This is a demonstration on how to play the Hurdy Gurdy, a medieval musical instrument, by Wyndebagge, at an English Heritage Living History event at Kenilworth Castle. A gurdy is a medieval word for your bottom and hurdy means turn, so swing your bottom, swing your pants. This is a dance instrument used for medieval raves. Impress your friends by surprising them with your secret talents of playing the hurdy gurdy! Play a hurdy gurdy.
Watch this Medieval pottery demonstration by Jim Newboult of Trinity Court Potteries at an English Heritage Living History event at Kenilworth Castle. This pottery wheel is not a kick wheel. It's an incredibly silent hand powered pottery wheel. This ceramics demonstration will show you how to throw a lovely clay pot on any wheel. Learn how it's done traditionally at a historical Medieval fair. How to throw a medieval pot.
Up for auction at Heritage, JFK's crusty old birthday cake, presented to him at his 45th birthday party in Madison Square Garden back in 1962. Marilyn Monroe performed her legendary “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” at this very event.
No one can resist the taste of spaetzle. It's undeniably one of Germany's best creations. And German spaetzle is even a hit during the holidays! So, join Robert Daugherty as he shares his heritage and skill in making German spaetzle.
This is a walkthrough of Chinese city Beijing home of the 2008 Olympics. Beijing is a huge metropolis and this tour shows you everything from the airport, cultural destinations, etiquette, city regions and train maps. Travel around Beijing, China.
See a burning building? Hold all calls to the fire department. Canadian artist Isabelle Hayeur fools passerbyers with her installation, "Fire with Fire", an artwork that creates the illusion of a fire-swept four-story heritage building in the downtown eastside of Vancouver. "The Downtown Eastside is the oldest neighbourhood in Vancouver; it is also the most run-down. This historic area is infamous for being plagued by social problems due to poverty. Before falling prey to serious urban decay,...
Three Haitian brothers, with no training of any kind, have constructed a working, flying helicopter. Total cost? 45,000 Haitian dollars, which comes out to approximately 1100 American bucks. Their chopper is the first helicopter to every be produced in Haiti.
Vive Cool City (a crew of raucous Aussies who decided to make internet TV) tour the world featuring marvels, oddities, and cultural anomalies. This particular episode features Minoru, veteran Yo-yo World Champion. This dude is good. Skip ahead approximately half way through to see his moves.
For those of you behind on their international politics, Vladimir Putin has once again been elected as President of Russia. And right now, there are over 20,000 protesters in Moscow yelling about election fraud. Now, whether or not you think they're right, or whether or not you think Putin is a badass (he is, for the record), you have to admit he is an amazingly interesting cultural figure. And what do we do with amazing cultural figures? Why, we make fun of them with Impact-laden photos, of ...
Unfortunately, I'm a little behind schedule on my pizza dough making mission, but I promise - more experiments coming soon! In the meantime, here's a beautiful video about the nuance that goes into bread making, as demonstrated by famed San Francisco baker Chad Robertson of Tartine Bread. Bread and pizza dough go hand-in-hand, and I've been thinking about picking up the Tartine cookbook for some time now. As I mentioned above, the nuance that goes into the process is really pretty remarkable....
In late 2011, representative from China, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan submitted a proposal called the International Code of Conduct for Information Security (ICCIS) to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that called for international consensus of a global set of rules and regulations that standardize information flow on the internet.
For those who only eat at fast food restaurants, you should consider traveling to a different part of Los Angeles. There are more options available besides McDonald’s, Burger King, and Carl’s JR. Los Angles is a huge city where you can find a restaurant in every corner. One can clearly observe the love and passion in which the managers expect their food to deliver.
Angry Birds finally hits LEGOs. It was only a matter of time before some LEGO maniac constructed Angry Birds from those popular little plastic building blocks. Stop motion brickfilms are sure to follow.
Cartograms are usually pretty mundane, but throw in Flickr, Photoshop, and a well-known public place and you have an artistic representation of popular colors. Much more eye-grabbing than your common map.
Check out this lesson in KhoeKhoegowab, the Namibian language commonly referred to as Click
I have to admit that I am an environmentalist wacko. That may sound strange, considering my life is tied up in PVC, which is considered one of the most poisonous materials on earth... but it's true. I love this planet, and I want it to be inhabitable for as long as the sun is in this phase of its life.
Video games and movies have a history of interaction dogged by failure. Video game movies and movie video games both tend to be terrible. There has never been a good feature film based on a video game franchise. Even documentaries about games, which should be rife given the rapid rise of games on the cultural stage over the last thirty years, have been few and far between. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is by far the best, and for several years now has been the only really stirring f...
Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, dates back to over 500 years ago and is still practiced as a highly respected cultural art form in modern-day Japan.
