Blogs

Bedhead, just because they're mentioned somewhere in this mess of a blog item

A few desk-clearing items before heading out to meet Galaxy Quest's Missi Pyle at the Dallas Comic Con this weekend. Turns out, I have two tix to Art Garfunkel's Sunday-night show at the Nokia Theatre in Grand Prairie, complete with parking and The Club passes. (All right, settle down.) No hoops here -- first to post your desire for said ducats gets 'em. Also, the lovely and talented Candy Lancaster has dropped on my desk five Bourne Ultimatum DVDs. Same rules: First-come, first-served in the comments section -- if only so our Friends'll know when they've been beaten to the punch. No. 6, incidentally, gets this size-large promotional American Idol zip-up hoodie, for which I have very little use.

A couple of musical selections for your weekend iPodding: I see someone's kindly transferred to MP3 Bedhead's final vinyl offering: "Leper" off the 10-inch Lepidoptera. On the other end of the spectrum is this excellent recording of a 1972 Thanksgiving jam session, recorded at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, featuring Doug Sahm, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and Leon Russell, among others. Also, I see Bernadette Peters is in town tonight and tomorrow at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, and I just thought it'd be nice to take an end-of-the-week listen to Meredith Louise Miller and Broose Dickinson's take on "Tonight You Belong To Me," off Miller's 1992 Bob. (Meredith, by the way, long ago moved to Austin -- and, from the looks of it, done got real smart.) Go. --Robert Wilonsky

Bonus MP3:

Meredith Louise Miller and Broose Dickinson, "Tonight You Belong to Me" (from the 1992 album Bob)

So, the Unfair Park braintrust has selected a winner for those Toadies tix and accompanying VIP pass: Laura Archer, whose simple suggestion mirrors one offered up earlier in the week by our very own Merritt Martin. "You should give it to the first person who can produce a receipt for (or other proof of) a bar tab of $50+ or more from Bar Belmont," writes Laura. So very simple. So very easy to manage. So very...on.

You have till 5 p.m. today to produce such a receipt, and to keep this easy, the person whose bar tab is the highest will win a night's stay at the Belmont Hotel on us. (We're just covering the room, mind you; the rest you gotta pay for, you lush.) So fax us (214-757-8593) or e-mail me with a scan. But you have till 5 to do it.

To the rest of our Friends who offered suggestions -- all of which were intriguing, some of which were brilliant -- we offer our heartfelt thanks and some gifts, because it's the least we could do. (And, incidentally, you're still eligible for the Belmont stay; why not.) We will contact you shortly with more info. Again, thanks and good luck. Back at you at 5:02 with the winner. --Robert Wilonsky

Here's the deal. We have a few Very Big Items to give away (hint), but it's getting late in the day, and we still have these Toadies tix and VIP pass to give away. So...we were going to give the Toadies ducats to the first person to send a cogent, diagrammable paragraph using all the song titles from Rubberneck. (This was Andrea Grimes' idea.) Then we were going to give them to the first person willing to sit in a room for an hour listening to nothing but Toadies covers we found on GooTube (like this one, gak). (Noah Bailey, you're a genius.)

Instead, we've decided upon this: You win the Toadies tix if you come up with the best way for us to give up the night's stay at the Belmont Hotel tomorrow. Now, you may be saying to yourself, "Well, that sucks. That means I can't win the Belmont thing now." And you'd be right. But that sucker's not gonna be easy to git. Besides, we're gonna throw in some excellent surprises to the winner of this contest, to be determined by the staff of Unfair Park by Friday morning. So before you leave work, or get out of your pajamas, submit a few idears to yer pals at Unfair Park. Like I said earlier, free Toadies, free Brutal Juice, free beer. And all for the price of some thinkin'. And if we get no submissions, I'm going to the Toadies show myself, then sleeping it off at the Belmont. Stop me. --Robert Wilonsky

And now, drive yourself insane with this...

Back from the movie, and a Friend of Unfair Park suggests this as a trivia question: What movie poster hangs over my desk? Well, really only two ways to know the answer to that one: You've been in my office, or you visited Cindy Chaffin's Fine Line Live today, where she's posted an interview with yours truly. Look, I know I like to listen to me talk and talk and talk, but I dunno why you'd want to put yourself through that. Oh, yeah -- now I remember why: For two tickets to the Dallas Stars' game on March 11, when Your Hockey Team plays the Los Angeles Kings. Then again, you probably don't even need to listen to the interview. Hint enough? And...go. (Me, I'd visit Cindy's site just for the Funland track, but that's just me.) E-mail me, no comment posting this time... --Robert Wilonsky

Update: Jay Howard, you're correct: The Great Escape it is. Next up, two tix to the Toadies March 17 show -- and VIP passes, which means free beer.

OK, here's our second prize package: Fifty bucks good for drinks and dining at Taste and/or State & Allen and two passes to the Nasher Sculpture Center. Hey, that's pretty nifty, innit? And all you have to do is be the first one to tell me from which sporting good store did Lee Harvey Oswald order the Mannlicher-Carano rifle he used (or didn't, whatever) to kill John Kennedy. And under which name did he order it? Could this be easier? --Robert Wilonsky

Update: Holy crap, Greg Holland is fast. Took him all of two minutes to come up with the correct answer: A. Hidell from Klein's Sporting Goods. So, mazel tov, Greg. And to the rest of ya, many more prizes to come.

Here's our first birthday present to the Friends of Unfair Park: two passes to the Dallas Museum of Art and a $50 gift certificate for St. Pete's Dancing Marlin (see, we love Deep Ellum, so there). All you have to do is be the first to complete the following, which comes from the City Code of Dallas, Texas 1941 -- specifically, the very confusing section labeled "unlawful sexual intercourse."

Art. 89-7. (1682) Unlawful sexual intercourse. -- It shall be unlawful for a male person over the age of fourteen years old to have sexual intercourse with a female person eighteen years of age or over, other than his lawful wife, within the corporate limits of the city of Dallas. It shall also be unlawful for a female person eighteen years of age or over to have sexual intercourse with a male person over the age of fourteen years, other than her lawful husband, within the corporate limits of the city of Dallas. Any person violating any provision of this article shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor and fined not less than twenty-five dollars nor more than ___________.

First one to e-mail me with the correct dollar amount gets the present. Or first one to explain the ordinance to me might also get the prize. Because, I dunno, it sounds kinda...wrong. --Robert Wilonsky

Update: We have a winner! It took a mere five minutes for Andrew Rye to come up with the correct answer: $200. More gifts to come in just a few. Incidentally, we're starting to think scavenger hunt...