Dan Shapiro says: "Item #3 on this page consists of an attractive woman smearing superglue on her eyelid, then repeatedly poking herself. The goal is to create a western-style eyelid "crease", and the video is just creepy." Link

Retired construction worker Wally Wallington of Flint, Michigan is moving one-ton concrete blocks over a ton each by himself without using pulleys or any mechanical equipment. He's reconstructing Stonehenge singlehandedly. Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

There are many things to like about this 1972 Ideal toy commercial:

1. The Jean-Jacques Perrey background music.

2. The black set.

3. The announcer's voice.

4. The name of the toy: Bing Bang Boing.

5. The toy itself, which is a brightly-colorted DIY Rube Goldberg kit with lots of fun parts that you can set up in different configurations.

It's got to be a Marvin Glass creation. (Thanks, Richard!)

Jake sez, "Omnisio allows you to string together any number of YouTube videos, with arbitrary start and end points. This is great for making funny mashups, etc, but to me it's true potential lies in the fact that it obsoletes forever the aggravating hunt through the related links for the next part of a multipart youtube. Just upload them, string them together in Omnisio, and post a link in the first part's description." Link (Thanks, Jake!)

In this video, an elephant is led to an easel, picks up a paintbrush, and paints a picture of an elephant holding a flower. Or at least, that's what appears to happen -- there are lots of cuts in the video and it's hard to say what's really going on. Fake or real, it's a great way to spend 8 minutes. Link

See also: Elephant artists

Boing Boing tv presents CUPCAKE CUTTHROATS, a cakesploitation epic exploring the dark side of electric art-cars shaped like baked goods. These homemade vehicles are crafted by Silicon Valley nerds (including one engineer from Tesla Motors) and Burning Man enthusiasts in a Berkeley, California, warehouse. In today's episode, Xeni joins the marauding muffineers for a 15-mph thrillride down mean, sugar-sprinkled streets.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion, downloadable video, and the names of the maker-muffineers.

Update: Scott Beale at Laughing Squid has some photos of the mobile muffins, too.

Village Roadshow Gold Class Cinemas is building 50 new super-premium theaters across the nation, with leather armchairs, valet parking, and chairside waiters who serve freshly prepared sushi and other seat-treats. Tickets will cost $35.

Each complex will sport theaters featuring 40 reclining armchair seats with footrests, digital projection and the capability to screen 2-D and 3-D movies, as well as a lounge and bar serving cocktails and appetizers, a concierge service and valet parking.

But the circuit will especially push its culinary offerings — made-to-order meals like sushi and other theater-friendly foods from on-site chefs (a service button at each seat calls a waiter). Moviegoers will have to pay extra for any food they order, however.

Link (via The Consumerist)

Here's a video of Fadhel Al-Said, a "researcher on astronomy," sharing his surprising findings about the shape Earth and the physics of the solar system with Iraqi television viewers.

Statement by a round-earther physicist: When you watch a ship sailing towards the shore, all you see at first is the mast. Then you see the bow, and eventually the entire ship.

Fadhel Al-Said: When you stand on the beach and look into the distance, everything you see is in the visible distance. In the blurred distance, you cannot see a thing. Later on as the ship gets closer to the shore or the harbor, you see the upper part. How do you see it? The eye, as I have said, no doctor has succeeded in understanding how the eye works.

Link

Transport For London's brilliant "Do the Test" cycling safety video invites you to pay close attention to a video of some basketball players, then demonstrates just how little you really saw, ending with a voice-over that explains how easy it is to miss things you're not looking for, like cyclists:

This phenomenon is known as "change blindness" - only a tiny fraction of all the information going into your brain enters your consciousness. People often fail to see a change in their surroundings because their attention is elsewhere.

Even stranger, if you are concentrating on something, you can become blind to other events that you would normally notice. This "inattention blindness" is possibly the reason why motorists collide with cyclists.

Just as it is important for road users to keep an eye out for cyclists, cyclists must also take steps to ensure they are seen by motorists.

Link (Thanks, Mr Jalopy!)

Today on Boing Boing tv, a double shot of animation from Michael Mouris, whose work you may recall from the epic Diddy/Bjork conversational gif.

First up, the classic "Fight Fight," a Mortal Kombat spoof in which the director performs the role of both vanquisher and vanquished. Next, an all-new exclusive for BBtv -- "Blingee IRL," in which all is pimped out and glamtabulous.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

Hugo-award-winning science fiction artist Frank Wu writes in with the astounding news that he's adapting his short film, "GUIDOLON The Giant Space Chicken DIRECTOR'S CUT" ("The long-awaited Director's Cut of GUIDOLON THE GIANT SPACE CHICKEN, about a Giant Space Chicken making a movie about a Giant Space Chicken.") as a feature film! He's spending the next three years on it, and the mightily talented Suzanne Rachel Forbes has posted her pre-production sketches to Flickr. Link to pre-production sketches (Thanks, Frank!)

