You come at the Lion King, you best not miss
The Lion King movie recut into a five-minute summary of all five seasons of The Wire.
I almost didn’t post this because it dogs on the underrated season 2. (via ★vuokko)
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kottke.org posts about remix
AC/D2 to play Star Wars music festival
If there was a Star Wars version of Coachella, some of the bands playing at the festival would be called Kessel Run DMC, Guided by Millions of Voices That Suddenly Cried Out in Terror and Were Suddenly Silenced, and C-3PO Speedwagon.
Human Planet: The Douche
Pitch-perfect take-off of BBC’s Human Planet nature series. The subject is The Douche, an urban-dwelling bottom feeder.
Among the progressive forward-thinking citizens, there stands a great cancer, a type of human that is not evolved like the rest of the race: The Douche. For the poor Douche, hunting is still its main priority. This type of human does not hunt for food; they are consistently trying to find their own self esteem.
Human Planet is a pretty great show, but I would love to see an entire series like this: Soccer Moms, The Hipster, Nerds, Trophy Wives, Eurotrash, The Academic, etc. (via devour)
Hilarious fake TLC promo
Turns out there’s not so much learning on The Learning Channel anymore.
Fake shows from the video: 12 Wives, 12 Problems; Dwarf Hoarders; Uterus Cannon; and Hasty Home Surgery.
Real TLC shows: 19 Kids and Counting; Strange Sex; Extreme Couponing; and I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant. (via ★dansays)
Tron Legacy soundtrack remixed
If you liked Daft Punk’s Tron Legacy soundtrack, you might like Tron Legacy R3CONF1GUR3D with remixes by Crystal Method, Paul Oakenfold, and M83. It’s just out today and I haven’t listen to it yet, so caveat emptor.
First person Super Mario
Here’s what playing the original Super Mario Bros would look like from a first-person perspective.
(via devour)
The Qaddafis and the Bluths
The New Republic compared the Qaddafi family with Arrested Developments Bluth family and found some similarities.
Mohammed Qaddafi and Gob Bluth are both the oldest sons of tyrannical fathers, and both stand in the shadows of their younger, more favored brothers. The sibling rivalry can get intense — Mohammed’s feud with younger brother Mutassim over a Coca-Cola plant ended only after a worker had been injured and a cousin had been stuffed into a car trunk, while Michael and Gob’s dueling banana stands ended with the fire department being called twice.
Debating The Hangover
The timeline of events goes like this:
Last night, I posted the trailer for the sequel to The Hangover.
This morning, my friend David posts the following on Twitter:
Poleaxed by indication that pop culture aesthete @jkottke might actually like Hangover, the execrable frat boy flick
To which I replied a few hours later:
@daveg Are you kidding? That movie is hilarious.
Anil suggested a debate:
@jkottke @daveg I will pay you guys for an Oxford debate about the Hangover’s merits, or lack thereof.
And Michael Sippey went there and posted a video of an animated David and an animated me having a debate about The Hangover:
I thought you were a pop culture aesthete.
No, I’m from the Midwest.
You live in Manhattan.
But I grew up eating hot dogs.
But you write about expensive conceptual restaurants and post pictures of contemporary art like that thing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where the woman sat at the table all summer.
That’s a pretty accurate five-line bio of me.
Collaborative tourist snaps
For her Photo Opportunities project, Corrine Vionnet finds tourist photos of famous landmarks online and layers them to make images like this:
(thx, reed)
Mississippi River system as subway map
A map of the Mississippi River and all its tributaries drawn in the style of Harry Beck’s London Underground map.
Prints are available. (via strange maps)
Last night, a robot DJ saved my life
…or rather, it recognized my face, looked up what music I liked on Facebook and Hunch, and played it for me. Meet AutomaticDJ:
8-bit Safari browser
Pixelfari is an 8-bit version of Safari that renders everything in pixely fonts and graphics. Here’s what kottke.org looks like using Pixelfari:
Beatles mockumentary from the year 3126
A short documentary report from a thousand years into the future about The Beatles.
First-hand records are certainly scarce. There’s a lot we don’t know about The Beatles, but we do know that these four young men — John Lennon, Paul MacKenzie, Greg Hutchinson, and Scottie Pippen — were some of the finest musicians that ever existed. The Beatles rose to prominence when they travelled from their native Linverton to America to perform at Ed Sullivan’s annual Woodstock festival.
Playmobil Joy Division
A nearly shot-for-shot version of Joy Division performing Transmission live in 1979…with Playmobil characters.
The Hood Internet Mixtape Volume Five
Yes. Yes! YES! It’s MIXMAS! The Hood Internet has released their fifth mixtape. Download commencing now.
