For those of you who like your folk baroque, Scottish guitarist Bert Jansch plays his only Texas show next Friday, June 8, at Houston's quirky Orange Show Center for Visionary Art. The former guitarist for British band Pentangle, Jansch was an influence on his own generation as well as ones to come. Jimmy Page admitted being "obsessed" with him, and his 2006 Drag City sleeper Black Swan featured Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart, as well as some of his best guitar work to date. Dude even just played with Pete Doherty. Jana Hunter opens. Doors at 8pm.

The speaker race is now officially on, with eight state representatives having filed their paperwork with the Texas Ethics Commission. Here's the confirmed scorecard to date:

Republicans: Tom Craddick, Midland; Fred Hill, Dallas; Delwin Jones, Lubbock; Jim Keffer, Eastland; Brian McCall, Plano; Jim Pitts, Waxahachie

Democrats: Senfronia Thompson, Houston; Sylvester Turner, Houston

Thompson already has a campaign Web site live, although it's actually the one from her brief run for the recently ended 80th session. Still, with a bit of polish it should do fine. It's odd that she would chose a Web site to reach this electorate (all 150 of them), but it could be that she's trying to keep the public pressure on her fellow reps, to remind them what a disaster the last session was.

That's not the only puzzler: Since the next regular session isn't until 2009, and potential candidates don't have to file with the ethics commission until basically the day of the vote, why is everyone filing so early?

Fog poured over the Berkeley hills like a waterfall as I drove through the Caldecott Tunnel last Saturday night. I took this as the best possible omen. Having grown up in the Bay area, I still get a certain … tingle from fog. You never know what’ll materialize out of it. By the time I was crossing the Bay Bridge, you could barely make out the San Francisco skyline. Ho, boy. Marianne Faithfull floated in there somewhere.

The Fillmore isn’t just another club. It’s perhaps the Great pyramid of live music venues. Save for the Beatles and Stones, the Fillmore birthed the big bang of Sixties emancipation. All of it, from Jimi Hendrix to Miles Davis. And there it still sits, on the corner of Geary and Fillmore. To walk up into the Fillmore is to enter the antechamber of Kings.

The tub of free apples remains at the top of the stairs inside, sometimes green, tonight red. Hippies got hungry back when tickets cost $8. (Tonight: $100 for two.) Pictures from rock & roll’s family album cover the walls floor to ceiling: Janis Joplin, the Who, and St. Jerry Garcia of the Second Staircase. Up another flight, the inner sanctum awaits. The Palace of the Legion of Honor, in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge further north, could house just such a hallowed room the same way the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC houses an entire Egyptian temple.

With a low, unceasing lysergic pulse, a first run of framed Fillmore posters covers every inch of the dining room’s sky-high walls. (More contemporary works finish out the back half of the hall.) The S.F. MoMa owns a series set, as should the Musée D’Orsay in Paris. These aren’t just telephone pole snags from 35, 40 years ago. The mind-expanding images of Wes Wilson, Bonnie MacLean, Lee Conklin, and the flying eyeball himself, Rick Griffin, are a singular movement in 20th century modern art, no less than the music screaming from their firework visuals. One stands in that room in humbled awe.

The Austin Lightning had a good weekend despite the rain – a 2-0 win over the El Paso Patriots Saturday, following a 1-1 draw against Laredo on Friday. Jared Chandler scored in each game, and Beto Papandrea had assists each night. Both games had to be moved to Vista Ridge in Cedar Park, due to the heavy rains on House Park's grass field. They're off this weekend and face a tough road trip next week to Baton Rouge, La., and Clinton, Miss., before coming home for three weekends in a row.

Pachuca beat Club America to win the Mexican Clausura championship on Sunday – the third major trophy in a year for the relatively small club.

Last year, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers set new all-time high records for the amount of drugs seized and the number of drug traffickers busted during routine traffic stops, the agency reports. Troopers seized nearly 48 tons of pot, three tons of cocaine, and 267 pounds of methamphetamine; in all, troopers pulled in an estimated $335.9 million worth of dope and arrested 1,975 "drug smugglers." And better yet, there's photos!

