First off, if you haven’t heard, Xoc just released Xoc Plays Super Mario Brothers 3.  I was lucky enough to contribute some bass tracks to this album, but I’d be pimping it even if I weren’t on it.  It’s pretty fantastic, and it’s only $5.  Go here and get it, I’ll wait for you.  http://www.xocmusic.com/xocplays3.

Ok, you have it now?  Great.  I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed playing on it.

I guess this is as good a time as any to announce another of my special guests: XOC (aka Jason Cox)!  You probably saw that coming.  If you’re at all familiar with his work, you know he’s a multi-instrument wizard and a musical genius.  If you’re not familiar with him, go here and start downloading and listening: http://www.xocmusic.com.  His Super Mario World soundtrack is a masterpiece, and SMB3 is being compared favorably to it.  This pleases me.  It also pleases me that Xoc has contributed several tracks of stuff to my album.  He’s acting as kind of a chaos element, where he’s adding interesting textures and noises using a variety of instruments, including some of his own inventions.  Particularly, I’m talking about an electronic noisemaking thing he calls a “Craparratus” and frankly, I’m tickled to be able to list that in the credits.

Here’s the short version: I got the swine flu at PAX and everything has been crazy since then.

Long version: PAX was fantastic.  In addition to rocking faces, selling a bunch of Varia Suite CDs, and handing out ALL the promo CDs featuring some Yes, Mayhem, I got swine flu and nearly died on the plane ride home.

Hyperbole much?  Well, yes, but in this case not really.  I had a connecting flight from Houston back home, and about 30 minutes out of Houston I noticed that I was no longer looking out the window at the Gulf of Mexico.  We’d turned around.  The pilot came on the intercom to inform us that part of the cooling system had failed, and there was now a 500 degrees centigrade blast of air going directly into the back of the plane, threatening to melt the avionics.  Also they decided to just go ahead and put the landing gear down.  The stewardess said that they did this to conserve fuel, which anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of physics realizes is a lie.  That’s when I started to get scared.  What else were they lying about?  It was a horrible ride back to the airport as the deployed landing gear made the ride very jerky, and there were all sorts of noises which I probably overanalyzed as worse than they were.  I was very glad to be back on the ground.

While we were waiting in Houston for another plane, a lady said to me, “Well, let’s look at the bright side, at least we’re not all dead!”  I responded, “How can you be so sure?”  She looked confused, so I continued, “Being stuck in an airport terminal in Houston sounds a lot like Hell to me.”  Apparently, she was from there, so she wasn’t too amused.  At least she stopped saying stupid things to me.

I eventually did get back home, so all’s well that ends well, I suppose.  Except that I missed almost a week of work and gave my entire family the dreaded H1N1.  I went to the doctor, and the prescribed treatment for low risk cases like me is to go home and get some sleep.  So, that’s what I did.  I think we’ve all managed to get better around here, finally.

Also, one other note about PAX:  I went from being a fan of Jonathan Coulton to developing a disturbing unhealthy obsession with him.  His was one of the absolute best live shows I’ve ever seen and I can’t even believe we played on the same stage.

That’s why there haven’t been any updates around here.  I’ve been a bit indisposed.