From Jono Diener: 

It’s much easier doing blogs once a week where I get to talk about all the funny/weird stuff that happens rather than what food we ate each day and how we sat staring at our laptops for hours until we play. Our lives are half really exciting and half really boring. 

One weird thing we’ve been noticing at all these shows is girls passing out and being carried away by EMTs. These girls will wait at 9am to get into the show, run to the front row without eating or drinking all day and get crammed into a barrier with sweaty gross bodies behind them moving around for hours… and they just collapse. The show in Edinburgh, Scotland a girl was crowd surfing (or so we thought) and she continued to crowd surf on security guards hands until she was taken outside. Imagine my confusion while drumming and seeing a limp floating girl go by… Birmingham we counted TEN passed out girls taken out of the show. We realized throwing water into the crowd could potentially save some lives or at least a trip to the hospital (JUST KIDDING IT’S FREE HERE). I guess our music just knocks the SHIT OUT OF PEOPLE. 

So for some reason this week The Blackout has been getting a TON of cakes from fans. Little do their fans know… I LOVE CAKE. My friend Battleship (aka Gareth) was hanging with me on their bus and he gave me 3 cakes. One was a 3 day old HUGE chocolate cake, and then a small chocolate cake and a small raspeberry coconut cake. I’ve been trying to watch what I eat and work out everyday, but once I got sick that kind of was thrown out the window. I was in a really good mood and ate a cupcake, a slice of the big cake, then THE WHOLE SMALL CHOCOLATE CAKE. I then decided to not eat the 2nd small cake and tried to find the bassist of Hyro Da Hero who was in Sparta/At The Drive In/Mars Volta so I could present him with the friendship cake. I never see him and he’s very mysterious/important so I thought it’d be a good way to break the ice(ing). I was informed he doesn’t like cake so I gave it to the monitor guy from the venue (after everyone else told me they weren’t interested). Soon after we met Hyro’s manager/label owner and within 5 minutes of talking about WWF, Anto had him in a sharpshooter on the ground screaming. What a life.

After a lot of the shows on this tour the venues will have a “club night” where Sean Smith from The Blackout will DJ. This usually means the drinkers in our band will go out and come home around 4am. I was still trying to recover from my sickness so I stayed home in Birmingham while Anto, Ryan, Jordan and Karol went out to party. I fell asleep after working on some album stuff and when I  woke up I heard some amazing stories. The stories mainly involved Anto finding a Popcorn Cannon at the club, shooting popcorn, then sticking his head in it and breaking it. To try and keep the momentum he would grab humongous popcorn bags and start humping them on stage, open them up and try to pour them on the crowd below. He also was doing a lot of dance moves that were literally just him telling people to “suck it” (D-Generation X) which landed him on stage, all over the dance floor, and eventually on the bar where security screamed for him to get down. He truly is a party monster.

We made yet another new game in the van to pass time, this one at Karol Gajda’s expense. He is our long-time friend and is self-employed via the magic of the internet. He also keeps a blog www.ridiculouslyextraordinary.comwhere he documents his world travels, life lessons and many other really cool things. He tries to help people break out of their shell and in a sense, life a ridiculously extraordinary life! Our inside joke is that Karol is a multi-millionaire from blog money. Each blog he will make thousands of dollars, like $20,000 per word. For a 2 hour car ride we began replacing every song we could think of with the words “blog” and “blog money” including “I’m still Jenny from The Blog”. “Back in Blog”, “IT’S MY BLOG IT’S NOW OR NEVER. GONNA GET BLOG MONEY FOR EVER!” “New Kids On The Blog”, and the list goes on. Karol sat their quietly while Anto, Jord, Ryan and I (occasionally Kirk and Nick from the front seat) would scream blog songs. WE HAVE A LOT OF TIME ON OUR HANDS.

Some cool news, we’re working on the album artwork, release date, a new video and new press pictures really soon. It’s about time we get all that stuff sorted. Wow, being over here is making me sound like ONE OF THEM. I meant to say “get all that stuff… planned out?” Can’t wait to get the new song up, a pre-order and get this ROLLING soon. 

Next week we’ll have the final adventure chronicled for your viewing pleasure. Maybe we might even have some studio videos… see you soon!