Mathematically speaking...

...there is a thirty percent chance that my drunk-ass will get rained on before I get to the Electric Factory for the Umphrey's McGee show tonight. Math, as we know, is absolute - which is why I'm drinking Southern Comfort.

"Why aren't you driving?" you ask. I never drive to the city. The Electric Factory is near 6th and Callowhill, so I'll take the Speed Line to 8th and Market and start looking for bars. Any old port in the storm.

A full report will be filed tomorrow - but not too early.

I do know this: It won't be "lame", like Police drummer Stewart Copeland called their Vancouver show the other night.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The singer in the Police jumps like a "petulant pansy," the drummer is making a "complete hash," and who knows what the guitarist is doing? "This is unbelievably lame," Copeland wrote of Wednesday's show at the GM Place arena. "We are the mighty Police and we are totally at sea." "The mighty Sting momentarily looks like a petulant pansy instead of the god of rock," Copeland reported. "And so it goes, for song after song," he wrote, with tunes such as "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" and "Don't Stand So Close To Me" reduced to ruin.
"It usually takes about four or five shows in a tour before you get to the disaster gig. But we're The Police so we are a little ahead of schedule," he said.
Fortunately, no fists flew backstage as they did back in the Police's heyday. The threesome fell into each other's arms laughing hysterically, Copeland said.
"Screw it, it's only music. What are you gonna do? But maybe it's time to get out of Vancouver."

Sure, screw it. Meanwhile, the $400 ticket holders have no recourse, when they would probably like to ram a drumstick up your ass or ... at the very least ... squeeze a lemon in your eye.

I can be reasonably sure that the Umphrey's McGee show will not be lame, which is why I don't go in for stadium rock or over-hyped nonsense passing itself off as entertainment. It's also why I don't attend these reunion shows.

Emerson, Lake and Palmer was undoubtedly my favorite band as a youngster. When they re-united I wasn't going anywhere near the Mann Center. I preferred to be alone with my memories of great music. For those too young to remember or those who wished they had gone in the 70s, they have free will. For me, I will not sully the memory of a great band with a money-grab show made for industry, with ticket prices twenty times what we would have paid when the band was actually worth seeing.

The McGee ticket cost me $22, and I would see them twenty times before I'd see those grubbing geezers once. Good luck to you, if you're going.