Yank Blog

Effective immediately, The Weird Al Star Fund has a new mailing address:

Please use that address for any donations, or other snail-mail needs!

Also, you asked for it, you got it…. new merchandise! The first in a wave of new merchandise has been released. Check it out in our merchandise shop and check back often for more great stuff!

Weird Al Star Fund has just put up 4 items for auction on eBay, including a brand new sealed copy of “UHF” on VHS and three Windstone Editions figurines - a hatching baby peacock dragon, a hatching baby peacock dragon, and a winged flap cat.

To see and bid on these items, click here.

July 27 was our second anniversary, and also, coincidentally, the day we passed the $6,000 mark!! Great job everyone! Keep up the good work!

Our third year should be exciting too. Just in the past few days alone, The Merchandise Development Team has come up with some great new merchandise we can expect to see listed on our Cafepress shop very soon. If you’d like to help, surf over to the new forum. And, of course, we have another Al-endar in the works, and we’ve got more great eBay auctions still to list.

One final head-up. Our P.O. Box address will be changing in the very near future. Once we have the new address, we’ll update it on the website and let everyone know. Sorry for any inconvenience, but it is necessary.

When Steve Jay isn’t busy recording and touring with Weird Al, he is busy creating for “Ak & Zuie”. He’s changed the group and it’s now “Akin Zuie” and you can catch their first show on August 20th if you live in or near Lewiston, Idaho. See all the details at the Stephen Jay tour website.

Jim West, Al’s guitar player, has agreed to do a Q & A session over at the World Of Weird Al Yankovic Forum as time permits in his schedule. Jim will be answering questions about everything from his career with Al, to his solo slack key guitar work, to the latest advances in quantum physics.

Well, we might be kidding about the quantum physics part.

Ryan Hamann put together this awesome Polkamon flash video based on characters from Nintendo’s Gameboy.

Dates Schamtes. Reports can come in all they want about when Al and the band were in the studio recording for the 12th studio album, but it does us no good without hard evidence to back up such claims. Luckily, there is photographic proof of Al, Jon, Jim, Steve, and others all in the studio, presumably doing something more productive than just staring at the equipment. Check ‘em out at the official site. Oh and some other fan art stuff was posted as well.

Unrelated, a small picture of Al (from the mid/late 80s) is in the July issue of Wired Magazine on page 129. It’s a photographic look at history of “remixes” in society (fan fiction, parodies, mashups, etc) and Al gets a quick nod in the ’80s.

Astute Al-followers have noticed that the Recording Dates page on WeirdAl.com has been updated to reflect recent visits to the studio. All it says is that six new songs have begun recording. No titles or album name given.

Judging by the history of recording dates on that page, it looks like these are the originals. Then, anywhere from a couple months to a YEAR (eep!), Al will have the legal clearance to start recording his parodies. Two months after that is usually when the whole package hits the stores. Here’s hoping that it’ll only take a couple months at most to get the artists’ permissions and legal clearances.

Just a minor change on WeirdAl.com, but what news!

AL WITH THE BAND!
Al and the band are in the studio right now recording their next album.

Happy Anniversary UHF! That’s the theme of the July wallpaper. Congratulations are in order for Stephanie Lehane who submitted this winning entry. It’s hard to believe that everyone’s favorite film is turning 16 years old this year. You can take part in the monthly desktop creating your own wallpaper and submitting it. Good luck to those of you who will take on the challenge!