Video Of The Day: ‘Tune Up’ With San Francisco’s Pianobike

by Libby Zay on

Earlier this month I posted a video about a street performer who travels around France showing off his affectionate house cats. Well, the weird and wacky antics of buskers are far from limited to just France, so today we’re traveling to San Francisco where a man has turned his tricycle into a roving piano. Gary Skaggs says his girlfriend gave him a lot of flack while he was building the piano/bike combo, but he now makes his living wheeling around the Embarcadero and other tourist-packed places in San Francisco. If you’re planning to go to The City by the Bay any time soon, keep an eye out for Skaggs (and save a few bucks by checking out this budget guide).

[via San Francisco Chronicle]

YouTube Video Of Owl-Kicking Paraglider Prompts Investigation

by Libby Zay on

You’d think someone whose sport of choice is flying through the air would have respect for birds, but one paramotorist is catching heat after a video of him chasing and kicking an owl mid-air was uploaded to YouTube.

The man in the video doggedly pursued a Barn Owl in flight for more than seven minutes, kicking it several times as it flew over the landscape near Utah Lake. He then proceeded to brag about it, yelling, “I kicked an owl butt” in a taunting voice and asking, “Who’s the predator now?”

But federal and state wildlife officials aren’t smiling: since migratory birds are protected under federal law, officials are currently determining if the video warrants prosecution. They have a hunch the man in the video is Dell “Superdell” Schanze, a paramotorist who was arrested in 2011 after posting a video that showed him taking off from a historic monument in Oregon. I guess some people just never learn.

“I’ve gotten to know many pilots in the paragliding and powered paragliding community and I’ve found them to be some of the most considerate and conscientious fliers in aviation,” says our resident commercial and paragliding pilot, as well as “Cockpit Chronicles” columnist, Kent Wien. “But there’s always one, and I suppose every community has their own Dell ‘Superdell’ Shanze.”

The YouTube video has since been removed, but more than 50,000 people caught it during the four days it was online. Segments of it can be found in news reports online and on Facebook.

Paris Redux: Classic Parisian Neighborhoods As Seen Through Typography

by Anna Brones on

Design geeks and French lovers beware: this video was made for you.

Using some of Paris‘ most iconic neighborhoods and coming up with simple visual representations of them, the video was made as a holiday greeting card by global design agency Havas Worldwide.

My favorite is Canal St Martin, an area most tourists recognize from the “Amélie” stone-skipping scene and nowadays with the collection of bars, cafes and small boutiques, the preferred destination of Parisian hipsters. It’s ingeniously represented by a bridge in the shape of a mustache.

[Via: Huh Magazine]

Video Of The Day: Quiet Time In France

by Libby Zay on

The words “city” and “quiet” don’t usually go hand in hand. Cities are, by their very nature, synonymous with hustle and bustle. But in the short film above, Andrew Julian challenges this notion. He offers a glimpse of Paris that shows the exact opposite of a metropolis – in fact, people rarely appear in the video, and when they do they’re seen taking in their surroundings instead of blindly rushing by. What results is a slow, peaceful montage of France‘s famous architecture and landmarks. It’s a nice change of pace from the fast-paced time-lapse videos we often post, and a good reminder that sometimes you need to step back from the travel to-do lists and spend some time slowly soaking cities in.

New Finnish Passport Is Also A Flip-Book

by McLean Robbins on




Your passport has many uses beyond getting you in and out of a country. It can serve as a travelogue of sorts, showing you where you’ve been and taking you back in time as you relive trips stamp by stamp. It can also be a form of identification, or a way to remember what you looked like five years earlier, when you had that flattering (or not so flattering) photo taken.

Now, if you live in Finland, it can also be entertainment. Their new passport works like a flip-book. Each page has a photo of a moose, which walks forward when the page is flipped. Cool idea, no?

[H/T PSFK]