GeddyRulz

:goodone:

Yes, exactly! From that chapter title forward, they were talking about Rush being “more popular than they ever were!” That’s when I put it together: a lot of other “geek” things have become popular in the past several years, too… we’re seeing a Geek Revolution, and Rush could be riding the wave. The point about LONGEVITY being a factor is also valid. In that case, perhaps it was inevitable that people would come around to appreciate Rush: all they had to do was stick around long enough! But I think it's more of a Perfect Storm effect: longevity, yes, but also The Times - how at this point in history, Geek Culture is cool. To those who don't believe they were ever geeky: are you kidding?? And to those who believe they were always cool: yes, but always an interesting mix of cool AND geeky! Like most of us, I imagine! I don't like the label "nerd," but I embrace being "geek" -- geek has SOME cool in it!

I watched Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage again yesterday (such a great movie!), and at the end, it finally occurred to me WHY Rush has gotten mainstream acceptance in the past few years and was finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s the “Rise of the Geeks” factor. What’s geeky is now popular. Superhero and Sci-Fi movies are all the rage; relatively cool people are comfortable wearing superhero t-shirts like the Green Lantern and the Flash; young people flock to Comic Cons, whether they read comic books or not (and popular actors attend, too); the Big Bang Theory is the number one comedy on television. Simultaneous with all this, Rush gets put in Rolling Stone magazine, gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is invited to appear on the Colbert Report, becomes the subject of a full-length documentary, and gets inducted into the Hall of Fame. Geeky is now cool, and Rush have always been one of the most geeky bands around, ergo they’re now seen as somewhat “cool” by the masses, too. I think they recognize this recent cultural shift, and they’re rolling with it. Look for a moment at Rush’s most recent studio album, Clockwork Angels. It’s a futuristic concept album, a geeky thing. Just a handful of years ago, Neil Peart was still saying Rush would never do such a thing ever again, and yet now they have. Why’d they change their minds and do it? Perhaps because they know geeky things, even things like Rush concept albums, are now accepted and even embraced in today’s cultural environment. Nick Raskulinecz recognizes it, too. Throughout the recording, he encouraged and pushed the band to be themselves and really go for it – do all the things Rush is known for doing and has been criticized for in the past. I think Nick knew the resulting album, from the minds and talents of geeks, would be popular. It stood to reason: if Rush music is geeky and geeky is now popular, Rush should be as Rush-like as possible, because that’s actually a recipe for success today, not failure.

Thanks... but I've slowly been putting pounds back on, half-assing things in the health/fitness department for the past couple years. Time to get serious again.

(Maybe all you need to do to sell millions of albums is follow a proven formula.) ;)

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zdoldVaa944/VAd0mXMIfEI/AAAAAAAAAS8/i9-z3GPrLQY/s1600/adele%2Bstyled%2Bpic.jpg

Favorite comedy character: Adrian Cronauer, Good Morning Vietnam Favorite drama character: Dr. Malcolm Sayer, Awakenings Favorite dramedy character: Vladimir Ivanoff, Moscow on the Hudson Honorable mentions: World According to Garp, Dead Poets Society

(sorry; double post)

Just a flat-out AWESOME post. If recovering from depression was just a matter of "pulling yourself together" then it would be rare. Perfectly stated. And obviously depression is NOT rare, so such a "simple" recovery method doesn't exist; recovery is actually much longer and more difficult, meanwhile the victim suffers severely and daily. Many times people would ask me “WHY are you depressed” and I would answer, “If I knew, I wouldn’t be.” If I had a reason I could point to, some rational CAUSE which I could counter, I wouldn’t have BEEN depressed! I disagree, however, with the notion that all depressions are bio-chemical problems, and always solved by finding the "right" medication. In my experience, way too many depressives had terribly dysfunctional families while growing-up to just dismiss that environmental cause and instead say "it's bio-chemical." I've also seen (and experienced!) people who've become depressed because of the irrational/neurotic/perfectionist beliefs they have. Thankfully, society has gotten better about understanding depression and continues to get better. Back when I became depressed 25 years ago, many people either translated "I have depression" as "he's sad" or alternately as "he's crazy." And there was still a stigma attached to going to a psychotherapist, too. To some, seeing a therapist/psychiatrist meant you were crazy and might cause harm to people. I was careful who I told about it.

