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In the true Victorian spirit of exploration, Englishman Ed Stafford, 33, has decided to combine lofty ambition and sheer masochism in his quest to walk the ENTIRE length of the world’s longest river – the Amazon.

He is 612 days into his quest and doesn’t plan to finish until August 2010. The Daily Mail has a fantastic account of his daily tortures.

His average day would kill most people. Up at dawn, he walks for around eight hours, until 3pm. At this stage of the journey he will be lucky to have covered 7km in that time. This is jungle, real jungle – and you pay for every step with willsapping swings of the machete.

It’s like clearing the thickest hedge you could imagine for a whole working day. Only this hedge is filled with razor grass – which is pretty much as the name implies, grass that will cut exposed flesh to ribbons – huge thorns and spines on trees sharp enough to go straight through a carelessly placed hand, deadly snakes, poisonous spiders and foot-long centipedes so venomous that they can blister your skin with a touch. Oh, and the odd man-eating big cat. Specifically, jaguars.

The only good free-to-air TV station in Australia is SBS. It’s mostly government funded, and its charter to screen content that is designed for marginal and ethnic audiences. So it screens a lot of foriegn language movies and lots of stuff with genuine cult appeal. It’s done a whole bunch of new idents, and they are AMAZING. Some were done by Sydney studio, Mighty Nice, and some weren’t, but credits have been hard to track down. Enjoy.

A hilariously catty article from the Telegraph: Dan Brown’s 20 Worst Sentences.

My favorite:

The Da Vinci Code, chapter 5: Only those with a keen eye would notice his 14-karat gold bishop’s ring with purple amethyst, large diamonds, and hand-tooled mitre-crozier appliqué.

A keen eye indeed.

I’m not sure I can believe this. It’s completely frightening, it can slither and scratch. Yipes!

The ‘family photo’ may for some connote mutual love for their nearest and dearest. But for most, I’d say it’s a cringeworthy event, where-in at least one of the family members is quietly moaning through gritted teeth “just take the f’ing photo, mum” or sarcastically drawling “cheeeeeeeeeeeeeese…” The final product is equally cringeworthy. Sister Isabelle is half-blinking because the wind has blown a bit of hair in her eye, brother Ben has his mouth partially open, and uncle Herb is doing something odd with his hands. Cue AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com. A website that reminds us that no matter how strange you think your own family is, there are others out there who are much, much stranger.

Only fractionally different from the real thing.

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I generally find bike tricks to be a bit lame, but this guy, Danny MacAskill, is just awesome. It’s like la parkour

Amazingness.

Justice’s DVNO retro-wonderland clip from last year comes to mind:

Awesome photography from Neil Krug. Like the 70s seen through countless veils of nostalgia and marijuana.

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via Lifelounge