[Take the Bait is spirited deliberation centered around the hyperbole of Phish’s music and fandom, passionately exuded via the written words of phish.net contributors @FunkyCFunkyDo and @n00b100. Opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of phish.net, The Mockingbird Foundation, or any fan… but we're pretty sure we’re right. Probably.]

Funky: Among the many, many elements of Phish that keep me in awe of them and their music is the sheer greatness and fullness of their sound. It’s not that it’s loud, it engulfs; it’s not produced or prepackaged, it’s fluid and polished; it’s not that it knocks you over with intensity (well, sometimes it does), no, it flows over you with freshness and gusto, even the same song you’ve heard 100 times or more.

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Registration has started for the Fourth Annual Runaway Open charity golf tournament for Phish fans, the morning of the second show of the upcoming Dick's run, over Labor Day weekend.

We'll have up to 80 players this time, with a shotgun start at 10 a.m. (preceded by a group photo and warm send-off), playing at Willis Case. As before, we'll have contests - but it's all about swingin' sticks with fans, so don't sweat it if you're rusty, new to the game, or prioritizing fun over competition. So are we. :)

Early registration is strongly encouraged. All three previous events have sold out, with a waiting list we couldn't satisfy. The number of players has nearly doubled each year (16 to 32 to 54), but we've also opened registration earlier, to facilitate players' planning and to help find more players. So act soon - and please help spread the word!

Register by completing this online form and then making a donation to the Mockingbird Foundation of $150 per player, which covers all fees, cart, lunch, an event golf shirt, and a gift bag of goodies.

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[Welcome To Weekly Catch With Osiris! A weekly series brought to you from the team at Osiris. Each Wednesday we're going to bring you a historic Phish show from that week with some commentary. Our goal is to go beyond official releases and well-known shows to bring you some of the overlooked gems throughout Phish history. If you like what you find, we'd encourage you to check out the assortment of podcasts at the Osiris! This week's catch comes from Brian Brinkman of Beyond The Pond.]

Listen: The Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, NY - 05/14/1992

As the Spring 1992 Tour wove it's way back to the Northeast for its conclusion after three months on the road, the band was tight, filled with humor, and readying for a leap that would project them to the creative peak of the next three years. Here, on May 14, from The Capitol Theatre, a venerable must-play venue for all jambands, Phish played a show that displayed all the aspects that made the Spring 1992 Tour so ripe with youthful ambition and so filled with joyful pure Phishiness.

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Your time is near, the mission’s clear, but it’s later than you think. The inaugural Phish Studies conference will take place at Oregon State University this weekend. The three-day event is unprecedented. There have been classes about other bands. There have been conferences focused on other bands. There has never been a stand-alone conference devoted to a single band with this level of community integration and collaboration. You’ve never seen this side of Phish. The conference has been a dream of ours for a long time. Don’t miss out on your only chance to be at the first-ever Phish Studies conference held on a college campus. Help shape the future of the growing field, redefine what is possible in the Academy, and take part in history as it unfolds. You will always remember where you were.

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Welcome to the 375th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the second of May. 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 songs and dates of the two mystery clips. The clips are connected by a theme, but the theme needn't be part of the correct answer. 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. Good luck!

Answer: Congrats to @raisinsnacks on their first MJM, who needed no time (and no hint) to see that this week's theme was "Theme" in identifying the 11/2/13 "Theme From the Bottom" and the 12/31/14 "Theme From the Bottom." Stop by Monday for a more difficult pair of clips for MJM376.

Here's a look back at the Third Annual Runaway Open, last September 1st in Denver. This charity golf tournament for Phish fans included more than 50 players, in beautiful weather, the morning of the 2nd show during the three-show Labor Day weekend at Dick's Sporting Goods. Nearly a thousand dollars in prizes, from lot pins to free shoes, and a great time had by all.

Congratulations to the winning foursome (Gapp, Rusch, Mortell, and Bradley), the various contest winners (Colin Hall won for longest drive; Ron Mckernan did not win for closest to pin), and the ten raffle prize winners, and immense thanks to everyone for coming out.

