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Today I learned that the opening theme song for the original Iron Chef TV program was adapted from a song composed by Hans Zimmer, who has done scores for films like Interstellar, Dune, Blade Runner: 2049, Inception, and Dunkirk. Perhaps even weirder, the name of the theme song is “Show Me Your Firetruck”. (The song is from Zimmer’s score for the movie Backdraft.)
Tags: Hans Zimmer · Iron Chef · music · TV · video
The team at Tuk South visited one of the tallest sand dunes in Chile and did the obvious: threw a tire down it and followed it with a drone to see how long it would roll. The answer: almost three minutes. Take a break from whatever shit you might be dealing with at the moment, set your troubles aside, and watch this simple story of tenacity and gravity.
And yes, they went to retrieve the tire after it stopped: “Fear not. We collected the tyre. Leave only tuk tuk tyre tracks, take only memories.”
(I would like to see a Nolan cut of this, where it’s ambiguous if the tire stops at the end or not, like Cobb’s totem at the end of Inception.)
In a preseason game yesterday, Jacksonville Jaguars kicker Cam Little nailed a 70-yard field goal. The official NFL record is 66 yards.
Karen Attiah: I Gained 20 Pounds of Muscle. Here’s What I Learned. “Weightlifting embodies a form of female expression that society is not quite ready for: physical power that we define on our own terms.”
“You cannot keep your soul intact while building the Torment Nexus. The Torment Nexus is, by definition, a machine that brings torment onto others. It destroys souls. And a soul cannot take a soul and remain whole.”
Israel’s right-wing government has murdered five Al Jazeera journalists in a deliberate attack targeting front-line journalist Anas al-Sharif.
“James Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13 who helped turn a failed moon mission into a triumph of on-the-fly can-do engineering, has died. He was 97.”
“New FBI data shows that both violent crime and property crime are at their lowest level since the 1960s” but the media disproportionately covers crime, so most Americans aren’t aware of the decrease.
From the Phonograph podcast, a look at the early days of 99% Invisible (as that podcast’s 15th anniversary approaches).
Lilly Yokoi was an acrobat who specialized in performing on a bicycle. During her career, she toured around the world and appeared on the Ed Sullivan show three times. In this performance from 1965, Yokoi does some seriously before-their-time tricks on her Golden Bicycle, including a no-hands handlebar spin, a no-hands wheelie, a handstand over the handlebars, and several other tricks…all in chunky high heels, mind you.
Here’s an even earlier performance, from 1961. See also some bike tricks filmed by Thomas Edison in 1899.
[This is a vintage post originally from Nov 2014.]
Tags: cycling · Lilly Yokoi · timeless posts · video
Emily Wilson’s current project is translating The Odyssey (again). “I am doing a fully revised re-retranslation, to align my Odyssey translation more closely with my Iliad.”