Telepathe – So Fine

Micron63 – Death Is Colder Than Love

Ipso Facto – Six & Three Quarters

The Make-Up – Save Yourself (Smokin’ Aces Version)

Soulside – Baby

Daniel Frucking Farraday. He quickly became one of my favorite characters and in last night’s episode it was reveal upon reveal for that ass. Daniel is recognized by Ellie, one of the hostiles who bring Daniel, Charlotte, and Miles back to base camp – file Ellie under “Boner Shorts.” The big theory around the office this morning was that Ellie is Daniel’s mother. Ellie and Daniel recognize each other, is Daniel meeting his own mother in the past? What if they bang? Is Daniel his own fath-nevermind…Eloise was the name of Daniel’s lab rat in Oxford, before he fried her brain trying to send her through time. Eloise/Ellie, am I right?..Daniel admits his love for Charlotte, but we all knew that after last week. He seems to know exactly what is happening to Charlotte, but in true Daniel fashion he’s clamming up and won’t tell her what he knows. Lying to the one you love is not cool in my book, even if she is an annoying secondary character…Apparently Daniel knows about more than just time travel and ties from Express. You know, hydrogen bombs, nuclear weapons, all that  head-between-your-legs steez. Jughead, the resident H-bomb, eventually gets “buried.” This could be what is behind the wall in the Swan station. If you remember, Dharma caused some kind of “incident” that forced them to pour a butt-load of concrete in the Swan. The bomb could also be the cause of all the sickness on the island; infertility, Ben’s tumor, Rousseau’s team going insane, men being unable to grow facial hair. So many possibilities for Jughead.

Quick side note: As hard as I enjoyed last night’s episode, I went through some serious Ben withdrawals.

I guess the biggest reveal of the night is that Desmond is Charlie’s fath-nevermind. Penny and Desmond have a son named Charlie. I doubt they would name their seed after Penny’s father, and naming him after Charlie (who sacrificed himself for the good of the others) makes a lot more sense. Birth is so nasty, even on ABC. Des plays private eye and heads to Oxford where he finds out that Widmore funded Daniel’s time travel research. BOOM. He then learns that Daniel ditched Oxford after unsticking a human test subject named Theresa from time. BA-BOOM. Theresa is in the same kind of time trance as Minkowski. KA-BOOM. Desmond eventually makes his way to Whidmore’s office and demands to know the address of Daniel’s mum. Whidmore jots it down after some coaxing and tells Desmond to be wary of her and that this business has been going on for “many, many years.” Yadda, yadda, yadda, Desmond, Penny, and Lil’ Charlie are headed to LA to track down Ms. Farraday and to maybe check out the Frank Lloyd Wright Textile Block Houses.

How bout them landmines? The US military was on the island sometime before 1954 and dropped some mines near the river (great way to kill off some more no-name survivors). Why and how?

Something during the preview for next week really sparked my interest. Sawyer states that he saw Kate in the jungle: Now, this may be just projecting from my passion to see Kate die, but don’t people usually appear in the jungle after they’re dead and gone? I doubt they’re getting back to the island next week (or next week, or next week, or next week, or next week, &c.), so what do you think made him see Freckles?

Death Predictions: Hurley – has to survive. He’s the backbone of the show; the moral fabric among all these selfish bastards. Killing him would make me lose all faith in humanity. Kate – Sun is going to kill her (fingers/toes crossed). Sawyer – has to sacrifice himself somehow to realistically complete his character arc. Jack – will survive, living with deep regret and depression as a hermit, probably in Thailand. Sun – I really have no idea. I don’t even think they can get her back to the island. Sayid – I really don’t want to see him die, but he continues to live a warrior’s life and those always end one way. Ben – NO IDEA. He’s still such a grey character. It will be interesting to see if he actually kills Penny like he promised to Whidmore he would. Linuses never say “die!”

Last week, Hurley threw a Hot Pocket.

Suckers are just now starting to see some glowing press coverage for their upcoming EP on IAMSOUND, however, we here at Mishka have been familiar with these guys for quite some time. Brian “Pan” (second from the left) is not only the Bassist/Multi-Instrumentalist but one of our designers as well. Brian’s actually the first employee we ever hired.

Before they catapult alongside their contemporaries Yeasayer, Animal Collective & MGMT, you can get in on the ground floor by heading over to The Fader for an exclusive download of the song “It Get’s Your Body Movin”. Don’t be fooled by the song title, it’s not a new Freestyle single! Sorry Goomba Johnny! And you check them out live, they’re always playing somewhere in New York.

Beirut – March of The Zapotec & Realpeople Holland (2009) [Ba Da Bing!/4AD] // Grade: D+

I’m sure every Hipster worth his salt knows who Beirut is by now. You know! They’re that band who’re beyond awesome because they use brass instruments! In actuality they’re not that awesome, but this seems to be the prevailing sentiment used by most people when discussing Beirut. Just because a band introduces some exotic element uncommon to their scene is no reason to over inflate how good they are. Anyway, I digress…

March of the Zapotec & Realpeople Holland, in what I saw as simply a pretentious move, is an album’s worth of songs billed as a double EP. However, there is a very good reason it is  billed as a double EP, as both are distinct and separate works. I can at the very least give Beirut credit for succeeding there.

