Indie music video shot by university students in Canada, all in one take!

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by Lyndsey Parker in Video Ga Ga

There is perhaps no more polarizing performer in pop today than Lady Gaga, aka the artist formerly known as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. Some people think she’s just an attention-seeking weirdo. Some think she’s a no-talent gimmick. Other detractors think she’s actually a man. And then others, like myself, think she’s just flat-out awesome.

Well, recently some January 2006 footage of the freaky-deaky pop diva–or, more accurately, of “Stefani”–popped up online, in which she appears pre-Fame sporting her natural brunette hair and relatively normal clothes (no unitard, no red lace face mask, no zippered eyepatch, no hairbow made out of actual hair) and belting out a very ’90s-ish, Meredith Brooks/Alanis Morrisette-style (but perhaps prophetically titled) piano rocker called “Hollywood.”

While the rare vintage clip bears precious little similarity visually or sonically to Stefani’s spacewoman Lady Gaga persona (kudos to Stefani/Gaga for pulling off a massive makeover that even her obvious predecessor Madonna could never fathom), it does make it obvious that Lady Gaga has always been a) attractive, b) talented, c) charismatic, and d) female. Case closed.

But who would’ve guessed then that only three years later, this unassuming open-mic singer-songwriter type would be hanging from a chandelier above the MTV Video Music Awards stage, smeared in fake blood and glitter?

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Ten years ago, moviegoers were scared out of their minds by “The Blair Witch Project.” Will the newly released screamfest “Paranormal Activity” have the same effect? Early search interest points to “yes.”

The film is shot documentary style (but is scripted, like “Blair Witch”), and concerns a couple who may have a poltergeist in their home. They’re dubious at first, but quickly change their tunes after “things” start happening. But by then is it too late? After all, horror movies have a tendency to punish doubters as much as amorous teenagers.

One of the things that makes “Paranormal Activity” unique is its release schedule. Right now, the film is only being screened in a handful of theaters. However, if moviegoers make enough noise and bug the studio bigwigs, the film may get a wider release. Wisely, the filmmakers have made it easy for fans to voice their demand. A visit to the movie’s official site leads to a form that goes to theater owners. Power to the people.

And then there’s the trailer — “Paranormal Activity” did something unique in that the trailer aims the camera at a special sneak preview audience reacting to what they’re seeing on screen. The moviegoers scream, jump, and generally turn into blubbering messes of terror. It’s what every horror fan wants to see.

Lookups on “paranormal activity” are up a whopping 450% this week, and related queries on “paranormal activity trailer” are also trending upwards. Feeling brave? You can watch it for yourself below..

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By J.E. Skeets

I’m still waiting to hear from the Guinness Book of World Records regarding the actual title of this video clip, but if the guys from Dude Perfect claim this hail mary off the third deck of Texas A&M’s football stadium down to the field below is the “World’s Longest Basketball Shot,” so be it. These dudes are professionals.

What’s that you say — looks digitally doctored? I don’t know. The basketball never leaves the frame, it takes the right looking bounce (considering how flat it is), and their reaction appears genuine, especially if you guess this took 50 or so attempts to successfully pull off like I do.

But hey, if you’re still not convinced, Debbie Doubter, here’s a second reverse-angle shot from the field.

Real or fake, it doesn’t matter, because Dude Perfect is filming and uploading these videos for a good cause. For every 100,000 views their Summer Camp edition clip receives, the guys will sponsor an impoverished child through an organization called Compassion International.

So visit Dude Perfect, watch the videos and help do some good in this world.

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by David K. Israel

What if you finished reading this article and remembered every detail of it for the rest of your life? That’s the problem people with super-autobiographical memory face—and yes, it’s often referred to as a problem, not a gift. Their minds are like a computer hard drive that retains everything: dates, middle names, license plate numbers, even what they eat for lunch on a daily basis There are only four confirmed super memory cases, a disorder experts say is somewhat related to OCD, though no doubt there are plenty others who haven’t been identified yet.

So who are the four individuals who’ve all recently been the subject of a study at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine.? Let’s meet them and find out…

1. Bob Petrella

A Los Angeles based producer for the Tennis Channel, Bob Petrella may remember every number in his cell phone, but it’s his ability to recall sporting events that’s most remarkable. Give him a date, like March 30, 1981, and he could tell you not only that it was the day Reagan was shot, but also that Indiana beat North Carolina for the NCAA championship that evening. Even more impressive: when it comes to the Pittsburgh Steelers, his favorite team, you can show him a single freeze frame from most any game that he’s seen, and he can tell you not only the date of the game, but the final score.

