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various stuff floating around in my head this week...

1. the race
i'm gonna be slightly more bold and shorten my list of folks most likely to win the election. it looks like huckabee and guliani are probably toast. among the gop, mitt won nevada, but mccain won south carolina. and who the hell knows which dem won nevada. anyway... i'm sayin' its gonna be down to these four...

clinton, barack, mccain, romney

2. moving
with massive help from alison and ashby... i got the moving completed this weekend. it is a big relief, and quite an upgrade. and it is super quiet. it will be a longer drive to southside/dowtown, but i'll also have a lot more cash...

3. upcoming shows
i started editing the footage i shot for the through the sparks show this week. and it also looks like wiseblood will be coming out of hiding for a short acoustic set at bottletree on february 1st. this is the first wiseblood show since... the first wiseblood show... which was way back in sept. '06 at artwalk. this show next week will be the first time ashby and i have played a show only as a duo.

we were invited to join the bill and we both figured it was time to say yes. we will be playing again at bottletree for the massive raindrop music festival... and hopefully a brief run of shows in the spring and summer... then ashby and christine are off to england for a year. i think i'm going to play some ambient telecaster stuff along with ashby's acoustic/singing. we will be opening for some atlanta band and mr. jesse payne.


4. tonight on the history channel
my omegaman complex suffers a flare-up. the only thing cooler than being the last man on earth... is to have no people left on earth at all. human extinction is the ultimate fetish. if extinction can be cross processed in our conciousness to be defined as an inadvertant performance art-piece... then mass human extinction surely would be the defining event. fantastic. here's an excerpt of the show from salon.com:

Voice-over: There are estimated to be 400 million dogs in the world, and 300 different breeds. But very few of them are suited to surviving in a life after humans! Cut to fluffy handbag dog with a bow in its hair, looking a little desperate.

Voice-over: The smallest dogs probably won't last a week without us! Cut to an exhausted, limping bulldog, panting and looking around helplessly.

See, when people post letters about how bored and frustrated I must get watching so much TV every day, they really don't consider the sweet, nourishing delights of one-of-a-kind television events like this one. I mean, if exquisitely imagined gems like this don't give you a pure, raw thrill, then you don't have blood flowing through your veins.

Onward: Did you know that rats and mice are very dependent on people? How will they ever survive without our big boxes of untended Oreos? (Here we watch as a bunch of mice turn over some huge boxes of cereal and eat what's inside.) Did you know that, if we were all were vacuumed off the planet by invading aliens, leaving no trace behind, bears and deer might wander freely about the streets of New York City? Did you know that Hoover Dam would keep running normally for a couple years, but then mollusks would clog up its cooling pipes, thereby shutting down the generators?

Next, we see a CGI of the Eiffel Tower collapsing! Ominous chords! The narrator gasps: "Unchecked, nature's most powerful elements reclaim their supremacy on Earth!" And then, my favorite part: "Chicago burns! San Francisco's stately wooden Victorians are now only useful as kindling! And just as it did during the time of the ancients, Rome is burning again!" That's it -- I want a job writing this stuff.

"Five years after people," we're told breathlessly, "the roads of the world are disappearing like a green map that spreads like some relentless monster!" Hmm. What exactly is so monstrous about a bunch of crappy pavement being covered in grass and moss? We're the assholes who paved paradise and put up a parking lot -- shouldn't we be comforted to see bridges falling into the water and tall buildings covered in kudzu and ivy? Wouldn't it represent justice, at long last, if tigers from the zoo were roaming the streets of San Diego?

Ultimately, "Life After People" is a magnificent testament to the immense self-centeredness of the human race. I'm sure all the animals will watch it at their annual "Smell Ya Later, Suckers!" Festival, and they'll have a good laugh and high-five over the sudden disappearance of their clumsy, hairless, self-congratulatory oppressors.

5. clint wells strikes again
this time he has moved from the drum department to keyboards. tight. check it out. i was hoping he could have played with wiseblood next week, but he'll be on tour. dang.


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