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”

From Knackered Downunder

Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in the US, is bemoaning the lack of connection that many Americans now have with culture. It may be a familiar argument, but Gioia’s point is that it wasn’t always so.

What’s also interesting is that Gioia — in a commencement speech at Stanford last week — claims that one of the side-effects has been the bifurcation of America into passive and active citizens; in other words, those who spend time as passive consumers of electronic entertainment, and another group which uses and enjoys the new technology.

They go out — to exercise, play sports, volunteer and do charity work at about three times the level of the first group. By every measure they are vastly more active and socially engaged than the first group. Continue reading ‘art for art’s sake’