To give you a little example of how little I’ve been paying attention lately.

I just came across the logo for the winter Olympics last night.  The games begin in like 10 days and I haven’t even noticed.  I like to watch the Olympics – lots of people younger, healthier and in such better shape than I am, doing things I could never dream of doing.  I like when they play the national anthem when the US wins a gold medal and I like the occasional underdog story.  I just wished you could see more events on the TV coverage rather than so many talking heads and back stories.

But like I said I’ve been busy and hadn’t noticed that they’re coming up soon.  So when I saw the logo for the games tonight I really thought I might be on to something!

The logo for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics seems to have been inspired by the cover art for the 2000 studio album “Test For Echo” by Boneheads all time favorite band RUSH.  Neil Peart is going to be so pissed!  I must do something.

Tell me if you see something similar.

I know – RIGHT?

OK, so I smack myself on the side of the head to try and jar some trivial details as to what I know about the album cover.  I thought for some reason the rock formation was known as a Sisyphus.  It’s actually not – according to Greek legend, Sisyphus was a king of Corinth who was condemned to forever roll a huge stone uphill for some god-forsaken reason, and that stone always rolled down again as soon as he got it to the top of the hill.

The Rush song “Carve Away the Stone” on the Test For Echo album repeats Sisyphus in the chorus.
I thought about it some more and finally recall that it’s an “Inukashuk”, an Inuit word which translates as “taking the place of a man”.  Inukashuk serve as Inuit signposts in the frozen North of Canada.  If you didn’t already know –the band is from Canada.
Turns out lots of Canadians know about Inukashuk.  Neil did write about it in 1996 in a magazine article in relation to the postcard below.

“I was up in Yellowknife last June on a motorcycle trip across the country, and there’s one of those Inukashuk above the town overlooking it, and I was quite taken with it. I bought a postcard almost exactly the image you see on the cover … I just came back with this postcard and I thought of ‘test for echo.’ I thought that’s exactly what these men mean when you’re out in the wilderness … when you’ve been hiking for a few days and you come across one of these things, it’s such an affirmation that there’s life out there. Again the same thing: it’s an echo … and that’s the feeling a traveler in the Arctic would get, that it was a sign of life…” – Neil Peart, “Jam! Showbiz”, Oct. 16, 1996

So it was this personal encounter along one of his motorcycle trips that inspired the album art.  They didn’t actually create the rock formation, it’s always sort of been there.  So the logo for the Winter Olympics is probably not paying homage to my boys Geddy, Alex and Neil as I had originally thought.

Great white north indeed.

It’s been around for many many years.  I should have known that, but didn’t, at least not immediately.  Perhaps the designer of the logo was a RUSH fan – but there’s no impropriety here.

Made me realize my almost protective attitude towards my all time favorite band.  I’ve been a fan since I first saw them at the Nassau Coliseum in 1977 warming up for Blue Oyster Cult.  I’ve seen them in concert 26 times.  Chrissy and I had tenth row center tickets to see them in Montreal a couple of years ago.  That would have been great, but we had to sell the tickets as a friend had inadvertently choosen the same date for her wedding.  We’ll catch their next farewell tour in Toronto, no matter who’s getting married.

We’ve had opportunity to meet Geddy and Alex, been backstage several times and been fortunate to have seen many shows from right up front.   One of my all time favorite memories is taking Junior Miss Giddy to her first RUSH show in ’08.  A father’s infinite proud.  Yes, I do tend to get a bit geeky when it comes to RUSH.

I’ll prognosticate about the genius of Warren Zevon, Miles Davis, William Orbit, Ulrich Schnauss, Radiohead, Neil Young and Pete Ham all day. But the truth is – my band has always been RUSH.  If I actually followed a religion my Gods name would be Neil Peart.

Geek? Bonehead?

Yup.