Well! A lot's been happening! I got to see Gunpowder Gelatine twice in under six months, which is awesome! I'm still waiting for a hat that I ordered from the QOL store at the end of July (apparently issues with the manufacturers?), which is decidedly not awesome I finally decided to ask for a refund because that's way too long to wait for something. But my collection is being slowly built and re-built! For reasons I won't get into, I'm trying to come to terms with the very real possibility that I'll never get my stuff back from IL. In some ways, it's been... maybe a bit cathartic? For instance, I got a cassette copy of the US Greatest Hits off of ebay! I don't have a tape player anymore, but I'm still excited about it because I feel a lot less guilty for having to throw out my old copy when I was a kid. And that one didn't even have a case to it, which definitely did not help keep the tape itself protected. I also suspect that this reclaimed copy doesn't have a bit of Under Pressure recorded over because someone's brother was being a fucking asshole and wanted to prove that music tapes could be recorded over and didn't want to use literally any of the other dozens of tapes their parents never listened to anymore.
... Yeah.
But anyway! It sits on my shelf now, lovingly protected from harm. Maybe I'll start trying to collect all the cassette copies of albums...
I also got some VHS tapes! I've reclaimed Classic Queen, Champions Of The World, and Magic Years vol. 2 so far. I guess I could technically say the same for We Will Rock You, but this copy is the 1992 re-release. It feels nice to have all three "proper" tapes of the Magic Years series -which is not to say that I'm not appreciative of my taped copies of vols. 1 and 3 that my friend Jen made for me! And for the first time, I have a VHS copy of Live In Budapest, which is really exciting. It's been my dream for many years to own all their VHS releases.
And then in early September, I bought a red military belt and an inexpensive microphone stand so I could dress like Freddie on his birthday. Hopefully I'll eventually find the Adidas with the red stripes (has anyone else noticed that Adidas' shoes are fucking ugly as sin these days?)
You'll notice that my Magic Tour box set is on top of my shelf and blocking one of my posters. My cat kept trying to scratch off the stickers and I'm waiting to re-purpose my current TV stand as a cat-proof display.
I had time to kill yesterday before going to my friend's house for lunch, so I stopped in Newbury Comics in Harvard Square to poke around. As soon as I walked in, I heard Jailhouse Rock and it was very clearly Queen. I talked to who I'm presuming was the floor manager and said that that was a badass pick, and we chatted about Queen for a couple minutes. Then I went to look through their music stuff just to see what was there, and found that Freddie had his own CD section!
This kind of thing never happens in the US, so it's kind of huge for me. Anyway, I looked through Queen's CD section, and found the two-disc set of Live At The Rainbow '74. It took everything I had not to buy it because I'm going to order the Super Deluxe box set. Because if I can make that work, why not?
But Newbury Comics having the CD set marked down from $19.99 did not help matters. I had to remind myself that the Deluxe box set comes with other goodies that I want. And the small bit I heard over the stereo sounded amazing!
I'm also looking so intensely forward to Queen Forever that it's probably a bit concerning to others!