As a kid, my favorite thing to do at the Natural History museum was a midday stop, when my family strolled past an antiquated looking vending machine in the museum's musty basement. The Mold-A-Rama machine was oddly shaped, George Jetson-esque, and spewed out made-to-order, brightly colored plastic dinosaurs. There was such joy in watching the liquid wax pour into the mold, and then eject a warm, custom toy—well worth the dollar or two demanded. A version of this tradition was recently elevat...
Oleg Mavromati's latest project, Ally/Foe, allows online voters the chance to electrocute the Russian artist at a mere fifty cents a pop. From November 7th to November 13th, viewers of Mavromati's livestream can pay to vote “innocent” or “guilty.” 100 guilty votes result in the artist voluntarily shocking himself in front of the camera, live, with his homemade electrocution machine.
Sounds like an odd bragging right, but hold your horses, artist Hannes Langeder's handmade Porsche is pretty damn interesting.
The New York Times magazine posts a fascinating feature on a Chinese cultural phenomenon known as human flesh search engines. Out of China has borne cyberposses, internet vigilantes, who target everybody from twisted individuals violating social norms to government corruption.
Austrian composer Peter Ablinger has created a "speaking" piano. Ablinger digitized a child's voice reciting the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court to "play" on the piano via MIDI sequencer. Apparently, the computer is connected to the piano, which analyzes the human speech, and then converts it to key-tapping.
In the world of instructional video, there are some videos that transcend debate. Is there the intent to instruct? Is the idea simple and original? Is a step by step process articulated? Is the content revelatory?
Because of this one video, the company mail room can once again reclaim its destiny as a cultural Mecca. Face the facts: xeroxing your behind-crack during lunch break is so ... yesterday.
Scrabble Bingo of the Day: * FINNESKO [n/pl.] A finnesko is a boot made of tanned reindeer skin, with the reindeer's fur on the outside. It's an especially good, warm boot for subarctic regions. These boots originate from the Sami, indigenous people from the cultural region of Sápmi, located across four countries in the Arctic Circle; Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. This area is also referred to as Fennoscandia.
How much money do you think you're worth? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Think again. In the world of shopping centers and barcodes, you may only be worth a few bucks.
Video games are the newest major expressive media. As such, their role in society is still being defined continuously. A monumentally important example of this took place yesterday at the US Supreme Court. After a long deliberation, the highest court in the land handed down a decision invalidating a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors on the grounds that video games are protected speech under the First Amendment, like movies and books.
MAKE-UP:
Feeling comfortable or at home means living in an atmosphere where you are accepted. Some people moving abroad worry about getting adjusted to the new social environment or the western culture. You may have left your home to make big business, excel in your career, get married, meet a relative/friend, discover new places, or for any good reason.
The last few months of WikiLeaks controversy has surely peaked your interest, but when viewing the WikiLeaks site, finding what you want is quite a hard task.
OSPD1 In 1978, the first SCRABBLE Dictionary was conceived and published by Merriam-Webster, with the help of the National Scrabble Association (NSA). The idea was to include any word that was found in one of the five major dictionaries at the time:
This coming Friday, November 11th, 2011 is Veterans Day and everybody's celebrating! But only veterans and active military personnel can get the great deals being offered at restaurants and retail outlets across the country. If you need help locating some of those deals, below are all of the nationwide and local deals found across the Web. If you know of any more, share the spots in the comments below!
The debate over whether video games can be considered art or not has intensified in recent years as games like Braid and Flow have taken the digital aesthetic experience to new heights. These new games are great examples, but there are much older ones that present compelling arguments as well. The best is a 1986 ZX Spectrum/Commodore 64/Amstrad CPC game called Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
Japanese people are into many things Americans find weird—like YouTube's beloved canine-hosted cooking show or Daito Manabe's light up LED grills or even more insane, a vending machine that distributes live crabs. In light of these cultural oddities, the Japanese phenomenon of visual novels (NVL, or bijuaru noberu), seems relatively normal. A meeting place of books and video games, visual novels are a sort of "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" for the new generation.
FOXBORO, Mass. - The New England Patriots Alumni Club (NEPAC), announced that more than a dozen former Patriots players are gearing up to host a "Football for You" youth clinic in Worcester on Saturday, May 29 from 12:30-5:00 p.m.
A Self-Protection Guide 1) You can help protect yourself from violent crimes.
“Of a generation who remembers Tiananmen Square, 1989, I considered how some excuse – the lack of, or slow progress on, human rights in China because ‘times have changed’, or because other concerns, including making money, come first, or because rights, freedom, and democracy are somehow different issues there than in the West.” Denise Chong
At GDC 2011 this past March, three of the world's best game designers participated in a contest called Game Design Challenge. Each presented their vision for a game that fit the prompt "Bigger than Jesus: games as religion" before an audience, with applause to determine the winner. Jenova Chen, John Romero, and Jason Rohrer all spoke, and Rohrer won in a landslide with his revolutionary game called Chain World.
Two new and radically different ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) have burst into the news in the last week, and illustrate the very best of an innovative phenomenon: the commercial tie-in ARG, and the public service ARG.
