Nothing but Plague Doctors. Prior to medical/scientific knowledge about the causes of The Black Death, Plague Doctors risked their lives attempting to treat the infected while trying to protect themselves from the “miasma.” The very sight of a Plague Doctor terrified people as he was a harbinger of death, and due to his specialty, a Plague Doctor was often forced to be a recluse himself.
I missed the debut of the The Butter Dance, but inadvertently featured it here. Don’t try this at home, or anywhere for that matter. After all *ahem* Melati Suryodarmo is a professional. [h/t kdub]
Retro Pron – 1890s. Drool away me laddies. Drool away.
I’d love to see a vid with a surfeit of skunks circling overhead and dropping into this dude’s lawn just to see what he does. Check out all the pelts stacked up on the side of his house. The guy’s a pro.
Neil Armstrong’s “That’s one small step for man…” could be translated “Un petit pas pour l’homme,” and the title of the film is “Un petit plat pour l’homme” can be translated as “One Small Dish For Man”
3rd year animation project (assigned subject “Kitchen”) from Charron/Onectin via email. Very cool.
Eric Whitacre‘s Virtual Choir 3 is awesome and kinda creepy at the same time.
His call for the Virtual Choir 3.0, which included a purpose-built website to make video collection easier and more uniform, set a new record. It included 3476 videos from 76 different nations, including one from Vanuatu. That is the video you see above.
Buster Keaton’s 1926 comedy The General is based on a real event. In April 1862 a group of Union volunteers hijacked a Confederate train in Georgia and led the rebels on an 88-mile, six-hour chase through the state, tearing up tracks and cutting telegraph lines as they went and releasing cars behind them to slow their pursuers. The conspirators ran out of fuel just short of Chattanooga, their goal, but the Union awarded a Medal of Honor to most of them for the exploit.
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“I was more proud of that picture than any I ever made,” Keaton said in 1963. “Because I took an actual happening out of the … history books, and I told the story in detail, too.”