By David Futrelle
Given the events of the last several days, I’m sure a lot of you are feeling pretty wrung out right now. I certainly am.
One thing I do to get a brief respite from all the terribleness is to flip off the news (which I generally have playing in the background on the TV as I work, probably a bad idea to begin with), fire up the YouTube app on Xfinity, and put on the most extreeeeeeemely relaxing videos I know of, which for me tend to be hours-long videos of sunny beaches with no sound other than the wind and waves and the occasional seagull. When I don’t feel like looking at a beach I turn to videos of woodland streams or rain falling peacefully in the woods.
These videos are good to silently contemplate for a few minutes, or simply to have on in the background. They also make perfect aural backdrops for a meditation session.
So today I though I’d share a few of the videos that have become my standbys when I need a few quiet moments.
If you’ve got any relaxing videos or relaxation/distraction techniques that work for you, feel free to share them below.
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Happy Guy Fawkes Night everybody!!!
Woohoo, prettiest terrorist plot ever! Alan, are you going to burn a papist in effigy, as per tradition?
A couple of my mates went to Guy Fawkes’ old school and they never had bonfire night because the school thought it might be poor taste to burn a former pupil.
Well that’s just the sort of nannying which is ruining our modern youth. A night of playing with fire and explosives builds character.
Now I’m thinking the New Year’s eves of my teens, and how fire and explosives seem to be only fascinating for people who are too young or drunk to play with them safely.
I recently found a dodgy online copy of 20th-century character-actor Walter Slezak’s memoirs: His first movie was a silent biblical epic called Sodom Und Gomorrah. Anyway, he tells a story about their effects specialist, a man with very few fingers remaining, setting up a charge that was supposed to create a tidal wave effect, and the leading lady wisely insisting on seeing a test of the charge before she got on the raft that was supposed to be swept away by said wave. Turned out the effects man had mixed up his black powder with his dynamite.
The anecdote ended with the leading lady and her director yelling at each other in Hungarian, but he later went on to make, among other things, The Adventures of Robin Hood and Casablanca, so it all turned out ok.
@Alan:
Being Canadian, my first exposure to Guy Fawkes was, of all things, a reference in one of the Paddington Bear books. Where Paddington had to have explained why someone was going ‘Penny for the Guy!’ at one point.
@Moggie, Lumipuna:
I’m reminded of a friend of mine who used to do invite folks out for a barbecue and fireworks on Victoria Day here in Toronto. He once answered some other over-enthusiastic folks who wanted to set off their own fireworks with “I have done this for many years. You will notice that I still have all my eyebrows. This is because I know what I am doing.”
I think “penny for the Guy” is pretty much a thing of the past in the UK now. When I was a kid back in the ’60s, it was still common, at least among working class families like mine. Early November, us kids would be roaming around the local commons, finding wood for the bonfire, and scrounging straw, rags and old clothes to make the Guy. I think that’s dying out.
Alan: there’s a new Tom Scott video on a topic a mammotheer expressed interest in, and I think it was you:
@ moggie
Ooh yeah, that is one of my fave bits of engineering; cheers.
That was interesting about how it’s no longer putting the kettle on after Corrie; and now it’s compressing the peaks and troughs of renewables.
@Moggie:
Well, considering that More About Paddington, the book that a quick Google search tells me is the one with that scene, was first published in 1959… it would still have been common then.
(I knew intellectually that the books were older than I was, I suppose, but that date was still a bit of a shock to see.)