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January 16, 2012
Lumia

Make Me Smile Monday #2



Hot off the heels of the Make Me Smile Monday debut last week, we bring you the second edition – I’ve had a rummage through my RSS feed and dug out some of the juiciest bones to get your week off to a slightly better start than usual.


via Mental Floss (it’s a cake!)

Everyone loves nice, fresh, green vegetables don’t they (well, once you grow out of hating them on a point of principle), like the nice plate of asparagus above. Well go ahead, cut me a slice…..wait, what? Yessir, that there bundle of greenery is made of cake! Now, after I recovered from my initial shock, this made me smile. Cake that looks like asparagus….perfect! And it’s not just vegetables. There’s a whole heap of other confectionary concoctions that look like food, so for all the Nokia Connects staff reading this, my birthday’s in September…

People sometimes make me smile. Timescapes make me smile. Imagine my face when Joe sent this video round the office. It’s called ‘People Are Awesome’, and while I agree, I think it’s more the photography and special moves these guys and girls are pulling that are awesome:

Agree? Yes, of course you do. It made you smile.

The next smile of this week goes to this most awesome visualisation of how films look when someone adds about five levels of determined and extremely clever thinking.

cinemetrics from fb on Vimeo.

Frederic Brodbeck must have been on a higher plane when he came up with Cinemetrics, but…It. Is. Brilliant. Watch the video and compare, for example, Aliens and 2001. One looks spiky and busy, one serene and laid back. Which would you prefer to watch? Nowadays the word genius is bandied about rather too much, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and say this guy is worthy of the title. Even more so when I read that it was all for a graduation project – perfect excuse to spend some time watching movies.

Next up this week is the astonishing video of….well I’m not quite sure how to describe it! ‘Speed-building’ I guess is the best way. A 30 storey hotel built from the ground up in just 15 days – with what looks like just one crane. Think about that before you watch the video:

So I did some maths, and I reckon that these guys could rebuild a full-size replica of New York (if they so wished) in less than a year! That makes me smile. All I can think is that the builders employed here were killer Lego fanatics when they were younger.

(For an added ‘Construction-related Bonus’, check out a building made of 1000 doors. Really)

Now this made me smile. Take mini golf, add a dash of Seattle geekery, shake well with all sorts of code-controlled pneumatic obstacles – and you get Smash Putt. It looks from the video that this is very much an underground in-some-guy’s-basement kind of deal, but kudos to them for marrying their geek skills to an activity where the biggest obstacle faced is a windmill. Seattle is somewhere I visit a couple of times a year – wonder if that basement is listed anywhere…

What have you seen in the past week that has made you smile? Share it with us @Nokia_Connects

**POSTSCRIPT** The awards garnered by the Nokia Lumia 900 at CES clearly made me smile. A lot.