March of the Zapotec is the sort of Balkan Gypsy romp that reminds me of the accompaniment to some musical about Immigrant Jews and Pirates but without any sense of strong storytelling. If you’re going to be theatrical in your songwriting, then take a page from Tom Waits and make sure that your story is the centerpiece, rather than building around the gimmick of  “Hey, These guys are using horns!”

The second half, Realpeople Holland, is much more tolerable for my tastes, but is nothing more than a watered down lift of the sound that The Magnetic Fields have long since perfected. It really doesn’t compliment the preceding romp through 19th century L.E.S. tenements (I assume the band thought it would). I can’t for the life of me understand why they didn’t release this “Double EP” as two separate EPs a few months apart. All they do together is make for not only an annoying listen, but an uneven one as well.

Keith from The Prodigy rocking the “Don’t Fear the Reaper” tee from our Fall Skyway Trippers collection. So sick!

So I was on a conference call with some dudes from Sun this morning. Like Eleven dudes from Sun. It was one of those calls that quickly spirals out of control and you end up talking about life-or-death issues (technically speaking, of course) and what you thought was something that involved you turns out to be much bigger, much grander, and much more dangerous…thus leaving you on a call where you don’t speak everybody else’s language.

And I mean that both figuratively and literally.

So I went out on my porch and took a few snapshots of stuff. Trees. Cars. The ground. Squirrels doing it.

I’m in Sacramento—home of everybody’s favorite Cimmerian—which (I bet you didn’t know this) is rivaled only by Paris as having the largest per-capita number of green, healthy, beautiful trees within the city limits. With all those trees, of course, comes just about all the rats, bats, spiders, squirrels, and crows you could ever possibly imagine.

After coming back inside and diving into hour 2 of what was to become a 4-hour sit-and-try-to-use-your-words-a-thon, I did a bit of internet research and learned the following neat tidbits about the lolcats’ distant, flea-toting, plague-having cousins:

Squirrels typically live in trees — in holes in the trunk, or in treetop crow’s nests. The homes in the treetops are called dreys and sometimes consist of two rooms and a nursery!

Squirrels are industrious.

Twice a year, in the spring and at the end of the summer, the female squirrel has two to five kittens.

Baby squirrels are called kittens.

Squirrels can live up to 10 or 12 years. After six years, they are considered old squirrels.

Squirrels are just as painful to have as pets as dogs. Mortality sucks.

The typical squirrel predators are, in addition to the red-tailed hawks, wildcats, foxes, owls, raccoons, and opossums.

It’s not easy being a squirrel.

–

SO there you have it. Squirrels. Conference calls are awful.

This story is bizarre. Detroit seems wild. Read the story HERE.

Dungeons & Dragons has lost a lot of its negative stigma during the recent Nerd Renaissance. Vin Diesel is on the record (he doesn’t know it, but his character is actually a Level 2 human actor named Vin Diesel),  Tim Duncan rolls twenties, Colbert is out there, and yet some people still seem to have issues.

When I was younger I spent some time playing miniatures games like Warhammer, but it quickly became apparent that skateboarding and guitar had more appeal to the high school girls than an army of miniature painted Dwarves.

A few months ago I got the opportunity to truck out to the Sunset and embark on my first D&D adventure with a few of my dudes. We had the good fortune of playing with a Dungeon Master who’s been in the business for nigh on 20 years and has an amazing and fucked up sense of humor. The experience was somewhere between playing guns in your back yard when you’re nine and telling a dirty joke that goes on for four hours, but it was undeniably awesome and addictive. Usually when you are doing something creative in a group (let’s say draw), at least one person is at a disadvantage.  Everyone has an imagination and can tell stories, and its imagination that comes out in surprising ways in a good game of D&D.

Over the course of the next few weeks we summoned the God of Slaughter (who looked like a scorpion with Rodney Dangerfield’s head and spoke only in punch lines), charged at the door at a massive victory party we threw for a village we had not yet saved and I managed to get my own bong smashed in my face twice, causing some permanent damage.

Sunday was probably our tenth adventure and things are getting interesting. Chumbawumba Tubthumper, my fratty and overly confrontational Dwarf Rogue finally struck level seven. We’re rolling in gold from the party (which resulted in the death of everyone in town)  and about to open a hotel casino run by a vanishing race of snake men.

I will be posting highlights and photos from our ongoing D&D sessions in hopes that you, dear reader, will be encouraged to find your own goofy adventure.

Once again we’re back with another round of our custom color team New Eras, this time giving a nod to our friend’s up north, flipping both the Montreal Expos and Montreal Canadians colorways.

In addition, we also put a nice spin on one of the West Coast’s finest teams, and one of our personal favorites, the San Jose Sharks.

As usual, these caps won’t stick around for long, so get them before they’re out of the park!