Update Whoops, looks like we lost a paragraph in the original edit.

The good people at TED, who run conferences for very clever people about even more clever people who can do presentations without Powerpoint, are promoting a great project called Pangea Day that is all about citizen film-making, or ordinary people making films. The objective is world peace through video. Easy.

Anyway, Pangea Day wants to bring together a whole bunch of video-makers in a big celebration next May aimed at reducing cultural disconnects by empowering real people to tell real stories through film. This is a global do-good thing, not a comedy gangsta rap thing (see below). The celebration looks like being a Live Aid/YouTube mashup.

So the people at TED have asked that we help this video go viral. Go here to view, comment and recommend Pangea Day on YouTube. For more information on how to participate and the full presentation from the project’s founder — documentary-maker and TED prize-winner Jehane Noujaim — visit the Pangea Day website.

And if that’s too serious for a Friday, here is that gangsta rap video on the subject of fresh fruits.This video is slightly rude, so if you are more arch than the Knackered Hack, don’t go there. To protect your limbic from the offensive material — which has generated a rather dubious lawsuit against the two brothers who made the video — here is the refrain:-

It’s all about the produce produce, we don’t like to kid
It’s the lower middle portion of the food pyramid.”

And here’s one for the evolutionary fitness crowd .

They call me razor blade because I cut veggies with precision and skill.
I cut the roots off arugula, Italian parsley, and sometimes dill”

If you are a parent of a state school pupil in the UK, it is sports day across the country this week. Even though it is already Wednesday, tardily I’ve decided that we’ll focus on sports this week; coming first is not important, it’s the taking part that counts.

Sports day itself presents a variety of hazards for the modern parent. On average you can expect to lose two afternoons of work. Worse still you may get caught in an on-again, off-again spiral caused by the British weather. There is also the obligation to join what can be the life-threatening race between parents that normally concludes proceedings.

It’s no joke. A friend of ours once broke an achilles tendon in the fathers’ sack race. As far as I can recall, it took a good year to heal properly. And there’s worse when you consider the headline on the front page of Peak Performance sports science newsletter that dropped through the mailbox this morning screaming “Why fit athletes suddenly drop dead, and how to stop it happening“. Continue reading ’42 and the meaning of life’

Today at 6am another great British stereotype went up in smoke. England’s enclosed public spaces and workplaces became officially “smokefree”, following the recent examples of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. This means that the legendary hard-drinking, chain-smoking English pub regular will no longer be able to fill the air with acrid smoke as he props up the bar, and pubs may actually turn into pleasant places to be. Eastenders will certainly never be the same again. And what of that urban launderette experience of some pillock lighting up just when you’re folding your smalls?

That said, despite all the trumpeting about this being the best thing for our nation’s health in a generation etc, the Knackered Hack — who heartily approves of just about everything that’s healthy and life-enhancing — has his reservations. One of the founding principles of Knackerd-emia is to “do the opposite”*; in my case, most particularly to do the opposite of my nemesis, Michael Bloomberg, who allegedly tried to summons the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards for smoking on stage at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Where’s the satisfaction in that? Continue reading ‘no more coughing hacks’

We’re probably some of the last to notice it here, but 64-year-old Sir Paul McCartney has upped sticks and joined the digital music revolution.

He has left EMI after 45 years and gone to Starbucks’ Hear Music label as its first major signing. Yes, Memory Almost Full, McCartney’s 21st studio album since the Beatles, can be found nestling temptingly alongside the biscotti. As McCartney explained recently to the LA Times:-

I was bored with the old record company’s jaded view…They’re very confused, and they will admit it themselves: that this is a new world, and they’re a little bit at a loss as to what to do. So they’ve got millions of dollars and X budget … for them to come up with boring ways — because they’ve been at it for so long — to what they call ‘market’ it. And I find that all a bit disturbing. Continue reading ‘macca flees record industry dinosaurs’