Videos

• A video of a guy doing a fairly cool magic trick involving pulling a salt shaker through a glass tabletop. Plus, it was fairly novel to listen to the magician's patter since it is in Japanese. I've seen a number of magic tricks, but this is the first one that I've ever gotten to listen to in another language.
• A group of what looks like college student in Atlanta created a video in which they lined up their cars on the outer belt and drove the speed limit. An act of public obedience which looks at the effects of exactly following the law. It's interesting to see the amount of havoc that can be caused simply by complying with the letter of the law.
• This video of juggler/performer Chris Bliss made the rounds through a number of people whose blogs I read. The video is of Mr. Bliss performing his juggling finale. He performs a three ball routine to the finale of the Beatles' Abbey Road. I found the entire thing very entertaining. The video made the rounds, however, because juggler Jason Garfield wrote a scathing review of Mr. Bliss's juggling and then proceeded to perform the entire routine using 5 balls. And you have to admit that Mr. Garfield' routine is much more technically challenging. But it's boring as sin. Sometimes, technical prowess needs to be ballanced with a little showman ship.
• In-cockpit video of a jet trainer sucking in a bird. The resulting engine failure forces the crew to eject and crash the plane. The most fascinating part is listening to the audio track. The pilots are frighteningly calm. It's very impressive to see how the training kicks in. If I was in a jet aircraft with no engine, I think that I might behave somewhat differently than the pilots on the video.
• Ryan Vs Dorkman. How could you go wrong with such a cool title? What you'll find is a suprisingly well done light saber fight. It's at least as good as the stuff that Lucas did in 1978 in the original Star Wars. What's impressive is that the same stuff that they had to create from scratch 30 years ago can be done by a few non-professionals and a computer.
• The Australian comedy group Tripod performs an excellent song about playing video games. And I guarantee that every male in my generation who had played games can relate to the ideas in the song.
• An excellent parody of what would happen if Microsoft had designed the packaging for the Apple iPod. What's so scary is how 'Microsoft-ish' the final package looks. As it turns out, the video was produced in-house at Microsoft in their marketing department. No one knows exactly why, but probably to share the marketing guys out of their stupor.
• Marketer Seth Godin speaks at Google. The video is 45 minutes long and I haven't watched all of it yet. But the parts that I have seen are amazing. I read Seth's blog and think that he's quite a smart guy. And having seen him talk, he's also quite interesting to listen to as well.