3584 More things to share

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

If two people always agree on everything, then one of them is superfluous.

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Kites!  I didn't know you could do stuff like this with kites!

[http://youtu.be/8q5I5svj7F8]

iQuad performing at the Southern Oregon Kite Festival at Port of Brookings Harbor 7-21-12.

In the comments, JPurvis explains:

"For those who are scratching their heads, the kites that they are flying in the video are quad line kites known as Revolution Kites aka(Rev's). They are flown with 4 lines that are connected to 2 handles. The flyer can control the speed and direction of the kite by using the handles to change the pitch of the kite itself. The lines don't get tangled because they are braided really smooth and slide against each other without causing too much friction."

...and the operators are careful to unwrap after maneuvers that wrap them.

And then of course there are those commenters, the future saviors of the planet, who are yelling "Fake!  You can see the strings!"  Several of them.  Sigh.  Very depressing.  Never never never read YouTube comments.   Lose all hope ye who tread there.

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This, http://184.172.211.159/~gzdocs/documents/statements/audio_interview_0229_3.mp3, is an audio file of police deconstructing the 911 call from George Zimmerman, step by step, with Zimmerman.  Very interesting.

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I have a very long to-do list.  Yesterday I "wasted" a few hours watching a South Korean movie on YouTube, and I'm not at all sorry I did.  It all started with a chance mention of the Korean island of Silmido and some kind of secret mission there.

From the Wikipedia entry on Silmido:

Silmido became historically significant when it was used as the training ground (January 21, 1968 to August 23, 1971) for Unit 684, a South Korean group meant to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Il-sung in revenge for The Blue House Raid assassination attempt against Park Chung-hee. Traces of the training facilities can still be seen. Under circumstances that have still not been fully brought to light, the members of the group mutinied and went to Seoul in 1971, where they were killed or committed suicide.

This led me to the NY Times article on the incident and the movie, and then I found the complete movie on YouTube, with subtitles.

Of course, I couldn't not watch it.

Unit 648, composed of "expendable" men drawn from prisons and the streets endured horrific and often sadistic training to become just about the best and tightest fighting force in Korea..  South Korea has still not admitted much of anything, but a few trainers and guards survived to tell the tale.  The movie starts and ends with the basic facts, but the details of the men's relationships and motives and what happened on the island had to be invented.

The movie says the men mutinied because they found out they were to be killed because they were dangerous and knew too much - a political and social liability.  The official story is that they figured they would be kept on the island indefinitely and it was more like a prison break.  My opinion is that if they mutinied because of despair, they would have dispersed and gone into hiding when they reached the mainland.  Instead, they attacked the government.

The movie is ... I don't know what to say.  It's awful and wonderful.  Technically it's a masterpiece.  A word of advice, though - when you see the fire with the irons in it, and the trainer is speaking of torture, skip ahead about a minute.  I don't know if that scene was that bad, but I didn't stick around to find out.

I don't know why I'd never heard of this before.

Here it is.  It's 2 hours, but you don't have to watch it all at once.  I watched it in 20-minute pieces over the day. Larger screen is better.  If you don't have time now, bookmark it on YouTube.



[http://youtu.be/IaaF_94oBiM]