On Friday, City Manager Marc Ott announced the eight finalists for the top job at the Austin Fire Dept., five months after former Chief J.J. Adame resigned the job. (Adame had been in the hot seat since March, when he received a less than stellar job performance evaluation. He came to Austin from Corpus Christi in 2006.) The list of eight – honed from 38 total applicants, according to firefighterhourly.com – quickly became a list of seven after Longview Chief Michael Pruitt withdrew his name. The remaining finalists come from across the country, with just two plucked from Texas departments: Randy Bruegman, Fresno, Calif., chief; Jimmie R. Bryant, chief in Monroe, La.; Niles Ford, chief of Lincoln, Neb., Fire and Rescue; Richard Garcia, deputy chief of Fire and Rescue support services in Las Vegas; Noel Horan, assistant chief in San Antonio; Rhoda Mae Kerr, chief of the Little Rock, Ark., FD; and Raul Reyes, chief of the Greenville, Texas FD. The remaining candidates will be interviewed by local officials and a group of City Hall-selected community members, and then will host Austin city officials who will visit them on their home turf for a little look-see – a process not unlike that which last year brought us our new top cop, APD Chief Art Acevedo. Publicly, at least, Ott seems rosy about process thus far, and the challenge facing the finalists: "The Austin Fire Department has proven itself one of the leading departments in the nation," he said in a press release. "These candidates know that they will be expected to uphold its traditions of fire safety effectiveness and community responsiveness."

The over-the-weekend announcement from the John McCain campaign that the gloves are off between him and Barack Obama (what, so practically accusing Obama of wanting to molest your kids is just beanbag?) has already reaped odious rewards – see the media attention lavished on Sarah Palin's ignominious announcement that Obama's taken to "palling around with terrorists," a reference to his acquaintance with Bill Ayers, former member of the Weather Underground, a radical group that did some bombings back when Obama was eight years old. But Ayers and others, like former pastor Jeremiah Wright, are old hat. These names were gurgling up back during the Dem primary – and look how that turned out. But there's one name that hasn't really surfaced yet – one that unquestionably speaks to a candidates darkest, most shameful moment in his career. That candidate, however, is John McCain, and that name is Charles Keating. Keating oversaw the Lincoln Savings and Loan back in the 1980s, and like our current financial crisis, he used his customers' investments to bet on risky financial instruments that ultimately went belly up. The non-FDIC insured deposits were lost, wiping out tens of thousands of accounts, and costing the taxpayers billions. Again, like today, deregulation was responsible for the horrible financial mess – and it was John McCain who advocated for less and less oversight of his pal, investment partner, and donor Keating. Sure, I could lay it out more for you, but Obama can do it better. Over the weekend, he launched KeatingEconomics.com, which witheringly lays out McCain's intervention on Keating's behalf. This is a dark page in McCain's career that he'd prefer to turn. But if McCain's talking about Obama's distant associates, can't Obama talk about Keating, who flew McCain on his private jet nine times, donated $166,000 to his campaign, and whose greed and shoddy accounting directly parallels our current market meltdown? Here's a trailer for the Keating documentary Obama's assembled: UPDATE: Here's the whole 13 minute documentary.

It’s a little premature to start putting top 10 lists from 2008 in order, but the local releases this year have been absolutely stellar. I can’t remember the last time I had so many recent CDs from local bands sitting on my desk being played week after week. Suspects most likely to end up on my year-end list include Dan Dyer, the Petals, Alejandro Escovedo, 3 Balls of Fire, and Grupo Fantasma, but if Eve & the Exiles’ Blow Your Mind were vinyl, it would have been sitting on my turntable for a couple of weeks. The smartest thing Eve Monsees did with this record was sequence her originals as the three opening songs. Not only does it set the tone for her blue suede blues, it serves notice that the Exiles are one of the finest working bands around. Their musical sensibility is defined by the Texas roots all five members boast but the addition of Donna Pearl and Homer Henderson to the Exiles is what Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks brought to Fleetwood Mac when they joined in 1975: a secondary male-female dynamic. Monsees throws down her street-girl vocals on Doug Sahm’s “I Don’t Want” with smoldering sensuality and her guitar playing is sublime but former Naughty Ones’ shadow dancer Donna Pearl weaves her own hypnotic allure on “Starvation” and “I’ll Come to You.”

