Bahamas

Reading my first Stephen King book - ever! Some of you inspired me to keep his name in the back of my mind and my wife is an avid reader of crime, mystery and fantasy novels. She shares the stories with me in conversation, but I don't always bite. I wanted something completely different - and honestly, Barack Obama's A Promised Land is very interesting, but long and sometimes sleepy - so I wanted a complete change. Fairy Tale.

Well, looks like bjohio only joined to ask about Neil's road trips? I looked for this post to say that on Cygnus-X1.net (the excellent Rush support site) Sunlight On Chrome posted GPS routes for Ghost Rider on a Jan. 26 Twitter post. If you are still watching the forums, it might help?

If Rush is my "jam", winter wilderness stuff is my "peanut butter" It began over 20 years ago when the college approached the local search and rescue unit about wilderness skills - because students will be getting all their flight hours up here over Boreal forests. After graduation they can go on to become pilots for whatever company, but many will be bush pilots for mining companies and such. I started with the search unit in 2010 and got into this particular course a few years ago. It's a ten class program with 7 night classes of simple wilderness first aid, group dynamics, building a survival kit, proper clothing materials, footwear, combating fear and panic, etc. and then 3 outdoor exercises - 2 single Saturdays where they learn to start fires using only a flint striker (works anywhere, anytime, always and every time - with practice) and then shelters (the lean-to that you can build to any size with a multi-tool and wire or some rope) and the tripod signal fire. Then it culminates with an overnight weekend of all skills put together. Yes, some years it's -10 C and other years it can be -25 or more. It's a destructive non-environmentally friendly program, but using crown land and notifying the rural police, fire departments and such, and with one of their instructors doing a fly-over with dash cams on the final day, the students get to see how tiny and difficult it is to see the little columns of smoke from the signal fires at 1000 feet. They really get a perspective on how to stand out in thousands of square miles of dark forest cover. It takes hours to scramble a search team from southern Ontario and then many more to begin spotting and mapping the original flight plan and grid searching out from that pattern - over hundreds of miles, so they are taught how to spend a couple of days waiting and hoping for a rescue. They are nervous going in and super psyched and proud coming out. Foreign students, older students changing careers, always a few women, people of all walks of life - but want to be pilots. 45 - 55 students a year? We are all volunteers but it does net our unit some cash to continue operating and paying rent. Started back in the late '60s, the unit is still going but is rarely called out by police for searches these days - it's become more of an community education service. I have always been too shy to ask Alex - "Sir, what is in your aircraft survival kit?" But I think someday I will ask? Cheers Jack Aubrey! It's a really neat course and there are very few of them remaining. Thanks for asking.

I just returned from a class where we were teaching winter survival stuff to college aviation students - a two month long annual affair. After shelter building and discussing how they will be outside and cutting down trees and such, the next topic was signals. They need to learn how to signal to aircraft to improve rescue times and shorten the time spent waiting for said rescues. I introduced the next topic of signals - different types of sound, reflective, ground signal fires, etc. I said "so the next topic is signals." ..."Not only is Signals a great Rush album, we need to know the basics of..." There were a couple of chuckles, but most are too young to understand. Talking to them in groups outside, I always mention Rush as an icebreaker - more and more, it's "My dad is (this or that)" but not the students. Sigh. But I loved that I could sneak that in to get a sense of musical tastes!

Thanks, all. Some interesting points. Much appreciated!

I recently acquired a copy of My Favorite Headache (Thanks ytserush! And in mint condition). On the back of the CD jacket is a website: www.myfavoriteheadache.com so I checked it out. At the top of the page is "This domain name expired on 2022-12-22". There are still links to current bands and performances, it looks like a ticket community page of sorts. The CD is an Atlantic Recording Corporation, A Time Warner Company, 2000. But how interesting (to me) that a popular, established artist makes a solo album, chooses (?) a period of time to activate a promotional website - and it's 22 years with no renewal? Is that perhaps a Time Warner thing? "It's by the decade! Choose how many you want, ok, add two years if that makes you geschlappy about it". Or an expiry date is arriving and the artist figures it's been long enough? I would love to hear from forum artists more familiar with this business, or friends of Mr. Lee who could shed some light. Thanks, Cheers and Safe Holidays to all :) (Edit: And I just realised that after many years of wanting to own and listen closely to the CD, it arrived on Thursday - the exact day the domain name expired! Might buy a lotto ticket tomorrow?)

Brag, brag, brag! I won't say how many times I shovelled today, or how the windchill factor made the three outings feel very, very cold. But I feel for the other winter folks. The days are getting longer but winter is settling in to stay for quite a while.

