The D word

[pmcray]

I see that the MPC has just cut the base rate by 0.25%.

Obviously, the economy is in more trouble than we thought.

Oh, dear.

On a lighter note, I had a look at the LiveJournal list of most popular interests. The first 24 were unremarkable enough. 25 was Weezer. Who or what, I thought to myself, is Weezer. In turns out, unsurprisingly, that Weezer is (are? Are bands singular or plural?) a popular beat combo (me lud). Quite why they are so popular with LiveJournalist, I have no idea. But indy music does seem particularly popular around these parts.

Comments

[lproven.livejournal.com]

Oh, ask me a hard one!

Weezer did a single called "(Just Like) Buddy Holly" - it was, incidentally, very good.

It used lots of trick shots and some very clever state-of-the-art video compositing to make it look like the band were playing in the diner in the old TV series "Happy Days" - it even had the Fonz dancing to the song. It was superbly done, and as a lovely finishing touch, they had the actor who played the diner's owner, Al, come in at the end, tell the band they'd done a really good set, and ask if they'd tried the food. They replied "that's not so good, Al", which became a catchphrase of mine for ages.

He was 80-odd and retired, but he'd been old and fat 20 years earlier when the series was made, so he blended in perfectly and seamlessly with his own and the others' images on the archive footage.

It won the award for MTV Best Video of the Year for 1995.

Why?

As otherwise, the band largely sank without trace?

Because it was one of the two promo videos included on the original launch CD for Windows 95.

And for many people, Win95 was the first time they'd been able to watch video on their PC desktop. This was largely before the Web and you couldn't download it over the ~10Kbps connections of the time; you certainly couldn't stream it.

The other was a fairly forgettable track by Edie Brickell, after she dumped the New Bohemians. "You Don't Even Have To Try", IIRC.

Win95B used some crappy movie trailers instead - Rob Roy or something. I don't think the record company had a clue what they were doing when they gave the Weezer vid; next release, it was an expensive paid advert and it flopped.

That's why.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

Just dug it out. My Win95 CD's scratched but it's playable. The "high-performance" version is a laughably poor quality AVI, and even 8 years on, its 60MB is not terribly emailable. Good vid, though.