Of all the things on the internet these days, I'm liking videos like this the best. Starts off nice and then, "HOLY FUCK LOOK AT THAT GIANT FUCKING SKY".



Via Stellar

This spot for Chipotle featuring Willie Nelson, it's Pixar-ly poignant. Not bad for a fast food company, eh?



(Via Stellar)

It only takes a second to start watching this, but then you'll have to watch the whole thing. These Phantom HD cameras sure are something, aren't they? But also, what is this doing on Youtube vs Vimeo? Earlier.



(Via Stellar)

Slow motion makes things cooler (sometimes).



Thanks, Dominik!

My street floods fairly regularly because we're below the hills of Somerville so it's no surprise, with Hurricane Irene and all, that my street would flood this weekend, too. That said, I expected it'd actually wait for the hurricane to get here to start. Irene is supposed to get here sometime tomorrow...

Will someone get this chimp some goldang goggles? Dude keeps covering his eyes.



For what it's worth, here are some more scuba diving animals.

(Via Chris)

(In the context of how Obama gets to Martha's Vineyard.)
Me: I wonder if they take Marine 1?
Her: What's that? 
Me: The President's helicopter.
Her: [sarcastically] Oh. You know everything. How would I know that?  
Me: Didn't you see Independence Day?

In Nature's Casino is a Michael Lewis article from the NY Times Magazine in 2007 nominally about hurricane insurance, but also about making money in chaotic and hard to predict markets. It's fitting today, with Irene fever gripping the East Coast. I'm pretty sure I posted this already.

But there was an exception: an American so improbably prepared for the havoc Tropical Depression 12 was about to wreak that he might as well have planned it. His name was John Seo, he was 39 years old and he ran a hedge fund in Westport, Conn., whose chief purpose was to persuade investors to think about catastrophe in the same peculiar way that he did. He had invested nearly a billion dollars of other people’s money in buying what are known as “cat bonds.” The buyer of a catastrophe bond is effectively selling catastrophe insurance. He puts down his money and will lose it all if some specified bad thing happens within a predetermined number of years: a big hurricane hitting Miami, say, or some insurance company losing more than $1 billion on any single natural disaster. In exchange, the cat-bond seller — an insurance company looking to insure itself against extreme losses — pays the buyer a high rate of interest.

The article is fascinating. Load it up on your iPad now so you can read it by battery when your power goes out on Sunday.

Here's a bonus Lewis column from 2005 I found while looking for the above. It was written a couple months after Katrina and talks about how someone was about to make a buttload of money in New Orleans.

This is not OK. A shark swims in the streets after Irene hits Puerto Rico. I don't care if this is fake. The thought alone makes it real enough. (Here's a report of sharks in the streets of Australia.)



(Via @Dens and @ecori_dave)

Via Chris.