Depeche Mode

Last Friday I got to see Depeche Mode in concert a the Comcast Center in Mansfield, Mass. I got free tickets courtesy of Harpoon Beer. I altered friends via twitter & facebook and had a few get some too. I made various plans with them to get together at the show. According to the confirming e-mail, seats weren't going to be assigned, so we all figured they'd be lawn seats. As it turned out, they were very nice seats under cover. Also as it turns out, only Tiffany and Joe made it. But the concert was good and I'm glad that I went, even if I did end-up sitting alone.

They played for an hour and a half, then were gone for almost five full minutes before coming back out and playing three more songs. They started the encore set with "Stripped", but Gahan only sang the first parts of the verses, none of the chorus. And because the crowd wasn't quite the rabid fan-base he might have been expecting, most of the people either didn't know the words, or couldn't follow along, so it was just lame. In Gahan's defense, the sing-along with "Policy of Truth" was rather loud, if not impressive, so that may have set him up.

Martin Gore did "Home" with just piano accompaniment, and that was impressive:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_Gwq1UxFHw

After they finished the third song of the encore and walked off, I was wondering how they could not do "Personal Jesus". And then less than a minute later, they came back out and did that as the final song of the night.

coincidence?

Today LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter were DDoS'd for most of the morning and periodically throughout the day. There's speculation that it was politically motivated by the Russians. That LiveJournal is owned by the Russians apparently wasn't enough to spare it from their political wrath. Whether or not this explanation for the outages turns out to be wrong will, ultimately, probably be irrelevant.