and steers with his body. National Geographic has been following his story and will be broadcasting the (hopefully successful) attempt on Friday, Sept 26th at 7:30am ET. Way too early for my blood to get up, but you guys on the east coast might be able to catch it. You can catch the documentary of the JetMan on National Geographic already. More info (and jaw dropping videos) over on the official site: Flight of the Jet Man.

Too Many Domain Names

Filed Under Funny, Video | 2008-09-07, 22:00

I usually resist posting funny YouTube videos, but I figured this one might have some more widespread appeal since everyone knows my obsession with domain names (230+ and counting). Oops, just registered another one thanks to Rubin

via Self Made Minds

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Mona Lisa painted in less than a second by paintballs

Filed Under Art, Geek, Video | 2008-08-28, 17:07

This video is by far the winner of the “Coolest thing I’ve seen today” award. Mythbuster’s Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman showed a crowd at NVISION 2008 the difference between a CPU and a GPU (well kind of). While not the most technically accurate demonstration (multi-core CPUs anyone?), it was definitely impressive. For the CPU, they used a robot with “addressable paintballs” to draw a smiley face. Then a huge contraption consisting of “thousands of pounds of aluminum and steel, a mire of high pressure air hose, hundreds of pounds of compressed air, and 1,100 specifically addressed paintballs and 1,100 barrels” to represent the GPU approach. “Leonardo” will make just about any tech geek drool.