The spectacular footage below, which captures a bunch of insane thrill seekers as they zoom around a canyon in webbed flying outfits, is apparently from a 2007 extreme-sports movie called Seven Sunny Days. It won’t be long before a big-budget action movie appropriates this subculture for a chase sequence, just like the Bond franchise did with parkour in Casino Royale. Holy crap, just take a look.

This fantastic slo-mo video sequence, in which top skateboarders ride through a postindustrial landscape rigged with explosives, is the intro to a skateboarding DVD called Fully Flared, which Ty Evans, Spike Jonze, and Cory Weincheque directed for the footwear company Lakai.

These people are reckless and crazy, and we get to watch!

Make sure you stick around until the end, because you’ll get to see an entire staircase get blown up with napalm.

The music is M83’s “Lower Your Eyelids to Die With the Sun.”

[via my pal Jonathan Hayes, again!]

Here’s the coolest thing I’ve seen online in weeks: an astonishing eight-and-a-half-minute reel in which an incredibly agile young man demonstrates his skills at parkour, a physical discipline of French origin that’s equal parts extreme sport, urban dance, and life philosophy. Parkour really took off in Europe a few years ago, thanks partly to a fantastic 2002 promo ad for the BBC that starred the founder of parkour, David Belle, as a man who traverses dozens of physical obstacles—roofs, walls, fire escapes, people—as he rushes home to watch his favorite BBC1 shows.

The dude in the video below is apparently Russian or Latvian. You can watch the video here (a decent-quality Flash version) or here (a lower-quality streaming version). The first two or three minutes are a little slow, but then it really takes off. The bleak postcommunist landscape is somehow the perfect setting for this guy’s amazingly graceful moves.

Lots more info about parkour here.

This picture exists in several places on the web. I don’t know where or when it was taken.

I follow sports about as much as I follow, say, the shenanigans of Paris Hilton—which is to say, very little. But between the ages of nine and roughly thirteen, I was a typical baseball-obsessed American boy. I watched This Week in Baseball every weekend during the season, and I also loved a goofy kids’ show called The Baseball Bunch, which was hosted by Johnny Bench and the San Diego Chicken. The San Diego Chicken!

In 1981, at the height of my Fernando Valenzuela-stoked baseball fixation, a singer named Terry Cashman had a minor hit with a novelty song called “Talkin’ Baseball (Willie, Mickey and the Duke),” a nostalgic ode to Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Duke Snider, and 1950s baseball in general. I’m sure I would find this song deeply irritating if I heard it today, but back then I loved it. I wanted to own a copy of the 45, but I couldn’t find it in any local stores.

At the time I was an enthusiastic subscriber to Baseball Digest, a compact little magazine stuffed with profiles, predictions, and statistical analysis; much of the content was syndicated from various major and midsize newspapers. I wrote to the magazine to ask the editors if they could help me locate a copy of the Cashman disc. When I opened up the April 1982 issue, I discovered that my excellent letter was in it.

I’m not sure if the incorrect restrictive comma before the song title was my fault or theirs, but the same error exists in their response, too, so I’m going to blame it on them.

Here’s the cover of that issue:

Much to my surprise, Baseball Digest still exists. I have a box filled with all my old issues from the late ’70s and early ’80s; if I still cared about baseball, I’m sure they’d be fun to look through, but, um, I don’t really care.

A 1992 episode of The Simpsons featured a parody of Cashman’s song called “Talkin’ Softball,” and it was sung by Cashman himself. You can listen to it here.

No, seriously: Bill Laimbeer, the widely loathed giant who played center for the Detroit Pistons from 1982 to 1993, appeared as a Sleestak in at least one episode of the cheesy ’70s show Land of the Lost, a program that terrorized a generation of young kids on Saturday mornings. I discovered the Laimbeer connection on my own a couple of years ago, when I watched a two-episode LotL videotape I had bought during a bout of nostalgia. This obscure bit of trivia is, I admit, probably only of interest to North Americans born between about 1963 and 1973 who remember the nightmares caused by those hissing, rubber-suited monsters. Like the entire show itself, the Sleestaks seem hilariously campy now, but they were terrifying to a six-year-old. Also terrifying was the show’s incredibly weird music, a bizarre amalgam of eerie synthesizer bleeps and down-home banjo pickin’.

This image is from the opening credits of a Walter Koenig-penned episode called “The Stranger” that aired in late 1974, when Laimbeer was 17:

One of these Sleestaks is Laimbeer:

Laimbeer went from menacing Marshall, Will, and Holly as an adolescent to menacing the entire NBA as an adult.

The first film to be made from a Don DeLillo script, Game 6, had its premiere at Sundance a couple of weeks ago. It’s about a playwright and Red Sox fan (played by Michael Keaton) who skips the opening night of his new play to watch the fateful sixth game of the 1986 World Series. Game 6 was shot on a tiny budget by the director Michael Hoffman, and it also stars Robert Downey Jr. and Griffin Dunne. After the film’s Sundance premiere, The Hollywood Reporter had this to say about it:

[Continue reading "Don DeLillo, Screenwriter"...]