Goddamn I love The Hold Steady

Cymbals Eat Guitars on Don't Look Down

I really really like this band. Their album is super good, but seeing them do all this live seems to be the way to experience it. It can be pretty angular, but it's pretty damned good. Check it out if you're bored.

Cymbals Eat Guitars

The Great Prayer Experiment

...Such experiments, if done properly, have to be double blind, and this standard was strictly observed. The patients were assigned, strictly at random, to an experimental group (received prayers) or a control group (received no prayers). Neither the patients, nor their doctors or caregivers, nor the experimenters were allowed to know which patients were being prayed for and which patients were controls. Those who did the experimental praying had to know the names of the individuals for whom they were praying - otherwise, in what sense would they be praying for them rather than for somebody else? But care was taken to tell them only the first name and initial letter of the surname. Apparently that would be enough to enable God to pinpoint the right hospital bed...

What's that you say, Lord? You can't cure me because I'm a member of the control group? ... Oh, I see, my aunt's prayers aren't enough. But Lord, Mr. Evans in the next-door bed ... What was that Lord? ... Mr. Evans received a thousand prayers per day? But Lord, Mr. Evans doesn't know a thousand people ... Oh, they just referred to him as John E. But Lord, how did you know they didn't mean John Ellsworthy? ... Oh right, you used your omniscience to work out which John E. they meant. But Lord...

-Richard Dawkins

separation sunday

It got to the part with the cattle and the creeping things. Said "I'm pretty sure we've heard this one before. Don't it all end up in some revelation with four guys on horses and violent red visions? Famine, and death, and pestilence, and war? Pretty sure I've heard this one before." You, in the corner with a good looking drifter, two cups of coffee and ten packs of sugar. I heard Gideon saw you in Denver. He said you were contagious. Silly rabbit, tripping is for teenagers. Murder is for murderers and hard drugs are for bartenders. I think I might have mentioned that before.
He's got the pages in his pockets that he ripped out of the Bible from his bed stand in the motel. He likes the part where the traders get chased out from the temple.
I guess I heard about original sin. I heard the dudes blamed the chick, I heard the chick blamed the snake. And I heard they were naked when they got busted, and I heard things ain't been the same since. You, on the streets with a tendency to preach to the choir. Wired for sound and down with whatever. I heard Gideon did you in Denver.
She's got a cross around her neck that she ripped off from a schoolgirl on the subway on a mission to the city. She likes how it looks on her chest with three open buttons. She likes the part where one brother kills the other, and she has to wonder if the world ever will recover. Cain and Abel seem to still be causing trouble.
She said "I was seeing double for three straight days after I got born again. It felt strange, but it was nice and peaceful and it really pleased me to be around so many people; of course, half of them were visions. Half of them were friends from going through the program with me. Later on, we did some sexy things. Took a couple photographs and carved them into wood reliefs. Hey, but that's enough about me, c'mon tell me how you got down here into Ybor City."
He said "I got to the part about the exodus, and up to then I only knew it was a movement of the people. But if small-town cops are like swarms of flies and blackened foil's like boils and hail, I'm pretty sure I've been through this before."