Picture 1: Diving in!
Picture 2: Clumsy Canine wants to join but hesitates and slowly glides in anyway.
Picture 3: Clumsy Canine has to be rescued from the slippery cliffs.
Picture 4: Clumsy Canine resting on the non-slippery lawn.

Last show was cool, Houston really rocked! In the final song (which, of course, is "Hearts On Fire") we brought up the young thrash band Havok to sing with us onstage. They singer, David, has incorporated the high-pitched screams of early Tom Araya and had ended their set with a Slayer double feature in "Post Mortem" and "Raining Blood". Those two are always a guaranteed Thumbs Up in my book! Fans of thrash metal should definitely check them out, their album "Burn" is out on Candelight Records now and you can find music samples at myspace.com/havok. Live, it was hard to not notice the impact Slayer has had on them, but the album also has lots of Anthrax influences mixed in with the Havok sound. We all liked a lot!

Everyone was a little anxious to get on our way home, so the mood was pretty light when we had breakfast at Jack In The Box outside the airport. They have the best Oreo shakes there, they are fantastic!

That's it, North American tour's over for now. Summary: not as much people everywhere as we'd like, but still ok. And the level of dedication, commitment and intensity rivals that of any other nation on earth. Bodes well for the future, I'd say. Thanks for making this tour so memorable and successful for us, I promise it won't take us another five years to come back!

Woke up at five, thinking there was something wrong with the pizza slice I had three hours ago. It only got worse, and by eight I was in full blown food poisoning mode. Probably brought on by the Caesar sallad I had before the pizza. Spent the day miserably locked up in my bunk, where even the slightest move to any side provoked a severe nausea attack. Thank god for the in-bunk fan, otherwise there would have been puke all over! I could barely move all day, and we still had a show to do at night. Luckily, it was a very late one - we went on stage after midninght - so I had time to recover enough that I could sit up for more than ten seconds at a time. Bamyl Koffein saved this gig for me, don't think I would have made it otherwise. Went ok under the circumstances, but I apologize to the fans in Austin: you will get double energy next time, I promise!

We played in Denver yesterday, and spent a day getting there and a day going back south. Kinda redundant for just the one gig, but the Colorado audience more than made up for the long trip! Today we woke up in Amarillo, TX, for another day off. The bus was parked at a hotel, which was close to a couple of restaurants, and we chose Mr. Lin's Buffet, which had to be the largest buffet I have ever seen! They had all kinds of food, but mostly chinese, and even some sushi. Everything was all you can eat for $7.99! Tasted pretty ok too, and when we all had our fill we had a band meeting planning the next recording. It will still be almost a year away, but time passes quickly and it's better to be prepared.

Joacim and Pontus went back to the hotel to shower, while the rest of us continued across the freeway to Target and Best Buy. They had the iPad on display, it was released two days ago here. Pretty cool stuff, but I was disappointed that it wasn't a small computer but instead a large iPhone. I'll probably get one anyway, haha.

After purchasing a hard drive (Anders), a couple of movies (Fredrik) and some stand-up comedy DVD's (me) we started back. On the way was a Hooter's, and we spontaneously went in there for "just one beer". You know how that goes, and we ended up having a fantastic evening!

I e-mailed a pic of us drinking out of those gianormous tankards to Joacim, and sure enough, smelling a party they joined us.

Anders was goofing off with a small bowl of ranch dressing, which is something I cannot for the life of me understand why it doesn't exist in Europe. It's a great tasting sallad dressing made of mayonaise, herbs and salt and pepper. Or something, I'm no chef. I just know it tastes great.

Sufficiently boozed, we stumbled across the eight-lane freeway, something which we only hours ago had joked about doing. Goes to show what alcohol does to your sense of judgement, I guess. We made it safely across and back to the bus, feeling like we had just run across the street in Frogger.

We're on our way to Denver, having a day off in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We've had great weather on almost the entire tour, with just two or three days of rain. and this was no exception. Anders and I woke up earlier than the others, so we went in search for food. We found the positively ancient Maloney's Tavern, established already in 1991. Then we wandered around for a while and located a movie theatre, where we made the capital mistake of choosing Clash of the Titans as our early afternoon feature. It was absolutely atrocious, and I was very close to walking out in the middle of it. What made things worse was the fact that this was a 3D version of a movie clearly made for 3D, which made for several long sequences where we were supposed to enjoy the #D effects but without them simply looked cheesy, Avoid at all costs!

Back at the bus, the others had stirred and were going to a mall. Anders and I didn't feel like going right away, so we went to the shower room to do just that. Then we went back to the cinema to check which other movie we could see. Turned out Green Zone began at 10:20 pm, so we went for pizza before. I promised to eat a couple of slices, but I lied and had only one. Anders finished the rest on his own, and got a "Well done!" from the waitress.

