The Baseballs are a German Rockabilly band with attitude, and if you are not already familiar with them you should be! They already have a huge library of music to their credit, and I can’t wait to see what they do next. The first track here is Umbrella, the second is Chasing Cars, the third is Hot N Cold, and the 4th is Candy Shop. Sadly, I can’t seem to find a Baseballs video to embed that is anything like a currently acceptable video quality, but perhaps that was a deliberate attempt to invoke those classic days. Or perhaps everyone in Germany watches their music on cell phones only, which would work with these. However low rez the video is, the music remains world class!
Terrestrial Human
At the Syfy channel web site you can stream The Expanse pilot episode right now, without having to wait for the series premier on the channel itself. Earth, Mars, and the Belt are on the ragged edge of war, with the prize up for grabs the vast resources of the Asteroid Belt. This one looks like it is going to be quite tasty, I am looking forward to the new series. It will begin its run on Syfy on December 14th.
Charlie Kaufman wrote the screenplay for Anomalisa, an animated film that has won a number of important awards on the film festival circuit and received an assortment of critical praise. If you don’t recognize the name, he also wrote the screenplays of a couple of other movies I really liked, Being John Malkovich and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It will be in a limited number of theaters December 30th, and pretty much everywhere come January. Which tells me Charlie is going to see if he can’t pull off a small collection of Academy Awards for his latest masterpiece.
When I watched the Mocking Jay Part 2 parody trailer the other day it cracked me up, so I dug around the site some more. In the process I found this fun Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron music video parody. I like this groups attitude and style, and hope they will keep creating these. The group I am referring to is Studio C, and hopefully they will keep cranking out these silly parodies.
The ISS, or International Space Station, is very easy to see from the surface of the Earth using just the Mark I Eyeball, providing you know where to look, and depending on whether or not you will have clear sky’s for viewing. There are a number of resources available for knowing where to look; the one embedded here is from the folks at SatFlare, who do a great job with online satellite and flare tracking. Another favorite is the one at I.S.S. Tracker, and of course Heavens-Above has a 2D tracker, the 3D tracker I linked here, and an app you can download to your phone or tablet. I rather enjoy watching the ISS hurtling overhead, knowing that someone might be looking back at us; you should try it sometime and see if you don’t agree.
On Wednesday we get Victor Frankenstein as told from Igor’s perspective, and The Good Dinosaur, an animated Disney/Pixar presentation. Both films are obviously taking advantage of the holiday weekend to pack in a couple of extra days worth of box office receipts to bolster their opening weekend take, but there are a few good things coming out on Friday as well. Tamasha is a Bollywood/French fantasy tale about two people wandering about an island trying to fit themselves into a society they do not belong to, while Janis: Little Girl Blue is a documentary about Janis Joplin’s rise to stardom traced through her correspondence with her family, friends, and collaborators.