Sometimes relativity can be a flat out bitch.

You’ll see posts like this from time to time. I could title them “My Commute Pissed Me Off Today” but I am too lazy to group things together that way.

My commute is about 37-38 miles. When I first started working in Framingham I took route 38 to 495 to 3 to 128 to 90 to 30. On a good day I could get there in a little under 40 minutes. On an average day I could get there in about 70. On a bad day… on a really bad day… 2 hours plus. The traffic was horrible and generally unpredictable. I say generally because the 495/3 interchange was always awful, and 128 between 3 and Winter Street was always awful. The rest of the trip is what varied.

After about a year of this I started looking for alternate routes. My group moved from Canton, MA to Framingham, MA and that allowed a lot of back road options. I mapped out one route to take home and over time tweaked it to avoid bad spots. I still kept to the highway in the morning for a while, but eventually I was taking back roads both ways.

The trip time using just back roads stayed at about 65-70 minutes. Slower than the best days on the highway, but about the same as the average day. If it keeps me out of 40 minute long traffic jams I consider it a fair trade.

When we moved to Methuen I kept the route more or less in tact. I take 93 to 495 to the Tewksbury/Lowell line and pick up my old route from near there.

This is definitely turning into one seriously boring post. Where the hell was I going with this? Oh yeah, relativity.

Last week most of the morning drives took about 75 minutes. Yesterday it took a little less than 80. Today it took 81. A difference of less than 10 minutes… but it seemed… like… forever.

Maybe it was the brand spanking new detour on Treble Cover Road in Billerica. I already take a huge detour around a closed bridge on Monument Road in Concord, but today we had that added little insult.

Maybe it was the on-again-off-again construction site on route 62 in Bedford. (Bedford or Concord… I think it’s Bedford). That one was made worse by me being the lucky guy the traffic cop stopped after letting about 30 cars going my way through.

Maybe it was the guy on Moore Road in Wayland who almost drove off the road twice in a space of about 20 seconds. He kept swerving into the opposite lane. If we weren’t the only two cars on a tiny little side street he would definitely have killed some one. I don’t know if he was texting, eating breakfast, jerking off to porn, or what… but he’s lucky to be alive.

Whatever it was, something today made the drive seem infinitely longer than the drive yesterday, when in fact the time was almost exactly the same. Yesterday the slower than average time was written off to the rain. Today… I don’t know, but the perception was definitely written off to Einstein. Damn you Theory of Relativity. Damn you!

I’m having another OCD-iPod-Commute thing going on again too. This time it’s Rush bootlegs. I have a million of ’em. More than I will ever listen too. Every now and then I’ll make up a playlist on my iPod with one show from every tour. (including the short pre-recording session warm-up tours… yeah… I’m not too obsessed.) I set up one of these playlists over the weekend and started listening yesterday on the drive to work. I will not be able to stop this until I get through the entire thing. 28 shows, 570 songs, a running time of 2 days, 4 hours, 44 minutes, and 16 seconds. So far I’ve made it through the first five tours.
Rush
Fly By Night
Down the Tubes
2112
All the World’s a Stage

Yeah… it’s a compulsion. It’s OCD time. Just hope for your sake that if you are near me while I have my iPod on me it’s a good recording and not a cassette tape recording made from the back of the hall.

Don’t let Einstein kick your ass today.

Good luck.

Happy Black Friday everyone…

The Christmas shopping is in full swing.

Somebody stop me!

Just taking a moment to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving (where applicable)

Enjoy the day folks!

Ryan O’Byrne is now officially my all time favorite Montreal Canadian.

Thanks man, Boston fans will love you for this.

I LOVE the way he covers his head as the puck goes into the net. You are the MAN!!

The four day weekend is less than an hour away. Soooooooo close.

Tonight Larry and I are going to visit Mike. Mike’s wife is visiting family in Wisconsin so Larry thought it would be a good idea to keep him company for a while on this the night before Thanksgiving.

