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It’s coming from all sides…first Joe mentions Van Halen, then Chez106 speak about how it has hit RED ALERT status on their website which can only mean one thing.

Chances are, Van Halen are coming to Ottawa.

Beauty. Whoever is interested, let me know.

What’s my history with Van Halen? Well, to recap my history in the music scene, I wasn’t really into music until the mid-90s. 1996 to be exact. I remember it well. Someone had lent me the Aerosmith – Get a Grip album. What a beauty. What were these amazing sounds coming from the speakers? Guitar solos? Sweet Mother of Pearl!

Later on that year, I picked up the Van Halen – Balance album where I was introduced to Van Halen. A decent album, I didn’t know what to expect. Then the cream of the crop came to me in the form of Best of – Volume 1. I didn’t know what the hype was about. Some old singer of theirs…a Mr. David Lee Roth had come back to the fold and recorded two new songs for the album. What’s the big deal? He isn’t the current singer, Mr. Sammy Hagar.

After listening to Best Of album, I realized that there was a whole world of Van Halen out there to experience. The David Lee Roth era was more rock (it seemed to me) whereas the Hagar era was more toned down, more “Hey, I’m getting a little older, but I’m cool with it.” rock. At least, judging from the Best Of album. I can’t say I own many other Halen albums other than 1984 (the quintessential!).

So now Diamond David Lee Roth has returned to the fold for a tour and Ottawa is a rumoured date. Excellent. This is an experience that doesn’t come around too often.

I am laughing to myself right now thinking of Troy and him saying “What the heck?! My first album was 1984, and Ryan didn’t even get know the band until 1996?!”

update: Alright, I’ve been listening to Balance again and I take it back. Van Hagar rocks just as well as the Roth Era. They must have just picked out the slow tunes as singles.

iplaying: Poundcake – Van Halen (Best Of…Volume 1)

My chair is broken to the point where it always loses it’s height setting and I’m sitting a foot from the floor. Argh.

My friend Sara’s brother has a weight bench with weights to give away. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll hook you up with Sara. I don’t know ANY details.

So besides the fact that I had to travel to the far ends of the Earth to get these new earphones for my iPod, I got them for free care of Apple.

My warranty is almost up and I managed to get a new iPod out of them a few months back. So, considering my warranty is running out next month, I thought I may as well invest in a new pair of headphones!

Very simple process actually – they will send you the new headphones without even receiving the old ones back right away. They do give you a time limit (like 3 weeks) to send back your defective ones or they charge you $23.

Two thoughts come to mind here:
1) Apple warranty is pretty good about their cheap-ass earphones. I mean, your dog could eat your earphones and as long as they are on warranty, they will replace them. In my case, I simply indicated that the left phone cut in and out sporadically and voila, a new set sent my way!
2) Even if I didn’t return my old ones, $23 seems like a cheap price to pay compared to the $39 that is charged for a new pair. Granted, you have to be under warranty.

Anyhow, in the end, I must admit that I think the iPod headphones suck anyhow for their sound quality, but there’s no wrongdoing with owning a new pair.

iplaying: Get It Right – Jets Overhead (Help! A Day in the Life)

“And on the seventh day God ended his work which He had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which He had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it; because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made“ (Gen. 2:2-3).

And on this seventh day as God rested, he looked around and said “I am hungry.” and he created lunch meat for his killer sandwich. We’re talking five layers of good lunch meat.

Then years later, Moses came around and produced the Fifteen Commandments, and the eleventh one stated:

“Thou shall not throw out your roommate’s lunch meat while you are throwing out thine own. Especially if you proclaim to thyself “Huh, I don’t remember buying ham.” Very especially if you don’t even open the package to give it the smell test.”

The results of breaking this rule may have your roommate having to go out to buy some more lunch meat for his lunch in the morning. This involves going out in the cold bitter night after not only a hard day of work, but a hard day of class and then he has to sit in his freakin’ cold car and it only warms up by the time you pull into the driveway. On the bright side, the car was warm when I had to go back out to get some lunch meat. There is always a silver lining people.

Let this be a lesson Michael. 😉

iplaying: Everyday I have The Blues – B.B. King – 1949-1966 King of the Blues

You may not know this, but my love is for the Smashing Pumpkins.

So there is movement to the nth degree in the Pumpkins world so heck, before I start getting into other blog entries that I was planning, let me just throw out some randomness for you. For those of you who don’t really care for my stream of consciousness posts, hit the skip button on the remote and fly to another chapter.

– So I threw on a little The End is the Beginning is the End – Remixes today and it brought forth a memory of visiting Carol in Oshawa when she just moved there and I just moved to Ottawa and both of us were unsure of the future in these gigantic cities but all went fine and I still remember the time I visited and Carol’s roommate was out of town but Carol made me sleep on the floor instead of letting me sleep on the bed. What the heck? Ha ha, this was not what I had in mind for this memory, but this other one just popped up. I find it hilarious how at teenagers, there’s this taboo against sharing a bed together whereas nowadays, we’re older, wiser and realize that it sucks sleeping on the floor. Better to chance it with the morning breath and some drool hitting your face than to wake up underneath some desk. I would like to throw a shout out to Chantelle that weekend for allowing me to crash in her (on top of the covers of course) the next night that weekend after seeing the floor I had to sleep on. No worries Carol, I hold nothing against you. In fact, I am laughing right now at the memory.

