Saturday's show went well. Follow That Bird were even better in the Carousel's more intimate setting than at Trophy's. The Dialtones are somewhat hard to describe (electro-folk? ambient Childe ballads?), but were wonderful. We had a good time during our set, too.

Last weekend I read David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas while traveling, and I highly recommend it. It's a series of matryoshka first-person narratives, leaping (sometimes mid-sentence) from a 19th-century Pacific sea-voyage to a preening young composer caught up in family intrigue in 1930s Belgium to a 1970s Silkwood-style journalist to an aging foppish British publisher in roughly current times to an enslaved clone awakening to consciousness in a horrible corpocracy in the near future (shades of Never Let Me Go) to a tribal Hawaiian at the end of civilization hundreds of years from now, then back again through all the narratives. Somehow it manages to integrate all the stories, despite the widely disparate styles and scopes, and while I was a bit bored and confused at first, the narrative caught me completely before the first temporal shift.

Last night Mrs. Obscurity and I watched the first episode of S4 of The Wire (thanks, Scott!) , and this one's going to be a motherfucker. There was so much to love about the episode. The show got the mix between spending time with familiar characters and introducing new characters just right. My favorite things about the older characters: Carcetti going bugfuck crazy in a hellish situation of his own devising (and I got the biggest laugh of the episode out of his deputy campaign manager explaining why he wasn't going to vote for Carcetti), Herc missing Carver (and it's clever to have him working for Mayor Royce), Carver's interactions with Bodie, McNulty turning Daniels AND Bunk down, Daniels filling Bunny's shoes, the comparison of the Homeland Security briefing at the Western with the teacher training day, how Prez's introduction to his classroom mirrored his first visit to the Major Crimes Unit, that Snoop more or less used the nail gun appropriately, Kima and Lester's complete duping of their new Lt., Syndor's role as the new Prez, and shit, I could go on and on.

Wire-heads don't often enough emphasize how funny the show is. Hey, folks, it's hilarious.

Emlyn Lewis, I'm calling you out in particular: go rent the dvds, now. You can thank me later.