Green Zone was a movie with Matt Damon from the makers of The Bourne series, and was a lot better than Clash of the Titans. Still not great, though, and I left wishing we had seen the new Ben Stiller flick Greenberg instead. Coincidentally, we were again all alone in the theatre, and this time for the duration of the movie. On a Saturday night! We speculated it might have to do with the content of the movie, which displayed the United States as forging evidence of WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) in Iraq so they could invade it and take the oil. There is some truth to that, of course, and the truth sometimes hurts.

We were in Phoenix today, and my brother lives here with his family. He came to pick me up so I could hang out with them all day, it was fantastic! I don't get to see them very often since they live over here, so I cherished every moment.

After the show, we went to get a late night snack. The first diner we went to was closed, so we continued on to eventually find an Waffle House! When we toured with Death twelve years ago, we spent many a night at the WH, eating their blueberry waffles and listening to the country songs on the jukebox, all of them centered around how great WH is. This was very nostalgic for us, and I am so happy we finally got to go back! Turns out Jez (tour manager) and Fish (backliner) also has a passion for the place, so this was one happy bunch of touring people!

The Galaxy in Santa Ana is not far from where Samwise lives, so he and his wife Christy came down to watch another show and hang out. Sam has done every cover on every release since the "Hearts On Fire" single in 2002, so he is very important to us. Great artist who works at Blizzard Entertainment, the guys who brought us World of Warcraft and the Starcraft series, among others. Sam rules on so many levels, and we owe him a lot.

Lazy morning went into afternoon for most of us, and it was three o'clock before we finally made it to Beverly Center, an up-scale and very posh shopping mall in Beverly Hills. A pair of Diesel jeans just like the ones I was wearing cost $250 (that's €185)! I thought they were expensive in Sweden and was hoping to make a bargain over here, but this was ridiculous.

In the evening, we went to the Laugh Factory to watch host Kevin Nealon bring on four stand-up comedians in what, quite literallly, was called New Material. They all had to come up with brand new jokes just for tonight, and after their 7-8-minute set Kevin interviewed them for a while. Among the comics performing was Chris Rock's brother Tony Rock, obviously the highlight of the evening. I laughed so hard I cried, and he even singled out us long-hairs to set up a joke.

Joacim wasn't feeling well, so he went back to the hotel to rest while Fredrik and I continued on to the Rainbow for one final visit. Both Anders and Joacim has lived in LA and they claim that the pizza at the Rainbow is something to die for, so we obviously had to try it. Look at the size of that thing! But we finished more or less all of it; Fredrik said before we ordered that he could eat a minuscule slice and nothing else, but when we were done, that's all he left! I had my three slices and it was heavenly!

On the way back we came across another memorable sign, and this time it was for the wording. Wouldn't you agree that "extreme caution" should only be used in extreme circumstances? A side walk reconstructing can hardly be described as extreme, can it?

Since it was Fredrik's first time in LA and we had two days off, we took him to Hollywood Boulevard just to have done that.

We also went to LA Ink, which was closed, and walked by several strip clubs that one way or another were linked to Mötley Crüe. Crazy Girls, for example, was the site of the shooting of the "Girls, Girls, Girls" music video.

In the evening, we went back to the House of Blues to watch Steel Dragon, an so-called hair metal band that certainly know what they are doing but don't dare admit to take it seriously and therefore come off as they have no soul or spirit at all. It works well over here in LA, apparently, but I think they will have a hard time getting it over at the Sweden Rock Festival in June. I like to think Scandinavians (and Europeans too) have more integrity than being fooled by the stereotyping. Having said that, what Steel Panther do they are really good at, and a great live act! We got to hang out with Ritchie Kotzen for a while, which Fredrik especially thought was very cool.

Immediately upon returning from the training session, we showered and then it was time for some interviews. After that, I went to eat at the Saddle Ranch, which would prove to be a place we kept returning to over the next couple of days. Dinner was followed by a meeting with our management, North American booker and US record label, and then, finally, I got to shut my eyes for a second.

House of Blues on Sunset and a late gig tonight, the last with Powerglove. Thanks for this time, guys, good luck on the next tour! They will be replaced by another young band, Havok, from now on. They play some sort of deathrash, high-speed metal which sounds promising. Fredrik has never been in LA before, so we simply HAD to get him to the Rainbow before they closed. Super-fast showers and we were off, we had at least an hour before it closed, haha. There was quite a party there, being Saturday and all, so we had a very good time! Everything closes at 2 am here, apparently (except strip clubs, and they kinda suck, and not in a good way), so we brought the party back to the bus. Mikkey Dee was here working on a new Motörhead album, ex-Dimmu Borgir keyboard player Mystiis and his girlfriend, Samwise (responsible for all HF cover art) and his wife and Pontus' friend Howie (who replaced him in Talisman years ago) were among the people who populated our extremely slantedly parked bus. It was hard enough to walk through when you were sober, nigh on impossible to do it without holding the ceiling when under the influence.