Molly's Revenge and Enya Revised

It looks like getting another Celtic music lens — Celtic Music: Kim Robertson — published was a good idea to boost the rank of Celtic Music: Lenses. This morning the latter showed up at the number 8 position. That didn't get it on the bottom of everyone's dashboard, however. I think that might be reserved for lenses that are in the top 10 over the previous month. We'll see.

Today I've added Celtic Music: Molly's Revenge. They're a group from California known for their lively performances on stage with bagpipes, guitar, fiddle, whistles, bodhran and vocals. Mostly they perform in California, although they do make it up to Oregon and Washington once or twice a year and have gone farther afield. This past January they performed at the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow, Scotland. They were joined by Moira Smiley, a vocalist and accordion player who performs with them on occasion and is on their latest album.

Getting the modules for the CDs done went quickly since there are only seven CDs and I'd just worked extensively in the same format yesterday. Often the hardest part of a lens is writing about the performers. Sometimes I've done that first to get it out of the way, but this time I did it last, partly because although I wanted to do a lens about Molly's Revenge, I've never seen them live and don't yet have any of their CDs. They do have videos on YouTube, so I was able to get some feel for their performances, and I thought it was impressive that they'd traveled from California to Scotland for the Celtic Connections event.

This afternoon I got an email from someone in the UK who had visited my Enya video showcase. He said he wasn't able to view any of the videos and wondered if it had anything to do with him being in the UK. I went to the lens and started clicking on the videos. Out of the ten, not one came up. All said they'd been removed from YouTube for copyright reasons. As the visitor said, the lens had lost the very reason for its existence.

While I considered deleting the lens since none of the Celtic music video showcases have ever rated very well, I thought I'd see if there were any Enya videos left on YouTube. At first glance, I saw a bunch that used Enya's music to go with pictures or their own video. Then I spotted the EnyaTV channel, which had added five videos about four months ago. It's got Enya's official OK, so they're probably going to be up for a good long while. When I first called up the channel, I saw a link to another channel called EnyaFanClub, started by someone in Russia. That channel had videos of TV appearances Enya has made. Some of them are songs and some were interviews and documentaries.

I replaced the ten YouTube videos, which I'd done using YouTube Plexo modules to avoid the thumbnails. Plexos allow people to vote, but I wasn't particularly interested in that (and neither were visitors; I don't think anyone ever voted). In their place I used seventeen video modules which have larger screens than the standard YouTube module or the Plexo module.