We’re about 36 hours away from, jeez, what is it, my 9th year of sitting on my ass and watching this? (Damn leg.) Anyway, here’s a little info about the race that you could probably get elsewhere, but won’t because you’re all very lazy people:

On the mens’ side of things, it’s a very different year. Some familiar faces are out, you’ve got a lot of US presence (even if it’s naturalized US presence; hell, we’re all immigrants here) in the elite men, and you’ve got some faces you haven’t seen in New York for quite some time making returns. Meb is back, and the fella I’d consider the favorite going in, Robert Kipkoech Cheruiyot returns after what I’m pretty sure is a 4 year hiatus, which he’s spent beating the living piss out of the Boston course. However, Marilson Gomes dos Santos will be back to defend his title, and he was a much more confident runner last year, so it won’t be a cakewalk for Cheruiyot or anyone else.

Over on the womens’ side, it’s also a very unfamiliar field to me, aside from defending champion and superwoman Paula Radcliffe and, holy mother of pearl, Ludmila Petrova is back at 41, after taking 2nd last year! That should be a pretty solid rematch.

I’ll tell you where the real action is this year, though, folks: the wheeler divisions! I kid you not, both the mens’ and womens’ wheeler divisions, which will hopefully get a fair amount of airtime, are absolutely STACKED. It’s like the Wheeler Hall Of Fame up in this. I’m not sure whether the web feed will have cameras on multiple race leads, but I’m hoping, because this is going to be stellar.

The weather for Sunday looks to be maybe 5 degrees warmer than I think the participants would like (I could be wrong on this) with a high of 58, but not super warm, and the course is going to be a little wet and perhaps slippery from the overnight rain.

I’ll be here starting fairly early (television race coverage starts at 9 AM Eastern Standard Time) to yell “RUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN” for 5 hours or so, so stop by if you’re into that sort of thing.

Or 48 days out of a possible 782 (there was a leap day in there last year).

That’s how often I’ve gotten 8 hours’ uninterrupted sleep or more, starting between the hours of 10 PM-Midnight and ending between the hours of 6-8 AM (we’ll call that “Optimal Business Hour Sleep” or OBHS for those of you who like abbreviations) since September 4th, 2007.

I think I did an earlier count on here, I’d have to look, which widened the field to 6 hours or more, but if we’re talking the 8 hours we’ve heard about for generations as being ideal, during the hours that working folk are typically supposed to sleep, it happens for me 6.14% of the time, or just under twice a month.

I really don’t have other data laying around to compare this next to, so I’m not sure how everyone else does on this. What you see here is merely what I’ve experienced over the past 2 years and change in an environment when I don’t have to be awake at any particular time, but in which my honest, desired preference has been to be on a “normal” day-night schedule, and I’ve worked pretty hard at stabilizing it. This matters to me, because I feel my best when I operate under these conditions.

Even the major record labels have a higher success rate than 6.14%.

As I mentioned earlier, I was going through some old folders, and I found the very first music I put on a computer in one of them, from way back in April of 1999. raubrey on Twitter suggested that I post some of the highlights somewhere, and I’m going to do him one better. Since, miraculously, there were only 20 songs added to my computer that first magical week, I have a nice, even Top 20 list, but…I’m not going to tell you all what #1 is. It’s your job to guess. Yep, it’s contest time!

I’ll be giving away a copy of the new A Place To Bury Strangers CD, “Exploding Head” (which is quite good, but for some reason, Mute sent me an extra), courtesy of Mute and their possibly dodgy automated mailing list, to the person who makes the single, best guess out of the potentially limitless possibilities here. Base your guesses upon the rest of the list, the rough time period the list was assembled during (mid-April 1999), and the single hint I’m willing to give (the band in question are or were a labelmate of A Place To Bury Strangers, which actually narrows this down considerably, but still gives you thousands of possible guesses). Send your one guess to suck@mybigblackcock.com by 11:59 PM Eastern Time, October 31st, 2009, and the closest guess (as determined by our judge, me) wins! In the event of an exact, correct guess, the first exact guess that I receive wins! This contest is open to anyone in the world, except Jessica H. of Fresno, California, (because she knows the answer, and I’ll know if you try to get it out of her), any past or present employee of Mute, and anyone who uses the name of a Suicide song as their DJ name, because that’s sort of embarrassing.