My fiancé and Larry’s wife are going to dinner and a movie. This is the first time Jen and I have both gone out separately in… in… ever? I can’t remember the last time I went out somewhere without her. She thinks I’m going to have a ton of fun and forget all about her. I know better. 😉

Hi sweetie!

Today is the longest day of the year, hands down. Nothing comes close. (at least for me.)

The day before Thanksgiving. Thursday is a holiday, Friday is a day off work, and then the weekend. This week the week is shorter than the weekend. I mentioned before that I love this holiday, but the down side of it is Wednesday.

The last day before the four day weekend.

The single longest, least productive, unmotivated day of the year.

The result is… lots of clock watching for Robbie. Here, let me help you join me:

and how about this… a countdown to Rob’s quittin’ time…

Yeah, that should help me get through the day.

Hope you find a way to enjoy your longest day of the year.

Actually… in most stores the DVD came out yesterday to make up for the holiday… but today is the officially announced release date so we’re celebrating today.

Snakes and Arrows Live is now in stores. I defy you to find a more obsessed Rush fan than I, but honestly… I’m holding off on this one and putting it on my Christmas list. Rush has toured three times in the 21st century, and now all three of those tours were followed by a concert DVD. If you start with the Different Stages album released in ’98, every other Rush release has been a live record. Enough is enough I think. To make it worse, the audio portion of the new DVD was released as a live album months ago. The previous live releases all stepped on each other. This one does too but to a lesser extent. There are nine songs from the last Rush studio release on this record. That means we get live performances of new songs. That’s nice. There are also a few songs on the DVD that either had never been played live, or hadn’t been played live during the lifespan of many of the people in the audience. Again, that’s nice. At the same time though, we have still more versions of the concert staples. It just feels repetative after a while.

Having said that, I can’t wait to see this. I saw 4 shows on the 2007 leg of the Snakes and Arrows tour, the leg this video comes from, and 4 more on the 2008 leg. I loved every second of all of those shows. I traveled all over the place to see them. Two shows in Massachusetts, two in Connecticut, one in New Hampshire, one in Wisconsin, and two in New York including my first visit to Madison Square Garden. There were a few differences between the ’07 setlist and the ’08 setlist, but the DVD has the ’08 songs included in the bonus material. That’s a nice touch.

Being an embarassingly obsessed Rush fan means I do a lot of digging on the internet for Rush related news, info, rumors, and wild speculation. I generally hit two sites in this pursuit, The Rush Forum, and Rush is a Band. The Forum is a message board site that anyone can post to. Rush is a Band is a blog. Through Rush is a band I have gotten some nice tid bits of info lately, including a link to a Best Buy page where you can download the new DVD version of 2112 that comes from one of the 2008 shows which was not included on the Snakes and Arrows Live album.

Rush is a Band caused some Rush fan pain the other day with this post. It seems as though the band may be planning to use the “F” word in the near future. In this case the “F” word is “Farewell.” Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson did a television interview in October where Geddy mentions they might try to do one more tour. At the time the circumstantial evidence lead us to believe that he was talking about doing one more tour before taking an extended break. In other words, a 2009 tour. However, since then Geddy did an interview with Billboard magazine pushing the new DVD where he says the band is planning on taking an extended break now and looking at releasing another album maybe in 2010 and touring again in 2011. The additional rumor is that Neil Peart is saying that he does not want to be touring into his 60’s, and he turns 60 in 2012. Sooo… that means if they follow their rough outline the farewell tour will probably happen in 2011.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that they are all rumored to be saying that they have no interest in ending the band. The touring may stop, and frankly that sucks, but the band will continue. That means more new music. There was also an interview with Alex Lifeson not long ago where he talks about having a lot of interest in releasing music via the internet. Couple that with the fact that their deal with Atlantic records will be finished with the soon to be released Retrospective 3. Think of the possibilites… instead of waiting 2-3 years in between Rush studio projects the band could get together a few times a year, write and record a couple of songs each time, and release them straight into the waiting arms of the desperatly obsessed fans. Or, they just continue to write and record as they do now and release the records themselves. They were an independent band once before, there is no reason why they can’t do it again.

