Robert Plant has put paid to rumours that Zeppelin will tour again, at least with him doing lead vocals. While I'm not a died in the wool Zeppelin fan by any means, I must take my hat off to Robert for issuing this statement (he's currently on tour with Alison Krauss) while many 'old time' bands are jumping on the reunion tour bandwagon.

Now I don't begrudge anyone making money, but it does get my back up when I see bands like the Eagles or Beachboys, way past their prime, stroking their fans for tickets. Well, okay, maybe a starting ticket price of $55 USD plus ticketmasters' mystery fees is worth it as a starting point to see a band like the Beach Boys, but not for me.

Even worse is the example exemplified by a band I really respect(ed) AC/DC is one. For their recent Black Ice tours, all seats, no matter how crappy are $90. If you can get them. You're more likely to pay well into the hundreds if not thousands of dollars though. The concert in Toronto sold out in 20 minutes. On ticketsnow, the scalping, I mean "secondary market" site owned by Ticketmaster, you're looking between 295 and 1000 each for tickets. While this may not be the bands fault per se, it shows that bands themselves aren't the only ones cashing in on hard core fans and the bands are doing dick all to make sure that their fans have reasonable access to come see them. Working man's band my ass.

Save your cash and see some local bands.

You'll notice some new additions to the wee monkey blog. I've added a twitter feed which I may or may not keep. I realize twitter can be really annoying but it's kind of a neat way to concisely say what I'm up to at any given point. Unfortunately the plugin, which is supposed to only put one message up, puts all the twitter messages up. I think I can limit this at the Twitter end.

The other is the Colophon entry which summarizes the blog and how it's put together. Given Blosxom's mode of operation, I had to reset the date stamp to bury the entry.

The last thing is the Music I'm listening to section. This is a tweak of an allmusic plugin. It still uses allmusic (although I may modify it to use emusic) but only parses the album image. I found the original parsing syntax was falling down and including huge swaths of irrelevant text. This likely due to a change at allmusic that the plugin couldn't accomodate. A minor edit presents only the album covers.

So that's it for the blog function. In other news, the search for work continues. While I'm not totally depressed at the lack of responses to applications, it's getting the point where I might need to consider some types of work I'd really rather not be doing. Chin up though and we'll see what comes about. On the other hand, being unemployed is great for developing my disc golf game!

It's the season again for bike salmon. Those bikes riding upstream against the flow (i.e. against traffic) on the wrong side of the road. I'm usually pretty good at missing these bicycle aberrations, but I hit one today when making a right turn onto Dundas. One was on the sidewalk, one in the bikelane, screaming along the wrong way. After hitting me, they proceeded onto the sidewalk across the road and knocked over a little old lady. She seemed fine and was on her way by the time I got my situation sorted out.

Two broken spokes which I've replaced and I just need to retrue my wheel. What a pain in the ass.

Or at least it appears to be. I'm in the process of converting some old vinyl over and when I set up my old turntable, it skates across the LP. That's usually a sign that the stylus is pooched. At least I'm hoping that's what it is. I'm taking in to Ring Audio http://www.ringaudio.com tomorrow to see if they can sell me a replacement stylus.

I'm really hoping this is all it is.

One of the latest "issues" to arise in the upcoming American presidential race is the revelation that John McCain's Republican running mate, Governor Sarah Palin, has a 17 year old daughter who is 5 months pregnant out of wedlock.

Why this is such a deal is beyond me. Republican values are generally applied to "others" and not their exponents. Why should it be a contradiction that a staunch Republican has a pregnant daughter? Nancy Reagan was three months pregnant when she married Ronald Reagan. Why worry about yourself when there are children "out there" to save? George Bush spent $135 million on funding abstinence only sex-ed programs. The fact that they don't work is irrelevant to the Republican mind set. Oh, if people would only listen.

Okay, it's late and this is the best I could come up with.

As if you really cared. But this means at least that the majority of the technical things have been squared away. While I'd still like to add a few gew gaws, it appears that I have my blog running more or less as I'd like it to.

Now, let's see if I'll actually post to it!!!