The tour is over! Long live the tour! My word on this tour was "horsehockey," as in "I am not putting up with this - take your horsehockey elsewhere." It never really caught on. What was a success, however, was when I started singing one of Murder by Death's songs that went "Women and gin/women and gin/both go together like the devil and sin" as "Women and kids/women and kids/what are we gonna do with all these women and kids?" (Or, alternately ending it with "get in that boat you women and kids!") It was our personal, interband joke until Billy and Zach got drunk and told them all about. Good thing they liked it too, and for the last week of tour we screamed out "Women and Kids!" between every song. Everytime it got to that line in the song, Adam would start to smile because he said he was trying not to fuck it up after we put it in his head. GAMES PEOPLE PLAY!


Speaking of which - Wizard Staff. Much has made about this, and a couple of our friends already played a round of this before we even got home. I covered the basic rules below, and here's an idea of what it looks like.

Here's a good example of Dagan, Murder by Death's drummer, standing next to his impressive staff. This is probably Level 13 or 14. (He made it to Level 17...and he's 5'8") Building the staff provides an incredible feeling of accomplishment, but the real fun is trying to drink out of it.

This is Level 14 Bilbo. After awhile, unless you're a good taper like Billy, you need someone to help you drink, or you have to stand on something.

Or you get entirely triumphant about it and just swill like a God.

Here's Zach, Zalamia and Billy with their completed staffs near the end of the night. (You can tell by Billy's face.) All three reached Level 14 before the party petered out, and all three claimed they could have gone awhile further. (I don't doubt this.) Rod and I made it to Level 7 and there's some absolutely pathetic footage of me trying to shotgun a beer. Dagan finished as the Grand Wizard and everyone had a serious case of the D.A.D.S. in a Dunkin' Donuts bathroom the next day.

With that said, I leave you with four things:

1) The new Beyonce song, "All the Single Ladies," has literally blown my fucking mind. I am in love with this song - it's the most creative shit I've heard in ages. The production is fantastically weird for a Top 40 track, with a rhythm track built around the clicks of a camera shutter and that really awesome droning keyboard swell on the choruses. (The way the bridge snaps back into the chorus at the end is pretty rad too.) And goddamn can they dance their asses off. And Big Ups Hova for locking that shit down...

2) "Couch Racing Accident." (Don't worry - everyone survived.) You really ought to watch this three times in a row, focusing on a different one of the riders on each viewing. I recommend starting with the guy on the far right and trying to count how many flips he does. Or try and estimate what continent his shoe landed on when it flies off his foot at :43.

3) Best four seconds you'll spend this minute.

4) Instead of doing all this blogging, I really ought to be prepping for the Gettysburg Tour Guide test that I signed up for this Saturday. I took it once before, when I was 17, and missed the first cut by a couple of questions. This is more a personal challenge that any sort of potential employment since I'm probably not going to want to spend most of my summer in Gettysburg; plus, out of 300 people registered to take the test, they're only allowing the top 20 scorers to move on in the process. But also let this put to rest any doubts that I am a gigantic fucking nerd.

(And on a side note, I would love to find time to write about the three years I did Civil War Re-enacting in high school. Some of it is as insane as you might imagine.)