Boing Boing

Someone in San Francisco filmed a commercial that involved launching 100,000 rubber bouncy balls down the street. Pictures here, by way of Boing Boing. This is possibly the coolest thing ever done.

It reminds me of the very end of my sophomore year. My roommates and I were packing at three in the morning when we came across an old, cheap set of billiard balls we had never opened. Naturally, we tore open the packaging and headed over to the stairwell.

We lived in a three-story building, and the stairwells were tall rectangular boxes with poured concrete stairs running up around the walls leaving a square area about six feet on a side open all the way down. Our experiments revealed that pool balls dropped form this height not only didn't break, but they bounced back up to almost the same height they were dropped from. A well-dropped ball could get several solid bounces in before it drifted into a set of stairs and began to carom wildly throughout the well. Soon we were throwing out the whole tray of balls at once, watching them fall and rise information before exploding all over the stairs in a glorious cacophony.

After a few minutes a bleary-eyed dormmate wandered out to the landing we were standing on to ask us, incredulously, whether we were throwing pool balls down the stairs. Why yes, we replied, as though this was not only self-apparent, but also perfectly normal. Shaking his head, he wandered back down the hall.