I enjoyed his work. Not all of it, but a lot of it. Popeye was pretty bad, although that wasn't his fault. It was just a really bad movie. I was pretty young when that came out and I liked it at the time. For what it was, it was entertaining. I don't know why it gets so much hate. Unless you hate the cartoon. I loved “Popeye” at the time, and I think it still holds up for what it was: a live-action cartoon. It was directed by Robert Altman, who’s considered one of the best American directors. The attention to detail was great: they essentially built a WHOLE TOWN for the setting, and the casting and costuming was perfect. My Top Ten Robin Williams Movies, in (roughly) release date order: Popeye The World According to Garp Moscow on the Hudson Good Morning, Vietnam Dead Poet’s Society The Fisher King Awakenings Good Will Hunting Mrs. Doubtfire One Hour Photo

I think, for me, it always did. Yes, he's hysterical, and his "Live at the Met" special from the 80s was the funniest thing I'd seen up to that point, but he's a Julliard-trained dramatic actor who's been seriously underrated. He should've won the Oscar for "Awakenings" (even alongside the stellar performance by DeNiro), but he wasn't even nominated. He resonates for me because I look at this string of roles he chose - in "Garp," "Fisher King," "Dead Poets Society," "Awakenings," etc. - and see an over-arching message, a message similar to many of Neil's lyrics: You only get one crack at this, so make it extraordinary. Live in the moment, and with passion. Experience it all, and pay attention. Remember how it all feels. His body of work, until the past decade, was all so life-affirming... and that's why I couldn't believe his death was a suicide. But as someone said earlier in this thread, he wore masks well and his manic comedic style was probably a defense mechanism against really FEELING. When you see interviews with him, even ostensibly "serious" ones, he can only take so much of talking about REAL FEELINGS before he reflexively goes into manic mode. The Inside the Actor's Studio appearance is a great example: the first half was serious, and then you couldn't turn off the hyper clown. If we didn't know it then, we know it now: he was actually a "crying-on-the-inside" clown all this time.

I’ve also had personal experience with depression, and I can tell you there’s nothing worse. I think its cruelest symptom is the death of all hope. You felt terrible during every moment of today, as you did yesterday and the day before, and you know you’re going to continue to feel this way tomorrow and for the foreseeable future. You see no end to your suffering, no hope that your emotional pain will EVER go away. There are many times you feel you cannot tolerate another SECOND of it, yet you know you have hours, weeks, and months of this feeling ahead, perhaps even a LIFETIME of it. If you can’t understand why someone would commit suicide in that state, then I failed to explain it. Too many times our society uses “depressed” and “sad” interchangeably, and they are so NOT the same thing. As a result of this mix-up of terms, “depressed” has become an insufficient word to describe the severity and totality of this awful emotional state. Fools think sufferers can just “snap out of it.” They can’t, and it doesn’t matter how much money, fame, or love the person has. A personal anecdote: several times I tried renting a movie to “make myself feel better,” but this was a futile task. Things which were dark and sad made my feelings worse, naturally, but so did so-called “happy” things. No comedic movie or time spent with loved ones cheered me; they were just reminders that I SHOULD be happy but I wasn’t… and that’s depressing, so right back to the “no hope for the future” feeling. Besides, “happiness” is an illusion and the “happy people” around you are just delusional, see? You actually believe this unrelentingly dark outlook you have is the world as it REALLY is, and anyone who sees it differently is just kidding themselves. The first step towards recovery is believing that recovery is possible: there IS hope, and you won’t always feel like you did this month or this year. It can be so hard to see any hope, though.

I bought a new one online for just $55 and tax with free shipping – less than the cost of a tank of gas. It (almost) lasted me through the learning process, when you’re battering it around pretty good, but started falling apart at the end. Now I need replacement parts or a whole new ‘cycle. A little more than $100 would get you a good Torker, the most famous name in unicycles and the brand more people learn on than any other. (What Duncan is to Yo-yos, Torker is to unicycles.) They’re pretty durable; good quality. Unicycles go up in price to about $500-$600 for a top-of-the-line off-road “MUni” (mountain unicycle, for riding on dirt trails). Off-road riding is all the rage in unicycling circles, but I have no interest. I’m ready for a serious uni which will last longer than my $55 no-name brand piece-of-shit. I have my eye on a great quality Nimbus, which normally goes for $350 but I’ve found for $250.

If you can walk, you can uni. It's just practice, practice, practice. And there's ways of getting the MOST from your practice sessions, so learning won't take as long. It took me 6.5 weeks, but it shouldn't have. I made some mistakes that "instructors" on YouTube don't warn you about strongly enough. If I knew then... I could've learned in about a week.

Is there anybody here who can ride a unicycle and regularly enjoys doing so? I first got the idea to learn back in 1990, when I saw a drawing of a unicyclist on the cover of a novel. I swore then that I’d learn to ride one before I died. (I don’t really have a “bucket list,” but you could say this was the one thing on it.) I did nothing about it for twelve years, until Christmas of 2002 when I asked for and received one as a gift. Again, I did almost nothing for another twelve years (2014), when I finally began practicing in earnest. That was several weeks ago, and now I can ride! After 24 years of wanting to! It’s a fun hobby, good exercise, and gives you the satisfaction of knowing you can do something that only about 1% of the population knows how to do, not to mention accomplishing something which at times seemed “impossible.” It’s a perfect hobby for me – a mix of cool and geeky – and would probably also make a good hobby for the guys in Rush. Seriously, I can imagine all of them getting into it. Me, I just get a kick out of being the “eccentric guy” in the neighborhood.

