Hah!

Star Wars / A-Team intro

And even better, here is a Star Wars / Airwolf intro

Hah, this commercial is pretty awesome. It's like the Rube Goldberg machine of beer.

A new year, and a new decade are upon us! Here is my annual photographic review of the year. More travels, moving, a new job. So sit down and come along for the ride.

You can also see my past year in reviews for 2008 and 2007.

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Just saw this brilliant advertisement again. I first noticed it last year, during the Euro Cup. It’s a commercial by Nike, following the career of an unknown teenage soccer player through their eyes. In two minutes, the commercial goes from playing in a youth league, to playing for Arsenal, to playing for Holland in the Euro Cup.

It’s really well done and quite creative!

Where Do You Go is an interesting mashup that shows the areas you most frequent in a city, using a heat map layed on top of Google Maps. The data is derived from your Foursquare checkins.

The above image represents the areas of San Francisco I most frequent, based on nearly 400 checkins with Foursquare over the last year. Red / white are areas visited the most, while blue / green (and grey) are areas I visit the least or not at all.

This is a pretty fantastic use of one’s geo-location data and it’s something I’ve always been curious about. Just where exactly do I go all the time, and what areas do I frequent. This sort of thing might help plan further adventures to parts of the city that I neglect. I just might have to reinstall Foursquare on my iPhone after all!

Of course, when I do finally reinstall Foursquare, what happens?

Go figure.

(Photo via Wikipedia)

“There are two things you never talk about in an Irish pub: religion and politics…”

Last summer, we traveled to Europe. The campaign to elect the next U.S. President was starting to ramp up and at that point, Barack Obama was a household name. This lead to an interesting conversation with a fellow in Dublin, Ireland.

Right before we arrived in Barcelona, we stopped over in Dublin for a few days. On our last night there, we happened upon an old pub named Mulligan’s Pub.

Apparently, it’s one of the oldest pubs in Ireland, and there has been a watering hole at that spot since 1732. Incredible! People have been drinking beer at that spot since before the United States even existed as a country.

While Sanjin and I were enjoying some glasses of Guinness at the bar, an old Irish fellow sitting next to us strikes up a conversation. After finding out we’re from the States, he looks around and then whispers to us:

“There are two things you never talk about in an Irish pub: religion and politics. That said, what do you boys think about this Obama character?”

Fantastic. It was pretty amazing to think that Obama, who hadn’t even been officially nominated by the Democratic Party yet, had already piqued the interest and curiousity of people overseas.

While traveling through Europe last year, we stopped for a few days in Barcelona to check out the capital city of Catalonia. The hostel we were staying in gave us a flyer of interesting things to do over the next few days.

One particular entry caught our eye.

“¡Una nit de curts còmic!”

It’s written in Catalan and basically translates to “a night of funny shorts!”

That was pretty amusing to us, especially because we all agreed that Sanjin had just bought some ridiculous and funny shorts right before we left on our trip.

So we made plans that evening to set out for the bar / lounge (called the Mau Mau Underground) that was hosting “funny shorts night.” Sanjin decided to pack the shorts in his messenger bag and change into them when we got there, just in case the night ended up being a bust.

When we arrived, we noticed a distinct lack of activity in front of the bar. We paid a small cover and went inside, only to find the place fairly dead. A few people sitting on couches and either drinking beer or smoking.

We decided to make the best of our time there and plopped down on a couch and ordered a few beers. After a few minutes, they started playing some ridiculous and hilarious movie. It was over within a few minutes. Another one immediately started, and it was also over within a few minutes.

One of us turned to the rest and asked, “what’s with all these funny short movies…”

Their voice trailed off and instantly, we all knew what funny shorts actually meant! We shared quite a bit of laughter over our pretty obvious mixup. We sat down, content to enjoy the rest of the evening, watching funny shorts and having some tasty Spanish beers.

As an aside, one of the short films we saw that evening particularly stuck with me. It was an amazing stop-motion film focused on photography. Which is why I think it made such an impression on me. Ten Thousand Pictures of You.

“¡Una nit de curts còmic!”

Funny shorts night. It’s a phrase that will always bring a smile to my face.

This octopus is using a coconut shell for shelter and carrying it around wherever it goes on the ocean floor! The more I read about octopi, the more fascinated I am with them.

This video of The Known Universe is from the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium in New York City, and zooms out from the mountains of Tibet, showing every single satellite (artificial and not), star, and known galaxy in the universe. Absolutely incredible!

Can you imagine if this was displayed in the Cal Academy of Sciences’ Morrison Planetarium? (Which, if you haven’t been, is probably the most amazing planetarium in the world).

My immediate reaction on seeing this video was thinking back to the Powers of 10 video that I saw in a junior high math class, probably around 1995 or so.

[Via Kottke]

This seems like it will come in handy. I’m definitely guilty of committing a number of don’ts listed here!

[Via The World’s Best Ever]