you may need to sit down for this

July 4, 2007: A new Die Hard movie is being released.
Live Free or Die Hard

And it looks ridiculous. Also, ridiculously awesome.


(Others are excited about the Transformers movie coming out on the same day, which also looks pretty cool.)

video blog?

It's easy, and probably more entertaining than long, drawn-out ramblings of mine, so I thought about turning this blog into a more video-based journal.

Now that I've mastered how to embed YouTube material (and trust me, it's a challenge), I can share videos with you that I find out about over the course of the week.

We'll see how it goes.



My favorite band, Ween, came out with a country album back in 1997. It was a new genre for them basically, though they are constantly "testing the waters," so to speak, of every other genre out there. Nonetheless, it was a bold move on Ween's part, only because, as I've read in several interviews, releasing an entire country album did two things. One, it alienated a lot of the casual Ween fans ("ugh, country? I hate country"), and two, piqued the interest of country fans while misleading them at the same time ("this is some decent country; let me check out some of their other stuff....oh my, this is not what I expected"). To be blunt, though, Ween didn't, and still doesn't, give a damn.

I personally enjoy the album a lot. You have to be in the right mood, but it's a kind of country I actually enjoy. (Twangy, but also bluesy -- very different than, say, the Faith Hills and George Straits of our day...I don't know how you classify those two types of country, but they're different in several ways).

Anyway, it gets me to the two videos I'm posting today. Ween brought in a number of legendary country musicians from Nashville, who they eventually dubbed the "Shit Creek Boys." The musicians included Bobby Ogdin (piano), Russ Hicks (steel guitar), and Charlie McCoy (harmonica).

Here's a video of Russ Hicks and another guy on guitar. Is this not one of the most badass instruments ever created? It looks extremely hard to play (but what do I know?), but these guys make it look simple. Also, I'm amused that there is such a thing as an International Steel Guitar Convention, and that it was in St. Louis, my hometown. (Darn, upon closer inspection, they only are allowing a link to YouTube, but no embedding of the video. Here's the link if you want to check it out.)

And here's a video of Charlie McCoy, who can play the mouth harp like no other:

best video of 2006?

To me, at least, this was the funniest video I had seen all year (though I'm sure I don't remember every video I saw all of last year, so we'll say within the last month or two of '06, to be truthful).

I also wanted to experiment with the "embed" function between YouTube and Blogger, so we'll see how it works.

Enjoy.


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