I'd heard the same thing. A group of us (the writers of "The Camera Eye" webzine) were compiling factual errors we'd found, with the idea of sending them forward to him for a future edition. Nothing came of it. Oh, how I went on crusades! Up all night, arguing with people on the Internet, composing these perfectly well-worded diatribes. Check for a response in the morning, think about my response to their response while on the way to work, type it while at work, back and forth for nearly a week, at which point things would blow over but not before I felt exhausted and full of self-hatred for being such a prickly douche. I got smart; I don't do that shit any more. It's pointless, and just made me feel terrible. My wife couldn't understand why I bothered, and she was right. This cartoon hit a little too close to home: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls.png

I don't know. Very soon after his "Mereley [sic] Players" came out, he was tapped to provide information for the official Rush calendar - "this day in Rush history" kinds of things. I was surprised he and his demonstrably shoddy work was given that kind of imprimatur by Anthem. (They trusted HIM to do it?) Haven't heard a peep from him since, though. I confess to being a nuisance and thorn in his side when his book came out. I posted not one, but THREE negative reviews of "Mereley [sic] Players" on Amazon, each using a different name. I fought on a message board with someone claiming to be his "friend" but whom I suspected was Telleria himself. Telleria/his friend was defensive of the book as I ripped it apart. So many errors! What ticked me off wasn't the grammatical mistakes, but the FACTUAL MISTAKES he made. I imagined a whole generation of fans spreading false information about the band on the Internet, each claiming their errors were true because "it says so in the Telleria book." I couldn't tolerate something like that happening.. Telleria/his friend also delighted in pushing my buttons, he took a "Rushier than thou" attitude with me, saying I was a "lesser fan" than he because I discovered Rush in '83 and he'd allegedly been a fan from the beginning (1974). I hate people with that attitude. (As soon as I became AWARE of Rush, I was obsessed; it's not my fault I was only 6-years-old in '74.) But I think I easily "won" the argument with him, and in front of everyone on the board. He had nothing.

Yes. As a young obsessed Rush fanatic back in the 80's, this book was a godsend. You got the most detailed history of the band and so many incredible pictures. Before Visions, most things I knew about Rush were from word of mouth (which we all know how reliable that is), the tour book intros (thanks Neil for doing these for us), "The Brief History Of Rush" which was a few pages included in the beginning of the guitar sheet music books Rush Complete Vol's 1 and 2, and the Rush Backstage club newsletter. Totally. I was an obsessed fan, way before the Internet. I got my information by buying, reading, and re-reading every magazine article I could find. I went to the library and found old issues of magazines, and a Geddy Lee entry in Current Biography, that sort of thing. (Another Rush author, Robert Telleria, has read posts of mine and presumed I got all my information from HIM. Not true; I got my info from the same sources he did is all.) Young fans take Rush info for granted. Back then, you really had to DIG. Today, you just search Google and Wikipedia.

Hey, thanks everyone! Just came to TRF to see what anyone might be saying about the Woody Allen allegations and I stumbled upon this thread. Thanks to Dave for starting it. Thanks!!!

That's me. I've definitely done some pot, but I was always wise enough to never try anything stronger. As for the pot, I think I set a record during my junior year of high school, but I've only re-tried it a handful of times since, and I hated every experience. It wigs me out and I want to come back down immediately.... who needs that?

You can be sure of it. No me, mind you, but I can almost guarantee others do.

"Most linguists agree that, to some extent, the languages you speak play a role in shaping how you see the world. If you speak German, you might be a little more pragmatic; if you speak French, you might be just a touch more emotional; if you speak Klingon, you might be a bit of a virgin -- you see where we're going with this."

This is my ex-girlfriend's neice. I guess my ex-girlfriend is a whore...

I have a lot of friends who smoke the Wacky Tobacky and they're genuinely "normal," decent, upstanding members of society... yet look at the clerks and customers in that freaking store! I especially love the loser-user who says "I'm going to buy a bag, get high at home, watch some dumb movies and play some video games." He's got "Fortune 500 CEO" written all over him, eh?

I wanted to share this with as many people as possible, so I'm posting it here rather than in SOCN. If discussion gets "political," the Admins can move it. This was a story on the TODAY Show last week, about Colorado's marijuana legalization. Reporter Gary Guitterez does the wrap-around while standing in a retail store which sells pot, surrounded by large plants. Watch this clip until the end, or watch the end only, but make sure you see the last 30 seconds. This made me, my wife, and the anchors at the Today Show crack up! http://www.today.com/video/today/53962651#53962651