Ada Pinkston at Current TV just sent over a video they just posted featuring their Brazilian host Rico (no last name) of the Globe Patrol show getting reacquainted with Sao Paulo after being away for a decade. You know we’ve always got the best coming from Brazil covered, but watching what’s going down will give you a different angle of how I see this awesome city. Rico jumps around town to the Munny exhibit at toy store/ art gallery Plastik, goes to venue Studio SP to catch up with long-lost friends and interviews the Brazilian Larry Flynt, aka the sleazy Oscar Maroni, who was arrested last year for running a brothel. More fun with Brazil here.

The folks at Barcelona’s artist and designer consortium, ROJO, have been on our radar for quite some time now. Their wonderful design books, coupled with a multitude of other artistic endeavors, have more or less become staples of our design diet. Luckily for us we’re still hungry for more, because as our preferred purveyors of Spanish design perfection, they’ve got even more goodies for us to eat up. This time the group behind ROJO Magazine is going beyond print and product collaborations by expanding into the world of video art. Their new site, ROJO TV Online focuses on bringing art fans the best video talent around, completely ad free. Not only can you see astonishing work created by artists such as Robert Seidel, Antenna, and Javier Longobardo, but if you fancy yourself a master of the moving image, there’s an open call to submit your own pieces. So go ahead … show the art world you’re a creative force to be reckoned with.

Very few people across the globe would confuse George W. Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair with saints. Most can’t wait to see George W’s reign expire come January and are glad that Tony has been out of office for quite some time now. Filmmaker Mato Atom happens to be one of those folks who won’t fondly remember the Bush-Blair era as “the good ol’ days.” His online animated film Champions (Remembering the New World Order) is a look back at the dark climate these two world leaders created, using soccer as a metaphor to exhibit lack of respect for international convention and their propensity for not playing fair. While the film may be a little heavy handed in its political message, there’s disturbing beauty (and more than a little irony) in the instrumental version of “We Are The Champions” by Henning Lohner. No matter your politics, this film is definitely worth a look.

We kind of have a soft spot for bunnies. From Watership Down to The Velveteen Rabbit, cute cuddly things in distress bum us out. Which is why Dutch artist Sander Plug’s Chocolate Haas is morbidly fascinating. For those that were more fans of Donnie Darko’s Frank (the music actually kind of reminds us of the score) than Peter Cottontail, one hollow chocolate bunny after another gets the Lost Ark treatment, using heat guns, space heaters, and a hot iron. Sadistic? Kind of. But think of how much worse it would be if they were alive.

The ability to watch our favorite shows on the Internet has been a blessing to many folks who don’t have the time to catch their stories at the regular time they’re on. Anyone with the Internet can watch an episode of 30 Rock at their leisure, but unlike DVR, the Internet doesn’t always offer viewers the opportunity to skip those pesky commercials. The folks at Overlay.TV have come up with a solution for this promotional problem. Instead of getting rid of advertisements altogether, The interactive media startup out of Ottawa’s alternative is to integrate them into the program, via clickable product placement and information within the video player’s real estate, which appears throughout the course of the video. The site allows for ‘internet users, content owners and e-commerce sites to monetize and customize their video assets by overlaying contextual information directly onto online video content and linking to external websites.’ For instance, if you like a character’s backpack, you could click on it and find out where to buy it. If that’s not friendly to viewer and corporate behemoth alike then what, pray tell, is?

Not since Frank Perdue and his poultry-looking family sold us on his “all natural” birds have we been so taken with an advertisement for chicken. Foster Farms has taken Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” ads (the he ones where models of all shapes, sizes, and skin conditions teach us about the trickery of Photoshop), and applied it to tasty all-white meat. The ad is cute, but to be honest, we’re not sure which we’d go for: the untouched sock puppet chicken, or the unappetizing brand logo at the end. Ah, what the hell…it doesn’t really matter as long as it goes in the deep fryer.

Via swissmiss

Most people think the name ADIDAS is merely an acronym for dreaming about something that starts with an ‘S’ all day. However, there is a bigger story behind those famous three stripes and that story began with the dreams of founder, Adi Dassler. Dassler's tale is told in the first of a series of spellbinding clay-mation web films that as part of the brand's Celebrate Originality campaign, examine both the founder's spirit and one-of-a-kind operation, as well as his contributions to both sport and culture. The clip also explores the brand's multiple personalities that have, as oxymoronic as it sounds, taken on a life of their own in helping many persons establish individual identities. Check it out.

