I’m clipping this because until today I thought this was an urban legend. Apparently a guy pulled it off in 1982 too. Years on the Internet has made me doubt everything.
US Man Flies By Party Balloons
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An American has flown 235 miles on a garden chair using 150 helium-filled party balloons to lift him. |
Kent Couch rose into the sky from his home in Oregon, clutching a mug of coffee, |
He travelled around 20mph and nine hours later ended his journey in Idaho after shooting some of the balloons with a ball-bearing gun. |
Mr Couch, who navigated with a GPS satellite-guided tracking device, said: “If I had the time and money and people, I’d do this every weekend.” |
“Things just look different from up there. You’ve moving so slowly. The best thing is the peace, the serenity. |
“You can hear a dog bark at 15,000 feet. |
Couch was inspired by a TV show about the 1982 garden chair flight over Los Angeles by truck driver Larry Walters, who gained folk hero fame but was fined £750 for violating air traffic rules. Read more at news.sky.com |
This is the project of a friend of mine. Check it out. Sphere College is at http://SphereCollege.org . Other item info | Item number: | 230385303325 | | Item location: | Phoenixville, PA, United States | | Post to: | United States |
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| You are bidding on the opportunity to
be immortalized by becoming the first person to provide me with enough funding
to ensure the long-term, sustainable success of Sphere College.Read more at cgi.ebay.co.uk |
Nick Cave describes his fascination with and attraction to Mark in very sophisticated terms, identifying as key elements of Marcan theology a kind of pressured narrative urgency, a constant undercurrent of conflict, the isolation and anger that seem to characterize Jesus’ own inner life, hopeless incomprehension on the part of his own family and followers, a looming, desperate awareness of the cross, and the restless activity of Jesus’ “jewel-like imagination.” Seen at Christopher Cocca’s blog (bit.ly/11zhE6). | He enters a wilderness of the soul, where all the outpourings of His brilliant, jewel-like imagination are in turns misunderstood, rebuffed, ignored, mocked and vilified and would eventually be the death of Him. Even His disciples, who we would hope would absorb some of Christ’s brilliance, seem to be in a perpetual fog of misunderstanding, following Christ from scene to scene, with little or no comprehension of what is going on around them. So much of the frustration and anger that seems at times to almost consume Christ is directed at His disciples and it is against their persistent ignorance that Christ’s isolation seems at its most complete |
| Throughout Mark, Christ is in deep conflict with the world He is trying to save, and the sense of aloneness that surrounds Him is at times unbearably intense. Christ’s last howl from the cross is to a God He believes has forsaken Him, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.’Read more at www.meetatthegate.com |
In Thrilling Find, Scholar Unearths Long-Lost Letters of Benjamin Franklin |
He asked to see a volume of papers that had belonged to Thomas Birch, secretary of the Royal Society from 1752 to 1765. The volume was described simply as “Copies of Letters Relating to the March of General Braddock,” referring to the ill-starred venture of a British general dispatched in 1755 to capture Fort Duquesne, in present-day Pittsburgh, from the French. |
“The first thing in it was a letter from Benjamin Franklin to the secretary of the governor of Maryland,” Mr. Houston said this week. “I looked at the first sentence and said, ‘This doesn’t sound familiar.’ Then I got kind of nervous and bouncy in my chair.” |
He then did what any researcher worth his library card would do: He went outside and called his wife back home in California. Read more at chronicle.com |
An artist takes a collection of books found in thrift stores, cuts them up, and “remixes” them into new, handmade, collage-based books.
- Create a profile with your contact information
- Meet someone you want to keep in touch with
- Text drop and their email to 41411
- Example: “drop johndoe@email.com”
- (check out our shortcuts)
- They’ll receive all your information by email
- They receive your website, blog, LinkedIn
and more
- They can save it immediately to their address book
See more at www.mydropcard.com |
| wizmo (a group admin) says:
05 Sep 08 - Please add up to 3 photos a day of your most non-traditional, unique work. We’re looking for emotional freshness, not any particular technique.
We also have a workshop coming up in Big Sur, California, for those who are interested. Info here
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Every generation has its own artistic and emotional voice. Edward Weston and his colleagues broke away from the pictorialism that came before them and redefined photography as an art in its own right, celebrating it for its own qualities; sharp focus, depth of field, etc. |
| We must find fresh ways of seeing because to re-create what has already been done lacks the emotional freshness and honesty of new discovery. See more at www.flickr.com |
Annals of De-mining
Man, Mongoose, and Machine
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A trained mongoose sniffs the ground in search of mines. Behind the mongoose is an impediment sensor, which tells the robots (below) if it has bumped into something too solid to push out of the way.
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Standing outside a Sri Lankan army base in the spring of 2007, Thrishantha Nanayakkara mapped an entire minefield without once setting foot in it. Nanayakkara held a remote control and periodically made a note on his computer. A mongoose hitched to a robot did most of the work. |
| Nanayakkara, a visiting scholar at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a 2008-09 Radcliffe Institute fellow, picked an indigenous mongoose for its temperament, size (roughly 2.5 kilograms, light enough to step on a mine without detonating it), and sense of smell (able to detect explosives three meters away). He equipped his robot (roughly a meter long and half a meter wide) with a harness to keep the mongoose under control and a video cameraSee more at harvardmagazine.com |
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