As you guys will have read from our press release, 'the best of' is to help introduce new friends into the world of Maiden. We are not trying to sell this to the legions of our well valued Maiden supporters who probably already have these 'tracks' (and no doubt the entire collection of albums!).

Hotel room Santa Monica LA
Time: 7 pm. Sunday 17th 2008

Well, well, well, here we are then. After what seemed to be an eternity in the air we have finally arrived in LA from Tokyo!!!!
WOW what a 'Kin blast I had there I can tell you.

EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW IN TIME!

IRON MAIDEN'S BEST OF EIGHTIES ALBUM HERALDS A DOWNLOAD REVOLUTION - MAY 12TH

60 MILLION IN BRAZIL SEE MAIDEN ON NATIONAL TV AS SOMEWHERE BACK IN TIME TOUR ROLLS THROUGH THE STADIUMS OF SOUTH AMERICA

BRUCE DICKINSON 'CHEMICAL WEDDING' FILM LAUNCH @ CANNES FILM FESTIVAL - MAY 17

MORE STANDING TICKETS MADE AVAILABLE FOR TWICKENHAM STADIUM -- JULY 5TH

ROD'S DIARY FEB 18 -- NON DAY IN LA

It was always going to be a quiet day. Got up feeling at least rested and a little better though still not wise to eat yet. But didn't feel like it anyway - when you have these stomach bugs your body doesn't feel hungry as it wants to kill the bug and if you eat then you just feed it. I have had similar on bike rides in Kenya and late last year in Peru and have ridden days on just water and salts. After a couple of days you start to feel very aware as you are detoxing! Also it's a great way to lose weight (especially as no alcohol too) which has to be good on the road where its quite tough to keep any personal discipline. The band get to work out and sweat on stage but I get to be tied to a laptop. I try to get to the gym but haven't made it since India. You can always make time irrespective of how busy you are but when you are tired and jet lagged as we have been pretty well since we started with the thousands of miles we have travelled, its quite tough to make yourself. So maybe this bug will be a blessing in disguise, who knows!

In response to huge fan demand for standing tickets for the band's first UK stadium appearance at London's Twickenham Stadium on Saturday 5th July, with special guests Avenged Sevenfold and Within Temptation, promoters Live Nation have arranged for some additional standing tickets to be made available.

ROD'S DIARY FEB 17 -- THE 48 HOUR BIRTHDAY

Today we embark on the final journey which includes a fuel stop. Five and a half hours to Anchorage, fuel stop, four and a half hours to LA. Estimated 11 hour journey. We shall see.

It's my birthday today and as we cross the international date line I will get a 48 hour one. However not being too partial to the aging process I tend to avoid birthdays and celebrated it prematurely with Kathy and the kids before we left. The kids got me a new i-pod engraved "to dad" and put on it a load of family photos to keep me company and proudly show to friends and also loaded on many of my favourite albums. Nice thought!!
So I didn't say a word about this and thankfully except for a couple of isolated comments (Nicko, cos he is glad I am catching up!!) I seemed to be getting away with it. On the first leg it was the usual, get the laptop out and take care of emails to outbox and diary of barrier reef including choosing the photos which was fun as loads of good fishy shots!

According to a posting on Blaze's official myspace, the album due in late May will be called:

ROD'S DIARY FEB 16 -- TOKYO SHOW

Got up 9-ish to deal with some emails then back to bed til about 1pm -- feeling the flight and the night a bit. As I think I said before in Japan we go on stage very early, 5.50 pm in fact, so I left for the venue at about 2 as there were things I had to do.

Useful as it is, anyone who's ever submitted school work based on what they found on Wikipedia surely knows that it's not always entirely factual.

Flight left Cairns at 9.25 am for Narita Tokyo. Not too painful at the airport as Cairns is fairly quiet and the flight was uneventful -- caught up on some previous diaries and slotted a load of offline mail into the outbox to get off on arrival at the Tokyo Hotel. Then watched some TV and came across a very interesting film documentary -- it was already on so don't know the title -- but it was about the discovery in a place about halfway between Bethlehem and Jerusalem of a tomb potentially containing the "bone boxes" (don't know how to spell Jewish name of these) which the movie makers/investigators/archaeologists claimed could be those of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, his brothers and...