ANYHOW, Carol ended up picking me up The End is the Beginning is the End – Remixes album which was amazing considering I hadn’t even known this existed! I was very impressed by Carol’s thoughtfulness. So that’s what I was thinking about today in the car.

– Let’s talk world tour for a second here folks. It’s been confirmed that the Pumpkins are going to be playing in Germany this summer, as well as hints of festival dates all around the summer. What’s a boy to do? Well, considering Vero has two months off this summer in between classes and work, and I don’t have any classes either, methinks I’m going to try and convince Vero to hoof it over to Europe for the sole purpose of travelling the Pumpkins Express. We’ll see how that idea flies. 😉

– When I got into the Pumpkins, it was the Mellon Collie era. I absorbed everything they had. Hey, this comes back to Carol now also now that I think about it – she introduced me to Siamese Dream which was a killer album that I had only heard about after listening to Mellon Collie. Anyhow, you know my love of live music started from a little thing called ‘MP3’s which were pretty well unheard of back in 1996 when the Internet started. But slowly live concerts became available.

Let’s just say I have a crazy collection of Pumpkins concerts…let’s go to the point where I am obsessive and have pretty well every concert that has ever been recorded. We’re talking well over 1000 concerts here. Yes, I am obsessed.

Anyhow, I never really gave the Siamese Dream era a chance but I am listening to 1994-07-16 Tinley Park, Illinois which I’m pretty sure was during the Lollapalooza ’94 stint where they took the headlining spot after Nirvana clearly had to back out (due to Kurt Cobain leaving this realm). This concert is crazy amazing and I cannot believe that I never really gave the Siamese Dream live era a chance. I can see now that this was where the passion was. The raw energy of Billy howling into the microphone that you see once in awhile during the Mellon Collie era, but not really in his later years of the Adore/Machina era. This is THE moment of the Pumpkins.

– I had another random memory of the Pumpkins today. Backtrack in 1999 (or was it 2000?) when I was in Waterloo visiting Larisa and I went out to pick up the new Stand Inside Your Love single at HMV. I was a little scared I must admit. Coming off of the Adore album, I can’t say that I cared for the new road the Pumpkins had took. Where was the guitar heavy, emo rock I grew to love? It was like…they were growing up. The angst was leaving swifter than the Thought Police stealing you away. So I holed myself up in a room and put in the 2 song single in the stereo.

WELL. I was blown away. Stand Inside Your Love to this day is one of my fave tunes of the Pumpkins. It was classic Pumpkins. Let’s not forget the B-Side of Speed Kills. Why this never made the album is beyond me. Actually, it made it onto the vinyl release, but come on. This was beauty incarnate. I remember listening to that single about 40 times that evening. Now I know how the gents of old felt like when they crowded around the record player to listen to one song over and over and over again. Does anyone ever do that anymore? Sure, you may be into a song, but with a press of a button, it can leave fast.

Last night I arrived home to realize that a grand event had transpired. The entire series of Friends which I was downloading for three months was finally done. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t think it would have taken 3 months if everything worked out fine, but the computer crashed once in awhile in the meantime which deleted the downloaded copies, yada yada yada, it’s all done.

So last night I watched a few episodes but then I stumbled upon a Special Feater about the making of an episode. This was the gem of the set so far.

It takes a look at every step of the process to making a TV show – writing, set building, rehearsals, live audience (did you know to film 22 minutes of a TV show usually takes about 5 hours on a GOOD day? So if you’re going to see a taping of Friends, it’s quite a long time to be sitting in the audience!), editing, music choreography. Craziness! I found the documentary to be entertaining and has left me with more appreciation of the craft of television making. It is too bad that Samantha is back home already as we were talking about how much we enjoy Friends and I’m sure she would have liked to see that special.

Hilarious article here about dating people who use different Operating Systems than you. I can relate. I once dated a girl who had an iMac and at the time I was thinking “What the heck?!” (this back in the day where Macs hadn’t taken over the world.). I was sit there trying to get on the Internet and wonder why the menu bar on the top always changed. To sum up my experience, it was lousy.

Nowadays, it’s a different story.

iplaying: The Resistance – Sam Roberts Band (2006-04-27 Toronto ON)

Click here for an interesting article then come back for my comments.

So, this is kind of scary news for the most part if further research proves it to be true. Sure, we’ve heard rumours over time that cellphones could cause some form of tumor, but no one really had any substantial proof.

Let’s get one thing straight here – there’s not really any substantial proof here now. This research is asking for others to continue the research to correlate their findings.

Now, it doesn’t really go into details on how much you have to use a cell phone over 10 years to have the increased chance of a tumor, so for the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume every day for 10 years, for a minimum of 15 minutes. That’s your dose of those electro-waves frying your brain.

Anyhow, I’m not saying you shouldn’t run out and buy the new iPhone right away, but this is an interesting development in the world of communications. Stay tuned over the next few years for further developments on this front.

iplaying: Rebellion (Lies) – The Arcade Fire (Funeral)