"Our troopers are highly trained in drug interdiction," DPS Highway Patrol Chief Randall K. Elliston said. The record-setting year is a "reflection of that training," he said. While we don't doubt their skill, it is worth noting that at least some of the busted traffickers appear to have made the troopers' job embarrassingly easy – like, for example, the criminally challenged saps that packed their pot into the rear of their SUV so that it pressed into and obscured the vehicle's rear window.

Leaving the Legislature behind, let's turn to the relatively saner realm of city politics. Namely, vegetarian-hot-dog-eating contests.

It seems onetime Place 5 City Council candidate, UT-Austin Amnesty International coordinator, and Ann Coulter aficionado Colin Kalmbacher has found another pursuit to take up his time: the aforementioned veggie-hot-dog-eating contest last weekend at the Scoot Inn. (Man, they flipped that place from Tejano bar to hipster watering hole quick!)

Says The Daily Texan, "UT journalism senior Colin Kalmbacher was champion of the individual contest, scarfing down 16 veggie dogs in 12 minutes."

Ah, we remember the exuberance of youth, before it jaundiced into our current bourgeois complacency. (We're not sure if that's suitably reactionary enough for Colin, but we're trying.)

Yesterday we asked whether Houston's Rep. Sylvester Turner could overcome his links to Speaker Tom Craddick and get his fellow Dems behind him in a speaker race.

Well, it's less than a day after his announcement, and we have an answer. And it's a big "no".

His fellow Houston Dem Rep. Jessica Farrar put out a press release saying that she and others will stand by the other Dem candidate, Senfronia Thompson. She lauds Thompson's career and makes it quite clear that it will be a cold day in Houston before she backs Craddick's buddy: "Perhaps Sylvester Turner believes his record of sticking with Tom Craddick as Tom Craddick has 'stuck it' to Texans qualifies him to carry on Craddick's tradition of disservice to Texas as our next Speaker. Or maybe he is continuing to enable Craddick with a disingenuous candidacy designed only to provide 'cover' for the few other Democrats who have supported Craddick while he has abused our democracy and damaged our state."

She finishes off with a very definite statement: "One thing is sure. Sylvester Turner will not be elected Speaker in 2009. Instead, I – and many other Democrats – will support our candidate, Rep. Senfronia Thompson to serve as the next Speaker of the House."

So that will be no, then.

In an odd bit of timing, the Monday death of former City Council Member Sally Shipman (see tomorrow's issue) was followed shortly thereafter by the Wednesday passing of a former journalist who covered her – Daryl Janes, who partnered with Daryl Slusher to publish the city politics paper The Daryl Herald, 1985-'87. Both Daryls would go on to cover similar territory for The Austin Chronicle. Slusher then went on to become a City Council member; Janes went on to other journalistic endeavors and finally a job at the Texas Comptroller's Office. Below is a short obit put together by Comptroller Office employees:

With Republican representatives lining up to replace Tom Craddick as House speaker, finally a Democrat has entered the race. Well, Democrat of sorts.

Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, declared at noon today that he'll be standing as speaker for the '09 session. Distancing himself from Craddick and making conciliatory bipartisan noises, he said, "I have worked effectively in the House under a Democratic majority, and I have worked effectively in the House under a Republican majority. I have sought to treat every member with the utmost respect, and I have worked to operate the House with the utmost degree of integrity."

Even though he's a Dem in a GOP-dominated House, he's a stronger potential candidate than many in the field. As speaker pro tem for the last three sessions, he's no stranger to wielding the gavel. Plus Turner has a reputation as a bridge builder and a stickler for House rules, and his office was pivotal in helping expose the scandal at Texas Youth Commission. However, that could all be outweighed by his reputation as an unwavering Craddick loyalist who did little to settle the mood and concerns of the House.

Update: As has been pointed out, Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, was actually the first Dem to get in the race. Apologies for the howling omission - we blame the sine die parties.