Snow Patrol Winter Tour 2009 - The Wiltern, Los Angeles, 10-09
Snow Patrol is one of the fastest growing brands in rock music today. A few days before they came on at The Wiltern, they opened for U2 at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. They’re big and getting bigger. I had seen them before, about 3-4 years ago at The Hollywood Bowl. That concert was an awakening. I had never heard of Snow Patrol before that night. Sitting a level up from the right side of the stage, I didn’t realize I was witnessing one of the best and unique concerts I’ll see. Snow Patrol at the time was young and not well known. Their music had just been introduced to America (from Belfast and Scotland). Their music was excellent, the sound tight, the production pure Hollywood. The rapport established with the crowd at The Hollywood Bowl was phenomenal. Just alot of bantering and funny stories coming from a shy kid and lead singer named Gary Lightbody who seemed awestruck and giddy that he was getting paid to sing his songs. One read of their early struggles and it was no wonder. Combining the acoustics of The Hollywood Bowl made this a night I would never forget.
While I enjoy The Wiltern and will always pay to see a performer I enjoy, its acoustics are not on par with The Orpheum and needless to say, The Hollywood Bowl. And, unfortunately, the boys in Snow Patrol have grown up. They’re not as silly or awestruck so the luster has sort of worn off. However, and thankfully, their music survives because of its brilliant composing, truthful beat, hopeful, spiritual and retrospective lyrics, group harmony and genuineness. The production level did not approximate that of the Hollywood Bowl but it was still Snow Patrol and it was still magnificent.
Snow Patrol Playlist and Song List – The Wiltern, Los Angeles (partial)
Chasing Cars
Run
Chocolate
Hands Open
Open Your Eyes
Grazed Knees
Set The Fire To The Third Bar
Shut Your Eyes
How To Be Dead
Wow
Gleaming Auction
Whatever’s Left
Spitting Games
Ways & Means
Tiny Little Fractures
Somewhere A Clock Is Ticking
Same
Make This Go On Forever
Headlights On Dark Roads
The Finish Line
You’re All I Have
If There’s A Rocket Tie Me To It
Take Back The City
The Lightning Strike
Current Snow Patrol Members
Gary Lightbody – lead vocals, rhythm guitar, piano
Back in May, 2009, we talked about the Breville Espresso Machine, the 800ESXL model that is a die-cast steel espresso maker machine. We liked that it had very few movable parts and that it was made of steel. We hoped that it would last longer than the Krups plastic model that had lasted about 2 years. Here we are about 1/2 year later and it still functions well and produces marvelous cups of espresso. It is noisy though so if you don’t want to wake the others try brewing your golden goodness in the cellar or with the room doors closed.
This brings us to wallets. We like things that make life easier and better. The WalletBe men’s and women’s wallet product line is a smarter and smaller design (and unique – we’ve found that there are many that try to copy them but none that produce the quality and durability) that really does make life easier. WalletBe wallets – despite its logo insinuation is located in Sacramento, California – are manufactured with genuine leather (you can smell it when you open the gift box), are ridiculously priced (where else can you get genuine leather, designer-type wallets for less than $30?), and the story behind the founding of the company is a true American success story that proves anyone with a good idea and persistence can make it.
A little less than 10 years ago, Jim Dimataris stumbled upon an ad that was promoting QVC’s annual product “try-out” where anyone from the United States or from around the world could come to Minneapolis to demonstrate their products. If QVC liked them, they would sell them on their cable TV show. Jim had just designed and manufactured a unique men’s wallet that was slimmer and more compact than the average men’s billfold wallet. In fact, it was not a billfold at all. It didn’t open! It was a smarter design in that essential items could be located without having to flip open and thumb through the non-essentials. The idea was to minimize the amount of actions needed to retrieve a credit card, license or receipt.
The front pocket wallet was still capable of holding a good amount of credit cards and pictures. The inner (or outer) identification window prominently displayed the license which meant that there was no fussing, not even a flip over, needed to display or access the license. As important, the front pocket wallet design did not create those unattractive impressions in shirt pocekts or in the back pockets of jeans or slacks. And for the money we spend on jeans today, saving on the wear and tear of jeans meant men could wear them longer and save more money.
Jim’s front pocket wallet was selected (with 7 other products) from a pool of hundreds of product contestants by QVC for retailing over their cable TV programs. The story gets better, and riskier. He had to basically mortgage his home to gain the financing to produce the amount of wallets that QVC wanted. There was no guarantee that they would sell and QVC was not in the business of buying wallets. If they didn’t sell, Jim lost his home. If they did, he lived for another day.
Thankfully, Jim’s risk and vision paid off. The wallets sold on QVC, by the thousands.
Today, 1 in 300 Americans now own a WalletBe wallet. He has a great online wallet store at WalletBe.com where he annually sells hundreds of thousands of his wallets to men and women of all ages across North America, Europe, Asia and beyond. Given his vision, Jim has expanded his product lines carefully yet aggressively. Today, he offers about 20 different categories of wallets, all made of genuine leather – some from the Tuscany mountains of Italy, in addition to laptop sleeves, folding reading glasses, business card holders, and travel money belts.
WalletBe’s mission is to help people solve the daily inconveniences of life by designing and manufacturing fashion accessories that are smaller and smarter. We’ve owned many of his wallets for men and women over the years. None have disappointed; none are in disrepair; all are attractive and all have made our lives easier – well, at least anything that has to do with the things that we put into our wallets or travel money belts.
