Dave "I was saying boo-urns" Wong organized tickets to the Foo Fighters last Friday. The Shaw Conference Centre is a weird venue. It's huge, but the seats are perpendicular to the stage, with a big space in front of the stage and a big corridor leading back from the stage to the beer garden. My Morning Jacket and Pete Yorn opened for the Foo, but we didn't know what ahead of time and got there just as Pete was finishing his set. Wendy was pretty choked that she missed it.

We noticed a wide variety of people at the concert. There were plenty of general "alternative music" fans, young punks, slightly older ones with well-worn Nirvana t-shirts, and even a couple of the all-dressed-in-black, pale-faced, mopey-looking goth types. It was the old people who grabbed our attention. I saw one lady who I assumed had just driven her kids to the show, but then noticed she was slamming down two rye and Cokes at once. Then there was the sweaty old guy without a shirt. Why is there always one of those?

My last Foo concert was back at UBC, so it seemed appropriate to see them again a few weeks before I head back to school after my long absense.

In anticipation of becoming a poor student again, I've been looking for ways to save money. One obvious expense is my car insurance premiums. I took a driving course ages ago, so I called my agency today on the off chance that I could get any credit for it. The driving course didn't lower my premiums, so I asked about my birthday coming up next month. As it turns out, that puts me in a new age bracket and lowers my premiums by about 40%. So apparently I'm a 40% safer driver just because I'm getting old. One of my colleagues tells me that this sort of age discrimination will probably end soon, thanks to pressure from the media and government about unreasonably high insurance rates.