Do the people at National Geographic have the best job, or what? Just try this at your next meeting at work: suggest taking a team out to an airstrip to see if, you know, it’s really possible to float a house into the sky using balloons, like in the Pixar film Up. When you get fired, head over to NatGeo, because they just did it.

Over the weekend, a team of scientists, engineers and “two world-class balloon pilots” launched a 16 foot by 16 foot, eighteen foot tall house using 300 eight foot weather balloons (all brightly colored, of course) from a private airfield near Los Angeles. In the process, they achieved the ubercool, making an animated film come to life, and they also set a world record for “largest balloon cluster flight ever attempted.” According to My Modern Met, the real-life Up house went way up–10,000 feet–and flew for about an hour.

the aughts

This is not my list of what I think are the 10 best movies of the decade. You can look to Roger Ebert and his brethren for that. Instead, this is a list of the movies that I know I will still be watching and re-watching 10 years from now whenever they show up on cable. Or whatever has replaced cable in 10 years.

Be you the President or the Pope, wayward insects are apparently the quickest way to land yourself in the headlines! Over the weekend Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech in the Czech Republic. The only part of this, by all accounts, successful visit that made news was that a spider climbed on the Pope’s robes during his speech.