As many of you know one of my favorite organizations in the entire world is the Mercer Veterinary Clinic for the Homeless in Sacramento, CA. I have been volunteering there as a veterinarian for about 6 years now. The Mercer Clinic provides veterinary care for the pets of the homeless in the Sacramento area free of charge. Unfortunately the Mercer clinic only operates on a monthly basis and for the rest of the month my friend Anneke Vos basically takes care of everything else. You Mercer folks know Anneke, but for those of you that don‚t she is an 82 year old woman with a heart of gold that really cares deeply for the people on the bottom rung of the ladder and especially for their animals. This summer she spent a day in 100 degree weather searching for a homeless man with a limping old, dog named Lily so that she could take Lily to have her knee repaired. All of this, while she suffered from a healing punctured lung. I kid you not, this lady is the real deal and did I mention she is 82…

Anneke has been nominated for Animal Planet’s “Hero of the Year” award and has made it to the final ten participants. I don‚t know how these things work but if she gets the most votes she will receive $10,000 from the show. I know that if she gets the prize, every penny of the 10 grand will be spent helping the pets of the homeless; on things like paying for veterinary care for dogs hit by cars or infected with parvo virus, or finding a good home for an animal who‚s owner was put in jail (the #1 source of mental health care for the poor in CA). If she was not there many of these people would wait 2 or more weeks before their animals could be seen by a veterinarian at the Mercer Clinic. The money would go a long way to help these animals.

Could you please, please do me a favor and spend a few minutes to vote for Anneke? Just clink on the link below and hit the button by Anneke‚s name and picture. Consider it your good deed for the day.

Click Here to Help Us Vote for Anneke!

The voting ends October 8th so please vote early and vote often. Please forward this on to a friend you think would vote.

Thank you very, very much,

Mike Teglas

We just finished an amazing tour with Strike Anywhere which hit up the northeast and Canada. All of the bands on the tour including A Global Threat and Modern Life Is War were all awesome guys. We had a blast over the last 3 weeks. Click the pic on the right of us driving through the midwest to check out some pics from two of the great shows from this tour in Asbury Park, NJ and Strike Anywhere’s hometown of Richmond, VA. Now that this tour is done we are heading west to start the Pennywise, Circle Jerks Tour in Portland, Oregon on Sunday. Check the tour dates section to see all the dates for this tour. Awesome!!!

Our friends over at Hardkern.de have recently launched an intervieew we did while were in Europe over the summer.

Here’s a clip from the interview:

Hardkern.de: 6 years have been passed since your last release. What took you so long?

Over the past 5-6 years we have been touring, more touring, songwriting and recording. Three years touring on the last album, then one year off, six months making demos and finding a new label, then a year writing and touring on the new material (new places like Brazil and Australia and of course Europe festivals in the summer). That was followed in early 2005 with pre-production and three months recording the cd with Cameron Webb and finally three months of set-up time for the label to properly market the cd worldwide. Yes….that takes us from June 2000 to May 2006 in one paragraph. Time goes fast!!!

Hardkern.de: It was the same with your further releases. Don`t you think your fans become fed up with such long waiting periods?

I think that our fans would have been really pissed if we would have put out a crappy cd. I think it was better for us to wait and do it right.

Hardkern.de: The title of your new CD is “Our darkest days”. Did you have such a bad time during the last years?

As for the title, these are dark times that we are living in. All of the political strife in the middle east. All of the problems we are having in the U.S. with our government. There are also a numbers of personal struggles that actually gave us the bulk of the influence for this album title. The album title is very relevant to current events for the band and the world. We slowly started working on the songs in 2001 but most of the work was done in 2005.

Click here to read the entire interview!