Since my update on Friday we have learned that Spindrift and not The Larger Bowl (although that will be released later this summer) is the next single from Snakes & Arrows. We also got the first peak at Neil's fully-assembled new drum kit and a few scans from the the August 2007 Guitar World interview with Geddy and Alex. Otherwise things are fairly quiet so I thought I'd take the time to share a few random Rush bits that I've collected over the last few days.

Rush is on the cover of the May/June issue of Canadian Musician. Inside is a feature by Kevin Young titled In The Studio With Rush which begins as follows:

Imagine spending five weeks producing one of the first bands you saw in concert. That's what Nick Raskulinecz experienced when he got the call to produce Snakes and Arrows, Rush's latest record. "Nick was very young the first time he saw us," says guitarist Alex Lifeson. ...

The article also contains an interview with Nick Raskulinecz and a few new pics. I'll try and get a scan if possible. Thanks to readers Matt and king_daviaue for the heads up.

Reader PhillyMike provided me with a scan of a little article in the June 2007 issue of Spin Magazine. The article is titled Time Out of Mind and reads as follows:

Three new albums offer visions of the future, but are any of them realistic? And how do they compare with the grandpappy of dystopian discs, Rush's 2112? The New York Times' futurist-in-residence - it is too a job! -- Michael Rogers weighs in.

They then go on to compare 2112 with Nine Inch Nails Year Zero, Klaxons Myths of the Near Future and Satellite Party's Ultra Payloaded.

New World Lerxst 2112 let me know of a couple of Rush mentions in the July issue of Guitar Player Magazine. In an article about Dream Theater's John Petrucci on page 102 they mention how one of his riffs is a mixture of Metallica's Master of Puppets and Rush's Natural Science. On page 132 there's a review of the new electric/acoustic hybrid guitar, the Ovation VXT. The very first few sentences of the review read:

Lots of us remember the images of Rush's Alex Lifeson playing an acoustic guitar supported by a stand for the pretty intro to "The Trees. After playing the the fingerpicked part, Lifeson would step away, and crush into the songs distorted power chords on his electric. It was cool, if somewhat complicated, way to cover both acoustic and electric textures in the same song without missing a beat. ...

Open source content management system, Joomla!, has dubbed their next software release Red Barchetta. From the website:

We've dubbed Beta-2 'Red Barchetta', in keeping with the spirit of freedom, power, simplicity and flexibility unknown in an Open Source framework. Besides Red Barchetta conjuring up triumph through coding revolution, this baby provides developers and designers with unequaled tools. This makes Joomla! 1.5 Beta-2 the ultimate enabler for your projects. Now is the time for you to take it for a serious drive to help our team refine the software for our release candidate goals. It's also probably the best time for you to start learning the nuances of the new system to enable you to migrate your extensions and templates to the next generation CMS.

Thanks to Power Windows for the heads up.

Remember those limited edition Neil Peart R30 replica drum kits that were sold last fall for $30,000 each? Well - one of the folks who purchased one of these kits recently emailed Andrew Olson and recounted the experience and his reasons for the purchase along with some pics. Andrew put all this up on his Neil Peart replica kits page for all of us to enjoy. You can check it out here. You may also want to check out this other recent addition to Andrew's replica kits page too.

Due out in January, Fanboys is a film which follows a group of Star Wars-loving geeks in 1998 who travel cross country so that their dying friend's dream of watching The Phantom Menace at Skywalker Ranch before its release can come true. Reader Mike alerted me to several publicity photos of the cast from the film floating around the internet where the character Hutch (played by Dan Fogler) is wearing a Rush t-shirt. You can check out the photo here.

Comedian Adam Carolla has a radio show in Los Angeles and he recently had a Rush-themed contest on his show in order to win Rush tickets called Name that Nicaraguan Tune for Rush Tickets. Adam's personal friend, a Nicaraguan native named Oswaldo, would sing a Rush song in broken English and callers had to guess the name of the song. You can listen to the show here. Thanks to reader M@rio for the heads up.

And finally, reader jittles pointed me to this very positive little review
of Snakes & Arrows over at Melodicrock.com.

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