Mini review of Wednesday's Minneapolis gig

Everyone here is already an Eddie fan, so I won't go into the 'OMG he's great, you really should go if you can' stuff here. Suffice it to say, he was terrific and seemed to be in a good mood and having an 'on' night. Props to my fellow Minneapolitans for not shouting out too much stuff or using flash cameras too much (there was a little of both, but it didn't get obnoxious) and for being a warm, attentive audience.

How he looked
I've heard people say that Eddie is 'OMG so gorgeous in person, cameras don't do him justice', etc. I have to say I disagree. He looked good, but pretty much exactly the way he looks in photos, except about 5-10 pounds thinner. He wore the tour uniform of the swallow-tailed tux jacket and jeans, with a magenta and white striped button down shirt. I think there was some eyeliner, but it wasn't raccoon-y.

What he talked about
As you probably know, the material morphs and changes from night to night. I didn't avoid any 'spoilers' before seeing him live. I read blogs and reviews, watched and listened to clips as they were available etc. So, if you're keeping score at home....

He covered these topics that I've heard him do in recent shows, though sometimes the material was tweaked a bit:
Macs vs. PCs, opera, Wikipedia (he got his iPhone out at one point, but just because he got a call, not to look anything up. We were a little WTF-ish when it looked like he might take a call in the middle of the gig. He didn't .He just switched it off and laughed about having a random buzzing coming from his back pocket), God over-using the 'make volcanoes' button at the beginning of the world, dinosaurs/monsters, dinos going to church, Noah, hunter-gatherers, the Stone Age, the Agrarian Age, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, the shortcomings of using Latin in military situations particularly if you're being attacked with elephants, giraffes and tigers, cows and their four stomachs, weavers and journalists from the Bible, assassins and hashish, impatient badgers harassing God for food during the Creation, Spartans and their warrior sheep, the appendix, Darwin/evolution, Moses, the ten commandments with particular attention to the role of oxen, his ideas about the European Space Agency.

Stuff I hadn't heard about before the show
Minneapolis: the city that's impossible for dyslexics to spell!
Why you should run towards your grandchildren as soon as they're born
What God should have written about the Earth at the beginning of the Bible
A suggestion about how to enjoy the rotation of the Earth involving a bench and an imitation of a cowboy
The Puritans' crimes against fashion, and why God isn't married
The optimum circumstances for eating breakfast cereal
Shirley Temple's film about the Battle of Thermopylae, when she was trying to change her image

My personal favorite bits: opera singers who 'sing as though someone is shaking them', Spartan sheep who have seen the film Gladiator a few too many times, why farmers keep animals, and  'infinitatus soldatus? mathematicallus im-fucking-possibilatum!'

Ah, good times...good times.

Oh, and since I was the person who asked about merch at the beginning of the tour, I should add that there are child-sized t-shirts that say "Covered in Bees", if you have Eddie-loving hipster children in your life. They're red with black old-fashioned lettering and, of course, bees. They were selling for $20.