A Blogged Life

If you’ve got 1:33 to spare, here’s your moment of zen.

Robbins uses various metaphors to describe how he works with attention, talking about “surfing attention,” “carving up the attentional pie,” and “framing.” “I use framing the way a movie director or a cinematographer would,” he said. “If I lean my face close in to someone’s, like this” — he demonstrated — “it’s like a closeup. All their attention is on my face, and their pockets, especially the ones on their lower body, are out of the frame. Or if I want to move their attention off their jacket pocket, I can say, ‘You had a wallet in your back pocket — is it still there?’ Now their focus is on their back pocket, or their brain just short-circuits for a second, and I’m free to steal from their jacket.”

The latest episode of “Head 2 Head” from Motor Trend is a battle of the little luxury sixes, looking to see which of these $50,000 sport sedans, all equipped with automatic transmissions, can lay the largest claim to your money: the 321-horsepower, six-speed Cadillac ATS 3.6, the 302-horsepower, seven-speed Mercedes-Benz C350 Sport or the 300-horsepower, eight-speed BMW 335i.

Legendary primatologist Frans de Waal presents a video in which two capuchin monkeys are given unequal pay for equal work. One of them gets paid in cucumbers, the other in grapes. Can you guess which one is happier?

The halftime show of the OSU vs Nebraska football game featured the OSU Marching Band’s tribute to classic video games. This is a 9 minute video, and I surprised myself by watching the whole thing. Tetris at 1:25 is fantastic, and the running horse at 6:00 EXTRA fantastic.

One of the great things about rap music is how quickly it can take a piece of pop culture and interpolate it into hip-hop. The ease with which a hit song (in this case, Fun’s “Tonight”) can be sampled, looped up, and rhymed over, it’s why rap is the most immediate—and sure, lots of times ephemeral and disposable—vehicle for artistic commentary on the times we live in.

Answering the question: why does a McDonald’s burger look different in the ads than the ones you buy?

Over 30,000 still images, taken over the course of a year.