According to a piece on ABC news, Patrella “remembers all but two of his birthdays since he turned 5. He recalls where he was and what he did with high school buddies. Grainy images of the 1970s are vivid pictures in his head. ‘I remember all my ATM codes,’ he said. ‘I remember people’s numbers. [I] lost my cell phone Sept. 24, 2006. A lot of people, if they lost their cell phone, they would panic because they have all these numbers. I didn’t have any numbers in my cell phone because I know everybody’s numbers up here [in my head].’

2. Jill Price

Probably the best known of the four, Jill Price has described her ‘gift’ as “nonstop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting.” She was the first to be diagnosed with the condition, and recently published a memoir, The Woman Who Can’t Forget. Price remembers most details of nearly every day she’s been alive since she was 14 and compares her super memory to walking around with a video camera on her shoulder. “If you throw a date out at me, it’s as if I pulled a videotape out, put in a VCR and just watched the day,” she has said.

Like Bob Petrella, Price calls California home, though working as an assistant at a Jewish religious day-school, she’s about as far from Hollywood as you can get. And although people she meets at parties are impressed with her ability to remember everything from the date of the Lockerbie plane crash (December 21, 1988) to the last episode of Dallas, (May 3, 1991), in her memoir, she describes super memory as a nuisance, partly because she can’t seem to forget painful events, like when someone she was crushing on rejected her.

3. Brad Williams

For every Jill Price, there’s a Brad Williams, a Wisconsin radio anchor who embraces his super memory and enjoys having it tested. Ask him what happened on November 7, 1991, and he’ll tell you that it was the day Magic Johnson announced he was HIV positive. But Williams does not stop there. “It was a Thursday,” he once said in an MSNBC piece. “There was a big snowstorm here the week before.”

Unlike Bob Petrella, Williams has a tough time with sports, but excels at pop-culture trivia. For instance, he could name you every Academy Award winner and even nailed all five questions in the category “1984 Movies” when he appeared on Jeopardy! in 1990.

Although the folk at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine don’t agree, Williams says he never saw his ability as anything out of the ordinary. “Growing up, I never really had reason to think I wasn’t like everyone else,” he has said. A feature-length doc on his life, titled Unforgettable, is presently in production.

If you’re interested in the subject, remember to check it out once it hits theaters.

4. Rick Baron

A Cleveland native, Rick Baron came out and announced his super ability directly to USA Today, after reading a piece the newspaper published on Jill Price. Unlike Price, Baron uses his super memory to win stuff. Although unemployed, he’s extremely resourceful and is constantly entering, and winning trivia contests. His list of rewards include restaurant gift cards, tickets to sporting events, even all expense paid vacations (Baron has won 14 of them). Baron claims to remember every detail of his life since the age of 11, and is usually pretty successful at remembering the day-to-day going all the way back to when he was seven.

According to the USA Today piece on Baron, his sister claims he shows signs of hardcore OCD. “He organizes and catalogs everything. He even keeps his bills in order of the city of the federal reserve bank where they were issued and also by how the sports teams in that city did.”

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Pair worked together for months before discovery

By EMILY FELDMAN

After working side by side for weeks, two coworkers discovered that they are actually siblings brought together by a series of incredible circumstances.

Gary Nisbet and Randy Joubert, who share the same parents, were adopted and raised by separate families in neighboring Maine towns, never knowing the other one existed.  They attended rival high schools, moved to the same town of Waldoboro, Maine, and both wound up working for the same company, Dow Furniture.

The two rode side by side in a delivery truck and slowly put the pieces together.

“Something clicked with me,” Randy said. “So I got him up by the truck and said Gary, this is going to sound bizarre, but were you adopted?”

Gary, somewhat perplexed, confirmed that he was in fact adopted.  After comparing some notes — dates of birth, and finally birth parents names — they stared at each other in disbelief.

“This is such a small world,” Gary said.

Randy, the older brother, was the one who first had a hunch they may have been related.

“People are saying we look like brothers, and we go on deliveries together for the last month and a half and we keep getting it” Randy said.  He had recently dug up some information about his adoption and discovered that he had a brother who was born on June 10, 1974 — Gary’s birthday.

For two weeks the two kept the news to themselves, but last week they shared their story withco-workers.

Owner Lisa Dow says she cried when one of the brothers told her, ”I would have never found him if you didn’t hire me to work here.”

Gary and Randy are still in disbelief.

“I’ve been riding around with this guy for a month and a half and he’s my full blooded brother,” Randy said shaking his head.

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By Jay Busbee

Tiger Woods has played 1,044 holes of golf this season and has earned $9.7 million, or approximately $9,300 per hole.

Jason Hargett laughs at that figure. Laughs, I say!