Now that the contest info is posted, here’s the list of what music I put on my computer first (sans the mystery track), in chronological order, over the week of 4/15/99-4/21/99:

1. ???-???
2. Lords Of Acid-Pussy
3. Die Warzau-All Good Girls
4. Apotheosis-O Fortuna
5. Foghat-Slow Ride
6. Blur-Song 2
7. Aqua-Barbie Girl
8. War-Low Rider
9. Cheech And Chong-Santa Claus And His Old Lady
10. Isaac Hayes-Chocolate Salty Balls
11. Eric Cartman-Come Sail Away
12. Bob And Doug McKenzie-The 12 Days Of Christmas
13. Leonard Nimoy-Proud Mary
14. Neneh Cherry-Buffalo Stance
15. Mariah Carey-Fantasy
16. Hot Chocolate-You Sexy Thing
17. Front Line Assembly-Mindphaser
18. Marvin Gaye-Sexual Healing
19. Rockwell-Somebody’s Watching Me
20. Marilyn Manson-User Friendly

1. “Abracadabra” by the Steve Miller Band, as covered by Tom Tom Club. I think the voices would sound cute on the lyrics, and the song could be a “Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom”-era Tom Tom Club song.

2. “You’ll Never Find (Another Love Like Mine)” by Lou Rawls, as covered by Lou Reed. You have to figure that people (not on sight or sound, of course) have mistaken the two for each other in moments of senility over the years, and it’d be kinda cool to hear Reed’s swagger on this song. It might be the kind of thing that would’ve only worked in his prime, but I’d be willing to hear him try it out now.

12:37
fun fact: according to IMDB, there has never been a movie called “douchebags”.
12:37
and yet, hollywood continues the sequels and remakes.
12:38
there is a “hollywood douchebags”, from about a year ago.
12:38
but not plain and simple douchebags.
12:38
i actually cast the movie yesterday.
12:38
ray romano and johnny knoxville as the leads.

I bet you thought I forgot about this. Either that, or you didn’t give much of a rat’s ass. “But, sir! I only have this small part of a rat’s ass to spare on this Saturday morning! Please don’t use the curling iron on me!”

September:

zenova: 258
sybil: 258
the scott crawford show: 255
wolftab: 248
something true (overnightscape): 207
ecstacy: 195
something in my drink: 193
sybil inst: 190
puppet: 188
tonight: 178
something true: 161
sybil vers: 146
love life and sign: 145
untitled: 138
chord: 122
new song: 121

total:

zenova: 1415
sybil: 1323
sybil inst: 1159
wolftab: 998
sybil vers: 857
tonight: 850
something in my drink: 807
puppet: 790
ecstacy: 780
untitled: 768
chord: 624
the scott crawford show: 578
love life and sign: 569
new song: 544
something true (overnightscape): 320
something true: 319

Some songs move up the list, some songs move down the list. You know how it goes. By next month, barring any new releases (and I really wanted to get at least one out in October, but I’m not sure how logistically possible that is, as I haven’t even started ripping my studio apart or digging up raw tracks yet), every song on this list will probably have been played or downloaded at least 500 times by something, human or robot. That’s kinda cool. No more news on the donor front, but that’s OK. Donate if you like, don’t if you don’t or can’t afford to. A lot of my doing this is a matter of giving something back to music, which has given me so much. Speaking of donors, I’m still slacking on digging up my PayPal transactions to create a proper donor list for the liner notes, but it is still on the to-do list and I haven’t forgotten about doing it. Been a weird, busy, in some ways rough month, so it’s something I just haven’t gotten to yet. Soon. Thank you for another month of your continued interest and support, and by all means, add my page on Facebook, as well as the page for my other band Get Precious. It’ll make us feel all warm and squishy inside.