Have you ever wanted to hear Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, Rock the Casbah by the Clash or even Iron Man by Black Sabbath “sung” by online speaking dictionaries over karaoke or MIDI backing tracks? No? That’s a lie, and you know it. This site has a long line-up of classics with vocals from the Merriam-Webster and Encarta. It’s an endearing concept, and half the fun (o.k., let’s be honest; seven eighths of the fun) comes from imagining the creators piecing together these logistical nightmares sample by sample. I was going to make a version of California Dreaming, but gave up disgusted at myself for wasting my life.
Okay, two videos in this post, both of astounding cricket happenings. And no, that is not an oxymoron.
Here’s Sri Lanka’s fast bowler Lasith Malinga taking four wickets in four balls, which I believe is unprecedented in international cricket. Just checking…yes it is. Also, says the BBC,
it has not happened in first-class cricket since Fazl-e-Akbar achieved the feat in a Pakistan domestic match in 2001-02.
Imagine that. Six years of first-class cricket all over the globe, and no-one managed it until now.
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Here we have Herschelle Gibbs hitting six sixes in one over, the first time this has been done in one-day cricket. Maximum runnage. Some great things about this clip, besides the amazing achievement itself, are the faintly restrained South African commentators, and the animated mascot that pops up on every six, dances an annoying dance and kind of…clucks.
If you haven’t even looked at Blogvertise yet , take a peek over there now. Basically, this is the deal: advertisers are looking to get their products into the public eye, and they’re willing to pay you for blogging about them. You don’t even have to be positive about the product! Full rules can be found on the site, but here are some starters -
1. It’s free to register your blog.
2. You don’t have to pay anything. Ever.
3. They give you money for blogging. Which is what you’re doing anyway.
A neat Flickr-based web app, created as a component of an MFA thesis.
From the web site itself:
The ad generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language. Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly. By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.
