An oldie, but a goodie. And with the Peanut movie coming out real soon now, almost re-topical.
Zeitgeist-tastic.
So, what do you get when you combine the drawings and characters of Charles M. Schulz with the musical meanderings of Morrissey’s mind? You get This Charming Charlie – the tumblr that… well… combines those two things above.
Plenty more where that came from. What a genius idea.
Next week: Roadrunner does Skrillex: “Meep Meep Wob-wob-wob-wob-wob”.
SUSPEND YOUR SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE, for the 2015 John Lewis Christmas ad is here and while being a whole lot less full of penguins than last year, there are a few awkward stretches of reality that you’re going to have ignore if you’re going to fully enjoy this year’s effort.
Music is Oasis’ Half The World Away, covered by Norwegian artist Aurora (Aksenes), who will be singing at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert next month, along with some other Norwegian band.
And the advert is lovely and inclusive, sending out the right messages for the holiday period. Because, it’s always nice for a strange, lonely, probably harmless, but nevertheless ever-so-slightly creepy, old man to be able to stare directly into a young girl’s home, isn’t it? Especially at Christmas.
I wonder if her parents know about this?
She is, however, clearly a scientific genius. NASA need to sign her up right now.
Rigging up a telescope that size to be able to achieve that sort of resolution is something no optical physicist in history has yet managed. And yet she’s… what? 10 years old?, and is working out of the living room of a house in suburbia while being distracted by her brother’s XBox antics. Incredible. In. Credible. No, I mean literally, not credible.
And her package delivery system of twelve apparently ordinary helium balloons to get that telescope in a shoebox to him? That’s akin to the Rosetta Comet team landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. If this analogy is to be continued, she will come down to breakfast on Boxing Day wearing a dodgy shirt, and everyone will hate her and forget her altruism and seemingly impossible lunar transport system of the previous evening, and how she made an old man who can apparently survive without oxygen, very happy.
How did he get up there, anyway? What’s he been eating? Where did the wood come from to build his house and that bench? Why hasn’t an earth based astronomer noted his presence? Why does he look vaguely like a cross between a Galapagos tortoise and Doc Brown out of Back To The Future? So many questions…
And then, if we’re going to be properly pedantic (and hey, who’s going to stop us?), then “Half The World Away” would amount to a distance of 3,185.5km. That’s not even 1% of the distance to the Moon. Each party involved is going to be sadly disappointed by that sort of meagre effort, although I suppose Mr Green Cheese wouldn’t even know about it.
Look, it’s nice, it’s touching, but it’s wholly scientifically invalid and completely implausible. What are our kids going to learn from this?
I, for one, will not be shopping at John Lewis this Xmas.
UPDATE: The Guardian: Who is Moon Hitler?
The Independent (spoiler: it’s not): The John Lewis Christmas advert and the Commodification of Loneliness.
This is stunning.
Long-term readers of this blog will know my fondness for A380s (see my Lufthansa album and my BA post). They’re just so cuddlable and aeronautically impressive.
Other, more recent readers will have noted that I have done a lot of travelling to and from the UK over the last 12 months. All of those trips have been on Emirates, and they have not put a single foot wrong on any of the 28-odd flights I’ve done with them. I even enjoyed a spell in the A380 Business Class lounge on my last flight. Olives, bar snacks and Bloody Marys – a posh pub at 35,000 ft. A bizarre experience.
And then they released that Jennifer Aniston advert, but I still liked them.
But how amazing is this?
Here are a few numbers:
Cruising at just 4,000 feet (“just” for the plane, that’s pretty high for flying people) the trio flew in two holding patterns while a fourth object in the sky (the film crew in a helicopter) kept distance 1,000 feet above. The A380 couldn’t be more different from the jet wings worn by the pilots though. The Emirates craft pumps out 70,000 pounds of thrust per engine with a max speed of 490 knots, making the wearable-wing’s 88 pounds and 170 knots seem like a mild breeze in comparison.
It’s not an advert for Emirates per se, although it obviously incorporates quite a big bit of their hardware. Neither does it seem to be an ad for Dubai. In fact, I’m not exactly sure what it is an advert for. It might not even be an advert for anything. I’m almost getting the feeling that they just did it because they could for no actual monetary gain.
And that’s pretty cool.
Yes. More of this sort of thing please.
I really do. But quite aside from that, here’s the hauntingly beautiful Quintet Version (2 violins, a viola, a cello and a double bass) (and a piano, but apparently we’re not counting that) of Woodkid’s track I Love You, which you may recognise from this ad.
Wow. Just wow.
Woodkid’s album, The Golden Age is next on my shopping list. I’ve had a wander through his youtube channel and there’s some remarkable stuff there. Most of his songs seem to be around 4 minutes long. However, this colab with Max Richter is more than double that. No surprises there, though.
I love Guy Fawkes Night and I love these tips to make it EVEN BETTER from Michael Spicer, via The Poke:
I await, with some dismay, the traditional plethora of comments and complaints from pet owners, who presumably weren’t aware of the 5th November before buying their dogs, cats, children etc.