Roar

No animals were harmed in the making of this movie. 70 members of the cast and crew were.

"Roar" was first released in 1981. It's now being re-released.

The film follows wildlife preservationist Hank (The Exorcist producer Noel Marshall in his sole and career-derailing turn as an actor and director), who lives harmoniously alongside a menagerie of over 100 untamed animals, including cheetahs, elephants, lions and tigers on a preservation in the African plains. When his wife and children arrive (real-life wife Tippi Hedren, The Birds, and step-daughter Melanie Griffith, Working Girl) for a visit, a long-brewing battle for dominance between the lions erupts and threatens their very lives.

Here's the trailer:

Le palais idéal du facteur Cheval

Look at this crazy building!

It was built by Ferdinand Cheval who was a French postman who spent 33 years of his life building it. He called it the Ideal Palace.

He started in 1879 when he started collecting stones to use in the building and often worked at night by the light of an oil lamp.

The outer wall took him 20 years to build and the palace is a strange mix of styles from Christian to Hindu mythology.

Ferdinand died a year after completion.

The Ghost in the mp3.

There's been a lot of talk of some of the essence of music being lost during the conversion from analog to digital. Many people believe that vinyl is far superior to cd or higher bit-rate recordings. MP3s are a lossy, compressed and generally low bit-rate way of storing music. But most people use it as it's a convenient space saving format. How does it compare?

Ryan Maguire has a project, 'Ghost in the mp3' which explores the losses in the format. By salvaging the lost noise from 'Tom's Diner' when it converted to mp3 you can listen to the differences.

'Tom's Diner' was used as it wasorginally one of the main controls in the listening tests used to develop the mp3 encoding algorithm.

Frozen and the Thing.

This is a 'Frozen' version of the famous scene from John Carpenter's The Thing where Macready tests the other scientists to check if they are 'The Thing', an Alien which imitates the shape of other life forms.