“The Tower” (concept album)

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album cover of "The Tower" (concept album) - by Dr. B. (Durrell Bowman, Ph.D.)

Welcome to The Tower – by Dr. B. (Durrell Bowman, Ph.D.), 2024, 47:05: a Progressive, Pop-Rock, Experimental-Electronic Concept Album about One Person’s Path into and Exit from Higher Education. It’s available for streaming and/or download for $7 Canadian (approximately $5 US) on Bandcamp. You can choose to pay more, if you want to. Some of the eleven songs are new or new-ish, but often evoking certain existing styles and/or artists … especially from, say, 1969 to 1984. (I guess that’s my “Eras!” 🤪) Some of the songs are not so recent (one is as old as high school old!), but re-written with new words and re-arranged. The three weirdest pieces were composition-course projects to which I’ve now added words and vocal effects.

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Rush Live at the Juno Awards

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Thoughts on Rush playing live last night at the Juno Awards in Hamilton, Ontario.

There are about one hundred Rush songs that would give a good sense of what Geddy Lee can still sing quite well, but “Finding My Way” is not really one of them. (They even kept it in the same key as the original recording.) However, playing the first song from the band’s self-titled debut (1974) does suggest they meant it as a kind of re-birth (after last playing live in 2015), and it also subtly pushed the point that Neil Peart (d. 2020) hadn’t always been the drummer (or lyricist, obviously), even though he played that song live hundreds of times. In addition, Neil was born in Hamilton, and they had him (not John Rutsey) in the on-screen clips. Moreover, 1975 was the year the band won its first Juno Award (for Most Promising Group), so that also makes sense. The song’s not very Rush-like lyrics also suggest getting back on track: “I’ve been gone so long. I’ve lost count of the years . … Look out, I’m coming. Finding my way back home.” The band members were obviously enjoying themselves, which was nice to see!

Instrumentally, Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee were still quite good, and Annika Nilles was fortunately very good. On the other hand, “Finding My Way” is a boogie-blues-type song in 4/4, so we have yet to see what she can do with something more progressive-rock oriented. I’m not sure what Loren Gold and all those keyboards were there for. He added some organ-like or string-pad sounds (and even possibly supporting vocals) towards the end of the song, but I don’t think Geddy ever played keyboards on that song. Given the predominantly twenty-something nature of the music fans at that awards show, the band could have played a more familiar, later song, such as “Tom Sawyer” or “Subdivisions.” There was a slight chance some of those at the show might have known one of those, or at least might have heard one or both of them played by a parent or teacher on a CD, mp3, or stream, for example. And I wanted to hear the Oberheim OB-X8 synth! I guess it’s possible they played another song or two, but that only the one song was broadcast. Tickets are stupidly expensive for the Fifty Something tour, but it should be good for those who can make it. #Rush #Junos

Ticketmaster/StubHub – The Ticket Reseller Conundrum

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When I joined the Ticketmaster queue at 12:00 noon today, 6566 “people” were ahead of me to buy tickets in the summer 2026 Rush: Fifty Something pre-sale. So, the pre-sale probably accounted for most of the venue’s seats, and what I encountered was just for the second day out of the four in Toronto. Theoretically, there were tickets for as low as $137.75.

I joined the waiting room within seconds of it opening at 11:30. At 12:05 (in the queue for 5 minutes), it indicated that $137.75 and $173.25 tickets were limited. Clearly, StubHub, TicketSmarter, etc. reseller bots beat me in the waiting list / queue and bought up all the cheap seats first, to sell them at higher prices.

After 12 minutes, there were still 2946 “people” ahead of me, and tickets were by then “very limited.” After a 20 minute wait in the queue, the cheapest seats available to me were $417 each. After another 3 minutes, the cheapest were $608.73 each. After another 2 minutes, the cheapest thing was a hotel/tickets package for two at $1478.91.

StubHub very quickly had new tickets available for the same show on the same day, and the lowest price I saw within an hour was $380 each. A few hours later, it was $431, and StubHub also seemed to know that the event was 88% sold out. Why would a reseller know that, unless it had scooped up basically all of the tickets and replaced Ticketmaster as the seller?

