We got into Melbourne yesterday morning after a 21 hr. flight (6 from NYC to LA plus 15 from LA to AU) that we can characterize without hesitation as the worst flight of our lives. Get this: the seat-back entertainment system was one of those antiquated jobs with 8 channels, each scrolling repeatedly through a 2.5 hr program, most of which feature a movie and then some miscellaneous TV. This system -- already relegated in our minds, and in the minds of all civilized people, to a bygone era -- allows no pausing, no rewinding, and no choosing from a wide body of quality films, choosing from a wide body of quality films being the defining feature of a fair and just seatback entertainment system. THE WORST PART! was that the entertainment guide -- a handsome standalone booklet filled with lush screengrabs and irreverent capsule reviews -- proffered a SWEEPING selection of movies, a veritable wide body of quality films, all but 6 of which were UNAVAILABLE. The trick was this: as explained in the guide, Qantas is in the process of upgrading their fleet from the throwback seatback scenario that we were stuck with to the modern, on-demand approach, but the upgrade won't be finished until 2007. (!!!) As evidence of progress, they note that 12 of their 30 planes have already been upgraded -- a claim we find highly dubious and intented to placate a justifiably outraged hostage (for a person stuck in a plane for 15 hours with a repeating, un-pausable selection of 8 films can only be considered a hostage)! Because check this out: a sampling of Qantas's fleet found that zero out of three randomly selected planes have not yet been upgraded. That's one plane from NYC to LA (which then went on to Sydney), one from LA to Melbourne, and one that TM Storme and Soundmaster Matt took from Hong Kong to Melbourne. Now, we completely forget most of what we learned in college stats, and we've got a sneaking suspicion that 3 is an inadequate sample size, but nevertheless, boy are we ever dubious of that 12/30 claim. AND: on the return trip we'll add two more planes to our sample group. If it turns out that zero out of five is statistically significant (we intend to do the legwork on this), it's curtains for Qantas.

 Dallas: a big goddamn city in a big goddamn state, and here we don't use "goddamn" in the pejorative. No, Dallas kills it, every time. And here we don't use "kill" in the pejorative. 

This Dallas crowd tonight, they came out and made a difference -- for us, for themselves, for those less fortunate than them. 

You'll be familiar, of course, with the bromidic suggestion that everything is bigger in Texas. Well, that's not necessarily true. But their hearts sure are. 

You know what else is big in Texas? The skies. The skies are so big that you can fit seven Los Angeles skies, or 19 Chicago skies, or 528 New York City skies inside the common Texan sky. 

The streets in Texas, they go for miles. If you were to put every brick in every city in every country in the world in a line (excepting Texas's bricks), they would not be as long as a fairly short suburban Texas street that ends in a cul-de-sac. Indeed, they would bear unfavorable comparison to a Texan driveway. 

Texan mice are large enough that once, in 1928, when a Texan mouse stowed away on a truck and ended up in Yellowstone National Park, he killed a family of grizzly bears -- largely, it now seems, for the pleasure of killing. 

Texas dirt is so big that if you place a grain of it under a microscope next to a grain of another state's dirt -- Mississippi's, say -- the other state's dirt molecule will strike your eye as a beach ball hugging fearfully to the breast of the Texas molecule's Mother Earth. 

We exaggerate of course, but it is no exaggeration to state that the Texan music listener's heart pumps blood cells larger than non-Texas listeners' fists. That a snake from out of the Texas desert can lie nose to nads with a cross-Atlantic telegraph cable and not feel in any way inadequate. And it transmits better! And it can fuck the telegraph cable and forge beautiful children! For the Texan male can fuck any object -- animate or not -- and instill pregnation! And the Texas female -- my god! She need only desire them to instantly fill her belly (or backpack! or car trunk!) with a hundred progeny!

Texas! It may be big! But ultimately, the space-time continuum may, or very well may not, be bigger! 

It was a day off in Odessa TX today, and as the bus pulls out for a long dark haul to Dallas, the results speak for themselves:

- Michael is 28% tanner than he was upon waking this morning

- Everyone has seen "The Break Up", and 33% of the team has also seen "Poseidon"

- Shawn has 2 new lines shaved into the left side of his head

- Everybody ate at least one meal

- Two homeless dogs died from the heat

A full day, then, in Odessa TX! And another town that we can officially recommend to anyone who has had a tough go of it lately and needs some "me" time and thinks it might help to spend a day or two or even a week hanging out at the mall.   

Today in Tempe, Michael, Chris, and TM Storme went to the airport Sheraton to take showers (the venue had none). During the cab ride over, everybody's fingers were crossed for a pool, and on arrival we were thrilled to see that the four-hundred thousand degree Arizona weather would indeed be tempered by some pool time. So we changed into shorts and got right down to business, got into that pool not 10 minutes post-arrival -- only to find that the water in the pool was, instead of water (and this is going to sound really gross but it's totally true) sweat from people's balls! Tough to swallow, we know (double entendre intentional!!), but completely true: the pool at the Airport Sheraton in Tempe, AZ, is full of ball sweat. It's salty; cool, yes; objectively refreshing; but ultimately an unsettling find.   

Here are a few jokes we told to people we ran into while in San Diego today. A five star rating system shows how well each joke went over. 

_Did you hear the one about the dog who went running on the beach? He broke his leg and they had a vet put him down, because they thought he was a horse. ( * * * * )

_Did you hear the old yarn about the convict who tried to dig himself out of prison with a teaspoon? He got caught, and as ironic penance they made him eat his meals with a shovel. They made him do it for a year. ( * * * * 1/2 )

_You ever hear the tale of the eagle who made it his goal to land on every mountain peak in the world? They say he peaked at like 25 cliffs, or mountains or whatever. ( * * * * * )

_Did anyone ever tell you the old cock-and-bull story of the ice cream salesman who put a little something special into every pint of ice cream? Apparently it like doubled his sales. ( * * * * )

_I ever tell you the old shaggy-dog story about the nun who decided she wanted to actually sleep with Jesus? She went out and slept with a guy who had long hair and a goatee and a pleasant-enough demeanor, but who certainly wasn't the actual Jesus.  ( * * * * 1/2)

_But so his condom broke while they were doing it, and the nun was all worried about getting pregnant, but he calmly advised that they "cross that bridge when [they] come to it", emphasis from her head, because she thought his use of the word "cross" was ironic. ( * * * * * )