• George H.W. Bush succeeds Ronald Reagan as U.S. President
• the Soviet war in Afghanistan
• the Los Angeles city council bans the sale or possession of semiautomatic weapons
• fatwa on Salman Rushdie for “The Satanic Verses”
• Time, Inc. and Warner Communications merge to form Time Warner
• Exxon Valdez spills 240,000 barrels (11 million gallons) of oil
• Rain Man wins Best Picture
• Charles Keating goes to jail
• Tiananmen Square
• Seinfeld premieres
• France celebrates 200th anniversary of the French Revolution
• UA flight 282 crashes in Sioux City, IA
• Nintendo’s GameBoy and Sega’s Genesis are released
• Lyle and Erik Menendez kill their rich parents
• Pete Rose is banned from baseball
• Voyager II passes Neptune and Triton
• Hurricane Hugo causes $7 billion in damage in South Carolina
• the World Series is delayed by 10 days following the Loma Prieta earthquake (a 7.1)
• Douglas Wilder wins the Virginia governor’s race and becomes the first elected African American governor in the United States
• David Dinkins becomes the first African American mayor of New York City
• the Berlin Wall begins to be dismantled
• the Cold War ends
• The Simpsons premieres

The Dance Hall Crashers form in Berkeley, California.

Who’s got some great DHC memories? 1989, or otherwise?

• 18″x18″ Blue Plate Special Poster
• 4-page Blue Plate Special “Menu” (flyer)
• First 20 people to pay after the auction closes get a sticker
• Free USPS priority mail shipping in the US with a poster tube

All that for $10, shipped!

Now here’s the bonus. Everyone who buys one (I have 29 of these “packages” for sale) will be entered into a drawing for an autographed copy of the Blue Plate Special CD, signed by all 5 members of the band! There is only one of these CDs, so no guarantees, but your odds are pretty good at 1 in 29.

Read the auction for more details and pics. Happy bidding!

Update Aug 10th – Bidding is complete and 29 lucky winners have finished the auction. I will be out of town this weekend and will let people finish sending in their paypals/etc. I will ship Monday or Tuesday and post a note here when I do.

Update Aug 20th – All of the goods have been shipped and I’m happy to announce the winner of the CD auction is Simon Rhodes from Australia! He’ll be receiving his autographed CD in the mail soon. Thanks again to everyone who bid and to Julie and James for their patience and understanding.

Thanks for bidding!

UPDATE – so the new design is mostly in place. It’s not yet perfect, and we have a neat jukebox we’ll be adding shortly. Bear with us while we get all of our ducks in a row.

UPDATE 2 – To encourage participation, I’m happy to report that you no longer need to register in order to leave a comment. I’ve enabled some anti-spam measures and assuming they work, commenting will be open to everyone. So try it – leave a comment!

Which brings us to the first quarter of 2006. It took us a minute to edit the DVD last summer because Karina and I had to edit out the thousands of bad shots of us. It’s interesting what camera guys can get when they’re in the pit filming up our skirts. We had a good time in the editing bay laughing at ourselves because for the past ten years we had imagined that we looked way cooler on stage. This is not the case. We are not cool at all . To top it off, when we were doing the commentary the first time around, Karina and I started arguing, which then escalated into a full
blown fight. The guys thought it was the funniest thing they had ever heard, but we decided to keep the first pass at the commentary to ourselves. It actually is the funniest thing we could ever release, but we burned all copies, so you will never know.

Now that the DVD is out, we have decided it’s probably time to finish those songs we claimed to be writing. We managed to play one at the show without blowing it, but we really should have finished them all a year ago when we started them, because we forgot a lot of the parts between then and now. I swear we will do it. We are almost done with a bunch of songs. We talked about putting them all together and making one long medley so that you couldn’t tell that they were missing a part. We will ask Fat Mike what he thinks of our Frankenrecord idea and get back to you.

~Elyse

*Update 12/8* – Josh Hounshell sent in 12 albums worth of track listings for the discography including 5 compilation and import CDs we didn’t have listed yet. He is a stud! I challenge any of you with a big DHC collection to try and out do him…

If you don’t already have the DVD, you should order it now from Kung Fu records. The pre-orders have just started arriving as of yesterday and feedback is incredibly positive.