A lot of the people who read the same rumors I did were really upset about the end of Rush as a touring band. They were acting as if it were the end of the band. That is clearly not the case. As much as I would miss seeing them live, I remain very optimistic for the future of my favorite band. They seem to still be dedicated to making new music together, and as a die hard fan that is all I could ever wish of them.

Now, in honor of the new Snakes and Arrows Live DVD release here are a few pictures I took on the 2008 tour. Most of these are garbage, but being the crazed maniacle fan I am I think they are awesome.

First, a few from the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, NY. We were sitting in the last row of the balcony.

Now a few from the Verizon Arena in Manchester, NH. This is probably the closest I’ve ever been at a Rush show, and the band was incredible that night. Unfortunately my camera battery died so there aren’t quite as many pictures as I would have liked.

If you are a firefox user you can right click on the pictures and chose “view image” to see a much larger image. If you are using internet explorer, download firefox and use that from now on.

So, go out there and get your copy of the Snakes and Arrows Live DVD and bask in the glow of Canada’s finest musical achievement. You won’t be sorry.

And I have a post-script for this too that I almost forgot about. There was some question as to whether the DVD had any hidden content. Through Rush is a Band I got this link. It is a movieweb.com review with a reader comment that tells how to open up an easter egg. I don’t know if it’s accurate or not, but if you have the DVD you can give it a try. Allow me to quote it here…

Select 5.1, wait like 7 cycles, Jerry comes on and tells you to push play already, then when suitcase (Envy) Al tells you to listen to the man and go for it, go for it! You’ll see no menu options, just Al crossing his eyes at you. Hit enter or play You get a bonus extra What’s That Smell behind the scenes with interviews of Ged and Al in character being interviewed.

This is on the Blu-ray as well – go to Bonus Features, go down to Oh, Atlanta! then press ‘down’ again and then enter/select

And speaking of comments… LEAVE ONE!

Thanks!

There goes my fiance and her wedding dress. The dress is going in for some repair work.

Just came home from the jewelery store with a ring. Yeah, that ring.

Last night the Florida Panthers became the latest victim of the Bruins roll. 4-2. Beating the Panthers isn’t all that impressive (no offense to the Panther’s fans) with Florida in last place in the east and all.

I did not have a repeat of my guilty copyright conscience this morning and I downloaded the NHL.com highlight video… but then I couldn’t get it to play, so there goes that. Click here to watch most of the highlights.

I say “most of the highlights” because the Lucic vs Boynton fight isn’t included. Last night the Bruins had a tribute to the movie Slap Shot that included an appearance by one of the guys who played a Hanson brother. In that spirit, Nick Boynton and Milan Lucic beat the crap out of each other. I was always a Boynton fan when he played in Boston. I was a fan when he played in Providence for that matter. I was a little sad to see him go, but it was typical Bruins business practice to be so cheap during contract talks that the good players just couldn’t wait to get out of town.

The Bruins play the Canadiens tonight. I hate the Canadiens. I loathe them to the core of my soul. I hate them. I hate them. I hate them. Go Bruins.

On a slightly related note the Lowell Devils broke their 7 game losing streak last night. They had the lead 3-2 against Hartford with 6.4 seconds left in the third… and won in the shootout. That’s the kinda team they are. They play Norfolk this afternoon. We aren’t going, but maybe I might try and listen to some on the radio at WCAP’s website. Go Devils.

In closing, enjoy the Lucic vs Boynton fight. Milan Lucic could run for mayor of Boston and win in a landslide thanks to efforts like this. He’s only about 20 years old or so and already he’s a Bruins folk hero. Keep up the good work. Go Bruins.