Friday, June 27, 2008
The warm fuzzies, the big explosions
Give whoever made this ad for Discovery a simply enormous pile of dollars, because hot damn is it well done. The guy singing at the 39-second mark was originally my favorite, for the little grin he gets, but then there's the Mythbusters and THEN there's Stephen Hawking. So kudos on building up the level of star power and being an excellent example of how to do a commercial for a big sprawling pile of products under a single brand name.
As part of my zenly austerity campaign and attempt not to spend excess of time sitting couchbound, I don't have cable, so this ad had flown beneath my personal radar until this morning. To paraphrase Tim Cahill, it's not a problem when you miss a joke, but you feel a little left out when it shoots past without even waving, and at the risk of sounding a skosh one-note, that's what this morning's xkcd felt like. Once you've seen the video, though, further fangirlish swoonin' must ensue, as must frantic back-clicking through the strip's archives to solve some mysteries: (a) Who is that masked man? (b) What's in that wriggling package? (c) What's he doing on that roller coaster? and (d) What the hell is up with the hamster-ball fixation?
The world is making an unpromising few days up to me in compensatory weird lately, a trend of which I whole-heartedly approve. In getting contact info for someone I met at last night's F&F entertainment (an hour of assembling meal bags, then an hour of ladling cold bean soup into individual tupperwares, all while fetchingly clad in hairnet, plastic apron, and latex gloves and watched over by eagle-eyed, short-tempered chefs only slightly less cute than Gordon Ramsay), I encountered the term "laminar flames," which led to a web search on Navier-Stokes equations. Fire engineering: yet another kick-ass field of which I am 100% as-the-driven-snow-pure ignorant. I love the whole world, and all its craziness.
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2 comments:
"How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow."
OK Can you guess the author! Clue: It's really hard. And a major motion pickcha was made about the novel in 2006... and it's an American guy, and the title includes the word "kings".
Everything that rises must converge. :)
I confess to having needed to Google it, thanks to sinful ignorance of Southern political texts. I stick with banging the rocks together; the man said that was the secret.
The only problem with this ad is that the song is a fearsome earworm. I wandered the Jersey streets this weekend mumbling about momentum and magma and boom de yada, at least until I sank into the embrace of the cinema seat for a "Kung Fu Panda" fix. Cute movie.
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