Karl 
SWEET EMOTION: Aerosmith's Steven Tyler received an honorary degree from U Mass on Friday.
IF CLAUDE PATE could cover the Bee Gees' “Nights on Broadway,” I suppose I can't fault Billy Corgan too much for covering the oft-covered “To Love Somebody,” which Stereogum has for download.
ELVIS COSTELLO: As I linked to a story of EC refusing to refund fans for a concert delayed so that he could watch soccer on TV, it's only fair that I also link to an account that puts the King of America in a better light.
PATTI SMITH talks about the artists who influenced her, wh will also be a focus of the Meltdown festival she is curating this year.
COLDPLAY is “the most insufferable band of the decade,” according to Jon Pareles in The New York Times. Frontman Chris Martin is confused about how iPods work and by childbirth. Not very promising from a guy who likes to lecture his audience and just about anyone else who will listen.
THE OMAHA SOUND: Listen, my friends — the Arizona Republic provides a family tree.
SUMMER MUSIC: Salon is giving away a free iPod for the best summer soundtrack of freely available MP3s.
YO LA TENGO got a nice feature in the Japan Times.
LIVE 8: More headaches for Bob Geldof — according to The Independent, “anarchist groups that have rioted at previous G8 gatherings are planning similar disruptions in Scotland and plan to hijack Geldof's 'long march to freedom' on 6 July and the Make Poverty History rally on 2 July.”
ROD STEWART, having impregnated his fiancee, files for a divorce from Rachel Hunter. No word on who gets custody of Stacy.
TRENT REZNOR won a jury verdict of almost three million bucks against his former manager. Now he will probably discover that it's easier to win a judgment than it is to collect it.
78 RPM MP3s from 1911-26 aplenty at Turtle Services, Ltd.
THE NOTORIOUS B.I.G. murder nvestigation has been driven in no small part by an informer who describes himself as a paranoid schizophrenic and has said under oath that that his identification of the alleged gunman was fraudulent. The statements cast grave doubt on the theory that has been featured in Rolling Stone magazine, on MTV and PBS' Frontline, and in books and movies — that corrupt police officers played a role in the killing and that top LAPD officials covered up their actions.
PODCASTING: Live stuff from Steve Earle and Rilo Kiley is up at Some Depresssion.
TOMMY LEE may be looking for Adriana Lima, but in the meantime, he was spotted kissing seven different women in one night.
BATMAN BEGINS, and so do the advance reviews at Ain't-It-Cool-News. Two raves, in fact. I admit that Christopher Nolan in the director's chair has my hopes up.
YOUR MOMENT OF SITH: Courtesy of MetaFilter, but don't click on the links there if you want to avoid a spoiler.
SHORT TAKES: Filmcritic.com lists its Top 40 “Short Take” Movie Moments — memorable scenes that are no more than five seconds long. Number 40 is one of my Dad's favorites.
CINDERELLA MAN is getting overwhelmingly good reviews, but placed fourth at the weekend box office. I saw it and enjoyed it. It will suffer by comparison to Seabiscut, but the final fight is gripping and Paul Giamatti is as good as always, albeit in a supporting role here.
IRAQ: The New York Times has a truly interesting chart of statistics for May 2003 (the first full month after the fall of Baghdad), June 2004 (the last month before the Coalition Authority gave way to the interim Iraqi government) and May 2005. Some of the numbers are debatable, but kudos to the NYT for taking a look at the big picture, which can be lost in today's 24/7 news cycle.
IRAQ II: United Nations satellite imagery experts have determined that material that could be used to make biological or chemical weapons and banned long-range missiles has been removed from 109 sites in Iraq. This is doubly disturbing. First, because we may not know where these materials are. Second, because the Iraq Survey Groups found that Saddam's regime had ongoing chemical and biological programs and trained terrorists, which seems kinda threatening, even in the absence of WMD stockpiles.
CATS AND DOGS: Gidget the cat tries to provoke guide dogs for a living.
DOGS: Maya, a 74-pound black Lab, took on India, a 120-pound pit bull who was mauling a sixth-grader. She probably saved the boy's life, as the cops had to fire so many shots to stop the lunging pit bull that the gunpowder set off an overhead smoke detector.
IS AMERICA THE GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD? Matthew Yglesias, blogging the progressive Take Back America conference, starts a discussion of polling data showing that when you ask if America is “the greatest country in the world” most voters say that it is, but when you ask if Democrats believe that America is the greatest country, most voters say that they do not. Be sure to read the comments also.
SCANDAL ROUND-UP: In Nashville, two-year FBI sting operation examining how state contracts were awarded during former state Gov. Don Sundquist's administration, nicknamed the “Tennessee Waltz” has led to the arrest of several lawmakers. In Ohio's “Coingate,” between $10 million and $12 million in rare coins have disappeared a collection in which the state Bureau of Workers' Compensation (BWC) began investing in 1998 as a peculiar form of stock hedge.
