Illuminati-R-Us

1 Bohemian Gravity

You may already know this one. I am still blown away by the singing, the arrangement, the sharp perception of physics, the poetic "musicality" of the lyrics, and the video whiz-kiddery.

Wow, that is tremendous.

And I almost feel like I should receive a continuing education credit for having watched it. Never hurts to beef up my CV.

He has a channel on YouTube (Acapellascience), and he has coered everything from Entropy, gravitational waves and New hoerizons to Pluto, to the neutrino mass and Higgs Boson. It's Physics 101 over there.

2 Neil Patrick Harris hosting the 2013 Tony Awards, opening number: You might not expect it from the classics buff, but I do love me a virtuoso performance. And this one, which is so blatantly, in-your-face, darn competent is really, really fun to watch.

Arneb wrote:You might not expect it from the classics buff

No, I would expect a classic, like ACDC.

Well done, Doogie.

3 Talking of competence...

4 My son is SO looking forward to the European Championship, we just had to (re-)watch this:

And this:

In these sad times, may I be honoured to remind our American friends of one of the towering geniuses their country brought fourth? Ladies, and genlemen, marvel at Leonard Bernstein:



Of course, this is one for me especially, loving Mahler so much and having been a regular guest to the concert halls in my youth. And his German is so wonderful.

For those of you who are REALLY into computing, here is the next big thing in hardware design:

For the last day of the year: This was produced by German TV in 1963 and has been running every New Year's Eve since then. They've been broadcasting this on every public channel, at different times, for about about thirty years now because it's so wildly popular. It runs without subtitles or dubbing, because, really. This is what Germans have been laughing about for 53 years now, so for the ethnologically minded, this is interesting.

Good FSM, I remember seeing that decades ago! I would have sworn it was the Two Ronnies or similar.

I just tried to watch some steaming pile of crap about the Space race by the BBC: Rocket Men. Loud music proclaiming the utterly dicisive scene in an epic battle for the entire world in every single scene, wildly inappropriate comments (saying "not everyone was so lucky" after the close shave Gus Grissom had when his capsule failid to lock to the rescue helicopter and sank, with him escaping from it in a space suit - when everyone else in Mercury came down fine and Gus Grissom was later burned to a crisp in his Apollo 1 capsule) and just plain historical nonsense, like saying that "both nations had intercontinental missiles, but the fight for people's hearts weas decided in space", etc. I stopped after ten minutes of this slapdash, assembly-line produced garbage.

For a really good documentary of the Moon voyages, look no further than this magnificent film, In the Shadow of the Moon, which appears, disappears and reappears on YouTube on an irregular basis.I actually own it on DVD, and it moves me as deeply as it informs me well every time I watch it:

Never mind the Spanish subtitles, they can't be removed.

Hereis the entire "America first, XYZ second" series, starting with Luxemburg. The others are in the sidebar, going away as far as fuckin' Mars.

Two excellent examples of USian TV at the top of its game:

Tim Blais from a capella science has done it again, putting the entire history of exoplanet research into one song. The guy's amazing. I walked the son through the entire translation of the text, and he's been hooked to the video ever since. Great stuff.

In the wake of the Weinstein scandal, this gem of respectful, scrupulous but persistent and in-depth documentation cinema has caught attention. It was literally the Docu Hollywood Didn't Want You to See, being shown to critial acclaim on festivals, but never finding a distributor. Honni soit qui mal y pense.

An Open Secret, by Amy Berg (on Vimeo, not YouTube). I urge you to watch it, and soon, because it's only available for a short time). I did so tonight, and I will go tp sleep with a big, big lump in my throat, having my three kids sleep, securely for now, in my house.

Boy, did he age well. Not such a fan of James Cordon, but this one's epic.

In the same vein, he guy jumping up and down the stage is 76 years old. Still not a great singer, but what a presence.