November 26, 2014

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a….tandoori lamb chop?

by

While some turn to old-fashioned tactics to boost book sales, Nikesh Shukla is an innovator. To promote his book Meatspace, the writer jabbed a tandoori lambchop with a fork, attached it to a GoPro camera and weatherballon and sent it to into suborbital space. The video, below, has gotten over 20,000 views in the last 24 hours.

The lambchop rig took off from Cotswold and rose 1066 feet per minute for an hour and a half before the weather balloon popped at 82,000 feet in the air. The meat fell from space and landed in a farmer’s threshing machine in Dorset.

But here sci-fi meat turns true crime.

The farmer eluded Shukla and his collaborator graphic artist Nick Hearne, agreeing to meet and hand off the GoPro and space footage several times, and then failing to show up. It took getting the police involved to get the camera back and bring us the joy and marketing brilliance that is seeing the curve of our earth from the perspective of a piece of grilled meat.

How fitting, for a book that promises to be “a hilarious and troubling analysis of what happens when our lives become an aggregation of shared content.”

 

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