Alcoholic monkeys

So, apparently monkeys get drunk. Even more, they act just like us when they’re drunk.

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Ueli Steck speed solo Eiger record

What did you do this morning? Climb a mountain? Straight up the side with the cliff? By yourself? With no ropes?

This video shows Ueli Steck, from Switzerland, breaking the speed record for climbing the north side of Mount Eiger, which is also called the Death Wall because 64 people have died trying to climb it. The video is terrifying, exhilarating and beautiful.

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Renting a read from ‘newspaper landlords’

Do you want to read the news but don’t want to pay for the newspaper? Rent one.

Entrepreneurs in Ethiopia rent out newspapers to people for a small fraction of the price that it costs to buy them.  Apparently most of the people renting them aren’t looking for news, but are looking for jobs in the vacancy section.

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Best pranks of the last 100 years

It’s a bit late for April Fool’s day to copy them, but this video tells of some of the best pranks of the past 100 years.

 

This one, about the loudest sounds ever made, is from the same people.

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I ain’t gonna pee pee my bed tonight

I had no idea what on Earth I was watching when I first watched this video, but it’s strangely catchy and addictive. The singing, dancing, age of the people, the clothes and the lyrics seem like they shouldn’t go together, but they do in a hilarious way.

The Wikipedia article on the family is pretty interesting as an example of a family who decided to live an alternative lifestyle. It tells us that the mum and dad in this family moved to Spain from the US in the mid-1960s, and after their kids had grown old enough, 10 years later, they made a family band. They were apparently very successful from the 1970s to the 1990s.

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50 years ago today

I spent about half an hour this morning skipping through a documentary called First Orbit about the first manned flight into space by Yuri Gagarin.

The film combines recordings of video and audio from the flight (in Russian but with English subtitles), modern high definition video taken from the International Space Station and beautiful music. The video is edited to show what Gagarin would have seen from his capsule. It’s over an hour and a half, and you’d have to be pretty patient to watch the whole thing, but the first 10 minutes or so is definitely worth a watch, especially putting yourself into his shoes as he’s heading into the ultimate unknown with very uncertain prospects of returning to Earth.

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China’s Ghost Cities and Malls

Everyone knows that China’s developing quickly. This short documentary/news clip looks at the development of huge real estate developments – and even whole cities – that simple aren’t being filled by people.

The documentary raises some interesting questions about the quality of GDP growth and about what’s going to happen to China’s real estate market.

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I haven’t watched a rally in years so…

I haven’t watched a rally in years, so I enjoyed watching this documentary about rallying in the ’80s.

The Group B rally division was apparently held from 1983 to 1986 and pretty much let the car manufacturers make the fastest cars they possibly could. No surprise, then, that discontinued because the cars were simply too fast, and thus too dangerous.

Start at at the 5 minutes 20 second mark to see the driving and the crazies on the sides of the race course. How could anyone possibly think that was a good idea?