An aerial stunt, a speedy sweater, and pingos!

• British national glider aerobatic champion Guy Westgate pilots a glider that gets towed and then dropped by a helicopter at Antidotum Airshow Leszno 2024. A heck of a stunt in its own right, backed up by some spectacular drone videography that must have been a challenge to coordinate. This is the work of a team of experts, all working at the limit of what's possible. (I previously filmed with Guy, riding alongside him as he flew a plane with fireworks attached to the wings!)
   
• Thanks to Mark for sending over the Guinness World Record for sheep-to-jumper (or sheep-to-sweater, for folks outside the UK). From sheep-shearing start to wearable warm woolen in less than five hours, condensed into nine minutes. Be careful of the extremely loud cheering when they complete it, no-one checked the video's sound levels on export.
   
• I haven't seen Better Man, the biopic of Robbie Williams where he's played by a CG chimpanzee, but I have seen the most spectacular musical sequence from it, posted on the artist's official channel. I know this is probably the standard for a movie-musical showstopper these days, but it amazed me: a wide depth-of-field, nearly four-minute one-shot with hidden cuts and comps that also cover costume and hair changes, and several background gags that people will miss on first viewing. And it turns out there are still some things that only the movies can do... because YouTube compression really doesn't do this any favours. (There's a brief interview with the director which shows behind-the-scenes footage, although it's a bit bold for him to claim "no CG" on that final part, when the before-and-after shots on screen at the same time show several CG additions.)
   

• Exploding pingos! I saw pingos when I was up in the far north of Canada, and this might have made a good story for when I was visiting. I'm not going to define what a pingo is in this newsletter, though; you'll have to click for that. (You'll probably be a bit disappointed, though.)
   
• The captain of a British Antarctic Survey research ship talks about deliberately crashing his boat into ice.
   
• On Cats (strong language), a post debunking myths about cats in medieval times. Includes wonderful photos of both cats, and of pawprints on a medieval manuscript. (Idle thought: blog posts like this are basically the scripts for YouTube video essays... but those require far more equipment, money and time to produce, require giving up some anonymity, and need on-camera skills. But just reading an essay out loud gives you the potential to earn orders of magnitude more revenue. Something about that doesn't seem fair.)
   

And finally: a cozy dumpster fire.

All the best,

— Tom