I will try for tickets up to $200 again on Friday, when Ticketmaster’s “general public” sales open. I fully expect things to happen much the same as today. However, I will do a more direct comparison of actual seat-price levels on Ticketmaster and on StubHub. My guess is that their resellers are more than doubling the prices.

The US, Canadian, UK, and other governments need to put an end to the obvious “insider trading,” “antitrust,” scalper-bot shenanigans going on at Live Nation / Ticketmaster / StubHub / TicketSmarter, etc. Even if it’s currently legal, it certainly is not ethical. Actual humans should be able to buy actual tickets at the actual prices.

Not Travelling to the US

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There’s no way I’m travelling to the US in the foreseeable future. I may never go there again. It’s no longer anything like it was when I lived there in 1995-2000, 2007-08, and 2010. It already used to rank moderately low on international and even US-based rankings of things like freedom, democracy, life expectancy, relative cost of health coverage, and most other things. Its rankings have been far below those of European countries, Canada, Australia, and others.

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Don’t Trust Poilievre

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Canadian Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has never done a single thing except to complain about Canada being broken and to vote against everything the government has done or proposed to do to make things better for people. His current platform is just a flip-flop containing a few things he never actually wanted in the past, and he would probably change his tune about them in the near future. I don’t trust him.

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The CBC

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I’m seeing a lot of Canadian Conservatives make claims about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) being “funded by the Liberals.” In fact, it has existed as a Crown Corporation since 1936 through every single Liberal AND Conservative government. Such people might also be interested to know that it broadcasts just as many Pierre Poilievre (Conservative leader) ads and excerpts from speeches/interviews as anything else. Speaking of Conservatives, why is Alberta Premier Danielle Smith asking Donald Trump for help in getting Poilievre elected? She might as well skip the middle man and ask for Russia’s, China’s, and/or India’s foreign interference more directly.

Ontario, Canada’s “Sunshine List”

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$100,000 is now much too low of an annual salary threshold for Ontario, Canada’s annual, public sector “Sunshine List.” In 2024, a total of 377,666 public sector employees made at least that much, up from 300,680 in 2023.

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Canadian Politics

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I have traditionally voted for Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP), because that is the political party most closely aligned with my progressive beliefs and values. However, I have recently switched to supporting the somewhat more centrist Liberals, because the flip-flopping of the Conservatives’ Pierre Poilievre from criticizing Canada as being broken, obsessing about axing the carbon tax, and loving/aping Trump to “Canada First … For A Change” (whatever the f$%k that means) is just ridiculous.

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Computers in Canada – US Limits

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I’ve now set up a new-to-me computer: a Dell “one litre” mini, but it was refurbished and updated by Canada Computers. That’s just my first step in limiting the amount of money I give to US companies.

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The Tower (concept album)

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I’m still very slowly working on my concept album The Tower (about the various problems with higher education), but I’ve moved beyond “concepts of a plan” to an actual plan. I know what all ten songs are (plus the “bonus track,” which is lyrically only tangentially related to the concept), what 95% of their words are, and what style they’re in. Some are based on much earlier songs and instrumental pieces of mine (but with new lyrics and/or added spoken words), and some are entirely new songs.

It’s going to be very “old school” (say, 1969 to 1984) experimental/electronic music and progressive rock influenced, keyboard-based, classic rock and pop-rock sounding. Parts of it have influences from Tangerine Dream, Supertramp and the Who, David Bowie and Peter Gabriel, Ultravox (probably, contingent on finding certain late-’70s/early-’80s synth and electronic drum sounds), Rush (I like switching into 7/4, etc.), and Laurie Anderson (I’ve figured out pitch shifting, but vocoding so far remains a mystery to me).

I’m using the free (!) Digital Audio Workstation / DAW called Cakewalk, and I use freely available soft synths and other sounds from a variety of sources. Just to give a sense of what this crazy, elaborate type of software is like, here are photos of the first two songs (“Spread Too Thin” and “The Ivory Tower’s Crumbling”), but still without vocals added.