An quick addenda to the below post about today being last day of voter registration. Our friends at Burnt Orange Report have a handy Google Map displaying locations that are open until midnight tonight to accept your registration. Blockbuster Video and Thundercloud Subs locations are open late until the midnight cutoff, plus Guero's, Freebirds Hancock Center location, Clementine Coffee Bar and other establishments, so you have no excuse to get registered if you aren't already. Whether you're registering to vote for Obama, or to pull the lever against McCain, now's the last chance to register if you haven't already.

A frantic weekend in women's flat-track derby at the annual WFTDA Western Regionals held at the Verizon Theater in Houston. Out of 12 teams in the opening brackets, four teams won seedings and now progress to the national championship in Portland, Ore., (Nov 14-16) to face the winners of next weekend's Eastern Regionals. And the big four are: No. 1 Texecutioners: With a first-round bye, Austin's own didn't roll until Saturday morning when they defeated the Rocky Mountain Rollergirls (173-50). They then faced their nemesis from the 2008 Nationals, the Rat City Rollergirls, earning a spectacular and hard-fought victory (108-94). They topped off the weekend with a definitive win (135-59) over the new No. 2 seeds from the Bay Area. No. 2: B.ay A.rea D.erby Girls: Slicing through Rose City (120-95), B.A.D.'s hard-hitting style sent Duke City Derby flying (117-73). But the West Coast couldn't dislodge Texas in the final. No. 3 Rat City Rollergirls: Last year's national runners-up started hard with a pummeling win over Tucson (170-81), but couldn't make it two-for-two over Texas, instead settling for a run-off hammering of Duke City (158-95) No. 4 Duke City Derby: The only previously unseeded team in the top four, Albuquerque passed Pike's Peak Derby Dames (138-99) on Friday. They then threw in the biggest upset of the year, demolishing 2007 national champions the Kansas City Roller Warriors (132-117). Unfortunately, the Cinderella story faltered under the tough offense of B.A.D. and Rat City. Check back for full bout reports and exclusive video.

If you want to participate in the Nov. 4 election – you know, the really big one that you may have heard about with this Barack fellow running against the John guy – and you haven't yet registered to vote, then you must get it done TODAY. If your voter registration card is not postmarked on Oct. 6 or earlier, then you won't get to cast a ballot, so get it to the post office, or go to one of Travis County's offices, but get your registration card turned in. (If you're going to drop it into a mailbox, make sure today's pickup time at that box hasn't already passed.) And even if you think you are registered, double check just to be sure. You don't want to show up at the polls on Election Day and find out you were wrong and be deprived of your constitutional right as an American. Register to vote through Travis County. or register to vote through the state of Texas. But no matter what, get registered. If you still have questions, call 854-9473.

Going into this season, most alumni probably looked at the Longhorns' schedule and let out a long whistle like someone who got stuck with the check at a Brazilian steakhouse. Five games against ranked teams, three of them currently ranked in the Top 10! The only way the Horns schedule could have been any tougher was if it included a road game against the Cowboys in Dallas. So it was understandable why, after last season’s less than stellar performance, this was being called a “rebuilding” season; however, if the first four games of this season have taught us anything, it’s that with an average victory margin of 38 points, this team is ready to win now. After last season’s disappointing finish, most of the blame was put on a suspect pass defense and the growing pains of sophomore quarterback Colt McCoy. This year, however, instead of being the scapegoats, both the defense and McCoy are the main reason the Horns are 4-0 going into Saturday’s game against Colorado. The defense, which has put last year’s failures behind them, has not allowed a 100-yard rusher and only one 100-yard receiver this year in games that were never close. The fact that only Jarett Dillard of Rice University has been able to top the 100-yard mark just goes to show the lengths that Texas has gone to turn around the defense. The improvement hasn’t just been limited to the pass defense either, as none of the teams that they have faced has scored more than 13 points against the Longhorns. Of course, the defense will be tested by a strong Colorado team that is looking to avenge a two-game losing streak in Boulder, but if UT plays anything like they did in the first four games, the Buffaloes are going to have their work cut out for them.

WTF? First, Equality Texas, the entity which has organized the Austin Pride Festival for as long as anyone can remember announced this year that it was handing the festival torch to the freshly formed Pride Coalition, a group composed of representatives from just about every local LGBT concern. Great move, right?

Well one thing was made clear during the Veep Debate last night. Neither campaign supports gay marriage. Surprise!