Picks of the Week

Hmmm, for the most part Week Five went exactly as everyone predicted it would. Michigan and Indiana played a shoot-out that wasn't decided until the very end, Oklahoma beat a Longhorns team in the throes of a down year, Iowa proved Penn State really aren't very good, 'Bama proved that they are. For the most part I did really well, only getting caught with my pants down twice (I misjudged Michigan State's worth, and I missed the Stanford/Oregon toss-up), to bring my total through five weeks to 33 out of 42 (79%).

Week Five proved to indeed be a clarifying week, with many questions being answered, and even more being brought up. Which Big Ten team will beat Ohio State? Will anyone beat Alabama? What's wrong with Texas?

Week Six brings more of the same, with a few hard-hitting matches that will help determine a lot in several of the AQ conferences, especially the SEC, Big Ten, and Pac 10.

So, without further ado, here are my predictions for Week Six.

This is the part of the story where I pretend to bow real low and be humble and stuff

The beautiful peeps at decomP have nominated my short story "The Devil's Courtyard" for Dzanc Books' Best of the Web compilation. For those of you who don't know, this is like the biggest deal in the whole world and pretty much proves I'm the awesomest person ever, etc., etc.

Honestly, though, this is a huuuuuuuge honor, and I'm so proud to be considered for this. With writing, kudos don't come very often, so when they do you sort of have to bask in the radiance of it. Thanks a bunch, decomP. You're the best. We're BFF's foreva, for reals.

Party Crashers

About six months into Noble Three's short but prolific career we decided that it would be cool to set up a small mobile recording studio in Patrick's house and make small one-off recordings to put up on the web in between the official e-single releases. The idea was for these recordings to be aural sketches, off-the-cuff, without too much thought or fuss put into them. Certainly there were plenty of songs that we wanted to give the full Fuson treatment to, but these "sketches" would just be Patrick and me with as few instruments as we could get away with.

Well, it happened that about the third time we got together, to record the song "My Loneliest Year," we ended up screwing around with some keyboards and came up with the one and only Noble Three instrumental. There are no lyrics and the inspiration for it came simply from this really awesome synth patch I found on one of Patrick's keyboards, which lent a ton of ambiance to the recording.

The title comes from the Chuck Palahniuk novel Rant in which young people drive around getting wasted in the hopes of getting in horrible car wrecks. The witty, and somewhat twisted, term for these revelers is "party crashers." For me, I just liked the double meaning and so we offered this relatively throw-away title for this statistical outlier of a song.

We recorded two versions of the song. The first was very loose and shorter and was thrown together almost on the spot. Patrick liked this version better for its spontaneity and verve. I always preferred the second version though because I think it is a more fleshed-out iteration of the concept. There's more going on, IMO. And since it's my blog it is the second version y'all are getting here.

There are no lyrics so the lyrics come courtesy of no one.

Swamp Thing and the Green Movement

Is Swamp Thing the most morally complicated DC Comic book character? Possibly. Here's why.