We hope to see you at the fourth annual event this year, Saturday August 31st. Details will be announced, and registration will open, this Sunday, May 12th. Early registration is encouraged, as all three previous events have sold out, with a waiting list.

(P.S. The soundtrack from this video is Tom Tom Club's version of Phish's "Sand" from the Mockingbird Foundation tribute album Sharin' in the Groove.)

[Welcome To Weekly Catch With Osiris! A weekly series brought to you from the team at Osiris. Each Wednesday we're going to bring you a historic Phish show from that week with some commentary. Our goal is to go beyond official releases and well-known shows to bring you some of the overlooked gems throughout Phish history. If you like what you find, we'd encourage you to check out the assortment of podcasts at the Osiris! This week's catch comes from Brian Brinkman of Beyond The Pond.]

Listen: Page Commons Room, Student Center, Colby College, Waterville, ME - 05/10/1991

Aside from Vermont, perhaps no other Northeastern State seems to encapsulate Phish quite like Maine. According to this site, the band has been playing Maine since January 1989, and have played some of the biggest shows of their entire career there. Shows like 8/3/1991, 2/3/1993, 12/30/1993, 11/2/1994, 12/11/1995, 8/17/1997, 12/7/99, 8/2/03, and 10/19/2010 impacted not only their immediate tours, but the overall trajectory of their sound and career in a number of ways.

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Welcome to the 374th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the first* and easiest of May! 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 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck!

*Reminder: For the first MJM of each month, only folks who have never won an MJM are allowed to answer before the hint. If you have never won an MJM, please answer as a blog 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 @ucpete threw together to help guide you. If you're not sure if you've won before, check in the MJM Results spreadsheet linked below.

Hint: 25 years after the Dead's seminal live record from across the pond, Phish drops this heater from the very same continent.

Answer: Congratulations to first-time MJM winner @fukuoka_gumbo, who used the hint (referring to Europe '72) to place this jam in one of the two European '97 tours (Winter and Summer) and found the post-"Free" jam hiding in plain sight before the 2/20/97 "Swept Away." With his first win, he also takes home a code good for the free MP3 download of any show from LivePhish.com. The keen observer may have noticed that @ucpete shared a glorious SBD / AUD matrix of 2/20/97 in 24-bit FLAC format in the run-up to this week's puzzle, so really, we're all winning this week! Won't you come out to play MJM375 on Monday?

[Welcome To Weekly Catch With Osiris! A weekly series brought to you from the team at Osiris. Each Wednesday we're going to bring you a historic Phish show from that week with some commentary. Our goal is to go beyond official releases and well-known shows to bring you some of the overlooked gems throughout Phish history. If you like what you find, we'd encourage you to check out the assortment of podcasts at the Osiris! This week's catch comes from Myke "Lawn Memo" Mineo of The Daily Soundcheck.]

Listen: Le Spectrum, Montreal, Quebec, Canada - 04/29/1993

Lately, I have been caught up with listening to some of the all times greats. I went on massive binges in recent weeks diving deep with Duane Allman, Bob Marley, and Jimi Hendrix. As incredible as each of those respective musicians’ catalogs are, what continues to floor me is the young age of those men were when they passed. Duane was 24, Marley 36, and Jimi 27. So much genius for being so young! Here I am in my late 30s, and on most days I have no idea what I am doing, let alone creating “Statesboro Blues”, “Hammer”, or “Third Stone from the Sun”.

When asked to pick a show for the Weekly Catch series, I knew I wanted to pick one with a cool soundcheck. The timing worked out to chose 04/29/1993 Le Spectrum in Montreal, Quebec.

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Welcome to the 373rd edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the fifth and hardest of April. 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 songs and dates of the four mystery clips. The clips are connected by a theme, but the theme needn't be part of the correct answer. 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. Good luck!