This 1970 episode of the kids' show HOT DOG demonstrates surfboard manufacture with much groovy graphics and sound, cosmic ruminations on hanging ten, and hilarious cameos from Woody Allen and Jonathan Winters. Gorfulator notes, "This was made by 'HOT DOG,' a TV show I remember because the production company HQ was in my hometown of Burlingame, CA. They were a spinoff venture of Lee Mendelson (Charlie Brown cartoons) who were right around the corner." Link (Thanks, Gorfulator!)

This sweded cut of the Lord of the Rings is so elaborate and well-wrought that it almost doesn't qualify as sweded -- but the epic luls make up for the high production values. Link

See also:
Sweded remake of Star Wars
Sweded Jurassic Park

Two iphone snapshots from a recent Boing Boing tv shoot at a club called the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco, which led to this BBtv episode about the bedazzling internet personality Leslie "Shazam! You're Glamorous!" Hall.

Here's Leslie Hall's online store (Hefty Hideaway), where you can buy CDs and t-shirts and stuff.

Below: click the little audio-looking widget and listen to a Leslie and the LYs song that appeared in that BBtv ep -- "BLAME THE BOOTY," remixed by Ninja Science Laboratories. How fierce is that shit, seriously?

Previously on Boing Boing: BBtv: Leslie Hall - ceWEBrity, gem sweater diva, jammer of jams.

Further to yesterday's post about Clay Shirky's Harvard talk on his book Here Comes Everybody, here's another video of Clay and David Weinberger chatting about the implications of cheap group-forming for activists. Link (Thanks, Amar!)

See also: Clay Shirky's Harvard talk: Here Comes Everybody

Here's a great, insider account of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's internal process leading up to their decision to put a high-quality torrent of the show Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister online:

Tessa later said that the approval process was like playing a game of whack-a-mole. As soon as one approval had been given the nod, the next obstacle would pop up. Still, there was broad acceptance to the idea and in the end the approvals were easier than anticipated. It may sound like a difficult process to an uploader, but on the other hand, the list is much shorter than one a private broadcaster would have to check off. As a public broadcaster, our mandate to “be made available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means” really helped the cause.

Link (Thanks, Steve!)

MAKE's Phil Torrone went to Japan to met with the folks at Gakken ("Sophisticated Science Kits for Adults") and shot this fun video of the Edison-Style cup phonograph kit.

From Gakken's Sophisticated Science Kit for Adults, this replica kit uses the same technology that Thomas Edison used, replacing Edison's waxed pipe and stylus, the kit uses a plastic cup and a needle, but the end results are the same! You record your own voice on a plastic cup -- and play it back! Here's how it works, your voice vibrates the air minutely when it gets into the horn. Then the vibration is conducted to the needle and is translated into a wavy movement of the needle and carves a groove onto the cup.

Link

Eric Spiegelman says: "John Ford produced a pro-Vietnam [war] documentary on behalf of the US Government right before he died. The film was never released in the US, and very few people have seen it. I just put it online."

The last film ever produced by the legendary John Ford was a work of propaganda commissioned by the United States government in support of the Vietnam War. Production of the documentary, “Vietnam! Vietnam!,” began a few months after the Tet Offensive, and by the time the film was completed at the end of 1971, American policy toward the war shifted toward withdrawal and negotiation for peace. As such, the film’s message was obsolete and embarrassing the moment it was ready for distribution. It was never released.

Federal law at the time prohibited the domestic exhibition of any motion picture financed by the U.S. Information Agency, which included “Vietnam! Vietnam!.” Ford’s last documentary remained locked away in a vault for the next 27 years, when a change in the law allowed the National Archives to make it available to the public.

I learned about the existence of “Vietnam! Vietnam!” three years ago. Curiosity led me to pull the ancient reels from the National Archives and have them digitized. Years of neglect badly damaged the audio portion of the first half of the film, and my cousin painstakingly restored the soundtrack to the best of his ability.

The documentary is, actually, quite terrible. Nothing about it even approximates a John Ford masterpiece. Accounts vary as to the extent that Ford was actively involved in the production — he apparently spent time on location in Vietnam toward the beginning of the shoot, but his advanced age and poor health kept him home during almost all of the principal photography. According to Ford scholar Tag Gallagher, Ford supervised the editing of the film and rewrote it’s scenario. Regardless, John Ford clearly wanted his name associated with “Vietnam! Vietnam!” — it reflected his strong belief in the cause — and it is incontrovertibly part of his repertoire.

