He was just your average 10-year-old. He liked baseball, puppy dogs and the Playboy collection he found stashed underneath his big brother’s mattress. Yes, Timmy was your everyday happy-go-lucky kid.

Until the day he picked up an unauthorized Ringo Starr & His All Starr Band date from some other Web site.

Now Timmy spends his days undergoing painful physical rehabilitation and enduring excruciating injections to prevent his immune system from rejecting the prosthetic body parts he must learn to work with if he is to grow up to become a productive member of society.

Tour dates are like that sometimes. Sure, they seem harmless enough, but an unauthorized date for acts such as Neil Young or Janet Jackson can cause blindness, bleeding sores and mental deterioration, along with sudden loss of teeth, hair and skin. In this year alone, unauthorized dates for Wide Mouth Mason, Megadeth and King Cobb Steelie have caused untold destruction in this country, and have been indirectly responsible for flood, famine and pestilence in third world nations as well.

Fortunately, your friends at Pollstar.com are looking out for you. We examine every date, no matter if it’s for Honeymoon Suite, Kentucky Headhunters or Beaver Nelson. We check each date for hidden fuses, ticking noises and the likeliness of it being cancelled or postponed. And while it’s not 100 percent effective, we’re still the only Web site that runs each and every date through the contract-carbon analyzer, proven over time to be our best defense against tentative routings.

So the next time you find a big pile of Vince Neil dates on some other Web site, stand clear and call your local tour data disposal squad.

And remember, if the Web page doesn’t say “Pollstar.com” at the top, you just don’t know what you’re getting when you want the latest tour dates for your music today.