The five year old golf prodigy. HT: Susan Gertson

In footage captured on a passenger’s mobile phone, she is seen hurling pillows around the cabin after being bombarded by playful French tourists.

After one particularly heavy onslaught, the grinning stewardess flees to the safety of the galley, to the cheers and the applause of economy class.

Dick Cheney from a post on Sundries, with lots of photos of pols when they were young.

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. – Independent web videos.

..and here he is, about 46 years ago.

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From Very Short List:

We bet you’d be surprised to learn that the person designated to save the world from all its problems happens to be you. But thanks to the very clever and excellently executed interactive movie The Hero, you’ll see that that’s precisely the case.

All you have to do is upload a photo of yourself and the site will take care of the rest, as your image becomes seamlessly integrated into a convincing-looking film (we won’t spoil the surprise further). Swedish agency Draftfcb came up with this viral concept as a way of convincing a young and metropolitan audience to start paying a broadcast fee as part of the Swedish public-service system. And it’s been successful—there have been 2,500 new broadcasting fee subscribers through the Web site since the launch of the campaign, far surpassing the goal of 500. But while we can’t contribute, we can enjoy this terrific viral marketing for the fun that it is.

Try the Hero site here.

…including boiling eggs.

This is Egg Watchers, the egg timer that entertains you.

Virtual Kaleidoscope

Find out your walk score at, you guessed it, Walk Score.com

Disliking a man’s politics, doesn’t mean disliking the man. Here we see Obama in good humor, enacting the peculiar ritual of pardoning a turkey the day before millions get eaten.

Not exclude Joe Biden, from the Onion:

In keeping with a longstanding Thanksgiving tradition, Vice President Joe Biden ceremonially pardoned a 4-pound yam today at a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden. “Under my authority as vice president of the United States of America, I hereby grant this yam full and unconditional clemency,” a smiling Biden declared as he gently patted “Spud,” a Beauregard sweet potato grown in Louisiana and selected from millions of candidates yielded by this year’s harvest. “May he never find himself in a casserole. Right, little guy?” Like yams reprieved before him, Spud will ride as an honored guest aboard the second float of the Disneyland Thanksgiving Day Parade before spending the rest of his life in the comfort and safety of a tuber petting zoo

HT: Elena Trevino

Obama-weather.com. Seriously.

For a truly serious discussion of weather prediction, there is this from New Scientist:

WE’VE all watched those vast heaps of cotton wool float across the sky. Lofted and shaped by updrafts of warm air, cumulus clouds mesmerise with their constantly changing shape. Some grow ever taller, while others wither and die before our eyes. All bear witness to the ceaseless roiling of the ocean of air we call the atmosphere.

About 80 years ago, the British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson was pondering the shapes of such clouds when a startling thought occurred to him: the laws that govern the atmosphere might actually be very simple.

Even at the time, with scientific meteorology still in its infancy, the idea seemed absurd: key equations governing the behaviour of the 5 million billion tonnes of air above us had already been identified – and they were anything but simple.

No one was more aware of this than Richardson, who is recognised as one of the founders of modern weather forecasting. Even now, the world’s most powerful computers are pushed to their limits extracting predictions of future weather and climate from the equations he wrestled with using pencil and paper.

Yet Richardson suspected that behind the mathematical complexity of the atmosphere lay a far simpler reality – if only we looked at it the right way. (more…)

Make sure you watch until he starts begging for tips.
HT: Susan Gertson

From the 1950s.

They could just post an “out of order” sign on the escalator, but it wouldn’t be as much fun. HT: American Digest.

See the other 49 here.

500 hoppers invade Barcelona.

With their alien-like appearance and giant size these balloon sculptures might be a bit scary for a children’s party.

But after painstakingly constructing each one over three days artist Jason Hackenwerth probably doesn’t want kids playing with them anyway.

The extraordinary figures, which look like monsters from the depths of the ocean or creatures from another planet, are in fact highly complex sculptures made of nothing but thousands of common party balloons.

Oliver Yeh is the kind of guy who cooks up ideas so kooky, so out-of-this-world, that even his fellow MIT students tend to roll their eyes when they hear them.

But that never stops him.

His latest concept — to launch a camera into near-space using a weather balloon, a cell phone, hand warmers and a drink cooler — fell flat when he sent out an e-mail message to dozens of his classmates, asking for help.

Unfazed, Yeh managed to find one friend willing to chip in. And on September 2, the go-it-alone pair floated a balloon-camera high enough into the atmosphere to photograph the curvature of the Earth and the deep black of space, all on a lunch-money budget of $148.

“For me, it was just about not being afraid to do what I love to do,” said Yeh, a 20-year-old MIT senior studying computer science and electrical engineering. “Before, people were just kind of like, ‘That’s a crazy idea; there he goes all over again.’ (Yeh once convinced a friend to float the Charles River with him on a raft made of plastic bottles.)

“I didn’t have a lot of people who wanted to do it with me, so I’m really glad I stuck it out and succeeded in what I wanted to do.”

Terrified Duan Qiongxiu jumped out of her skin when she came across the mutant reptile.

Scientists are now studying the slithering creature to see how it managed to grow a foot — complete with four clawed toes on its stomach.

Duan, 66, of Suining, southwest China, said: “I woke up and heard a strange scratching sound. I turned on the light and saw this monster working its way along the wall using his claw.”

She was so scared she grabbed a shoe and beat the beast to death before preserving its body in a bottle of alcohol.

Guess she wasn’t all that rattled.

CLICK FOR PHOTO.

Can’t let the date go by without a comment.

They seem like a fun bunch. I stumbled over this video and couldn’t keep from smiling, along with approximately 21 million others.

A variation on Boggle.