Up here in Canada, they did not get a lot of airplay. Reading somebody say "the radio" is not trivial. Thanks BigMontanaSKY - any reason to give for learning about the band is nice to see.

Fine, I guess one does have favourites and disappointments... Top Five 2112 (it's stood the test of time, iconic, simple, decades of reference) Test For Echo Permanent Waves (before anything like Photo Shop existed and super cool politics with the newspaper headline) Counterparts Hemispheres Least Five Hold Your Fire (although I have said before - the three dots meant very little until I saw the memes circulating with two dots, after Neil's passing - that was a kick in the gut) Snakes & Arrows (I like the hands and the prose theme, but it's more than that, as an album theme) Vapor Trails (although the album itself means a great deal) Clockwork Angels (busy and bright) Fly By Night (simple and the first album together, but always looked too simple to me) Using the same artist is not an issue for me, the guy's brilliant and I have at least one book of artwork (dedicated to Lorraine) - love the album covers and associated contextual artwork - but the inside artwork often matters more. And this a visual survey, not a musical opinion. Outliers are: Caress Of Steel - Super cool with backstory, but doesn't stand out in a stack of vinyl. RUSH - early days, a splash of colour and defiance, classic but against all the artwork of the rest, not a top contender.

There is a book I go back to, often. It's about the populating of (middle) northern Ontario and the advertising of "free land" parcels to immigrants. Realtors and government agencies travelled across Europe looking for settlers in the mid to late 1800s to come to Canada. Those parcels were often tracks of rock and lakes but by clearing some of the land, one could stake a claim and plant crops on the thin soils of the shield's rocky landscapes. Thomas Osborne: How I Survived 5 Years In The Canadian Bush Another (though not as often) is A Girl Of The Limberlost, by Gene Stratton-Porter, a more US story of pioneer history. I will check this out, hoping for some cross-over!

It sounded like the last few albums, found it in Test For Echo. ...Lives connect in webs of gold and razor wire... Time And Motion Those bonfire lights in the mirror of sky, the space between wonder and why

The Wreckers ( it was the sound of Geddy's voice that made me keep looking in Clockwork Angels ) Each emotional injury leaves behind its mark Sometimes they come tumbling out Like shadows in the dark...

Forgot to look here for a while, thank you, _hi_water._ I will try to reply this weekend. Anybody else? Sounds like Clockwork Angels? But these guys are sneaky. I will find it!

I had to "Like" everybody's response. It's so neat to hear all the reasons and times in life when the band was appreciated. My older brothers were fans. As a kid I also heard Johnny Winter, Rory Gallagher, Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, it all played loud when our parents were away. But RUSH stood out because it didn't sound the same, the other bands were different but I could always tell who it was once I knew the band. But with these three guys I would ask who is that? RUSH. And that? RUSH. Wow! And then on my early morning paper routes I would listen to them on my Sony Walkman, in the cold slush and snow, the bright warm summer mornings, always RUSH. Growing up in Willowdale, Ontario (Toronto) my friends and I (walking back and forth from Boy Scouts) felt we "knew" the band. Hardly (they all live in Casa Loma - that's how they can make so many albums!), but it was this sense of wanting to know them. We collected empty bottles of pop to return for refunds so we could buy bottles of pop and we collected misguided golf balls from a golf course on the Don River to sell for a nickle so we could buy more bottles of pop. There are some lines in the Necromancer "...the three travelers, men of Willow Dale, emerge from the forest shadow. Fording the River Dawn..." We thought it was the coolest song in the whole world. The rest of my life and the band are for another story, I guess, as this is How did you find RUSH... But leave it to say that I followed them until Signals and then family/life stuff got in the way and I was off to University. I heard news about tragedy, achievement awards, solo albums and remember there is very little radio play up here in Canada, then got married, worked on an old house and left the band behind - another CD on the mix of CDs. It was Clockwork Angels and R40 that brought me back and I have spent a lot of time (more than I care to admit) learning as much as I can. Books, every album, 40th releases, concert DVDs, interviews, building half a book shelf worth of stuff. Reading Neil's stuff and finding myself snowshoeing through a forest and realising I was finding a similar peace, it really had a big impact on me. I absolutely love these guys and still order more stuff every few months just to build up a collection, because each part means something to me in my life. My last concert was the R40 with my brother. "The best seat at a RUSH concert is..." "Where I am sitting". I am STILL finding RUSH and who or what got me into the band. Edit: Golf balls.

Logged in to say 2112 on the DVD of the Clockwork Angels Tour. Watched the concert over two days, now ending with the Encore, 2112, and just amazing. The audience shouting "Hey!" with instrumentals and the stage visuals, very fun to watch again.