I offer the film here because it’s a little piece of American history that very few people have seen, and for that reason alone it belongs on the Internet.

Link

"Going For an English" is a classic sketch from the British variety show "Goodness Gracious Me," in which an Indian family goes out "for an English" after drinking too much, patronizing the waiter and demanding the blandest thing on the menu. It's some goddamned funny stuff. Link (Thanks, Neil and Farah!)

Here's a video of a Clay Shirky talk at Harvard's Berkman Center, called "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations." It's a summary of the ideas in his incredible book of the same title, a book that I continue to return to nearly every day in my thinking, making it the single largest influence on my thoughts in the past year. Link (via Copyfight)

See also: Clay Shirky's masterpiece: Here Comes Everybody

"It is a journey. It is a way of life." (Via Bedazzled)

Museum of Hoaxes wonders whether Fred and Sharon's movie production business is legitimate or some kind of publicity stunt. They aren't sure. What do you think? Link

The Occult Experience, now on Google Video, is a terrific 1985 documentary featuring footage of such magickal folk as Anton LaVey, Selena Fox, Michael Aquino, and H.R. Giger.
Link (via Cabinet of Wonders)

DON'T BLAME ME, BLAME MY BOOTY. Today on Boing Boing tv, Xeni visits the bedazzled world of "internet ce-WEB-rity" Leslie Hall, whose gem sweaters are as sparkly as her jams are funky. We speak with the Iowa-based star of stage, YouTube, and craft marts, and experience a live performance by Leslie and the LY's.

Link to Boing Boing tv post, with discussion and downloadable video.

Italian police released video of a thief who allegedly hypnotizes clerks at supermarket registers. From the BBC News:

In every case, the last thing staff reportedly remember is the thief leaning over and saying: "Look into my eyes", before finding the till empty...

The cashier who was shown the video footage has no memory of the incident, according to Italian media, and only realised what had happened when she saw the money missing.

Link

David sez, "This sweded version of Jurassic Park is truly excellent, from the hammy impressions of characters to the parcel tape velociraptor costumes." Link (Thanks, David!)

See also: Sweded remake of Star Wars

Here's a short video mapping in time-lapse the spread of Wal*Mart stores in America, from a few lonely dots in the sixties to a rising torrent that ends with an America blanketed by the blight. Link

If you recall the recently viralized La Pequeña Prohibida, and La Pequeña Amy Winehouse, then this video will come as no surprise. Honestly? I'd rather vote for this perky Chilean performing artist than McCain, Obama, and Clinton combined. (thanks, Susannah Breslin, via dlisted)

Calpernia Addams is the star of the subversive new competitive dating show "Transamerican Love Story" -- following on Mark's post, this seems like an apropos moment to point to her hilarious how-not-to video about rude questions transgendered people are often asked. The video's a little long, but it's full of great material, and highly edumacational. Thumbs up.

When you're done with that -- brace yourself, whore, you're about to get a stunning. (thanks, Andrea James!)

Heavy Metal Parking Lot, a mid-'80s film documenting lifeforms that once orbited around Judas Priest concerts, has been circulating on shitty-quality VHS bootlegs for years. I just watched it for the first time last night -- and it blowed mah mahnd. BB friends Coop + Ruth turned us on to it, and the film recently became available on DVD (along with Neil Diamond Parking Lot, and lots of other good stuff). Zebraman FTW!

Amazon Link for DVD purchase.

Update: Oh dear god there are ringtones.

Farewell My Subaru is a new book from Doug Fine, environmental journalist and NPR contributor, documenting an experiment in green living (in which, we might add, the author does not abandon his laptop, or the internet). Snip from the summary:

[He] vows to grow as much of his own food as he can, use only the sun to power his ‘Net surfing and sub-woofer, and consume little to no fossil fuel for an entire year — never mind that he’d never raised so much as a chicken or a bean. Or that he had no mechanical or electrician skills. Or that coyotes and mountain lions would like to treat his Funky Butte Ranch like a buffet line.

Today on Boing Boing tv, a short film to give you a taste of that experience, directed by Jason Ensler.

Link to Boing Boing tv blog post, with discussion and downloadable video.

Guinness just orchestrated a record-breaking gathering of people in video-game-character costumes on the London Millennium Bridge. As impressive as this is, I find it hard to believe that there were more costumed warm bodies present at this event than at, say, the Tokyo Game Show. Link (via Wonderland)

The folks at Rocketboom released a lovely, dreamlike episode this week in which host Joanne Colan appears to move forward in time through a reverse-time New York City.

Gabriel Delahaye (whose work we've featured on Boing Boing tv not once,