HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?

It's time for a new feature on this blog which will once more feature YouTube clips that I think are incredibly cool or incredibly funny and are a must-see for everyone.

Once upon a time, I had aspirations to be a professional trumpet player.  I played trumpet in school and college but then discovered that I had been taught to play wrong right from the beginning and it was too much of a handicap for me to make a career out of it.

One of my favorite trumpet players of all time is Christian artist, Phil Driscoll.  Here he sings (he sounds exactly like Joe Cocker) and plays Amazing Grace.  He often employed a unique echo/reverb microphone that made him sound like he was playing in some Gothic cathedral and at the end of the song he plays a fluglehorn.  If you want to skip right to the trumpet playing, it starts at about the two minute mark.

 
TWITTER PIC OF THE DAY

If you got to know me a little, you would find out that I'm one of the few regular people that is on Twitter.

One thing that I like about Twitter is that you can get sent all kinds of interesting and funny and amazing pics, so I'm going to be posting those pics that I find interesting or funny or amazing.

So

without futher ado here is the

TWITTER PIC OF THE DAY

In celebration of the last Hobbit movie being released today:

HOBBIT HOUSE

MICRO HERO OF THE DAY

OK, its time for a new feature on this blog featuring micro heroes.

So, I just posted about the book, The Death of WCW, and when combined with micro-heroes, how about the history of the WCW World Heavyweight Championship with accompanying micro-heroes.

Things were fairly stable until late 1999 and then its hard not too notice how often the title was vacated revealing an inherent instability in the booking of WCW and contributing to the downfall of the company (and lets not even mention the whole David Arquette thing).

 

MICRO HERO OF THE DAY

OK, its time for a new feature on this blog featuring micro heroes.

Thinking back to my Amateur Angelologist posts:

http://mattstarr28.blogspot.com/2014/12/some-ancient-cosmology-a.html

http://mattstarr28.blogspot.com/2014/12/amateur-angelologist-3-angelic.html

http://mattstarr28.blogspot.com/2014/11/amateur-angelologist-2-armored-angelic.html

http://mattstarr28.blogspot.com/2014/11/amateur-angelologist-metatron-i.html

MICRO HERO OF THE DAY

OK, its time for a new feature on this blog featuring micro heroes.

And to start things off right here is a pic of all The Mighty Micro-Avengers.

WRESTLETALK

 

 

So I was just watching some Monday Night Wars episodes on the WWE Network about, obviously, the Monday Night Wars waged in the late 1990s between WWE and WCW.  Now, back then I was a staunch WCW supporter as I've always held the WWE at arm's length.  I tolerate and watch some of the WWE but if it dissappeared tomorrow I wouldn't miss it and I think the wrestling world would be much better if the McMahon family had never been a part of it, much less dominate it. 

One of the best books about the Monday Night Wars is The Death of WCW (whose 10th Anniversary Edition was just released) by R.D. Reynolds and Bryan Alvarez.  This book, obviously, chronicles the death of WCW as they were on the losing side of the Monday Night Wars and it is, as stated already, one of the most thorough and insightful books on the subject anywhere.  It presents a chronicle of the time period in an honest and fair way, blaming WCW for its own mistakes while acknowledging the many things they did right and how the federation deserved better and if not for a few mistakes and one determined TV executive should still be in operation today.

I would definitely recommend this book to any wrestling fan especially if you were a WCW fan as it may give you a little closure to what happened to a wrestling federation that I got a lot of enjoyment from over the years.

 

FILM MUSIC MUSINGS

 

Here is the  feature on this blog that is akin to the You Tube Film Music Cue of the Day, in that it deals, once again, with one of the great passions of my life:  FILM MUSIC.

I have a huge document called My Top Scores List in which I have picked the Top 5 Film Scores for each year since 1980 along with some commentary on my choices.

You can imagine that by now the list is fairly long and contains a lot of info that I think is blog-worthy so I'm going to start publishing excerpts from the list right here on my blog.

So,

without further ado

Here is Film Music Musings

AFI's 100 YEARS OF FILM SCORES

The American Film Institute (AFI) revealed the top 10 film scores of all time in The Big Picture--AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores in 2010.  A jury of over 500 film artists, composers, musicians, critics and historians selected John Williams' iconic score from the classic film STAR WARS as the most memorable film score of all time.

Rounding off the top 10 were film scores ranging in theme from sweeping epics to westerns, including: GONE WITH THE WIND (#2), composer Max Steiner; LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (#3), composer Maurice Jarre; PSYCHO (#4), composer Bernard Herrmann; THE GODFATHER (#5), composer Nino Rota; JAWS (#6), composer John Williams; LAURA (#7), composer David Raksin; THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (#8), composer Elmer Bernstein; CHINATOWN (#9) composer Jerry Goldsmith; and HIGH NOON (#10), composer Dimitri Tiomkin.

 

Needless to say, I made my own Top 10 Scores of All Time:

 

The top six scores remain the same revealing that the AFI can get it right when it really counts.  I put Spartacus at #7 instead of David Raskin's Laura (a score that has been largely forgotten today except for its Main Title).  The Magnificent Seven remains at #8 and then I've put Ben-Hur at #9 instead of the inexplicable choice of Chinatown on the AFI list (What is the fascination with this movie?  I thought it was a fairly bad film with nothing really distinctive about it including the score.)  And finally, rounding out the Top 10 on my list is Raiders of the Lost Ark giving John Williams three scores in the Top 10 (no composer can touch him, he's the best!!!) instead of the over-hyped score to High Noon which is more significant because of it title song that the score itself.