WASHINGTON ELECTION UPDATE: Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges is expected to announce his decision on the contest of the Governor's race today.
TOM-KAT UPDATE: Katie Holmes joined Tom Cruise onstage when he picked up a lifetime achievement award at the MTV Movie Awards, which airs June 9th. I'm sure it was a memorable as Lisa-Marie Presley kissing Michael Jackson on some other MTV award show. The War of the Worlds world premiere has been canceled in part because of concerns about providing security for Cruise. Cruise's recent behaviour has been so spectacularly off-the-wall that it has prompted senior executives at Paramount Studios to call crisis meetings and consider cancelling the third instalment of the Mission Impossible series, due to shoot next month. Meanwhile, Brooke Shields, whose use of Paxil to treat her postpartum depression was recently attacked by Cruise, left a pair of tickets to her show Chicago for Cruise and Holmes, “one adult, one child.” Meahwhile, Holmes tells Entertainment Tonight that Cruise “cast a spell on me. Katie, you may be new to Scientology, but spell-casting is for Wiccans and Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Holmes is a top candidate to paly Wonder Woman, which would be a mistake, imho. And in the UK, folks worry that Cruise is enticing the Beckhams into Scientology.
PORN DRIVES TECHNOLOGY: Adult movies in the Sony PlayStaion Portable-friendly Universal Media Disc format will be released in Japan this summer. One of the reasons for the failure of Sony's Betamax format was the explosion of VHS adult movies, since this genre was not given production clearance in Sony's Betamax format.
GIRLS GONE WILD creator gone wild enough to be blackmailed. You would think the guy would know the power of embarassing videotape.
NORTH KOREA: The government is sending millions of city dwellers to work on farms each weekend, largely to transplant rice to combat growing food shortages.
SPAIN: Nearly a million people protesting the Socialist government's moves to negotiate with Basque terrorists. Pictures here. Funny how the folks who pulled out of Iraq after the Madrid train bombing are becoming more serious about terror in their own backyard.
AZERBAIJAN: Yet another country has thousands demonstrating for elections, election law reforms and access to state-controlled television.
BRADGELINA UPDATE: Jolie and Pitt were spotted in canoodle delicto on a NYC hotel rooftop Thursday. Meanwhile, Jennifer Aniston has turned to Buddhism to get over her split with Pitt. Sounds to me like she's been spending time with a copy of Seven Years In Tibet.
JESSICA SIMPSON'S ears probably were burning when Philadelphia’s Q102 radio station aired accusations that she's been busy outside her marriage. The Superficial also has this story, but adds pictures from Simpson's latest video shoot because… well, it is The Superficial…
JESSICA ALBA attended the MTV Movie Awards; Golden Fiddle admires her dress. Well, it would be more accurate to say that he admires its translucency. Photo possibly NSFW.
IN THE FUTURE, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes.
IRAQ III: At Friday prayers, a cleric representing one of the ruling Shiite Arab parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, called for the Iraqi government to execute Saddam Hussein and his aides as soon as possible, which he said would help deflate the insurgency. I don't know whether that will deflate the ethnic tensions the insurgents are trying to create and exploit.
YOU'RE TOO KIND: Amber Taylor blogs kindness in past love affairs. If you click through to the comments, you can read mine, which was inevitable.
LI-LO: Lindsay Lohan and new pal Nicole Richie are featred at the Gallery of the Absurd. And she's publicly complaining about injuries suffered after a papparazzi got into a car accident with the Lohan while playing cat-and-mouse. Lawsuit to follow, or will LL simply be glad she didn't snap like a toothpick?
DIE(T) LAUGHING: American researchers have found that 10-15 minutes of genuine giggling can burn off the number of calories found in a medium square of chocolate. Lindsay Lohan must never stop laughing.
JUDGE MICHAEL McCONNELL may be President Bush's first nominee to the Supreme Court, if one or more Justices retires at the end of the Court's term (which is usuall the end of June). You can read a profile from the Legal Times in which veteran Supremes scribe Tony Mauro writes,”it's hard for many to decide exactly what McConnell is: conservative, liberal, or a perplexing blend of both.”
IRAQ IV: Iraq's new government appealed to the Bush administration to be more assertive on four key political and military issues, including help with drafting the new constitution and bringing Sunnis into the political process. Fortunately, it appears that Sunnis have begun talks with members of the panel writing the country's new constitution.
IRAQ V: Roughly half of the 15,000 items looted from the National Museum of Iraq in 2003 have been recovered, said its director, who thanked American officials for assistance in restoring the building.
LEBANON: As expected, Hizbollah is doing well in the second round of elections, especially as it has allied with its historical arch-foe, the Amal Movement (though both have backed Syria).
BASEBALL BOOKS are featured in the Pittsburg Post-Review and at the blog of Laregehearted Boy, from whom I steal almost daily.