On Tuesday, Hargett participated in one of those “hole-in-one for big bucks” contests as part of the Mark Eaton Celebrity Classic in Utah. Hargett hadn’t planned on playing because of a sore wrist. But since even a bad day golfing is better than a good day doing anything else, he manned up, borrowed his brother’s clubs, and ventured onto the course at the Red Ledges Golf Club. And then this happened:

That hole was a 150-yarder, and Hargett used a nine-iron for a $1 million stroke. Only question now is, how much of a cut does his brother get? Those were his clubs, after all. Bet that won’t make for some awkward Thanksgiving dinners at all.

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Test your perception with these wild designs

By Olivia Putnal from WomansDay.com

If you’ve ever felt like you go a little cross-eyed after taking a peek at an optical illusion, then you know they can be a pretty intense phenomenon. What your eyes perceive when looking at one of these images is actually a visual illusion; you see the image as something different than what it is because the different cells and receptors in your eyes distinguish images and colors at dissimilar speeds. The eye can only receive a limited amount of visual stimuli, but as your brain constantly processes the visual information, it gives you the illusion of continuous sight. Whether it’s an optical, physiological or cognitive illusion, the design plays a trick on your eyes (and mind). Check out some of the interesting illusions below—but beware, you may not be able to absorb them all in one sitting.

Flowing Leaves

The brown leaf shapes against a green background make this look as if the entire group is flowing—making waves if you focus on the picture as a whole. Photo from Flickr

Pulsing Vortex

If you stare at this one long enough you’ll notice a fast and pulsing multicolored vortex. Photo from Flickr

Waves

The blue almond-shaped objects look as if they’re all passing over three separate columns. Photo from Flickr

Hypnosis

Although this image is comprised of simple purple and green squares outlined in black, it looks like it is bulging out in the center. Photo from Flickr

Kaleidoscopes

A collection of black, blue, green and white shapes appears to be five different kaleidoscope-type figures—each swirling toward their centers. Photo from Flickr

Wormhole

The black and white circular lines make this illusion seem as if there are various depths in the image, creating different entryways and tunnels. Photo courtesy of Paco Calvino

Bull’s-Eye

If you stare at the center of the image, it looks as if the outer rings are rotating in alternating directions—an effect meant to mesmerize the viewer. Photo courtesy of Todd A. Carpenter

Starbursts

These bright purple and green star-like shapes appear to be moving, which can be a little nauseating if you stare at it for too long. Photo courtesy of Angie Armstrong

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By ‘Duk

Push aside Tim Lincecum and his puppy and reset the adorable meter! This clip of Emily Monforto tossing away a baseball like an old Tastykake wrapper during Tuesday’s game against Washington is currently sweeping the Internet and broadcast world. (Not to mention inspiring at least 842,345 “hey, she’s just training for the day she starts throwing Duracells” and “maybe mom is a Cubs fan” jokes.)

The three-year-old’s direct disposal came directly after her dad Steve made a great grab of his first foul ball and was followed by an “Isn’t She Lovely?” hug that will melt even the darkest heart. I’d say so much for having a family keepsake, but watching as your darling daughter steals the hearts of every highlight show and blog definitely makes for a much better memory.

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By Lori Bongiorno

Meet the $150 (almost to) Space Camera.

Bespoke is old hat. Off-the-shelf is in. Even Google runs the world’s biggest and scariest server farms on computers home-made from commodity parts. DIY is cheaper and often better, as Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh found out when they decided to send a camera into space.

The two students (from MIT, of course) put together a low-budget rig to fly a camera high enough to photograph the curvature of the Earth. Instead of rockets, boosters and expensive control systems, they filled a weather balloon with helium and hung a styrofoam beer cooler underneath to carry a cheap Canon A470 compact camera. Instant hand warmers kept things from freezing up and made sure the batteries stayed warm enough to work.

Of course, all this would be pointless if the guys couldn’t find the rig when it landed, so they dropped a prepaid GPS-equipped cellphone inside the box for tracking. Total cost, including duct tape? $148.

Launch

Two weeks ago, on Sept. 2, at the leisurely post-breakfast hour of 11:45 a.m., the balloon was launched from Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Lee and Yeh took a road trip in order to compensate for the prevailing winds, which could have otherwise taken the balloon out onto the Atlantic, and checked in on the University of Wyoming’s balloon trajectory website to estimate the landing site.

Because of spotty cellphone coverage in central Massachusetts, it was important to keep the rig in the center of the state so it could be found upon landing. Light winds meant the guys got lucky and, although the cellphone’s external antenna was buried upon landing, the fix they got as the balloon was coming down was close enough.

The Photographs

The balloon and camera made it up high enough to see the black sky curling around our blue planet. The Canon was hacked with the CHDK (Canon Hacker’s Development Kit) open-source firmware, which adds many features to Canon’s cameras. The intervalometer (interval timer) was set to shoot a picture every five seconds, and the 8-GB memory card was enough to hold pictures for the five-hour duration of the flight.

