Can we get some more ominous organ sounds over here please?

First off, I should mention that I had the opportunity to go and see the Phantom of the Opera in Brisbane last week. Privileged audience that we were, we ended up seeing Anthony Warlow's understudy in the role of the Phantom. This was fine by me, as we figured that should he turn out to be any worse in the role than Gerard Butler (watch the movie, his first line where he's got Christine in the underground passage and you'll see what I mean) that we could always heckle for the original ending where the Phantom gets thrown in the river by the mob. It turned out that this in fact was not necessary as he was absolutely brilliant, if not somewhat a little on the short side. I've been wondering if the Phantom would still have been such an object of intense fear if people had've known that his name is in fact Eric. Somehow "Eric is here!" sounds just a tad bit less menacing than "The Phantom of the Opera is here!"

At the moment I'm working my way through my collection of extremely difficult to find out-of-print '80's cds in an effort to listen to all of them at least once. No, just because I've gone to all the effort to track them down and buy them doesn't mean I actually want to listen to them (face it, there's a reason most of them are out of print - they're absolutely shite, and that's putting it nicely). There's just something about having every cd ever released by every member of a particular band* that really sucks me in, regardless of the fact that I've realised that collectively none of them have released anything worth listening to since about 1989 (and not for lack of trying - I'm at over 20 cds and there's still quite a few out there yet to be collected - no, I haven't got high hopes for the rest of them). Next time I go completely insanely fangirl-ish over a band I'm going to pick one that has been around for a grand total of two years and has released one album and two singles and that's it.

Finally, I should probably mention that I will be supporting the Ebay boycott this week. Sure, it's been over a month since I bought or listed anything on Ebay, but this week I'm doing it INTENTIONALLY, which makes all the difference, really. It's to demonstrate a lack of support for Ebay's proposed changes to feedback and a number of other things which are in the works. The proposed changes to feedback mean that while buyers can still leave positive, neutral or negative feedback for sellers, sellers will only be able to leave either positive feedback or no feedback at all. Sure there's been a lot of people saying that a boycott will mean nothing and effect nothing, but if nobody tries then we'll never find out, and isn't it better to take some action, no matter how small or insignificant against the things you don't like rather than complaining but never actually doing anything to bring about change?



*Due to the extremely un-nice nature of the comments I've made here, I shall elect not to mention which band my current collect-a-thon is for, I don't want to get blacklisted for life by some random ultra-fan of the original drummer who left in 1978 before the band recorded their first album who believes that his 1993 solo album consisting solely of 79 minutes of satanic incantations recorded over a backing track which sounds suspiciously like it may sample the squeals of a cat in a blender is the greatest musical masterpiece ever produced.