What better way to take shed some fresh light on the whole creationism vs. evolution debate than by forcing one side to see the merits (and faults) of the other through the paradox of telling the opposite story?

Vancouver Film School students Marcos Ceravolo and Ryan Ulrich created Duelity, a Freaky Friday-esque take on natural history. The switch up plays out as the creationist theory is presented through the scientific findings of the General Organization of Development (G.O.D.), while the evolutionary theory is given through an impassioned biblical oratory complete with Darwinism illustrated in Vatican-ish stained glass.

The video comes in three versions: "Creationism," "Evolution," and then the total brilliance and exact execution of the project really shines when you watch the third version — "Duelity" — where both stories unfold simultaneously in a split screen.

One of my favorite TED Talks of all time was just posted — you can view it here or click on over to the TED site to explore. This 18 minutes of fascinating and intriguing stories by J.J. Abrams, creator of Lost, Alias and the soon to be released film Cloverfield, was just as awesome in person as it is now in digital form. His passion and genius for mystery is clear. Watch Lost, then go watch the man talk about it!

List views are so 2007; next up in the growing line-up of visualization interfaces is a new service from Youtube that lets you visually search related videos.

Looking perhaps a little too much like (and moving noticeably slower than) digg labs' swarm, related videos move around your current choice in multi-coloured bubbles. As you scroll into the other topics, the recs shift based on your preferences and the bubble colours change to help you keep track of which themes you've chosen and those you've steered away from. Click on any bubble to watch the vid. A white line, giving you a nifty trail of breadcrumbs to find your way back to where you started, instantly connects the videos you decide to watch.

Currently only available in full-screen mode and not yet on all videos, the search takes a little bit of time to get used to. Once you're in the groove and let your right brain take charge, it's easy and fast to intuitively move around and find a whole treasure trove of videos you probably wouldn't come across by search alone.

In the 60's "The Ed Sullivan Show" helped define popular culture. In the 80's and 90's MTV was pop culture and thanks to the ingenuity of Al Gore, our notions of what pop culture consists of today is defined by the World Wide Interweb. With that in mind, more people are hitting up The Net to find out if they should be down with O.P.P. or whatever the kids are hip to these days. While all of us here pride ourselves on being down with all the phattest trends, sometimes we let a few things slip through the cracks and that's where Epic Fu comes in.

Originally aired under the title "Jetset" by creators Zadi Diaz and Steve Woolf, this webby-award winning Vlog thrives on interaction, serving as a hub for all things geeky in the realms of art, tech, and music from both the online and offline worlds. Each week a brief webisode provides viewers with tips on trends that should be on their radar. And with nearly 3 million viewers a month that's one mighty Epic-Fu army. Maybe you should join.

If hard-working novices can master the kickflip on a skateboard, they hold the key to entering the next level of tricks. However, doing a kickflip — and landing the mofo — on a surfboard is another matter entirely. As in it’s almost totally impossible. But let’s say you can do a clean-as-a-whistle kickflip in the water, and in fact, you’ve done it in your backyard beach hundreds of times just for giggles. Now’s your chance to shine; get a buddy to film the whole thing from start to finish, then send it to Volcom as an entry in their $10,000 Kickflip-Off Contest. You’ll win it, but the $10K is not that important, nor are the endless babes you’ll get. It’s the initiation into surf legend status that, as a well-known credit card commercial likes to put it, is priceless. Get on it.

While CNN covers the important events and YouTube the completely unconsequential fodder, there does exist an in-between dimension that gets buried somewhere in the backyard of alternative media. Tired of not liking what they were seeing and totally bored by the things they did, two enlivened Melbournians decided to get out there and ask the questions inquiring minds want to know, like What is like to be a Mexican hostage? How (and why would you ever want to) do the nasty on a yoga ball? Can you really buy weed off the street in Australia’s hippie town, Nimbin? They post their Vice-style mini-investigations on Vive Cool City three times a week — that’s dedication to reporting, yo —and as you can probably guess, a lot of the material runs to pervy subjects (they embark on a quest in Tokyo to find out if the schoolgirl-underwear vending machines are legend. Admittedly, it was one of the first clips I watched). CNN and YouTube has their audiences, but Vive Cool City will have the rest of us.