I'm hitting the road for vacation tomorrow so I'm posting the updates a day early this week. Now that the tour's over things are pretty quiet in Rush-land. Fans everywhere are suffering from the post-tour doldrums, me included. Rush is taking a much needed break for a few weeks so this lull will likely continue through the end of summer. I'll be using some of the downtime to make a few minor tweaks to the site and wrap things up for the 2008 tour. I'm slowly getting caught up on updating the tour bootleg videos page and I've taken down the homepage tour box. However, you can still access all the tour information and threads on the tour page and upload pics if you have them. Other items on my agenda are a revamp of the sorely-neglected videos section of the site, a poll archive page, and perhaps some page layout shuffling. No major design changes or anything - just a few tweaks.

Thanks to everybody who generously donated to the site in the last few weeks. For anybody else who wishes to donate just use this link. With any donation of $3 or more you'll get a free RUSH IS A BAND bumper sticker. Also, check out my RUSH IS A BAND store at Zazzle.com if you haven't yet. There are fully customizable t-shirts, hats, mugs, etcetera available for men, women and kids of all shapes and sizes.

Earlier this month Pollstar released their Top 100 Tours chart (PDF file) for the first six months of North American concert tours in 2008. Rush came in at #12 with $18.3 million in gross sales and an average ticket price of $66.20. Rolling Stone just published this same list in their current issue but removed the non-rock/pop entries. This pushed Rush into their top 10 at #8. You can check out the entire top 10 list at this link. Thanks to Power Windows for the heads up.

As of Wednesday we have tour attendance figures for almost all of the 2008 dates. All of the Canadian dates except Montreal along with Milwaukee, Atlanta and Indianapolis have yet to report numbers. So far the average attendance has been 8,033 tickets sold out of 10,289 available and the average gross sales has been $527,158. To compare to the 2007 leg, the average attendance on that tour was 10,633 tickets sold out of 15,052 available with gross sales of $589,333. So attendance on this leg is down about 25% compared to last leg but gross sales are only down 10%. This illustrates the higher ticket prices on the 2008 leg. Indeed, on the 2007 leg the average ticket price was $55.37. This time around it's $65.63 - an increase of nearly 20%.

The other big news for the week was the release of details regarding Rush's involvement on the Songs for Tibet benefit album. Rush's contribution will be a newly-recorded live version of Hope which you can listen to a sample of at this link. You can check out the complete tracklist and pre-order the CD here.

In last week's updates I mentioned that the 2009 Rush Wall Calendar was now available to order via the NMR Distribution site at this link. It's now also available for pre-order at Amazon. I'm assuming it will also soon be available via the Rush Backstage Club too. Thanks to John at Cygnus-x1.net for the heads up.

Reader tst4eko uploaded over 1000 pics from the Indianapolis show to photobucket. You can view them at this link.

Reader charbaugh relayed this amusing story about a Rush sighting at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo:

This weekend I had a pleasant surprise at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo. In the Zoo Farm (petting zoo area), one of the keeper's brought a cool looking barn owl out, and my kids all went over to check it out. Being a Harry Potter fan my daughter asked the owl's name, thinking it might be connected to the stories, and the keeper said, "he's one of two we have here at the zoo. His name is Geddy, and the other is named Alex."

I asked if they were getting another one because they seemed to be one short, and she said "we're hoping to get a third, and if we do, he'll be named Neil."

My eleven-year old son and I gave each other a high five without anyone else in the area knowing why that was necessary.

Awesome. :)

We all remember watching the Colbert Show behind-the-scenes video of Rush failing at playing Tom Sawyer on the Rock Band video game a couple weeks ago. Comedy Central posted yet another behind-the-scenes video of rapper Nas showing Rush the proper way to play the song. You can check out the vid here or view it below (assuming you're not in Canada!):

Thanks to Stewart for the heads up.

Although I'll be on vacation for the next couple of weeks I still plan on posting to the site on a regular basis, although maybe not as frequently as usual. With Rush taking a break there likely won't be much to report anyways! Have a great weekend everybody!

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