Amazing flexibility and resilience. Surfers know they’ll be spending a few minutes underwater and it’s not uncommon to be held down with big waves pounding you like a falling steam train.
Ethiopian Marathon Training
Okay fanatical puritans, it’s time to read about the world’s leading runners, many of them the eminent top of the class from Ethiopia and Kenya.
My favourite piece of advice from Gudisa is ‘When you run the race, just remember that you will not die. So you have to run really very hard!’ Mersha is getting more and more obsessed with me recovering between training.
He wants me to stop working for the last two weeks of my trip and to spend all of my time between training sessions asleep. He keeps repeating the mantra ‘no recovery, no improvement.’ He’s right, of course, but there are limits to how much rest you can deal with.
High altitude training: What could be more enjoyable than sapping the living daylights out of you day after day?
You really can’t run anywhere from his house without encountering lung sapping, imperceptibly steep hills, so most of the running we did was fairly slow. We managed to cover a fair few miles though, fuelled by the near constant eating that comes with Easter celebrations here.
Moscow Skyscraper
A man has posted a video of himself climbing a 577ft Kotelnicheskaya building in Moscow, Russia.
Completed in 1952, the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building has 32 floors and is one of the seven Stalinist skyscrapers in the city, known as the Seven Sisters.
Keira Knightley
Keira Knightly’s impressive appearance in David Cronenberg’s Jungian psychological drama A Dangerous Method
She smoulders in this provocative shoot for GQ. Beauty notwithstanding her *prattling* magazine remarks.
GQ always pulls the most ironic quotes.
Smoky Eyes
Inspiring stylized look.
Life of Daring
“There’s a lot of distraction for people, so you might not never find the real you. A lot of people don’t.” -Bob Dylan
Mississippi Flood
Homeowners in Flood Zone Erect Their Own Levee. Great example of self-reliance
H/T Time, Inc Photo Scott Olson / Getty Images High Dirt walls surround a home near Vicksburg, May 18, 2011.
Mongolian Racer
Lovely adventure on horseback. h/t @brainpicker props @danchung
OFFF Paris 2010
Rather nice titles for the OFFF conference. An underwater deep sea world, full of these beautiful aquatic creatures and ionosphere sounds give it a really dreamy feeling.
Daring advise for girls
Gotcha.
Rebecca’s book was composed of dozens of short chapters explaining how-to skills that were absolutely not dumbed down. This book teaches a girl dozens of things–about female spies of the Revolutionary War, the ancient arts of palm reading, how to do a back bend, and the arts of public speaking. It is remarkably un-Kool, insofar as it is detailed in its history and skeptical of easy solutions.
It’s an all-you-can-know advise book about life for 8+ year old girls, drawn from culture. I love how this book skips between history and modern scenes. In one chapter, we read about Revolutionary spies. In another, we read about doing backbends. How did they find a balance between history and modernity?
Andi Buchanan (co-author) We were very clear from the beginning that we wanted the book to be a fantastic mix of great things to do and fun things to know — guidelines for having fun and being creative, not heavily directed advice. Part of the fun of being a kid is having the space to try things, even if they don’t turn out perfect the first time. We wanted to give girls that kind of freedom — the freedom to try things their own way and figure things out as they go along.
Invisible Frontier
Exploring defy defying acts of daring. This shot is apparently taken on the roof of the Pan AM building, which is now MetLife. Remarkable stunt. Invisible Frontier indeed.
Daring Acts of Rescue
December 2009 – A RAF rescue helicopter rescues people from their homes in the centre of Cockermouth in Keswick, United Kingdom. A major rescue operation is underway after severe weather conditions caused floods cutting off villages and towns in England’s Lake District. Wast Water is the deepest Lake in the Lake District and is over looked by Scafell pike which at 3206 feet is England’s highest mountain. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
Hard to imagine that the Life Boat crews would be rescusing folk from the downtown streets. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
Mountain Truck
Total daring idea for 4×4 extreme mountain use.
Off Piste
Dreaming about this scene from my home in London. Enjoying the big landscape action on DVD. It’s a Transworld snowboarding classic, TB9 (Amazon: Totally Board Nine) (2001). Every daring act starts with inspiration.
Apple 1984
25 years ago, Ridley Scott directed what is arguably the most powerful and memorable commercials the world has even seen. It’s still a remarkable spot. We salute this visionary director.
Chivas Regal spot
Soundtrack “To Build a Home” by The Cinematic Orchestra. From their Album Ma Fleur. I think this spot touches the right kind of noble sensibility. Good for them for aligning the product with those honorable values.
Kayakers dam drop
Extreme kayakers have been condemned for canoeing down a dam in mid-Wales. A photographer captured the latest incident as one canoeist slid 300ft down the spillway at Llyn Brianne reservoir, on the borders of Ceredigion, Carmarthenshire and Powys. Welsh Water said the practice was dangerous and such activities were banned at the reservoir which has the tallest dam in the UK.
James Marsh, Man on Wire
Don’t wobble when you reach the top. This new doc might well strike a chord for the audience, especially those desperately eager to establish ‘why’ and ‘how’ do you go about walking the wire across the 1970’s construction site of the Twin Towers. This was one of the most defining stunts every accomplished by a French climber.
Synopsis: August 7, 1974. A young French man named Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire suspended between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. He danced on this wire for an hour with no safety net before he was arrested for what has become to be known as the “artistic crime of the century”.
“Man on Wire” is the perfect example of matching doc director to doc subject. French tightrope walker and juggler Philippe Petit became world-famous when he walked between the two World Trade Center towers, then under construction, on August 7, 1974 — a completely illegal if fantastic act that involved complex preparation and shook up New York City’s police department. (He had to cross back and forth several times to avoid the cops.) Petit had already achieved artistic notoriety for his feats at famous sites like Notre Dame in Paris, but to traverse the air space between what were then the world’s two tallest buildings? It’s not only his unbeatable skill, though, that makes Petit an ideal subject for a doc: He is a ball of fire, a fascinating egomaniac who engages you completely with his energy and confidence. Petit has written several books, including To Reach the Clouds, which recounts the feat in downtown Manhattan.
The full interview with British director James Marsh.
Cloud Cuckoo
“Cloud Cuckoo”. It’s now registered on IMDB. The film celebrates daring acts of childhood imagination. This 12-minute short tells a tall story about a young boy’s adventure to an imaginary cloud factory. An award winning production in partnership with an aspiring young Scottish producer Lachlan MacKinnan. Our fantasy script secured the renowned acting talents of the late Doctor Who supremo Jon Pertwee.
Be provocative
“The secret is to be more provocative and interesting than anything else in their environment.”
* Be Visual
* Be Different–Break Patterns and Expectations
* Be Daring
* Change Things Regularly
* Inspire Curiosity
* Pose a Challenge
* Be Fun
* Be Controversial and Committed
* Be Stimulating. Be Exciting. Be Seductive
HT @Kathy Sierra for the inspiration from her blog posting, “Creating Passionate Users”
