Winter would be better with more skiing ostriches.
The creator of this next video doesn't explain what this ostrich was doing in Iran. Escaping from something? Wikipedia confirms that ostrich is an African animal, although it does intriguingly allude to a now extinct Arabian Ostrich.
Equally, winter would be better with more dancing ostriches.
According to YouTube, 28 million people have already seen this video since it was posted in September, but in case you missed it...
I am blown away by what this guy can do with his ankles. Not only does Nonstop, the dancer in this video, move in amazing ways, the musicality of this performance is also great.
YouTube commenters seem primarily struck by the impression that Nonstop looks "boneless."
I wonder what they would have thought of modern dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis (whose rippling arms were insured by Lloyd's of London).
In her autobiography, St. Denis reminisces about the "astonishment" of German audiences in 1907:
It is hard to realize now, when most dancers use an arm ripple, that at this period it did not exist as a part of the dance. I was the first dancer in the Western world to use my arms in such a fashion.
[...]
During the Wintergarten engagement I had an amusing visit after the performance. I knew that my arm ripple was the subject of much interest and speculation on the part of the public. In the Incense my arms were held out from the shoulder and were raised and lowered with a subtle rippling movement which began between the shoulder blades and seemed to extend through and beyond the fingers. In the Cobra the arms took on the undulating ripple of the snake’s body. After my Cobra dance we would frequently see women furtively practicing the sinuosities of the snake dance in the orchestra seats of at the back of their boxes. But I did not know that it was also the object of scientific curiosity.
[...]
A group of German professors had witnessed my dances and wished to call upon me in a body. [...] They were anatomists who had been intrigued by the famous arm ripple which lay completely outside of any previous experience of theirs. Would the highborn be so gracious as to repeat this phenomenon in the more intimate confines of her dressing room?
[...]
One of them took off his pince-nez and began to tap along my arm from shoulder to wrist, explaining to his confreres in excited terms what, in his estimation, was happening to the muscles. [...] I rippled with the right. I rippled with the left. I turned my back and, dropping my shawl chastely to my shoulder blades, allowed them to behold the wondrous beginnings of the movement.
They all talked at once, and they all exclaimed in various tones, “Das ist wunderbar! She has no bones. Yet it doesn’t stop. It goes on and on.”
