Tom Petty announced his summer tour today, and it begins with a May 6 date at Raleigh’s Time Warner Cable Pavilion. He’ll be supporting his first studio album in eight years, Mojo. Joe Cocker will open. Presale tickets go on sale on Wednesday (3/3) morning at 10am. Tickets go on sale to the public on Monday, March 8, at 10am.

Joe Ovies at the WRAL SportsFan blog astutely points out today that McDonald’s ad for Canada honoring the hockey Team Canada features crowd shots from none other than…Raleigh. Click on the link, then watch the “Anticipation” ad.

Channel 17 ran an informative crawl during last night’s Olympic broadcast. It regarded cable customers who get to their HD on NBC by literally tuning the TV to 17.1. If these viewers cannot get their TV to tune into the HD version of the Olympics, they should try rescanning their channels. Incidentally, this also applies for those periodically having trouble tuning their TV (not their cable box) to 5.1, 11.1, 50.1, etc.

When the TV runs its new channel scan, it will find the hidden channel to which Time Warner has newly assigned WNCN’s HD channel. (Periodically Time Warner will reassign the actual location in the bandwidth where some channels exist in order to get more efficient transmission. The cable boxes and CableCARDs do a fine job of detecting these new addresses, but QAM tuners, which people use when they tune in to 17.1, need to be manually remapped).

Amos Lee will be playing the Lincoln Theatre on April 6. Tickets are $22 in advance.

WRAL’s site features a section called “Because It Is Friday: show each other some love today”. I don’t know if this icon exactly expresses the sentiment they intended. I know a few Republicans who would say this is the way things are…

That incredible voice from the 2003 season of American Idol is putting on a single concert in Raleigh’s Memorial Auditorium. The concert is at 8pm on March 12 and tickets go on sale to the general public tomorrow at Noon.

Beginning today, WRAL is swapping 2 of their 3 biggest local sports talk acts. Adam Gold and Joe Ovies will move to the afternoon drive-time slot on 99.9FM while Mark & Mike will be taking over the morning drive-time slot on 620am.

It is a very interesting move that says nothing more than 99.9’s coveted afternoon drive-time ratings must have been extremely disappointing. Mark and Mike are pretty knowledgeable about football and hockey, but their talent in the basketball is extremely inappropriate for this market. Adam Gold, on the other hand, is extremely knowledgeable, but is only slightly less annoying than Billy Ray Cyrus.

Three Days Grace, Adelitas Way, and Chevelle will be coming to the RBC Center on Saturday, April 10.

After an abysmal start to the season, the Carolina Hurricanes enter the Olympic Break as the NHL’s hottest team. Is there room to make the playoffs? Let’s see…

The boys are only about 8 points out of being in the conversation. Had they just won 1 game every month, we’d be right about where the team is in the standings most seasons. Perhaps the playoff cutoff will be lower than the typical 93 points, because the current 8th place team is going to have to go 14-3-1 to get to 93.

So maybe the cutoff isn’t 93 this season. With around 20 games to go, and with a playoff-level team winning 60% of the time and, therefore, earning 24 more points, I’m thinking the cutoff will around 87 for the East this season.

In order to get 87 standings points, the Canes will have to get 32 points in the remaining 21 games. So, they will have to close out the season with a 16-5 (76%) record. So really, Rutherford should trade every unrestricted free agent, limit practices, and perhaps have the team meals at the Raleigh Convention Center to assure that this team tanks  and gets at least a decent draft pick for putting the fans through that horrible first third of the season. There sure are some nice draft picks to get this year.