I can’t help it, I am intrigued by things that may seem pointless or boring to you. For instance I love telling people that there are more possible chess game outcomes than atoms in the universe. I usually get one of two responses to that:

1. “Your life saddens me.”
2. “That’s impossible. Your life saddens me.”

It only follows that this video intrigued me. It’s another video about the relative size of things, specifically using the power of 10 scale. If you liked my previous posts regarding this sort of thing (Big Ol’ Numbers and Our Sun Is Tiny) then you will undoubtedly enjoy this video. If not, here is the web page you should be reading instead.

BONUS VIDEOS!

Here’s my way of saying thanks to you for somehow having enough of an attention span to still be reading this scatter-brained blog. I like to sprinkle a little miscellany everywhere I can, especially if it’s gimcrack miscellany. If you read Digg everyday you’ve already seen these. Sorry.

Lightning strike right on the beach! (Audio is NSFW)

Chuck Norris in training! BOOM HEADSHOT

Yes I called it Deer Creek. And the Colts play in the Hoosier Dome, FYI. Plus I still don’t recognize Mizzoora.

This is the first time I have ever seen Radiohead. We were in the pavilion, but we might as well have been in the lawn because of how far back we were. I have never been too keen on Radiohead’s discography (which is something that is changing starting today), but I believe they played songs from most of their albums. I definitely remember hearing songs from The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac, and In Rainbows. Here was their set list:

1. 15 Step
2. Bodysnatchers
3. There There
4. All I Need
5. Pyramid Song
6. Nude
7. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
8. The Gloaming
9. Climbing Up The Walls
10. Faust Arp
11. Videotape
12. Morning Bell
13. Idioteque
14. Reckoner
15. Everything in its Right Place
16. Just
17. How To Disappear Completely

Encore 1
18. You and Whose Army?
19. Bangers and Mash
20. Exit Music (For A Film)
21. Jigsaw Falling Into Place
22. Karma Police

Encore 2
23. House of Cards
24. The National Anthem
25. Street Spirit

We left during House of Cards and could hear the last two songs on the way out to the car. It was nice getting out of the venue without having to wait in any traffic.

It was a pretty good set list. If I ruled the world they would have also played Optimistic, Airbag, Paranoid Android, and Lucky. But I’m not complaining.

Let’s go to the footage. Here is some video I took with my tiny, ancient Sony Cybershot digital camera. I was able to squeeze about 10 minutes worth of mpeg video onto my 256mb memory stick. The videos are in chronological order.

Pyramid Song

I love love love this song.

Weird Fishes/Arpeggi

Climbing Up The Walls

This is better live than on the album BTW.

Reckoner

This is the longest video clip. It’s also one of my favorite Radiohead songs. These were the most beautiful moments of the show.

Everything In It’s Right Place

Awesome lighting effects during this song.

Karma Police

Can’t believe they played this one! I thought this would be as rare as Creep, so I’m either wrong or lucky.

I wish I had footage of Just. It was awesome. I think I had footage but I somehow deleted it when I was scrambling to make room on my memory stick for Karma Police. In retrospect that was a stupid decision. I guess I was caught up in the moment.

The only problem with Radiohead is that they’re too high and mighty and depressed and 1337 or whatever to speak to the crowd. After seeing bands that actually interact with the crowd like Snow Patrol, Coldplay, Ryan Adams (in the last 2 years at least), and Ben Folds, it was weird seeing a band that said nothing to the crowd. They’re assholes I guess. But their music is really really good and I’m buying whatever Radiohead albums I don’t already own ASAP. Except maybe Hail To The Thief.

And on a totally unrelated note, I hit 30k points on TheSixtyOne the same day I hit 30k visitors on The Gimcrack Miscellany. Awesome! How in the heck did that happen? Oh yeah, I posted about Katy Perry & Zooey Deschanel. People probably come here and see my posts and go “WTF?”

It’s Friday. That means multiple posts chocked full of stuff I find on Digg. Hold on to your butts.

If you’ve seen my first post about Flight Of The Bumblebee performances, you know where I’m going with this. There is some new video footage of the fastest guitarist in the world. Officially the fastest. That’s not just an exaggeration.

