A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:

I hate to do this y'all, but we are in dire straits. Here's the short story. Scott owes $1,432.92 on his credit card because both us and The Dukes Of Hillsborough are really stupid. If you can help out, at all, even just a little bit, we'll thank you endlessly until you get sick of it. Scott has a PayPal account and if you can find it in your heart to put even a dollar or two in there we would appreciate it. And above all, please don't give more than is convenient to you, i.e. if it comes down to spending your last two dollars on a can of beans and a quart of beer OR helping our dumb asses out, get the beans and the beer.

The PayPal account is this: timversion@earthlink.net

Here's the long story. In May, both us and The Dukes went to England to sorta tour. It was fun, good times, met some great people, yada, yada, more on that later (I'm slowly, slowly writing a journal)...anyways we sent some shit to our pal Buz who runs the Punker Bunker record store over there. Some was to sell and some was just equipment (pedals, guitars, etc.) and other provisions. At any rate, we insured it...I know, I know...we're stupid...thanks. Well, a couple months after we get back, I get an email saying that Buz is desparately trying to get in touch with us. So I write him. Turns out they imposed some sort of tax or import fee on him totalling $1,432.92 for all the shit we sent over there and they had turned it over to collections and were threatening legal action and all sorts of nonsense!!! Apparently, they thought Buz had imported all that stuff to sell out of his shop. Buz is a killer dude and we couldn't let him face ruin at the hands of our idiocy. So we got in touch with the collections agency and leveled with 'em and tried to straighten everything out. Told 'em it was our stuff, Buz didn't sell any of it, we didn't make hardly any money and brought most of it back with us (all of which is true!!) and would they kindly reverse their decision to tax Buz or us or whatever for what ultimately amounted to our expensive vacation in England. No such luck. They said they would consider refunds only after the balance was paid in full. Basatrds! Anyways, we asked if we could transfer the charges over to us so that Buz wouldn't get run out of business or anything like that and they said yes. We had no plans beyond that and were actually hoping that either (a) shit would get lost in the shuffle or (b) it would be some British company we could put off paying them for awhile. No such luck. Since we shipped everything over FedEx (Scott gets a discount cuz he works at Kinko's), they had his credit card number and went ahead and charged the entire balance to his credit card!! So now Scott has a 1,432.92 balance on his card he has to pay really soon (12/8) to avoid a bunch of late fees and interest and other bull shit. Divided seven ways that comes to about 200 bucks a piece. Some of us have pretty decent jobs, but the most of us are flat broke most of the time and $200 is a lot of money. Both of us bands made a little money at FEST also, but the total doesn't cover much of it. So, like the desparate fools we are, we turned to the public at large for a little bit of help. I know y'all are probably also living on beans and rice as well especially with gettin' to and from FEST and all, but if you can spare anything to help us out we'd very much appreciate it. Besides, when's the last time we ever asked for anything? Ha ha...seriously though, I know there are a lot of sob stories out there like this, and it's part of playin' in a travelin' band and all that and I know we got ourselves into this stupid situation, but we wouldn't ask if we didn't need it.

So, again, the PayPal account is this: timversion@earthlink.net

Please help us try and break even!

Thanks for reading this and if you can help out, thanks again.

Russ

PS - Please pass this message along to all your rich, punk-rock loving friends and relatives, cuz' everyone has those right?

PPS - If we can get outta this 'un, I swear we'll make it up with some more charity work! You name it, we'll do it!