Ladies and gentlemen!  Welcome to a very special Blog Wednesday!  It’s our 100th episode spectacular*, and so today we’ve pulled out all the stops** to bring you the biggest***, best****, and most brilliantivitous***** Blog Wednesday the world has ever seen!  Let’s start by taking a look back at some memorable moments of Blog Wednesdays past:

“And then we had to drive”
“played a show”
“Pensacola”
“Album does not have a title yet”
“Alternator”
“Fight them with my bass-spear”
“Long drive”
“Brooklyn”
“jumbotron”
“The Blue Party”
“adoring moustache fan.jpg”
“warm, cheap tequila”
“craft services”
“driving”

…What a fun trip down memory lane!  Moving right along, I’d like to take this moment to share a few choice photographs, because a picture is worth a thousand words, and this will save me the trouble of writing some of those words!  (pause for laughs)  Some of these you might recognize from previous entries, and some will be illuminating never-released photos from deep within the vault (which is a folder on my computer labeled “band pics”)!  Please prepare yourself for looking at things by the end of this sentence:

Just kickin’ it in Lafayette. For those of you keeping score at home, this is the first camera phone picture I ever took.

Mamas, feel free to let your babies grow up to be cowboys. Just not these cowboys.

This orgy of cell phones typically crowds our center console during long road trips. And yet we wonder why our vans have so many electrical issues.

All I am going to tell you about this photograph is that I have it saved on my computer as “what.jpg”

Zack and George looking cool while they filmed close-ups of Andrew for our EPK. That was one of the sweatiest days ever.

Well, at least they spelled our names right. And by “they,” I mean “we.”

This might actually have been the best “our van broke down so let’s do some sax and banjo jams along 59-South at three in the morning” jam in all of human history.

Apparently Zack can juggle! Also, how weird does his face look without The Moustache?

Speaking of sentences that contain the words “moustache” and “weird…”

Saxbot 3000, at your service.

Easily the best possible thing to have on a jumbotron in front of thousands of people.

AHAHAHAHAHA BECAUSE GRASS MEANS DRUGS no really folks we’re all straightedge.

One of the billions upon billions of awesome photos taken by the immensely talented Alysse Gafkjen. This one hasn’t gotten much play so far, so here it is.

Two things about this photo illustrate why our dear friend Chris Rogers belongs on the short list for greatest dad ever: He’s taking his kid to a Revivalists show, and, if you look closely, he’s protecting the kid’s hearing too.

We’ve progressed so much since this photo was taken, but we still have yet to look this awesome.

So that about wraps up the pretend TV show portion of today’s programming!  We here at Blog Wednesday would like to thank our loyal reader (hi mom!) for your continued support.  Now, back to writing like a normal person:

Hello, friends!  Rob here.

I hope the above was at all worth reading, because that’s why I skipped last week.  I have been numbering these entries for as long as I’ve been writing them, and when I got home to my desktop where I keep everything stored up I realized that this is actually my one-hundredth blog update.  I knew it was looming, and I’d been thinking about doing something a little different to commemorate the occasion, but I didn’t quite realize it was already upon us and I just didn’t have the energy to pretend to be TV’s Troy McClure after Halloween weekend.

Speaking of which, what supernatural entity did we offend in order to bring about our recent streak of car trouble?  Since I last updated, we’ve lost two alternators, apparently because of a wiring fault on our giant trailer.  The second loss cost us a show in Dallas and a day of rest after a very busy week, and that wasn’t even the worst.  When we left the next night after making up the Dallas show, the wheel well flew off of the trailer while we were on the highway.  As it left, it pulled up some of the metal paneling above the axles, which fortunately only shredded one tire.  So there we were, sometime around midnight, nine hours away from home, beating the trailer’s paneling down with a tire iron and covering it with duct tape so it wouldn’t bend back out and destroy our spare tire.  At this point I can only assume that one of our ancestors plundered the treasures of a long-dead Pharoah sometime in the early twentieth century, and now King Rama Hukenhotepset VI’s revenge is being visited on our generation.

But it wasn’t all bad.  It never is.

For instance, Voodoo Fest.  Good heavens, that whole day.  We opened up the main stage in front of a massive crowd, then we crammed the WTUL interview tent and turned it into enough of a party that I think their program director almost forgave Dave for saying “fuck” like three times on the air (good thing the FCC doesn’t care about blogs yet!), and THEN we had to jet over to the ‘Wolf to set up for our set at the Krewe of Moms’ Halloween extravaganza, which was a 2:00 AM set.  So that whole thing was cool.

But THEN we had to wake up early to drive to Dallas, and, because New Orleans is controlled by smart people who pick the best possible times to close I-10 for construction, fight our way through two hours of detour traffic (because, you know nobody is trying to leave New Orleans via automobile the Sunday of Halloween weekend), and then all that van stuff happened.

Last weekend was mellow.  All we did was drive to Tuscaloosa and back to play a show with a fantastic band called the Alabama Shakes (seriously, listen to them all the time).  This week, we’ve got a private party in Memphis on Saturday (I think I heard something about a riverboat, so next Wednesday is probably going to be interesting), and Friday, we have the event that I have been waiting for ever since I learned how calendars work: 11/11/11.  It’s my birthday, it’s a show at One-Eyed Jack’s, it’s us and Rotary Downs, and it’s the perfect occasion for me to reach into my stash of real Four Loko and make some horrible decisions.

My 126th birthday probably isn’t going to be very fun, so let’s try to make this one count.

Okay, that’s about it for this week!  I know we already did the whole “100th Episode Spectacular!!!!1″ thing, but, with the end of the year coming up, and production City of Sound finally (finally) winding down, it’s hard not to think about what kind of year this has been.  I really think this has been a big year for us.  It’s funny, because on paper I’m not really sure what I can point to in order to justify that statement but things just seem…  Bigger.  More real.  This has been the first year where I’ve really felt like I can see the results of everything we’ve been building.

And it just keeps getting better.

Alright, okay, enough of that.  I’m sure you’ve all got places to be, and so do I.  Thanks for reading, though.  Thanks for leaving comments and saying nice things that let me know that people actually occasionally read all of these words.  You could be making a sandwich or watching a reality show about insufferable housewives or spending time with your children, but instead of all of those things you have chosen to read these internet words, and that makes me feel nice.  Thanks everyone!  Until next week.

This commemorative blog post is dedicated to the everlasting memory of Vandalf the Maroon, Father of the Napgun and Emperor of the Four Kingdoms of Ohio.  May He rest in peace.

*:  Not actually spectacular.
**:  Very few stops were actually pulled in the making of this entry.
***:  Not really.
****:  Not really.
*****:  Okay, I’ll give myself this one, but only because it’s a word I made up.