Category: Video

Sulphur-crested cockatoos’ ability to pry open bins has spread across 44 suburbs in only two years

Straya.

Californian kingsnake!

I know, it sounds like a phrase you’d encounter in a political rant about California, dream to nightmare, blah blah.

Actually, it’s an actual type of snake.

Sheep herding in Israel

Videoed from above by Lior Patel. Watch the sheep here. Or, watch them where I first did, at Mick Hartley’s blog.

Very social animals. Which is how one man and a dog are able to control vast numbers of them.

Sheep come in flocks, not herds. Yet, the verb is herd. We don’t flock them. Odd.

Do you love robots now that they can dance?

I watched this video, and resolved to repost it here, only then to realise that I had encountered it because my favourite Twitterer, Steve Stewart-Williams was the reason I was seeing it in the first place:

Remarkable. And, I agree with SS-W, a bit scary too.

Quins wins

There’s been all sorts of sport going on lately, what with England playing cricket against New Zealand (NZ won) and against Sri Lanka (a mismatch), and then New Zealand finding the time in between the rain of Southampton to beat India in the World Test Championship. Plus, there’s been football, and all the fuss when Scotland exulted in their 0-0 triumph against England at Wembley, which was their best moment so far and England’s worst. Today Wales got thumped by Denmark, one of whose players nearly died in an earlier game, so Wales were the bad guys of that. No links because if you care about all that, you already know it and if you don’t know about it you don’t care.

However, my favourite sporting achievement of the last week or two has definitely been Harlequins beating, first, top of the table Bristol, and then defending champions Exeter, both very narrowly, to win the Rugby Premiership.

Before these two games, David Flatman said, at the end of the final highlights show of the regular season, that Harlequins would have to tighten up their defence. Flatman’s was the classic “I’d love it if they won but they won’t win it, will they?” attitude. Harlequins just carried on trying to score more points than the other fellows, which would have to mean scoring a lot of points, because they don’t really do that defending stuff well enough to win any gongs, just by defending. That was their attitude. When you consider that Quins conceded 36 points while beating Bristol in the semi and 38 points while beating Exeter in the final, I think we can say that their way of winning worked out pretty well.

I actually support Harlequins, them being based at Twickenham, through whose station I have travelled many, many times, going from my boyhood home to London or more recently visiting friends out west, including one who lives in actual Twickenham. But like Flatman I considered Harlequins to be heroic losers rather than winners. The sort of also-rans whose running makes the Rugby Premiership a title worth winning, but not the sort who’d actually run out the winners themselves. Fun to watch, until it becomes clear who is going to win.

Not this time. Highlights of the semi already recorded. Final highlights tomorrow evening at 11.30pm. Video set.

“This video makes me feel like CRT is a cult …”

CRT, as referred to in this posting, and in this tweet, stands for Critical Race Theory. I say that because I very much like the idea that at least some of my readers here have no notion of what “CRT” stands for. After all I do not bang on here very much about such things, having other preoccupations nowadays, here anyway.

However, this snatch of video strikes me a truly remarkable:

(“CRT” also causes me to remember a libertarian collaborator from my earlier late twentieth century life, Christopher Ronald Tame. Chris would have detested what CRT means now.)

I doubt that “Cardinal Pritchard” is really a cardinal, and if he’s not then I don’t know what else he is besides a (Not The) Babylon Bee writer, but this is what the Cardinal says about this bit of video.

In all seriousness though, this is one of the strangest things I’ve seen in a while. And I’m willing to bet that only like four people in that entire group found the experience “a little weird.” Cuz it seems like most of them are super into it.

If this feels like a “cult”, then I say that, in the days of my youth when I was an unwilling participant in it, Church of England congregations sounded to me just like this also. I suppose a religion is a cult that has achieved social respectability, by stabilising into a part of the social furniture and by becoming less pushy and obnoxious, and people no longer want to complain about it by calling it a cult.

But cult, religion, whatever. This is very clearly a religion-like event.

Australian region covered in cobwebs as spiders flee floods

Straya. Video here.

Frisby sings about Wetherspoons and Bollocks

I just received an email from Dominic Frisby, plugging his latest aria video, which is entitled I Love Wetherspoons! State of the art culture warfare, which I highly recommend. The aria, not Wetherspoons. I’m not saying that I don’t recommend Wetherspoons, merely clarifying the point I am and am not making there.

So far so good. But the best moment, for me, came right at the end, when I was offered the chance to sample another Frisby musical delight, in the form of something called …:

… Oh, Bollocks.

This is an English word I resort to regularly, and have also already talked about here quite a lot, one of my favourite examples of this word in action being this one, involving taxis. Very satisfying to see bollocks identified by my favourite Dominic as an important English usage. The word communicates a subtle mixture of regret, defiance and hence, consequently, perhaps even a dash (because you never know your luck) of triumph.

The scene with the Angel of Death, right at the end of this video, spoke to me with particular force, what with that personage having recently sat himself down next to me.