Recently in Audio Category

"Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about."

----- Cory Doctorow

So...seen any good movies lately?

Wikipedia:

The original lyric for this perennial George M. Cohan favorite came, as Cohan later explained, from an encounter he had with a Civil War veteran who fought at Gettysburg. The two men found themselves next to each other and Cohan noticed the vet held a carefully folded but ragged old flag. The man reportedly then turned to Cohan and said, "She's a grand old rag." Cohan thought it was a great line and originally named his tune "You're a Grand Old Rag." So many groups and individuals objected to calling the flag a "rag," however, that he "gave 'em what they wanted" and switched words, renaming the song "You're a Grand Old Flag."

Click the link below and you can hear one of the earliest recorded versions of this song as performed by Billy Murray and recorded February 6, 1906.

It's a Grand Old Rag

UPDATE (and HT to Cory): ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive director Stephen Worth sez,

[Billy] Murray actually did do cartoon voices. He was the original voice of Bimbo in the Max Fleischer Talkartoons, and his voice is featured in quite a few Bouncing Ball cartoons. We have one of them posted on the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog. Mariutch (1930).

If you watch this and you're not tapping your toe within moments, well, you have no pulse.

Here's Xeni's take on it:

In the "MP3s" section of Baidu and Yahoo China, I stumbled on  Taiwanese pop star Jay Chow (aka Zhou Jie Lun)'s  theme song for Fearless (Huo Yuan Jia), the new Jet Li action movie about 19th-century martial arts hero Huo Yuan Jia. Here's one ripped MP3 of the song, here's another -- it's wicked catchy. Sort of hiphop meets backstreetboys meets chinese opera (sung in falsetto by a dude). After I listened about forty times, I found the movie's official site (gah, no US release dates! I'd gladly pay to see it!), and the music video: high, low.

I like the part in the music video where the dude is being such a hard-ass rapper and he punctuates the end of a line with the FAN. Like, "BLAYUMM--how you like me now, with my figgidy-FAN?!" I give Jay-Z like five minutes to rip this off cover this.

You have got to listen to the mp3 and watch the video, like, now. It'll make your day.

My nephew, Ben, was featured last week in "Your Take" on Download.com for a music video he directed and co-produced with musician Phil Snapp.

Check it out!

Those of you that want to read this blog via a web-based news reader can now choose from several popular choices listed below. You can also find these links near the bottom of my sidebar, just below the Search box.

Just curious -- how many of you do this and what readers do you use?

Subscribe to E Pluribus Unum
(via Feedburner)

(also via Feedburner)