BEYOND awesome!

As an adolescent, I went up a down escalator once, for fun. This lady looks like she was having no fun at all.  Her StairMaster at the gym was broken, maybe?

Actually — it's a MAP OF JAPAN!

Does it happen to be shaped exactly like Japan?

Holy Hokkaido Batman! No, Seriously. Look carefully, and you'll see Hokkaido. And Honshu.

Apparently, hubby is Jewish, and not quite as much of a hardass.

Eeeeeeeeexcellent.

If it weren't for the trite lyrics, and the spoken-word meltdown in the middle, would everyone hate this so much? It's not a bad jazz composition at all, salsa-influenced, and the band is pretty tight.

Hi Phil! I've been following your posts since Usenet, it's neat to find you here!

Esthetically, it's gorgeous.  Practically, however, it would severely impact space flight. A spacecraft has to cross the equatorial belt twice per orbit. And while the Voyager spacecraft made it through Saturn's rings, it's not a maneuver you would want to try over and over. Eventually you'll have a collision. That creates debris which would soon impact other satellites, which would then impact still more satellites, etc. I took out a ruler and made some measurements on the image of the whole Earth at the opening of the video (yes, I am a nerd). The ring looks like it starts about 1,500 miles above the Earth's surface and ends about 5,000 miles up. So you can probably achieve low Earth orbits, where the Shuttle, Space Station, and Hubble Telescope fly. Communications satellites use a “geosynchronous” orbit, 22,000 miles above the Earth. If your rocket engine fails while you're trying to cross through the altitudes occupied by the ring, you will end up with an object that will eventually collide with the ring.