Rolling Stones Zip Code Tour

My recent interest in the top 500 albums list from Rolling Stone has already paid off in more than just hearing great music.  While working my way through the "best" albums of all time yesterday I came to the seventh item on the list, The Rolling Stones' (not associated with the magazine) Exile on Main Street.  That reminded me that tickets for the British rock group's final tour went on sale that morning and I bought two tickets in the nosebleed seats.  Sending an e-mail to my mom about my recent purchase reminded her of the tickets being available and we bought an additional ticket (on the first level near the stage) for her.  So Joanna, my mom, and I will be seeing The Rolling Stones in Arlington on June 6.

 

It will be Joanna's and my first (and only if this truly is their final tour) time to see the band, but the upcoming event will be my mom's third time to see them live.  Her first Rolling Stones concert was when she was in high school and she drove down to Houston to see the group.  It would be something to be able to experience the same band 50 years apart.  I envy my mom for what she is going to be a part of this coming summer.

 

On an additional note regarding the music list I am listening to at work, I found that the exaggerated singing people do to make fun of Bob Dylan really isn't that far off base of what he actually sounds like.  Also, I was highly impressed with Marvin Gaye's What's Going On.  Didn't realize I would be such a fan of his stuff, but I really liked it.

Rolling Stones' Top 500 Albums

Do you ever get placed next to a coworker with an annoying habit that absolutely drives you nuts, but saying anything would make you look like more of a jerk than the person actually committing the social atrocity?  I am in that situation currently with a gum chewer.

 

While I do have a distaste for everything related to chewing gum, the umbrage I take against her is for popping the gum every 30 seconds.  I sit about 15 feet away from her and every time I hear the pop, or sometimes multi-pop, of the disgusting gum being blown out of her mouth it is like nails on a chalkboard.  I cringe when the sound starts and it takes only about four or five times before I feel my skin crawling and I have to either leave my desk for a long time hoping she ultimately grows tired of the gum or put earphones in and listen to some music through the computer.

 

Since leaving my desk for an hour that isn't my lunch break isn't really going to work out in the long run, I have elected to start listening to different mixes on YouTube.  Finally I decided to listen to what are considered the greatest albums of all time, leading to a list published in Rolling Stone Magazine in 2003.  Obviously it is heavy on rock and roll since that is what the publication has focused on for so long and lists like this are never 100% accurate since music is art and art is subjective, but it at least gives me a jumping off point to listen to some great music that I normally wouldn't ever hear if it isn't played on the radio or I don't already own the CD.

 

Looking through the 500 albums listed, it turns out I had only heard 23 of them in their entirety, and 15 of those were from The Beatles and U2, which I own all of their records.  The other eight albums I had heard were from The White Stripes, Coldplay, The Strokes, Arcade Fire, Miles Davis, The Clash, and Amy Winehouse.

 

As of this morning I added the second album on the list, The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds.  I'm not sure I would say it is the second greatest album of all time, but it was certainly enjoyable.  It did have "Sloop John B" and "God Only Knows," which are great tracks.

 

Having already reveled in the first and third albums on the list from The Beatles, which are Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Revolver, I will be moving along to number four.  This afternoon will be brought to you by Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisted.

Book Idea

Every now and again I have a dream or a thought pops in my head that is the smallest grain of an idea for a book.  Sometimes I chase that concept down the rabbit hole and come up with a formulated synopsis or even the vaguest of plots.  However, most just end with me shrugging the entire thing into oblivion, never to be revisited again, which normally comes after watching an episode of Mad Men or a great movie and realizing my level of writing is nowhere near adequate enough to make it to bookshelves.

 

There is one idea I've had in my back pocket for about a year now that I have not yet been discouraged enough to drop.  I have even gone so far as to write out a couple of chapters, only to be thwarted by a busy work schedule or hectic family life, but in all reality it will never likely be completed.

Ordinarily I wouldn't take the time to blog about these book ideas because they ultimately will not go anywhere, but for some reason I had a dream the other night about a time travel story that I thought was interesting and I don't know that it has ever been done before in a way that gained popular traction.  I'm sure this notion has made it into a book or television episode as some point in history, but as far as I know I haven't seen it.

The dream in question was about a group who discovers a way to travel back in time and after fiddling with the most popular uses of time travel, such as making lots of money and changing past decisions in minor ways to have a better life in the present without completely rearranging things that would create a time paradox (are you lost yet Joanna), the team decides to make major historical changes to better mankind.  I haven't ironed out all the details as to what they would do in the past, but the third act would be assassinating a dictator that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Okay, you might be thinking this sounds very common in time travel stories as every science fiction writer and their dog have created a story about going back in time to stop Oswald from assassinating President Kennedy or killing Hitler some time prior to his reign of Germany, but what makes mine a little different is that it would be of a ruler that nobody has ever heard of.  It would be a fictional dictator of some real civilization and the final chapters of the book would see the group planning and executing the project to stop this fabricated madman.

My Twilight Zone ending for the story would be that once they accomplish their task in the past, by returning to the present they learn of a new person named Adolf Hitler that never existed in the previous timeline and by executing one madman who had caused the killing of less than one million people it led to the ultimate birth of a worse madman who caused the killing of more than six million.  By tampering with a previous timeline that we believe doesn't exist, they created the current timeline we are living now and have no knowledge of ever having had a different course of events.

Like I have said before, I won't do anything with this idea, but I feel like there is just enough there to make it interesting for a Syfy TV movie or paperback adventure story found on a Half-Price Bookstore shelf.