Tag Archives: Celtic-rock

Announcement, Performance

St. Patrick’s Day 2019 – NO GO

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Ouch! … So … Here’s the news …

St. Patrick's Day is broken

Last night the wheels fell off of St. Patrick’s Day 2019 — Nae Regrets, my Celtic-rock band, will not be playing. NR usually has 2 annual gigs, –they are a BLAST to play and the folks hosting us always take good care of us.  In and around these gigs — if we can — we try to wedge in a few other performances.

You were the chosen one!
Obi-Wan is disappointed

With St. Pat’s on a Sunday this year my aim for Nae Regrets was to play Friday evening, pull off some gigs Saturday along with busking Emerald City Comic Con, and then do our beloved Sunday gigs then go home and be back at it like normal people come Monday morning. The closer we’ve gotten to St. Pat’s 2019 the more things have fallen apart. Nae Regrets has been on on/off hiatus for a long time, but we have ALWAYS pulled it together and played St. Patrick’s Day. Not playing this year could mean the longest stretch that we haven’t played.  I am disappointed to say the least.

When something isn’t happening, don’t force it — it’s time to take a step back.

NFWL big audience for Nae Regrets
I’m Thane — did someone say my name?!?

Make Your Darn Good Cookies book cover

Rolling with the punches, over the next year’s time I want to work with Thane on the music we’ve been talking about.  I’ve always loved what NR does — especially when playing live — however I have wanted to take the music to where I have always imagined it.  There are two other musicians I have wanted to bring on as core players and an amazing collection of other gifted artists I would like to have contribute. For some time now Nae Regrets has had 2 albums planned out on paper with more material to follow — but time and logistics have kept things from happening.  2019 will be the year to re-group!

Bummer about St. Pat’s 2019 — in addition to Nae Regrets’ albums, I wanted to bring copies of my book!  “Make Your Own Darn Good Cookies“ is available now on Amazon in paperback and e-book forms. WIBC

Things I Will Not Have To Put Up With Not Playing St. Patrick’s Day 2019

  • bad tattoo
    The 3-leaf Shamrock is Irish whereas 4-leaf clovers are Los Vegas

    Plastic Paddys

  • Drunks
  • Green beer (#cheap, #domestic)
  • Bad bars
  • Unappreciative audience members
  • Over-appreciative audience members
  • Audience members who won’t GTFO my stage
  • Four leaf clovers
  • Drunks
  • Plastic Paddys
  • People who think it’s okay to be “Irish for a day” and that means getting drunk and hitting someone
  • People who think it’s okay to impugn Irish heritage because it’s white people
  • People who don’t know the first thing about St. Patrick
  • People who think St. Patrick was only good and fail to also see that he also destroyed a culture and heritage that was perfectly fine on it’s own
  • People who fail to understand that I am playing Scottish pipes and wearing a Scottish kilt and that the heritages of Scotland and Ireland are not interchangeable … but I’m out there playing because it’s a gig and I need the money
Movie, Review, Zombies

The Dead (2010)

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For starters, I have to say that I’m surprised that this tile wasn’t already used by some previous zombie film. Maybe it was and I’m just not aware of it, but let’s get into it, shall we?

RATING – Yellow Puss, nearly Green Ooze – The Dead is an interesting film among Z-films.

Somewhere off the coast of war-torn West Africa a plane-load of American soldiers are evacuating.  The plane crashes in an area where the night before a horde of zombies attacked villages through the area — and US military engineer, Lieutenant Brian Murphy, is the only survivor.

With no other options and limited resources,  Lieutenant Murphy starts to walk his way out of the country. Yeah, it’s The Journey, but for this film it works rather well. Amid a country of zombies there are very few humans — often called ‘survivors‘ — and our engineer finds and teams up with a regional soldier, Daniel, who is gone AWOL and looking for his son.  In time, Daniel asks Brian to locate his son.  And that’s all I’ll tell you about this as to not give any spoilers….

If National Geographic made a zombie film, it would look like this…

Here’s the thing about this film and my review — call it a confession if you will — I did not get to write my review after watching it, and I had a lot of good things to say during the viewing. Once I got around to writing I got very busy with Xmas holiday stuff and touring the state of Washington as a guest player with a Celtic-rock band — I did not have time to re-watch and better-write my review, but I will tell you this …

Remember kids, always brush your teeth.

This film has an unexpected element and rather different charactre among Z-films. It wasn’t a great film but it was a good film, and frankly it was hard not to give it a Green Ooze rating. It also gives some beautiful views of parts of Burkina Faso and Ghana. If you are a zombie film fan, The Dead is a must-watch.

Links

Addendum

Yes — an ADDENDUM!  Why?  Because I wrote and published this before, and somehow it survived a hard drive crash I had, but it didn’t originally get posted when I moved my website.  ANYWAY… Take a look at the Wikipedia page for this film regarding the production — it’s nearly amazing the film even got made…

The cast and crew encountered many problems.  Shooting was planned for 6 weeks — it took 12!  First there was a delay in shipping the equipment to Africa which added 3 weeks.  The lead actor, Rob Freeman, contracted malaria and almost died in the middle of filming.  Additional delays were caused by major damage to camera equipment.  Howard J. Ford — one of the directors — later published a book, titled Surviving the Dead (2012), that detailed the troubled production.