The picture you see above was shot from around 93,000 feet, just shy of 18 miles high. It’s short of the widely-accepted Kármán line, which is at 100km (62 miles) up, but it’s in the stratosphere, and it’s still impressive. To give you an idea of how high that is, when the balloon burst, the beer-cooler took 40 minutes to come back to Earth.

What is most astonishing about this launch, named Project Icarus, is that anyone could do it. The budget is so small as to be almost nonexistent (the guys slept in their car the night before the launch to save money), so that even if everything went wrong, a second, third or fourth attempt would be easy. All it took was a grand idea and an afternoon poking around the hardware store.

The project website has few details on how the balloon was put together — but the students say they will be posting the step-by-step instructions soon. UPDATE: The instructions will be available for free, not $150, as earlier reported.

Project Icarus page [1337 Arts]

Photo credit: 1337 Arts/Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh

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By Travis Reed, Associated Press Writer

MIAMI — It sounds like a new book in the Harry Potter series, but “Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey” will be a high-tech ride and the marquee attraction at the “Wizarding World of Harry Potter,” a new theme park area opening in spring 2010 at Universal Orlando Resort.

The “Forbidden Journey” ride was named by author J.K. Rowling and described Tuesday by Universal officials in a Web cast revealing details of what the Potter park will look like.

The ride will takes guests through scenes and rooms from the blockbuster movies inside a richly detailed remake of Hogwarts Castle made to look 700 feet tall. Hogwarts is where Harry attends a boarding school for witches and wizards.

Guests will enter the “Wizarding World” through a station archway named for Hogsmeade, the magical village near Hogwarts. A plume of steam and a train whistle will sound the arrival of the Hogwarts Express. The goal is to make the experience immersive, so nothing outside is visible after guests pass the Hogsmeade station archway.

Rowling, known for carefully guarding the Potter franchise, hasn’t yet journeyed to Orlando, but the design team has made several trips to London to consult with her.

Other rides include the “Dragon Challenge,” a twin high-speed roller coaster themed after the “Triwizard Tournament” and the family roller coaster “Flight of the Hippogriff,” named for a creature with an eagle’s head and a horse’s body.

“Along those journeys they’re going to be swept up into the greatest parts of the movies and the books. We’ve pushed every technology available to us to give guests a theme park experience unlike any they’ve had before,” said Paul Daurio, producer of the Potter area.

The Harry Potter park will be part of Universal’s Islands of Adventure.

Art and set directors from the films, including Oscar-winning production designer Stuart Craig and art director Alan Gilmore, were hired to translate the movies into the park.

Every shop and eatery is Potter-themed. Honeydukes sells chocolate frogs and “Bertie Bott’s Every-Flavour Beans,” Ollivander’s peddles magic wands, Zonko’s joke shop has Sneakoscopes, and the British restaurant Three Broomsticks pours Butterbeer.

At The Owl Post, guests can send letters with a certified Hogsmeade postmark. Magical instruments and equipment are available at Dervish and Banges, including everything needed to play Quidditch — a game like soccer played on flying broomsticks.

“The interesting thing about Harry Potter is that the stories are so rich in themselves, so deep,” said Universal Creative President Mark Woodbury. “There wasn’t so much difficulty of creating the look, it was, ‘How do you execute at a level of authenticity that is unquestionable?’”

There could even be new footage of Potter stars shot on actual sets from “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” and “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” A Universal spokesman declined comment on the issue, but the company was explicitly granted those privileges in its 2007 licensing agreement with Warner Bros. Consumer Products Inc., according to the contract filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Potter area will be Universal’s third big-ticket addition in three years. SEC filings from the company estimate the combined cost of The Simpsons Ride, Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit and Wizarding World at between $275 million and $310 million.

Simultaneously, the resort owned jointly by NBC Universal and private equity company The Blackstone Group finds itself on shaky financial footing. If it cannot find refinancing, $1 billion in long-term debt may be maturing as soon as April, the company said in SEC filings.

The Potter park is sure to prove popular not just with American fans but also with visitors from the United Kingdom, Potter’s home and the largest source of international tourism to Orlando, with about 1 million arrivals a year.

“It couldn’t have come at a better time,” said Danielle Saba Courtenay, spokeswoman for the Orlando Convention and Visitors Bureau. “There is such an affinity for the characters, particularly in the United Kingdom, and we do expect that the pent-up demand and having such a strong name will drive traffic to the area.

“It’s such a huge worldwide brand, and the only place in the world you’re going to be able to experience it is in Orlando,” she said.

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Scrambled eggs anyone?

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