I’m not really into motorsports, but I understand there’s a big Formula One race going on in Europe this weekend. I admire the capabilities of the F1 cars, and I thought I’d post a few racing-related videos. Enjoy!
The best video is up first. Ari Vatanen climbs Pike’s Peak in a Peugeot 405 T16. This is back from 1988. If you watch it, you will very likely break into a cold sweat. Ari literally speeds through hairpin turns where even the slightest miscalculation can throw him right over the edge and into the deadly precipice below.
“Top Gear” shows off one of the most exclusive cars in the world, the Ferrari Enzo:
The Dutch (I think) came up with this souped up cart that runs on a 1100CC bike engine and puts out 164 bhp. That thing looks terminally unsafe and I’d never get in it, but it does put up a good fight against a Dodge Viper:
Some spoiled brats race a Ferrari 355 against a Dodge Viper GTS through a twisty mountain road in California. What do you think happens when someone that doesn’t know how to drive rally-style gets behind the wheel of a Doge Viper? Watch and see:
A plane lands on a motorhome in this next video — it gets billed as the world’s shortest runway:
This last one is another thriller. A stunt plane comes within inches of crashing miserably as it undergoes a loopdeloop:
A few days ago, I announced a free book giveaway. The book was Java I/O, 2nd Edition, by Elliotte Rusty Harold (my review). All you had to do to qualify was to leave a comment on that post with your thoughts about ComeAcross — what you liked, what you didn’t like. There were only two takers, Jeremy and Cosmin. I held the drawing tonight — actually, the word drawing is a bit fancy. It was a coin toss. I went by the order of the comments and Jeremy got heads, Cosmin tails. Jeremy came out the winner, and will get the book. Jeremy, please send me your mailing address, and I’ll ship the book out to you! 🙂
I also promised I would post a link to the winner’s website directly in my blog post. Here is Jeremy’s blog, and it’s pretty cool. It was started in February of this year, and it deals with photography, technology and programming.
Stay tuned for more book giveaways in the future! I have plenty of books that might be useful to others, and would like to give them away if I can. Doing it through my blog is a pretty nice way to do it, too.
If I’d taken some sociology classes in college, I might have gotten this point sooner: humor is driven, by and large, by societal norms. Furthermore, it is usually in contrast (marked or absurd) to those same norms. Allow me to illustrate.
Japan: most of us know that public conduct there has been driven by very strict rules, for as long as history holds. For the most part, it still is. Everyone’s supposed to be proper and dignified. The very regimented lifestyle, and lack of personal space, I might add, leads to the desire to escape it all, to do something completely different. Hence, Japanese humor and comedy focuses on the absurd, on the unlikely, on the odd, the weird, etc. If I’d gotten this sooner, I wouldn’t have asked why Japanese ads are so embarrassing a while back. Now I understand, and I can begin to enjoy it.
Take a video like this for example, a “study” of the best way to escape farts. Only the Japanese could have dreamed this up.
Or how about this follow-up to the Human Tetris video I posted before?
England: No need to explain much here. In the land of the stiff upper lip, public behavior was excruciatingly dry and complex, at least for a particular class — so much so, that most English humor focuses entirely on it, and the contrast between said behavior and that of the lower classes. A search for Benny Hill, Mr. Bean or Harry Enfield on YouTube suffices to illustrate my point. The behavior of the upper classes is so captivating when skewered, that even bastardized versions of such behavior, the ones that trickled down to the bourgeoisie and the middle class, are fascinating. Keeping Up Appearances was one show that capitalized on this.
USA: You might ask why current humor here in the good old US kind of stinks (at least I do). Well, to answer my own question, I think it’s because we’ve been free of restrictive societal norms, at least when it comes to public behavior. In a way, we’ve neutered one of our most potent sources of humor, though it wasn’t done on purpose. We started out with a few civilized cities and mostly wilderness and farms, and it’s still pretty much that way ;-).
Most people are still relaxed in public, and getting even more relaxed. Americans just don’t ascribe to certain norms when out in society, and to a certain extent, this is excusable. In a melting pot like ours, standards differ from family to family, and without huge, focused, national efforts to introduce some standards, things will not improve.
Fortunately, we did have those annoying yuppies in the 80s and early 90s, and we could make fun of them for a while, until that got old. The movie Trading Places (1983, IMDB listing) has some pretty good examples of pseudo-aristocratic behavior just ripe for skewering.
So, here in the States, we’re fresh out of good material unless we tap into history. Or, we could always make fun of how indecently relaxed people have become in public. For example, not a day goes by that I don’t see people wearing unsightly plastic clogs (you know, the “fashionable” kind, the sort that give you athlete’s foot and make your feet smelly) or low-cut jeans that make me wonder what’s more disgusting — the fact that they’re not falling off even though I can plainly see the butt crack, or the plentiful layers of fat that flow over the waistline.
At any rate, the point that I wanted to get across is that I finally get it: humor, by and large, is driven by societal norms, which of course, differ from society to society. I’m beginning to enjoy Japanese humor. I even get why those ads featuring American celebrities are so absurd. They have to be. When you wear a suit and have to act proper all day long, even at home, you long for something completely different.
No matter what culture or nation we talk about, as people, we all share a basic set of needs and wants. One of those is laughter. While the things that make us laugh may differ from region to region, we all want to laugh, and we enjoy ourselves even more when we laugh with others. It’s nice (at least for me) that I can get to understand other cultures through their humor. It’s certainly an interesting way to look at their societies.
I liked the Volkswagen “Unpimp your ride” commercials instantly when they came out. I’ve always liked clean lines and elegant cars. I think “pimped” cars are in truly bad taste. The mods are almost always done for the wrong reasons, and usually only to show off in garish fashion. The poor cars end up looking worse than before and make me cringe when I see them. Imagine my delight when Volkswagen decided to poke fun at the people who pimp their rides!
Meet Hal, the IT system admin depressed because Steve, one of his faithful servers, died… I don’t particularly like Hal or the ad itself, but it is effective and sticks in your mind. This was done in the style of the Apple ads, and was for Symantec’s Backup Exec software. Back when I used Backup Exec, it only did file-level restores, and was kind of difficult to use. Let’s hope the new version advertised here works better.
I don’t drink Coke and I don’t play GTA, but I thought this ad was pretty cool. It’s always nice to see the bad guys turn good. Two words also come to mind: synchronized serendipity. This ad is very watchable.
Here’s another Volkswagen ad, this time for the Phaeton. The Phaeton is probably a pretty amazing car, and the Phaeton plant is a pretty amazing place full of innovative engineering, but unfortunately, the price is too high for the VW brand. It would have been much better to build Audis like this. After all, they’re the same company. But the ad is amazing. I’ve never seen shadow play this good.
Another Bud Light ad, this one about the best men who hired an auctioneer for their friend’s wedding. The beer ads are always pretty good, and not surprisingly so. Given the amount of money that Budweiser throws at their advertising, the ad agencies have to make sure they come up with the good stuff.
The story behind this photo is a bit interesting. Ligia and I were visiting St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York when I took this photo. I didn’t have a tripod with me, so this was taken handheld with my 24mm lens. This is why I love fast lenses and cameras that have very little noise.
Three weeks later, close friends of ours were visiting, and I had a gift for them. I asked them to go through the photos I took in Manhattan and pick out one they liked best. I’d then postprocess and print it on the spot. They picked this one and I did my part. A day or so later, I uploaded it to Flickr, and it made it to Explore within 12 hours.
Why the title? Because more people seemed to walk out than walk in.
Raoul Pop 