Decisions, decisions...

(Amanda Barrett of The Ditty Bops portraying both the good and bad witches from the Wizard of Oz.)

Tonight was a night of choices for me as there were two concerts in town that I had been meaning to catch. The first one I had actually bought a ticket to and that was to see Toad the Wet Sprocket. The best band ever to take their name from a very obscure Monty Python sketch. Now I had missed seeing Toad more than a decade ago when they played literally a block from my dorm room and I felt that this would be a grand opportunity to make it up and finally get to say that I saw the band behind Dulcinea. Then I found out that The Ditty Bops were playing the same night.

And I guess you can see which one I decided to go see.

I’m sorry but seeing a Ditty Bops show just might be the most fun that you can have at a concert. Of all the bands that I have seen I can’t recall a show that makes you laugh and smile as much as these two girls do. I can’t call them a rock act or a pop act because if they are anything they are an old vaudeville act updated for the twenty first century. Because they sound like something you would have heard ninety years ago with all of these harmonies that are out of left field and props just fly out of nowhere (such as the fact that the entire band and support staff were dressed up like characters from the Wizard of Oz.) All of their songs are upbeat and poppy with some really good guitar work. The band really is just the two girls, one playing mandolin and the other picking at a guitar, with a little piano and keyboards in the background. They are well worth a listen.

Plus, there are two undeniable facts. One, they are touring the country on bicycle. As in they are riding out of KC tomorrow morning at 8 and going to Warrensburg. They’ve traveled 2500 miles so far, or as they put it “1000 miles farther than the ball of twine is long.” Second, they are, well, to put it mildly, gorgeous. And that is more than enough to make me a fan.

(So E, that was the solution to one of the quandaries. The second one also seems to be solved though not in the way that I originally anticipated. Still, hope springs eternal…)

Anyway, I know that I promised to accomplish the following this weekend: a) post the remaining pictures from my trip and b) put together the new CD. And I meant to do those things except that I forgot that this was the week that they released NCAA 07 for the Playstation and well that took up most of my weekend. Because you know that I need to enter the names of all the ND players and spend a lot of time learning the playbook and getting a sense of how the team will react. My thoughts so far a) Brady tends to throw a lot of interceptions in the red zone, b) that is probably a result of my always trying to get the ball to Szamardjia in those situations, c) basically if you can get the ball to Szamardjia he will catch it, he’s like a freaking superman in the game, d) yeah, the defense isn’t looking too good, e) nice to know that I could put up 66 points on Illinois and open a can of whoop ass on Kansas, f) hey, the fact that I turned off the game while I was playing Kansas State has nothing to do with the outcome of the game. But man, do I have ill will towards that school.

As always, I’ll be spending the next week updating rosters and improving the fan signs in the game, just because you need to see in a blowout people raising signs that read, “Screw this, I’m going to the Backer.”

The five random CDs for the week
1) Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band “The Mountain”
2) Tift Merritt “Tambourine”
3) John Hiatt “The Best of John Hiatt”
4) Alejandro Escovedo “More Miles than Money: Live 1994-96”
5) Various Artists (mainly Aimee Mann) “Magnolia (motion picture soundtrack)”