Freestyle Trial

What is it about the French that makes them do crazy (albeit in a spectacular kind of way) stuff like this? From the people that developed freerunning or Parkour, Freestyle Trial is what you get when you combine Parkour with a motorbike.

This guy Julien Dupont is freaking awesome.



Here is Jean-Yves Blondeau, another crazy Frenchman with his awesome body roller suit.

Via Fresh Creation

Audiosurfing the classics

This ad promoting the Zurich Chamber Orchestra transforms the lines of sheet music into the rails of a roller coaster:



This so reminds me of the awesome indie game Audiosurf, where you turn your MP3 songs into a playable, gem-collecting obstacle course. Well worth the $10 purchase price, in my opinion. Here's a clip of a guy playing Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor in Audiosurf:

7382 used chopsticks

That's how many chopsticks were used to make this canoe.



City hall worker Shuhei Ogawara spent two years collecting spent chopsticks from the cafeteria. Perfectly good wood that would otherwise have gone to waste, instead were glued into strips to form the canoe shell.

Kwytza Kraft has also found uses for recycled chopsticks.

Asahi via Pink Tentacle

IKEA Train

I want to ride this train.

To promote the opening of their new store, IKEA has decorated the seats and curtains of this Portliner Monorail in Kobe, Japan.

via Pink Tentacle

Very good documentary on ape intelligence

Ape Genius, a documentary from PBS Nova. 52 minutes.

Hey, that's my 'hood!

I just found out that my neighborhood of Westwood, near UCLA, is home to the Stupidest Bike Lane in America (all 275 feet of it), according to Slate:



I walk through there many times, and didn't even know we had any bike lanes (or bikers).

via LAist

Let the gays have their buttsecks

You were told that gay marriage is immoral:





So in 2000 and 2004, you voted for the party of "family values":





Which elected this guy not once, but twice:





Who then started a useless war, killing thousands of troops
and hundreds of thousands of civilians:





Pissing off the very people we were trying to help,
fueling even more extremism:





Not only that, the cost of the war
grossly exceeded its $50-60B estimate:





Pushing up our budget deficit and partly to blame for
collapsing the value of the US dollar:





Which makes buying oil a lot more expensive:





Thus higher energy costs also means
higher prices for everything else:

---

Q: So in the end, what are some lessons to be learned?

A: Don't let the fear of the gays having their buttsecks
cause you to bend over for your government and take it up your own ass.



Think about that when the anti-gay
hysteria starts up again in 2008.