Nice piece, Charlie. I enjoyed thinking about the "hose" concept again, and the transcendent beauty of the "five star" show or jam, as a follow-on to your recent excellent rants and the diverse reactions thereto about show ratings and "stars".

Also enjoyed briefly recollecting IT -- how could that have been twenty years ago?? The Tower Jam, one of the most bizarre while totally captivating displays I've ever seen, walking into the sunken art garden with the half buried Big Boy burger store sign while very high and Jason Colton is standing next to it (need to find photo I took). Liked the masthead of the festival newspaper Dean edited, lots of familiar names of people who don't suck at writing about the Phish.

(BTW, I really want one of those "YOU SUCK AT PHISH -ICCULUS" T Shirts! because I do, at least in terms of technical explanation, though I agree with your star rating "system" and of the way you reviewed the SPAC shows we attended...8/25 II and Wave of Hope -> Simple > Fuego -> CDT jamming is up there in my pantheon of best all time (130) shows, probably the only 3.0 show I can think of offhand). Those shirts need to be in the Phish.net store, I think that will sell (paging Pete).

Lastly, I want to thank you for probably unintentionally introducing me (via links) to Relisten.net the universe of streaming archives that was somehow converted from the huge number of audience recordings ("tapes") to something with a super slick and simple front end that includes an iOS app.

That's a huge improvement being able to stream archived tapes and linking all these things together in a simple hierarchical directory where you can drill down artist > year > tapes in chronological order. And it's free like the old crunchy non-commercial user-supported internet, last but not least about that.

And one more thing about that which I really like, and which brings me back to your rating rants, is that Relisten as well as the link to Phish.in pulls the meta data about the shows, dates, venues, setlist, lyrics, jam flairs...and user ratings from Phish.net, through our APIs. So kind of like any kind of "RottenTomatoes.com" style fan ratings elsewhere on the internets, the "fan ratings" in category Artist = Phish are from "dot net" which is the best, maybe only source, which offers sample sizes in the range of 700+ per show, which are considered statistically significant IRL. And I like that the sites give credit and profiles in the "about" sections to Phish.net and MBIRD as the data sources. Classy.