Carmen and Jay-Z?

Last night, as an early birthday present, my parents took me to the French opera, Carmen. It's one I've always wanted to see, and I was extremely excited to go. So, Saturday night, we make our way to Symphony Hall. I sit down, not really knowing what to expect. The show starts, and like all operas are, they immediately start singing. For those of you who don't know, an opera is basically a non-stop musical. No talking, just singing the entire time. This can be extremely boring to some people, like Simon who saw it a night before me, and told me how he "...fell asleep like 100 times."

I love opera though, thanks to my parents who introduced me to it at a young age. From the beginning I thought that the music and performances from the entire cast was beautiful. Sadly, tonight the 21st of November is the last day for everyone to see it, so I can't exactly recommend for you to go see it.

Afterward, we went to a really good diner in the middle of downtown Phoenix, and I heard a song that resembled the beat to the Rihanna hit, Umbrella. It got me thinking, and, ah yes, this was the original song that Jay-Z stole the beat from. Then, Umbrella was the next song! Everyone's heard of the popular beat stealers like Vanilla Ice and David Bowie, but there are other lesser known ones like Shut Up and Let Me Go By The Ting-Tings and Take Me Out By Franz Ferdinand. Moral of the story is, listen out for sampling from other bands. Every band has done it at least once, if not with every song, like the Black Eyed Peas.

On a less, enticing point, I have a few new pages for you to check out as well.

I started a blog fan page for all the people who read and enjoy my blog. It's very simple. Just press the like button if you have a facebook. That's all I'm asking. You can handle it. The link for that is right here:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Joeys-Blog-Page/113630322038018?v=wall

Also, I've been keeping up with my twitter page as much as I want to, so, there's a link for that as well. If you have a twitter, please follow me:

http://twitter.com/joey123mo

So yes, there's that. But please, do me, and yourself a favor. If you don't have a facebook, don't try and like the page, it's not going to work too well. Same goes for twitter. But other than that, check them both out.

Thanks! :)