Looking for the next hit international music performer? There’s no certain way to know, of course, but as good a place to look as any is the Mercury Prize. That award goes the best new album from a British or Irish artist.
Here’s the first half of our look at the 12 albums nominated for the Mercury Prize. Click on the corresponding album cover to listen to song samples.
Is it possible to walk across the United States, from New York City to San Francisco, in two minutes? It is through the magic of stop-motion photography and the trickery of time-lapse video. There’s even time along the way to snap a few photos of Washington D.C. monuments and to take in Mt Rushmore.
Here’s the video of how such a journey would look . . .
No soup for you! At least there wasn’t for the last six years at 259A West 55th Street in Manhattan. That was once the location of Soup Nazi restaurant of Seinfeld fame. And, as of yesterday, it is again.
Even the most casual of Seinfeld fans probably know of the Soup Nazi, the surly proprietor of a delicious soup takeout joint featured in an episode in the sitcom’s seventh season. Said surly proprietor was based on a real character, Al Yeganeh, who was not at all fond of Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi” nickname. (Although prior to the Seinfeld Soup Nazi episode Yaganeh’s regulars referred to him as “The Terrorist,” which doesn’t strike us as any better a moniker.)
In the wildly popular Guitar Hero and Band Hero video games the goal is to rock the video crowd. But what if the game Vuvuzela Hero existed? Then the goal might be to cause as much auditory pain as possible.
Here’s a video of what a Vuvuzela Hero game might look like:
Stop motion animation has been around almost as long as cameras have. But Olympus took it to a whole new level when creating an Olympus PEN digital camera advertisement.
For the ad, Olympus took 355 photographs with a PEN camera and printed them out to billboard size. They then took those billboards and photographed them in an urban environment to tell a story. The result is a very cool, especially when you consider that no special effects were involved and that the whole ad was shot using a camera that costs around US$600.
The Olympus PEN, not incidentally, is a really excellent micro four thirds camera—it looks like a compact point-and-shoot digital camera but can accommodate interchangeable lenses. As much as Spot Cool Stuff loves the still photos the PEN produces (and we do!) were this gem-of-a-camera really excels is in taking HD quality video.
When Alice tumbled down the rabbit hole into Wonderland she found herself in an entirely new world in which nothing worked how she expected it would.
You might get that same surreal feeling the first time you experience Lewis Carroll’s classic tale on an iPad.
Spot Cool Stuff recently took a visit to places in Hawaii where the hit TV show LOST was filmed. That was our way of biding time until the day the show’s fifth season arrived on Blu-ray.
Happily, that day has come!
As a kid we used to sled on a wooden Flexible Flyer. As a college student we used sled on food trays we, um, “creative acquired” from the school cafeteria. That’s what sledding was like back then. This is sledding today:
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