Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

The Knife - Heartbeats (Unofficial Animated video)

Animated by Guy Collins

(via atencio and hipsterdiet)

This is simply fantastic. I love this song, and The Knife have so many good tunes that it’s impossible not to like them. The way these visuals take each element of the song and animate it repeatedly reminds me of Michel Gondry’s take on Chemical Brothers’ Star Guitar, which used aspects of the French countryside to represent each instrument or melody within the song.

When done correctly, like this one is, it looks amazing and adds another layer to the song as you can see when certain instruments come in and drop out at different points. Fantastic stuff.

24 hours of the London Cycle Hire Scheme

(by James Cheshire on Vimeo)

Using Oliver O’Brien’s London cycle hire status map, this is a really cool visualisation of the whereabouts of the new Boris Bikes over the course of a weekday.

Red means a full docking station, whilst blue means empty.

You can see how the clusters round mainline train stations rapidly empty between 7 and 9am, with central London filling up. The opposite happens around 5pm, and in the evenings it looks nigh-on impossible to find a bike in the very heart of the West End.

In theory, TfL should be able to use this kind of data-analysis to ensure that bikes are always available in places of high demand. I’ve already seen vans towing cages full of bikes, redistributing them to where they are needed, and hopefully they’ll be able to figure out a pro-active method of doing so, rather than reacting.

I really should go sign up for this bike hire scheme, shouldn’t I?

Setting off a Chinese Lantern in East London

(via my Vimeo)

I was at a BBQ round a friend’s house last night, and as it started to get dark they brought out a Chinese lantern. Off it went, and as it did so we realised that we were basically on the flight path for some fairly low-flying planes coming into London City airport. Oops!

Tool - Schism

(via MadInChains on Youtube)

It’s not often that I get a real hankering to listen to one album in particular, but for some reason today I had Tool’s Lateralus album in my head. I put it on when I got home, and remembered just how good it is. It’s a fantastic collection of songs, and I remember how much I loved it when I first bought the CD.

It also brought back memories of actually buying the CD itself, because it was one of those artfully packaged jobs. The booklet was made of transparent plastic, with each page turn revealing a little more of the stylised human head dissection. It was a cool CD.

Equally stunning were the videos made for each song. They were a mix of puppetry, stop-animation, and performance art, and were pretty freaky indeed. Someone has taken the time to rip them from a DVD in HD and put them up on Youtube, which means we can get weirded out all over again now.

The Good Men - Give It Up

What an absolutely classic early 90s dance tune. You might remember that Simply Red sampled the percussion for their song Fairground, ruining it.

This evening, I’ve been going through the tracklistings for the Now That’s What I Call Music series of compilation albums, remembering some of my favourite tunes from the early and mid 90s, which was when I first got into music. You can find this song on Now 26, which also included Apache Indian, Haddaway, Culture Beat, and loads more.

What a great period for music!

You might remember Pogo from that Alice in Wonderland mash-up song a little while back. He’s still making music, mostly from Disney films, but I absolutely loved this track that he’s made from real world sounds.

It’s strangely enchanting, and even with the distorted vocal you can hear his mother’s Australian accent. Amazing stuff.

And I suddenly feel very untalented indeed…

I can’t remember if I’ve already posted this trailer or not, but Machete is going to be absolutely fucking amazing. October can’t get here quickly enough…

The biggest advert on the biggest stage for goal-line video technology that you’ll ever see.

Hopefully we can go on and win the game and it won’t matter…

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!”

Brian Blessed voices his support for the England team as only Brian Blessed can, quoting one of the most famous speeches from Shakespeare, with support from other English sporting stars in this promo from the BBC.

I love Brian Blessed.

I think we all need to take a second to remember the USA’s greatest World Cup moment: Diana Ross in the opening ceremony to World Cup 1994.

Not content with doing the worst ever mime-job to the music as she jogs the length of the field, she then proceeds to completely miss the goal with a penalty from about 5 yards away. The goal still explodes though, perhaps more in shock at her attempts to lip-sync than the accuracy of her strike.

As it happens, the 1994 World Cup turned out to be a really fantastic tournament. With it being in the USA, most of the matches were on during the evening British time, and the final didn’t kick off until really quite late, if memory serves, because it was in California. I still stayed up until the end of the penalty shoot-out and the pony-tailed Roberto Baggio’s infamous spoon over the bar.

This was about the time when I was really getting into football, and it was definitely the first World Cup I remember. It was followed by Euro ‘96 in England, when you couldn’t help but just be swallowed up by the drama of it all. That was also my first taste of the agonies of being an England fan, as we hadn’t qualified for USA ‘94. There have been many more disappointments since, and probably one more tomorrow!

But I look at it this way: we’ll never be as bad as Diana Ross.