OK Go Has Another Music Video Spectacle, This Time In Zero Gravity

Ok Go is back with another one of their extreme
music videos, this one featuring
moments of weightlessness 

The rock group OK Go has always made absolutely wild, extreme, and creative music videos ever since their innovative, insane and highly entertaining Rube Goldbergesque clip for the song  "This Too Shall Pass" back in 2010. 

Their latest video, for the song "Upside Down And Inside Out" was released Thursday and already is racked up two million views on Facebook within the first day.

And no wonder. The thing was filmed in zero gravity. Really!

They filmed the video while flying over Russia in a special plane that cosmonauts use for training, reports Fast Company.

The plane uses high speed flight maneuvers to create moments of weightlessness. The periods of weightlessness lasted only about 27 seconds each, so videographers had to stitch the brief clips together to create a seamless video.

"The physics of this thing are wild," guitarist Andy Ross told Fast Company.

Plus, the experience was doubtlessly difficult on the band, the other actors in the video, and the crew filming it. Not for nothing, the special plane they were on is dubbed the "vomit comet."

Wild music videos are OK Go's niche. "We're always trying to stretch ourselves.....always trying to push the limits," Ross said in the Fast Company interview.

Here's the video:

Gunning For The National Anthem. Literally.

Gunning for a melody: You can play a song by
shooting at these targets.  

Here's a loaded blog post, I guess both literally and figuratively.

The video at the bottom of this post shows a guy playing "The Star Spangled Banner" by shooting at targets that have different musical tones when they are hit by bullets.

I have to admit the guy's a damn good shot to pull this off.

Of course, the loaded part is, first of all the gun is loaded. Second of all, is, boy, are people going to have different reactions to this! The gun enthusiasts will say YEAH! Second Amendment, baby!!

Some of the people less enthusiastic about guns will roll their eyes at the mix of patriotism and guns.

Of course, as BoingBoing notes, you can do other songs as well, with revamped lyrics like this Smokey Robinson parody:

If you feel like lovin' guns
If you're independent
I second that amendment.

For those of you who love both guns and music, you're in luck!  You can buy these musical targets from MusicalTargets.com.

As they business tagline says: Your source for armory harmony!

The targets are labeled with the notes, say "C" or "D" and you can shoot out a song with the targets at your own practice range.

Just be sure to set this up where it's legal to shoot guns, and nobody will get hurt by a bullet in case you miss. Hey, nobody's perfect.

A Major 8 Chime Set costs just $249 and a full Double Major 16 Deluxe Set, pictured in this blog post, goes for the low, low price of $600. Operators are standing by! (Not really, but you can go to their Web site.)

Without further ado, I present you the explosive gun shot National Anthem.

U.S. To Bomb Guam With Poison Mice To Combat Snakes

If you needed more proof that the United States is a leader in weaponry innovation, here it is:

We're going to bomb Guam, a U.S. territory, with toxic, poison mice, according to the Associated Press

Dropping poisoned mice on Guam
might solve a snake problem.  

Yes, it sounds like this is one of those snarky "Your tax dollars at work" attack on government waste, but this actually sounds like it might be for a good cause.

The poison mice, raining down from the skys, will seem like manna from heaven to the invasive brown tree snakes that have pretty much wiped out the bird population on Guam. That is until the snakes, having eaten the poison mice as if they were at a giant rodent buffet, get sick and die.

I like this line from the AP story:

"The solution to this headache, fittingly enough, is acetaminophen, the active ingredient in painkillers including Tylenol."

So, I guess Tylenol is good for my headache, but bad for brown snakes. I wonder if the mice have headaches that get cured before they die from acetaminophen poisoning.

The plan is pretty brilliant in that the scientists are taking care not to hurt other animals. The toxic mouse bombs have stuff attached to them so that they get hung up in the trees when they fall, so the tree snakes get them, but the rodents don't make it to the ground, where they could otherwise harm other wildlife.

As for hurting birds on Guam with the toxic mice, that's no problem. The tree snakes have already killed all of the birds,  so poison mice aren't a problem in that regard.

I just wonder what happens to the dead snakes after they've eaten the Tylenol flavored mice. On second thought, maybe I don't want to know.

White Stripes Meet a Science Lab

I found a neat video. It's a remake of the White Stripes song "Seven Nation Army," which was a big hit in 2003.

In this version, people used actual sounds and video footage taken inside a science lab, painstakingly edited it, and ended up with a great version of the song. Watch: