Happy New Year and welcome to the 488th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the first puzzle of 2022! The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and dates of both mystery clips. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Stay safe!

We are excited to unveil a new home for the Narration Chart!

First completed on the Silver Anniversary of the Crest Theater Gamehendge show, the chart now features 182 transcriptions of every available Gamehendge narration from April Fool’s Day, 1986, through the most recent “Harpua” from the 2021 Halloween run.

The project began in 2017 as a spreadsheet with links to the setlists, audio from phish.in, and all new transcriptions created by a team of volunteers from the phish.net forum. Its new placement within the site’s database will ease access and maintenance and hopefully increase exposure to this unique aspect of Phish’s performances.

In addition to the five “complete” performances (and one partial version) of the Gamehendge saga originally introduced in Trey’s thesis for Goddard College, The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday, the chart also includes a wide variety of performances from the two narrative heavyweights, “Fly Famous Mockingbird” (75 entries) and “Harpua” (57 versions), 23 different pleas to read the f***ing book, 12 “Rhombus Narrations” that served as an introduction to “Divided Sky” for several years during the first decade of the band, along with rare narrations accompanying songs like “Esther,” “Tela,” “The Lizards,” “The Sloth,” “Llama,” “Punch You in the Eye,” not to mention one very special “Wormtown.”

Volunteers will continue to keep the chart updated as new performances occur and new recordings appear (like last year’s 3/8/93 release!). Of course, please send along a note if you find any kind of narration (but banter ≠ narration) hiding in the recesses of old shows or if an egregious error requires an edit.

Tamara Rubin interviewed Jon Fishman for nearly four hours via Zoom a little over ago, and shared clips of it on January 9th - but still very few have seen it. So, here's what she recently posted to Reddit:

Since almost no-one has watched this since last year (as I understand the connection between Phish and activism is not something that all Phish phans want to engage in) I wanted to share this again. Last winter I had the opportunity to interview my friend Jon Fishman on Christmas Eve. We chatted for about 4 hours but I cut the interview down into three bite-sized 10 minute segments. This is why the background gets so dark in the last segment (the ambient light at Jon's house disappears because I didn't know our interview would go that long and I didn't think to ask him to light himself for the zoom chat!) Thanks for checking this out. Once you click through to this link there are links to all three segments of the interview on YouTube. We talk about parenting, tour, the pandemic, politics and - because I am a childhood Lead poisoning prevention activist we also talk about lead poisoning... but that's really not the bulk of the 30 minutes of published interview - it's kind of fun... we edited it to be fun too (to make sure to show some of the fun from our call).

You can see all three clips on YouTube: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Welcome to the 487th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the second puzzle of December - shout-out to MJM HoFer @sumac22 for the clip! The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery clip. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 3 PM PT / 6 PM ET. Stay safe!

Reminder: For the first MJM of each month, only folks who have never won an MJM are allowed to answer on the blog before the hint. If you have never won an MJM, please answer as a comment below. If you have previously won an MJM, but you'd like to submit a guess before the hint, you may do so by PMing me; once the hint has been posted, everyone should answer on the blog. If that's confusing to you, check out the handy decision tree that I threw together for you. If you're not sure if you've won before, check in the MJM Results spreadsheet linked below.

Welcome to the 486th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Tuesday, the first of December - shout out to @Zands for the clip! The winner will receive TWO MP3 codes courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net and last week's winner @raisinsnacks, who has kindly donated their second code to this week's winner. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery jam. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Thursday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Stay safe!

Decades ago, Rolling Stone had a web-based poll for best guitarist ever, with a long list of choices. For a younger guy eager both to spread love for Phish and to explore the developing web, well... that was just an open challenge.

It was difficult to vote for anyone (such as Trey) more than once, because submitting a vote went to another page, so you'd have to go back to the voting page, argh. The web then was simpler and mostly static, but bandwidth was smaller and slower, so moving forward and backward, well... that was just wasting time.

But I soon realized that I could copy the source code of that page, to create a page that instead directed back to itself. And voted for Trey by default, rather than needing to make a choice. And had no graphics, very little other text, and only one choice in the voting list (Trey, already selected) so was much simpler and so quicker to load. But... I still had to click a button, sigh.

Then I discovered that, instead of submitting by mouse action, I could have it automatically submit after a few seconds. And I learned that it worked for only a single second. And even 0.5 seconds. I eventually settled on 0.25 seconds, arbitrarily. Voting more than four times per second seemed excessive, regardless of His Crimsonness' greatness, amirite?