Blahg

12 June 2010

This little bit of irony just occurred to me. Back in 2006 I was making plans to see U2 in Japan on my birthday. One morning I put a "courtesy hold" on airfare. That very evening, right before I was going to complete the purchase, that leg of the tour was postponed because of an illness in the U2 family. It just so happened tickets for Gorillaz at the Apollo in New York City were going on sale that same week - including a show on my birthday.

I actually managed to get a seat in the second row and plans were quickly rearranged, not a big deal considering the logistics of a NYC trip were much, much simpler than Tokyo.

That Demon Days concert was one of the best I've ever attended. The trip overall, for that matter, was a mini-masterpiece that reinvigorated my love for the Big Apple.

Well, four years later, U2 have had to miss performing at Glastonbuy because of Bono's back surgery. Who's filling in? Gorillaz!

It's a small world.

Unfortunately, I won't be at Glastonbury. Hopefully Gorillaz will bring their Plastic Beach tour Stateside. I'm already a Sub Division member!

Here's another U2 connection: When I went to the Prince of Persia press screening, there was only one trailer. It was awesome. Bono narrates with Magnificent playing in the background. He talks about how it's not about rich or poor, black or white, this or that. He rattles off a number of different topics. And it's clear from his voice (he's never seen on screen) that he's getting more and more excited. What's it all about? The World Cup! For this Bonoholic, that trailer was a treat. Prince of Persia? Well, it's decent entertainment.

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29 May 2010

Finally finished reading Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. I got it on release day (15 Sept. 2009) and read some of it on my flight to D.C. during the U2 360 Tour, but, as usual, plenty of distractions got in the way as soon as I got home from the trip. That would include things like needing to get dentures for Mom and temporarily falling off the light rail commuting bandwagon, which typically serves as my best opportunity to read on any given day. You know. Life stuff.

Back to the book.

While I wasn't entirely sold on the main heavy this time around, and there is a major plot twist that is essentially a storytelling cheat, there's so much to be admired in Brown's latest Robert Langdon adventure. I enjoyed the loads of trivia, for lack of a better term, and all the interconnections between the world's religions, brought to the foreground while Langdon runs around D.C. during the course of one evening to rescue a friend and find the lost symbol.

It's a really spirited piece of work. And the biggest surprise about the ending is all the thoughtfulness behind it. The book shouldn't be taken literally. It's a work of fiction. But Brown's way of mixing fiction with fact and history and religion is truly exciting. It's the kind of juicy stuff that makes my mind do somersaults.

As I mentioned, I was in D.C. shortly after the book's release and people at the U.S. Capitol told me they were reading it in order to be able to debunk it. Apparently people take Brown too seriously and have argued with them about points in the book, even within two weeks of its release.

My little D.C. trip turned into its own little adventure that included racing through the nation's capitol with one tour guide in order to catch up with a different tour revolving around Brumidi's paintings. Yeah. That was cool! So was chit-chatting with folks at the National Archives. What was supposed to be a short trip to pay respects to the Constitution turned into a two-hour odyssey, a lot of it spent chit-chatting with folks at the Boeing Learning Center. Yeah. I geeked out in a big way at the Archives, now its own full-blown museum... and at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

And there was also the post-U2 show visit to Ben's Chili Bowl with a few fellow Bonoholics. It's the lcoation where Russell Crowe's bag is stolen in the great, great movie State of Play. Right on!

Now I can look back on the trip with even more satisfaction. I like to think of myself as a kindred spirit to Robert Langdon. After all, we both work in "code." But now I can appreciate all the more the accomplishment of finding a way to edit an HTML document on my BlackBerry and FTP it over to a client Web site - all while hanging out at the base of the Washington Monument. It was a simple textual update to the Web site and I didn't want to go through the inconvenience of going back to the hotel for the laptop.

Amid all the book's references to various timeless, persistent religious concepts was one about the number 33. I knew that was when Jesus was crucified, and I was 33 when I followed U2 on the Elevation tour, with the goal of getting my soul back after having sold it to corporate America during college.

Well, the number 33's significance goes even deeper in terms of numerology. Apparently back in the days of Pythagoras it was the number for divine truth. Interestingly, the discussion about the number 33 takes place on pages 332-333 of the Doubleday hardback edition.

The aftershocks of the D.C. trip will continue for quite some time. Still in my stack of books to read: Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer by James L. Swanson and Roosevelt's Secret War by Joseph E. Persico. They're competing for mind space with Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides, Max Brooks' World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Arthur Conan Doyle's A Scandal in Bohemia, and no less than three archaeology books about Egypt.

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