Magnificent

U2 Sunday night. Incredible. I'd never seen them live before, and I'd been wanting to see them for quite some time. Everything about the afternoon/evening was excellent. Miss Alison Hay, Katie, Nick and I had a great tailgate session in the parking lot (even if it did cost $40), and had great seats for a great show. The set was crazy, it was like this giant spaceship thing, with tons of lights and a crazy video screen that moved around and expanded and contracted. The set was ridiculously high energy, with Bono, the Edge and Adam Clayton running all over the stage and the bridge/catwalk thing that went out over the audience. Larry Mullen got to move around a little bit too, but the drum set was on a rotating platform, so that was kind of cool. Here's the set list:

09/20/2009 Gillette Stadium - Foxboro, Massachusetts, USA
Breathe, No Line On The Horizon, Get On Your Boots, Magnificent, Mysterious Ways, Beautiful Day / Blackbird (snippet), Elevation, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For / Stand By Me (snippet), Unknown Caller, New Year's Day, Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of, The Unforgettable Fire, City Of Blinding Lights, Vertigo / She Loves You (snippet), I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight, Sunday Bloody Sunday / Rock The Casbah (snippet), MLK, Walk On, One / Amazing Grace (snippet), Where The Streets Have No Name / All You Need Is Love (snippet)
encores: Ultra Violet (Light My Way), With Or Without You, Moment of Surrender

Was super excited they played "City of Blinding Lights", which is probs my favorite U2 song. It was a great mix, especially for a relative U2 newcomer like me who is familiar with most of their new stuff and their hits, and there were some of their other, older songs in there too. All in all, a great experience. I hear they're much better at indoor venues rather than stadiums, and if that's true, I can't imagine what they'd be like at the fleetcenter, because this was pretty awesome.

Not awesome, however, was trying to leave after. I figured that we'd wait an hour or so to get out of the parking lot...we got in the car at 11:45 and pulled into the hotel parking lot in Norwood at 2:45...yep. 3 hours to get out of the parking lot and 7 miles up rt 1. I can't believe that people do that every weekend for Pats games. The traffic I guess was much worse Monday night, 95/128 was backed up for 27 miles trying to get to the show. G-ROSS.

Saturday night Miss Alison Hay and I went and saw The Informant!, the new Steven Soderbergh/Matt Damon flick. I had initially heard mixed reviews, saying that Matt Damon was excellent but the movie itself was kind of blah. I concur with that sentiment. Matt Damon was indeed sensational, possibly giving the 2nd best performance of his career (his best? Good Will Hunting, he should have won an Oscar for that role...but that's another post for another day) as Mark Whitacre the pudgy, executive at the Illinois based Archer Daniels Midland(ADM) in the early 1990s who wound up blowing the whistle on the company’s price-fixing tactics, only after his wife forced him to. For the first 1/2, the movie is fairly straightforward and is basically The Insider meets Erin Brockovich, and has these great inner-monologue voices overs by Damon. The best one by far is about Polar Bears. Just as he's about to bring down ADM, Witacre and the film go in a completely different direction, becoming more and more convoluted, and, quite frankly, difficult to follow, thus making me lose interest. The one saving grace? Marvin Hamlish's great score, harkening back to the cheesy game-show themes of the 60's and 70's. The film had a slick look to it, and it looks like they had a great time making it. Too bad it didn't translate that well on screen. Grade: C

NYC this weekend to see A Steady Rain, Bye Bye Birdie and Memphis. Sox/Yankees series in the Bronx this weekend too, maybe I'll see some players? That would be awesome. Speaking of baseball, New York, and the Yankees, they're the first team to clinch a playoff spot...the NYTimes twitter feed said "Yankees headed back to the post season" as if they were there last year...uh, they weren't. They're probs going to play Detroit in the ALDS, and the Sox will probs play the Angels. They lost their 2nd straight to Kansas last night, hopefully they can bounce back today and tomorrow.

Came across this last night online:

Have I said how excited I am for this?