Medieval Longsword Techniques
Like real life, this video is silly for a while, and then it gets interesting. Also like real life, you don’t get to choose the soundtrack.
Anyone Can Lay Waste to the Countryside in Wartime
When there’s a hot war on, your typical borderline boy can wreak a lot of havoc. That’s what we’re built for, in evolutionary terms. Fighting and making more little borderline boys: It’s what we do. It’s understood.
But let’s take a moment to recognize true greatness when we see it. Not many of us can cause damage like this in peacetime. Flattening houses is generally frowned upon in peacetime, even if you do have the keys to the tank. Your friends riding up top in the turret probably weren’t up driving a tank through a house for no reason, but you? You’re on a mission. Your not gonna let a little thing like an armistice or treaty or just plain good manners spoil your fun. We salute you, Suriname Steve! It’s hard to know what you were trying to accomplish, but that just makes the accomplishment so much more notable.
(Thanks to old friend Charles Schneider for sending that one along)
Carrier Landings for Dummies
Ah. Blissfully free of bad soundtrack music. A camera pointed in the correct direction, and oriented properly. The video is long enough to get a real sense of what’s going on, but not overlong, and packed with pointless filler. And if you were wondering what happens after you land, wonder no more. They park the thing, too. It’s glorious.
One Banana, Two Banana, Three Banana, Banzai!
I don’t know, man. After the, how shall we say it, unpleasantness back in the 1940s, we decided that Japan shouldn’t be so militaristic. We encouraged them to make Speed Racer cartoons instead of replacements for the Musashi. We assured them that if they limited themselves to singing karaoke versions of Sinatra songs, and making transistor radios to play them on, we’d make ICBMs and point some of them over their heads to the scary people to their west. Now I see we’ve gone too far.
This video is a ceremony to commemorate the founding of the Japanese Air Defence Force, and these are air defense pilots. And to a man, I’ll bet they’d rather be on the receiving end of another nuclear attack than have to participate in another of these Banana Splits skits.