Clapping music
Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin “perform” Steve Reich’s Clapping Music. This is mesmerizing.
(via @sippey)
Everything is a Remix, part two
Kirby Ferguson is back with the next installment of Everything is a Remix, his examination of remix techniques used in film.
Featured are two of the most extensive borrowers in film: George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino. Part one is available here.
Musical subway map
Alexander Chen made a version of the NYC subway map that plays music as the trains intersect routes.
At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.
Check out the full version; there are more details here. See also Isle of Tune. (via about 20 people on Twitter just now)
1950s version of The Empire Strikes Back
Ivan Guerrero remakes recent-ish movie trailers using footage from old movies…for instance, imagine if The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1950:
Guerrero has done several others, including Ghostbusters (1954), Up (1965), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1951). (via @themexican)
Literal New Yorker cartoon captions
The Monkeys You Ordered is a collection of New Yorker cartoons with literal captions. Like so:
(via @dens)
Video game football
In the Seahawks/Saints game over the weekend, Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch made an improbable game-winning touchdown run. So, I can’t decide which one of these videos is better. Marshawn Lynch’s Tecmo Bowl Run:
Or Marshawn Lynch as Super Mario in star mode:
Se7en ending with stuffed animals
Surprisingly, the ending scene of Se7en is no less effective with stuffed animals standing in for the actors.
(via @sippey)
The Muppets sing Kanye West’s Monster
This is surprisingly well done.
Continuing with the unexpected Kanye groove on kottke.org this morning.
The beauty of Pixar
A nice video tribute to Pixar that weaves together footage from all their films.
(thx, asdhsa)
The lost Radiohead album
It’s called 01 and 10…ok, it’s not really a lost album. But apparently if you take the first five songs from OK Computer (from 1997) and the first five songs from In Rainbows (from 2007) and alternate them, the songs fit together musically and lyrically to form a coherent album.
Consider that In Rainbows was meant to complement OK Computer, musically, lyrically, and in structure. We found that the two albums can be knit together beautifully. By combining the tracks to form one playlist, 01 and 10, we have a remarkable listening experience. The transitions between the songs are astounding, and it appears that this was done purposefully.
The lyrics also seem to complement each other. There appears to be a concept flowing through the 01 and 10 playlist. Ideas in one song is picked up by the next, such as “Pull me out of the aircrash,” and “When I’m at the pearly gates, this will be my videotape.”
(via prosthetic knowledge)
The year in film, 2010
Some gloriously crazy person took clips from 270 films that were out in 2010 and mixed them together into a coherent narrative:
This year’s movies have legitimately transformed my idea of what is creatively possible. To commemorate, I’ve remixed 270 of them into one giant ass video.
Wonderful. Here’s a list of all the films used. (thx, aaron)
Michael Jordan advises LeBron James
Cleveland’s response to LeBron James’ boner of a Nike commercial has more heart, but this mash-up of the LeBron commercial with a previous Michael Jordan Nike commercial is an absolute masterpiece.
Map of the world rearranged by population
If all the countries in the world swapped geographic positions based on population, then you’d have something that looked a bit like this:
Take the world’s largest country: Russia. It would be taken over by its Asian neighbour and rival China, the country with the world’s largest population. Overcrowded China would not just occupy underpopulated Siberia - a long-time Russian fear - but also fan out all the way across the Urals to Russia’s westernmost borders. China would thus become a major European power. Russia itself would be relegated to Kazakhstan, which still is the largest landlocked country in the world, but with few hopes of a role on the world stage commensurate with Russia’s clout, which in no small part derives from its sheer size.
Canada, the world’s second-largest country, would be transformed into an Arctic, or at least quite chilly version of India, the country with the world’s second-largest population. The country would no longer be a thinly populated northern afterthought of the US. The billion Indians north of the Great Lakes would make Canada a very distinct, very powerful global player.
The full map is here. Interestingly, four countries stay in the same positions: the US, Ireland, Yemen, and Brazil.
Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book is called Tree of Codes and he constructed it by taking his favorite book, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, and cut out words to form a completely new story.
It’s a rare novel that’s blurbed by Olafur Eliasson:
[A]n extraordinary journey that activates the layers of time and space involved in the handling of a book and its heap of words. Jonathan Safran Foer deftly deploys sculptural means to craft a truly compelling story. In our world of screens, he welds narrative, materiality, and our reading experience into a book that remembers it actually has a body.
Vanity Fair has an interview with Foer on how he came up with the book…I’m guessing it might not have a Kindle version. See also The Jefferson Bible.
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