So I checked the calendar this morning and found out that it's been 2004 for three weeks! How the hell did that happen? Can I blame the Democrats?

It's been three weeks of coping with millions of teeny little problems, which have banded up and presented themselves as a single object of pain, like a Portuguese man o' war. There was also a week of playing the Deadline Dance, refereed by an editor who should be nominated for the Nobel Patience Prize as a result. And the last three days I've been playing host to the meanest goddammed rhinovirus on the planet.

There has been some good, though. I've discovered the secret of getting people to say nice things about you: say something nice about someone else first! After dropping a nice review on the new CD from Ken Layne and the Corvids, fuzzy rays of happy warm puppy rainbows flowed throughout the Internet. Now, Layne himself is calling me a gentleman (fightin' words, you!). And I've even been Instapunk'd by the Professor, who calls me the greatest thing to happen to musical criticism since Lester Bangs was crushed in an industrial sheet metal press.

Wait, he didn't say that. Must be the cough syrup talking again.

Monday's looking good, real good. See you then.