Wanna watch a movie?

Tonight's movie buff - Mark Malkoff gets the most out of his Netflix subscription:

Musical interlude

Tonight's musical interlude - all-girl quartet Bond's Explosive:

Eye protection

Today's safety article -- Lucky Gunner tests a whole passel of ballistic eye protection:

Read the whole thing here.

Ventriloquist

Tonight's ventriloquism humor, with Nina Conti:

Musical interlude

Tonight's musical interlude - a little from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana for you. To wit, Orff's setting to music of the medieval latin poem O Fortuna:



The lyrics:

O Fortuna
velut luna
statu variabilis,
semper crescis
aut decrescis;
vita detestabilis
nunc obdurat
et tunc curat
ludo mentis aciem,
egestatem,
potestatem
dissolvit ut glaciem.

Sors immanis
et inanis,
rota tu volubilis,
status malus,
vana salus
semper dissolubilis,
obumbrata
et velata
michi quoque niteris;
nunc per ludum
dorsum nudum
fero tui sceleris.

Sors salutis
et virtutis
michi nunc contraria,
est affectus
et defectus
semper in angaria.
Hac in hora
sine mora
corde pulsum tangite;
quod per sortem
sternit fortem,
mecum omnes plangite!

English translation:

O Fortune,
variable
as the moon,
always dost thou
wax and wane.
Detestable life,
first dost thou mistreat us,
and then, whimsically,
thou heedest our desires.
As the sun melts the ice,
so dost thou dissolve
both poverty and power.

Monstrous
and empty fate,
thou, turning wheel,
art mean,
voiding
good health at thy will.
Veiled
in obscurity,
thou dost attack
me also.
To thy cruel pleasure
I bare my back.

Thou dost withdraw
my health and virtue;
thou dost threaten
my emotion
and weakness
with torture.
At this hour,
therefore, let us
pluck the strings without
delay.
Let us mourn together,
for fate crushes the brave.

Fill 'er up

Tonight's commercial - vintage and modern Ferrari race cars, filmed in major cities, doing their thing:

Musical interlude

Tonight's Irish jig - from Riverdance:

Obama: Narcissist-in-Chief

Today's top-20 look at the self-absorbed White House occupant, courtesy of Jordan Rickards. An excerpt (links omitted):

14. Obama as the standard of divine law

For millennia, theologians have struggled with the concept of sin. Usually, though, the question focused on how one finds redemption from sin, or what constitutes a sin, not who gets to decide what a sin is. It seemed a given that sin, by its very nature, is a transgression against God’s values. What those values are is subject to debate, of course, but the debate is always in the context of divine law and divine will.

Except to Barack Obama. When asked to define “sin,” he stated that sin is “being out of alignment with my values,” whatever those are. So take that, St. Augustine!


13. Announcing the killing of Osama bin Laden

Perhaps the only time the nation has truly been united under President Obama was when he delivered the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed. And why let a great opportunity for self-aggrandizement go wasted?

Just as he had felt compelled to include himself in the report of the Navy snipers who killed the Somali pirates who had hijacked an American tanker in 2009, telling us that he had heroically “given the order” to shoot, in his relatively brief announcement about the Bin Laden killing Obama referenced himself fifteen times, speaking at length of his minimal role: “I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda… I was briefed on a possible lead… I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden… I determined that we had enough intelligence…and authorized an operation.”

Oddly, never once during this speech did he mention the Navy SEALs who actually carried out the operation. But that was a minor detail.

Read the whole list here.

Cutaway view of a Formula 1 car

Tonight's auto racing inside look - a cutaway look at a Sauber F1 car:

Musical interlude

Tonight's musical interlude - all-girl string quartet eScala performs Palladio:

Swimming with the Devil

Tonight's water adventure - swimming in the Devil's Pool, Livingstone Island, at the top of Victoria Falls, Zambia:

Musical interlude, 10,000 singers edition

Tonight's musical interlude - the final movement from Beethoven's majestic Ninth Symphony:

From the video's description:

The performance of "Daiku", "The Ninth", Beethoven's 9th Symphony with 10000 (amateur) chorus singers is a Japanese highlight every year in the end of December. Here is the last movement, recorded at the 2011 concert in Osaka, this year dedicated especially to the memory of the victims of the desastrous tsunami in March. ...

Spooky

Tonight's aural notes, from a waterphone:

Learning the piano, long distance edition

Tonight's long-distance musical instrument instruction:

From the video's description:

Jarrod Radnich, nationally noted composer and pianist of "Virtuosic Piano Solo Series" personally instructed Miss South Dakota, Anna Simpson, on one of his piano compositions. The composition, Pirates of the Caribbean, was then performed by Simpson at the Miss America Pageant. He did the training with a distance of thousands of miles between them!

Independence Day

Today's memorial video - I was going to title this post "Happy Independence Day", but quite frankly, with the awful US Supreme Court decision upholding the abomination that is Obamacare, and the Court's apparent green-lighting of virtually unbridled further intrusions on personal liberty by Congress, there's not a general air of happiness afoot.

This video, with its symbolism of destruction and rebuilding, seemed more apropos:

Musical interlude

Tonight's musical interlude - Neil Diamond's Coming to America:

Almost ready for takeoff, Captain

Tonight's aviation oddity:

From the video's description:

This 747 is sitting in a boneyard in Mojave, CA waiting to be dismantled and recycled at the end of its useful life. On May 23rd, 2012 the area experienced extreme winds of 70+ miles per hour and reports of gusts up to 100 near the pass due to a low pressure zone. Without the weight of its engines and with its landing flaps deployed, the slightly tail heavy 747 tries to take to the skies one last time. The next day the plane was found to have also rotated about 45 degrees from its original position. The same wind storm damaged many rooftops, cut power and sent huge clouds of sand and dust billowing into the sky. Mojave will occasionally experience this type of wind storm due to geography. --Mike

...

Musical interlude

Tonight's musical interlude - Pomplamoose's Another Day: