Karl 
ON THE PITCHFORK: A boffo review for the power pop complilation Yellow Pills and a list of indie rock songs about God. ALSO: Brooklyn Vegan has discovered that Pitchfork is beta-testing an internet radio station.
B.B. KING: The Arkansas Legislature has approved a $5,000 expenditure to build a monument honoring bluesman B.B. King in the tiny Delta town of Twist.
SON VOLT will have a new album, a retrospective disc and a live DVD available in the near future.
STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON: Sylvia Hauser recently pointed me to Nina Gordon's unpluggedety cover of the NWA staple. Coincidentally, the next day I came across the ni9e blog’s “explicit content only” version of the original, which edits out everything except the profanity.
BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE took long enough but will be releasing three new albums on a staggered schedule, one this Fall and two next year. It's like their Lord of the Rings.
THE ROCK SNOB'S DICTIONARY has a promo site that's fun in itself. “The Rock Snob is a confounding person in your life. On one hand, he brooks no ignorance of pop-music history… On the other hand, he will not countenance the notion that you know more than he about a certain area of music.”
BOURBON STREET is a hotbed of racial discrimination, harassment and price gouging, according to a study done following the death of a black student who suffocated after a scuffle with white bouncers outside Razzoo Bar and Patio.
STONE AGE PORN: An increasing number of archeological finds seem to indicate the Stone Age was an orgy of sexual imagination.
LEFTY BLOGMEISTER Markos Moulitsas Zúniga spent three days at a conference of various leaders of the budding Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, concluding that old-style activism is ineffective.
RIGHTY COLUMNIST ANN COULTER is the cover story of Time magazine this week. But in the accompanying photo gallery, Time runs a photo captioned Protesters blast Coulter at the G.O.P. Convention in New York City last year that is clearly a fake to anyone who bothers to read the signs. In the event that Time wises up and yanks the photo, just click on the “Read more” link at the bottom of today’s links to see a screenshot of Time’s web site from Sunday.
COMPUTER-GENERATED GIBBERISH: Pranksters from M.I.T. wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with “context-free grammar,” charts and diagrams. One of the papers was accepted for presentation at the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.
U.K. ELECTION: A YouGov survey for Friday's Daily Telegraph found Labour extended its lead over the Tories, but an ICM survey for Channel 4 news indicated that Labour would be down from 408 to 384 seats while the number of Tory MPs would increase from 165 to 193. An ICM poll showed a much bigger win for Labour, though it also showed a small loss of seats.
BRITNEY: Rumor has it that her baby is a girl (not yet a woman). Stereogum presents “Pregnancy 101 for the Federlines.” And those awful paparazzi end up paying for the Federlines' ice cream.
IT'S A GIRL! No, I'm not confirming the Britney rumor — I'm referring to the baby wholfin. The only whale-dolphin mix in captivity has given birth to a playful female calf, officials at Sea Life Park Hawaii said Thursday. And since “liger” is one of the top search terms that refer folks to this site, I'd be remiss to snub the wholfin, though the wholfin does not have the buzz the liger got from Napoleon Dynamite.
MARIAH CAREY loses 30 pounds, the Photoshop way.
CELEBRITY FREELOADERS: The Hollywood “gimme!” syndrome has run amuck. How much does it cost to maintain these lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-gluttonous? And, when the price of all the private jets, personal stylists, masseuses, and champagne is tallied up, who's getting stuck with the bill?
STADIUM ROCK: London's Daily Telegraph argues that the Brits do it better, at least when applied to bands over solo performers.
MELLENCAMP does not seem to be a common name, so it's interesting that about a dozen people with that name living in the small town where John Cougar grew up are collecting farm aid from the feds.
JEFF TWEEDY: The Houston Chronicle got a lot of good material in their interview with the Wilco frontman, including a sharp observation about punk rock. But the most endearing quote may be, “Man, I think you should quit if you're not a fan.”
BLACKSBURG, VA: Police have arrested a 28-year-old man they say shot his 14-year-old girlfriend.
