HearSay likes blow-job jokes as much as the next 15-year-old boy, and thus had a ball-slapping good time at the Ridglea Theater's maiden venture into stand-up comedy last Wednesday. Emcee Eric Bolton started the evening with the classic "So why do they call it a blow job, anyway? It's not like anything actually gets blown, you know." Up next: Monty Griffin's blow-job jokes, Ken "The Tie-Dye Guy" Mathias' blow-job jokes, Todd Justice's blow-job jokes, and Gary Hood's blow-job jokes. The crowd-pleaser came from Justice: "Blow job. Sounds like work. Now if you were to call it blow-shopping, I bet you'd get a lot more. 'Hey, honey, wanna go shopping?' "

Between the blow-job jokes were some cute Christmas stories, which would have worked better five months from now; and witty Passover jokes, which might have worked better eight months from now, though not with this crowd; and political jokes about Bill Clinton, which would have worked better back when he was in office, but which at least got us back to blow jobs. Hood, two-time Emmy nominee and house emcee at Hyena's in Fort Worth, closed the show with a non-blow-job riff on Fort Worth Weekly -- or, as he dubbed it, Observer Lite. Stop, please, HearSay's sides are aching.

"I had angst," said Four Mile Mule guitarist Daniel Hines last spring, explaining a guitar-smashing incident that happened on stage more than a year ago. According to Four Mile Mule drummer Matt Key, however, artistic temperament is not unusual for Hines. "With Daniel, there's always been personal conflict," Key stated in an e-mail designed to dispel rumors about the band's breakup after a recent onstage outburst, this time at an 8.0 show with Colin Hill. "The word is that we all fought on stage, broke up. Not true. We did not get into a brawl. Daniel was frustrated, got upset, yelled. So now we're looking for a new guitar player, but the band didn't break up or anything."

Frontman Lou Vargo admitted to "a little shoving thing on stage, but nothing big. We just weren't having a good night." (At 8.0? Imagine that.) Vargo said the band is shopping for a fourth member, maybe even a fifth. "It'd be fun to get somebody with a Hammond B-3, or somebody who can play pedal steel or banjo," he said. "We're shooting for the same intensity we had with Daniel, but with various instruments. Maybe a mandolin."

In the meantime, Vargo said, Four Mile Mule has cleared their books through September. "This is my first break in four years," he said, though he's filling it with "lots of writing," a duo last week with bassist Kirk Richardson at Thirsty Armadillo, and a solo gig Thursday at the Ridglea Theater with Scott Copeland and Carey Wolff.

Hines, who didn't return HearSay's calls (but he might have tried; HearSay rejects call-waiting as a tool of the devil), is said to be planning a solo album.