Hint:

Answer: With his third win in a row, we have another future emeritus knocking on the door to the club of the promised land and a seventh win! @MikeThong picked up the "Mothership Connection" linking this week's jams to their performance at Hampton Coliseum: the 1/2/03 46 Days, the 8/9/04 Bathtub Gin, the 10/20/13 Golden Age, and the 12/18/99 2001. Will he claim his crown by tying yours truly for the record of most consecutive MJM wins, or will n00b week foil his pursuits by pushing it back another week? All that we know, is that we at the emeriti club will welcome him when and not if he reaches seven wins... stay tuned next week for a refresher in difficulty back to square one!

[Take the Bait is spirited deliberation centered around the hyperbole of Phish’s music and fandom, passionately exuded via the written words of phish.net contributors @FunkyCFunkyDo and @n00b100. Opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of phish.net, The Mockingbird Foundation, or any fan… but we're pretty sure we’re right. Probably.]

Funky: Well, n00b, if you know of any two words more polarizing in the Phish lexicon, I’ll put pants on while writing my segments. No, I’ll do it. I’ll do it, n00b. Pants, on.

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[Welcome To Weekly Catch With Osiris! A weekly series brought to you from the team at Osiris. Each Wednesday we're going to bring you a historic Phish show from that week with some commentary. Our goal is to go beyond official releases and well-known shows to bring you some of the overlooked gems throughout Phish history. If you like what you find, we'd encourage you to check out the assortment of podcasts at the Osiris! This week's catch comes from Michael Shield of Across The Margin.]

Listen: New Orleans Fairgrounds, New Orleans, LA - 04/26/1996

With the 2019 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival kicking off this week down in Louisiana, we at Osiris figured this would be an ideal time to Weekly Catch-up with the instances in which Phish played the festival, occurrences which have taken place twice, first in 1996 and then eighteen years later in 2014. While we would like to direct you towards the exploratory, fiery “Down With Disease” that ripped through the fairgrounds in 2014, the focus here today is on the quartet’s first appearance at Jazz Fest, where Phish played and enthused and entirely fun “jukebox” set highlighting many of the facets that make them so special — and oh yeah, Michael Ray (Sun Ra) joined the party for a hot minute!

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Welcome to the 372nd edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the fourth of April. Special shout out to fellow MJM emeritus @WayIFeel for his assistance with this week's theme and clip selection! 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 songs and dates of the three mystery clips. Theclips are connected by a theme, but the theme needn't be part of the correct answer. 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. Good luck!

Hint: This picture.

Answer: Mere minutes after the mention of a potential rare win for the Blog between @ucpete and myself, @MikeThong was able to crack our puzzle of jams played on foreign (to the USA) soil. Correct identification of the 7/30/99 Ghost from Japan, the 7/22/13 David Bowie from Toronto, and the 6/25/97 Down With Disease from France earns our scantily-clad friend a feathered win to put in the cap while en route to a fifth download code! Knocking on the emeritus door, I see... do we have yet another champion to crown this year? Stay tuned to find out, where puzzle difficulty increases next week.

Oregon State University will host the first-ever Phish Studies academic conference, showcasing research about Phish, its fans, and culture. The three-day event will take place on May 17-19, 2019, in OSU’s Memorial Union. More than 50 presentations from scholars from more than 20 states and Canada will present at the conference. In addition to academic presentations, the conference will feature a number of special events, including art exhibits, community panels, a concert, and a documentary film screening.

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[Welcome To Weekly Catch With Osiris! A weekly series brought to you from the team at Osiris. Each Wednesday we're going to bring you a Phish show from that week with some commentary. Our goal is to go beyond official releases and well-known shows to bring you some of the overlooked gems throughout Phish history. If you like what you find, we'd encourage you to check out the assortment of podcasts at the Osiris! This week's catch comes from RJ Bee of Helping Friendly Podcast.]]

Listen: The Warfield, San Francisco, CA, 4/17/92

As I sit here in California, I'm grateful to be reflecting on an awesome California run and and a notable, if sometimes overlooked, show from San Francisco. True to the point of "Weekly Catch," this is another one of those "show the night after the show" kind of shows. Follow that? Me either. Anyway, the night before is one of the most famous shows I’ve come across, 4.16.92.

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