OIL-FOR-FOOD SCANDAL: United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan blames the U.S. and the U.K. for the scandal because they failed to stop smuggling to Turkey and Jordan. Annan's own investigation into the oil-for-food scandal lasted precisely one day. The response from British Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammel: “We have been co-operating fully with the Volcker inquiry. And what I do know is that his interim report actually makes criticisms of the U.N. management system and not of national governments.” U.S. officials noted that the U.N. Security Council committee overseeing the program as well as Congress allowed the exports to Jordan and Turkey, and were open about it. Security Council members probably could have exercised more oversight of the oil-for-food program, but Annan's attack is a bit like blaming the police for crime.
SEND AWAY THE CLOWNS: Eastern Iowa police have issued a warning about a registered sex offender now working as a clown at children's birthday parties.
AYE-AYE: Not just sailor lingo, but also one of the world's strangest and most endangered animals — one has been born in captivity at a Bristol zoo. Note the elongated middle finger, which the aye-aye uses to flip off its enemies.
IF YOU JUST PAID YOUR TAXES FRIDAY, you will be happy to learn that an IRS employee was arrested Friday on charges he destroyed numerous tax forms and letters from taxpayers, according to the U.S. Attorney's office in Boston.
NATURE OR NURTURE? Research on monkeys suggests that a sense of morality is programmed into our genetic code.
AMAZON is looking to partner with Blockbuster or Netflix, rather than launching its own U.S. DVD rental service.
“RESURECTION ECOLOGY:” Hatching eggs once thought to be dead and producing colonies of animals as they existed decades ago is allowing scientists to study evolution.
RUPERT MURDOCK gave a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors that should have been titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet.”
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? Maybe it has too many capitals.
JOHN BOLTON'S NOMINATION to be U.N. Ambassador has raised questions about the extent to which the U.S. should act multi-laterally and about Bolton's temperament as a boss. On the weekend before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote, some are finally asking the question that may strike at the heart of the suspicions that swirl around Bolton: “Dude, what's up with that 'stache?”
HONOR KILLING? In Holland, an Iraqi-Kurdish man, 21, is suspected of murdering his sister, 18, to protect the honour of the family. The victim was a non-practising Muslim and had a child in 2004 by her non-Muslim boyfriend. She was killed 15 days after the birth of the baby.
MADONNA AND P.DIDDY: Madge's movie company is being sued for sexual harrassment; Madge is being sued for negligent hiring. The alleged harrasser is executive-producing an untitled Sean Combs movie project next year, which may pressure the company into settling the case.
TOMB RAIDER: A vermont teenager is being held after police said he raided a tomb in a cemetery and removed a head from a corpse. Court documents said the suspect allegedly talked of using the man's head as a bong.
ANCIENT TREASURES REVEALED? Thousands of previously illegible manuscripts containing work by some of the greats of classical literature are being read for the first time using infra-red light and techniques developed from satellite imaging.
IRAQ: Winds of Change has its regular round-up of Iraq news posted. And that CBS News stringer detained by the U.S. military after a gunbattle between U.S. forces and insurgents this month “tested positive for explosive residue,” though it’s buried at the very bottom of the story. Reporters Dexter Filkins of The New York Times and Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News, returning from Iraq, gave their impressions of how the situation there has evolved on Meet The Press. And Iraq’s new president has said the insurgency could be ended immediately if the authorities made use of Kurdish, Shia Muslim and other militias. I suspect that will be resisted due to the tension it would create with the Sunni population, though the president is also floating the idea of an amnesty for Sunni insurgents again.
REVENGE OF THE SITH: With the final Star Wars movie due in about a month, related activity on the 'net is inevitable. For example, Boing-Boing presents the unintentionally sexual Star Wars coloring book.
HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, due April 29th, gets a good advance review in the London Telegraph, assuring folks that the beloved work of Douglas Adams has not been Americanized for the big screen.
CANADA: The latest polling suggests that Adscam may indeed bring down the Liberal government, as the Tories' improved standing will tempt them to call for a new election.
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER TEACHER is under investigation for having sex with two female students in NYC. The teacher has not been charged, but the allegation that he had sex with a 16-year-old has been forwarded to the Queens district attorney's office. When this story broke Friday, it was the fourth case involving NYC teachers that week.
SO HERE is what Time had up on its web site Sunday as part of its story on Ann Coulter:
