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Rocknation

Rocknation's Journal
Rocknation's Journal
December 18, 2014

Terri Schiavo was not persistently vegetative: she was as dead as a dinosaur.



...The blue areas are remaining brain tissue but most of the scan shows black areas which are essentially fluid (cerebrospinal fluid). The normal body reaction to irreversibly damaged tissue is to replace it with fluid and this is clearly what has happened after Mrs. Schiavo suffered severe anoxic damage to her cerebral cortex. Most of what remains of her brain is essentially a fluid filled sac surrounded by a thin shell of brain tissue rather then the solid structure we normally associate with a brain...


At the time, Terri Schiavo was neither persisting, vegetating nor pining for her native Florida Everglades; she had passed on. She was no more; she had ceased to be. She had expired and gone to meet her maker: Terri was late. She was a stiff, bereft of life and resting in peace. If she hadn't been impaled by feeding tubes, she'd be pushing up the daisies. Her metabolic processes were history; she was off the twig. She had kicked the bucket, shuffled off her mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible -- " target="_blank">SHE WAS AN EX-TERRI!


rocktivity
December 8, 2014

For me, that's only the SECOND best swimmer's reaction ever

Summer Sanders once thought she'd finished so far out of the money she didn't even look at the leaderboard as she held on to the edge of the pool. The camera stayed on her as she caught her breath and finally started looking for her name -- on the lower part of the board. You could see her confusion mounting: Had she been disqualified? Had she simply skipped over her name? But she finally looked all the way up, and her freakout was epic! "I thought I'd finished fourth," she explained afterward.

Congrats, Alia!


rocktivity

December 3, 2014

DING DING DING! Rocktivity, you're our grand prize winner!!!!

"Disintermediating the labels" -- is that the legal term for "We are no longer ON a record label because our last album proved that Queensryche minus Tate equals zero, so we've gone into desperation mode"?

I was wrong about that. But I wasn't wrong about this:

...(S)eeing as (new singer) Todd (Le Torre) won't be getting anything out of the holding company, is it unreasonable to conclude that "generating" HIS income will depend on the crowdfunding?


I've dug up original singer Geoff Tate's side of the story:

I think it really began around February of (2012)...about moving our merchandising to a third party. We had control over our own merchandising company for years and years and we ran it ourselves. It's a very successful entity, and the other three guys wanted to...hand it over to somebody else and pay them more money to operate it...Our manager found another company that would do it for considerably less...

(W)e had a gig in Sao Paolo, and before the show we had a meeting...They said that they weren't planning on replacing me, but they had just fired our manager, our office assistant and one of our guitar techs, who all happened to be my family members...They had worked for us for ten years...

Of the 144 songs that Queensryche has released, I've written 116...I'm a 25 percent holder in our companies... (They want to) cut me out...split (my) 25 percent...and hire some young guy that's gonna work for a weekly wage...


And this from Queensryche's label Century Media:

...Eddie Jackson, Scott Rockenfield and Michael Wilton have successfully agreed to...buy out their former lead singer's share of the Queensrÿche corporation while allowing him the ability to be the only one to perform Operation: Mindcrime and Operation: Mindcrime II in their entirety.

(Tate)...can only refer to himself as the "Original Lead Singer of Queensrÿche or "Formerly of Queensrÿche" for a period of two years...(after which)...he can(not) mention Queensrÿche at all...As of September 1 (2014), there will be only one Queensrÿche entity (who) will continue to perform selections from their entire musical catalog including songs from Operation: Mindcrime...

But if they still have a record deal, WHY are the remaining members of Queensryche trying to raise $2 million AND doing crowdfunding? Proof yet again that the simplest explanation tends to be the right one: Buying out Tate most likely included giving him the rights to most if not all of their entire back catalog -- and they are just plain flat broke!

If (what's left of) Queensryche no longer have either publishing income or the bandmembers who generated that income, that leaves the band's name as their sole asset (which in turn makes their eliminating their newest members from the holding company extra inexcusable). Tate, meanwhile, has already signed a record deal, putting his ex-esteemed colleagues just one Operation Mindcrime Live album away from being the world's best Queensryche tribute band.

Detection of desperation mode accomplished: I love the smell of vindication in the morning.


rocktivity
December 2, 2014

Queenryche "missed" when they "divested" themselves of their most valuable "assets."

You're absolutely right about it being so much harder to be a rookie non-Top-40 act these days, and for the need for a new paradigm. The problem with Queensryche's paradigm is that without singer Geoff Tate (and original lead guitarist/co-composer Chris DeGarmo), it comes across more like something that the Kramer character on the Seinfeld show would have come up with. Anything you invest in is supposed to have inherent growth potential -- where is Queensryche's?

If a Bon Jovi or a Rolling Stones or a Judas Priest were doing this because they had lost their record deals, didn't want to invest their own money, and most important, still had their most profitable members, this career move would be intelligible, at least: investing in those bands would be a gamble worth taking.


rocktivity

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