He performs Flight Of The Bumblebee song faster and faster and faster. Each time I thought it was the fastest the song could possibly be performed. But then he goes one faster. If the speed dial goes to 10, he turned it to 11.

I think if he went any faster, the signal sent from the pickup in the guitar to the amplifier to the speakers to our ear drums wouldn’t be able to keep up with his fingers and it would result in some sort of warp in the time-space continuum flux capacitor 1.21 jigawatts huey lewis & the news elisabeth shue fish under the sea dance. And we would all die and/or get injured.

Fast forward the video to 2:56 and get ready to live.

Which films did I annoyingly quote and/or reference in this blog post? Hint: there are 4 of them.

Well, I was gonna post about how 99% of cops are complete idiots, but that is going to be a more involved post that I don’t feel like doing right now. In the meantime I stumbled upon a little gem on Digg today. So, here’s a little more light-hearted fun for you:

Step 1: Read this article and watch all the videos (the first two South Park videos are not required).

Step 2: Watch the new Pork and Beans video by Weezer.

They wouldn’t let me embed the video, so you have to go over to YouTube to see it.

I can’t believe some of these people came out of the woodwork, including Chocolate Rain Guy and Leave Britney Alone Girl. Do you think they got paid? If so, how much?

I bet these numbskulls did it for free.

I have been inspired by the 4th of July to post about fire-related phenomena, seeing as how millions of (probably drunk) people are about to shoot dangerous bombs into the sky. Remember the movie Backdraft? Can you believe that came out 17 years ago?!? I was pretty into that movie back in the 90s and I felt like revisiting the subject today.

Backdrafts were featured in the film by the same name. We all know what a backdraft is by now. All the oxygen is consumed and there are no longer flames but everything is still so hot that any new oxygen introduced to the fire will rapidly expand and splode real big. Lets turn to the video evidence.

I thought that was pretty cool. But then I learned of flashovers, which are indeed cooler - or hotter, depending on your preferred level of literalness. What happens is, in an enclosed room (similar conditions to a backdraft) a fire gives off hot smoke which radiates heat onto all the surfaces in the room. Once all of these surfaces get to around 1000 degrees, they expel flammable gases which ignite, along with every surface in the room. All at the same time. That’s tight.

Read more about flashovers and then feast on these yummy youtubez.

The flashover in this one happens at 1:15:

This one happens right away and the rest of the video is garbage:

But wait, let’s take it one step further. What happens when a flashover occurs OUTDOORS? An eff’n firestorm. That’s right. A storm made out of: fire. Is fire even a thing to be made out of? I’m starting to get confused and overwhelmed and scared.

Firestorms are rare as a dang two-headed kid. They happen usually in nature during wildfires. But we have managed to set buildings and stuff on fire in the past that are capable of producing them too. I want you to visit teh wicky on firestorms and think about them for a minute. Here is the first sentence: “A firestorm is a conflagration which attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system.”

!!!!!!!!11!!1!1one

Here are some firestorms that resulted from fires us humans made: The Great London Fire (1666), The Great Chicago Fire (1871), The Oakland Firestorm (1991), and the one created by the atomic bomb in Heroshima.

So we have this comparison: backdrafts < flashovers < firestorms < fire whirls -WAIT wha??? Fire whirls?!?

Yes, fire whirls. They exist. And they are coming to get you. According to Wikipedia, a fire whirl is a phenomenon in which a fire acquires a vertical vorticity and forms a whirl, or a tornado-like effect of a vertically oriented rotating column of air. You may wonder how this happens. Me too, but I figured it out on my own: Lucifer.

Just listen to the following sentence and then I’m done with my tirade on fire whirls:

“An extreme example is the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake in Japan which ignited a large city-sized firestorm and produced a gigantic fire whirl that killed 38,000 in fifteen minutes in the Hifukusho-Ato region of Tokyo.”

When you go to bed tonight I want you to think of “a gigantic fire whirl that killed 38,000 in 15 minutes” and I guarantee you will have dreams about fire, featuring scenes with Kurt Russell and Donald Sutherland.

I believe that was recorded in Mordor.

Wow, that looked really windy. And fiery angered evil.

So our final tally is backdrafts < flashovers < firestorms < fire whirls < flame hurricanes - WAIT, wha?!?

I know they exist. I have seen them with my mind.