THE NATIONAL SPELLING BEE was dominated by kids of Indian ancestry. What's their secret? In part, it's a craze the Indian-American community; in another part, it's a devotion to rote learning largely abandoned in public schools.
SEN. ROBERT BYRD looks shockingly vulnerable in the latest polling — he's lucky he has another year to campaign.
SEN. TOM HARKIN calls Christian broadcasters “sort of our home-grown Taliban.” Pat Robertson often says stupid and outrageous things, so apparently Tom feels he must sink to that level.
IRAQ VI: In Operation Lightning, Iraqi and U.S. forces are rounding up hundreds of suspected insurgents and have uncovered 50 weapons and ammunition caches and a huge underground insurgent bunker complex west of the capital, containing “numerous types of machine guns, ordnance, including mortars, rockets and artillery rounds, black uniforms, ski masks, compasses, log books, night vision goggles, and fully charged cell phones.” Also, an Iraqi believed to be a top terror leader in northern Iraq also was captured by U.S. and Iraqi forces in Mosul.
ZARQAWI DIED on FRIDAY, according to Iraqi Sunni sheikh Ammar Abdel Rahim Nasir. But Zarqawi is one cat with nine lives, so count me extremely skeptical.
DEEP THROAT: W. Mark Felt is almost certainly the Watergate informer, but there's a reason why you won't see him doing TV interviews. John Dean — yes, the former counsel to President Nixon — argues at length that the story begins with Felt, but does not end there.
THE DAWN PATROL: The Mudville Gazette rounds up posts from Milbloggers in Iraq and Iraqi bloggers about the small steps forward in Iraq that generally go unreported. Often, the soldiers' version of events differs from the version we see on television.
VIOLATING THE GENEVA CONVENTION: The ACLU is so devoted to exposing any violation of the Geneva Convention by U.S. troops that it has successfully sued for the release of four videos from Abu Ghraib prison and dozens of photographs, arguably in violation of Article 3.1(c) of the Geneva Convention. At least, the International Committee for the Red Cross thought when pictures were published of Saddam Hussein in his underwear.
ACLU II: When not busy forcing the release of photos sure to inflame the Muslim world, the group has been shredding some documents over the repeated objections of its records manager and in conflict with its longstanding policies on the preservation and disposal of records. The debate over the use of shredders is reminiscent of one late last year over the organization's efforts to collect a wide variety of data on its donors, even as it criticizes corporations and government agencies for accumulating personal data as a violation of privacy rights.
GITMO A GULAG? William Schulz, the head of the Amnesty International USA said on Sunday the group doesn't “know for sure” that the military is running a “gulag.” Schulz later said, “Clearly this is not an exact or a literal analogy.” Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident and political prisoner, argued that Amnesty compromises its work by refusing to differentiate “between democracies where there are sometimes serious violations of human rights and dictatorships where no human rights exist at all.” Washington Post columnist (and frequent Bush critic) E.J. Dionne asks, “Why do President Bush's critics make life so easy for him?” The column could be summed up by its conclusion: “Human rights are too important to be lost in bad metaphors.” Speaking of bad metaphors, The New York Times now calls for Gitmo to be shut down, asserting that “What Guantánamo exemplifies – harsh, indefinite detention without formal charges or legal recourse – may or may not bring to mind the Soviet Union's sprawling network of Stalinist penal colonies. It certainly has nothing in common with any American notions of justice or the rule of law.” The NYT editorial board is usuing the same metaphor used in body of the Amnesty report — the metaphor of law enforcement. The U.S. tried the law enforcement model of dealing with terrorists for a while. The NYT editors might stroll down to Ground Zero to remind themselves of how well that worked out.
QURAN DESECRATION: A military inquiry found five cases Quran mishandling, of which only three were intentional. Of the major media, it appears that only CNN headlines the fact that the inquiry foun 15 cases where detainees mishandled the Quran, including the attempt to flush it down a toilet. Meanwhile, three GIs face murder charges for the suffocation of an Iraqi general during an interrogation last year. Call me crazy (who doesn't?), but I think that merits more attention from the media than a guard stepping on a Quran.
AMERICANS TRUST THE MILITARY much more than they do the media. The latest Gallup Poll shows 74 percent of Americans have a lot of confidence in the military, but only 28 percent have that much confidence in TV news and newspapers. Oddly enough, a Google News search shows almost no major media coverage of these results.
WARNING: THE BIBLE may be hazardous to your health, according to some British hospital officials. Shouldn't Amnesty International demand an investigation of this treatment of a holy book?
SQUIRRELS INVADE the city of Novosibirsk (“New Siberia”) in Russia.
THE SAN FRANCISCO SNAKE had to be imported from the Netherlands.
THE SWARM: Two women were hospitalized Thursday after they were attacked by a swarm of bees in East Bexar County, TX.
OIL-FOR-FOOD SCANDAL: The only U.N. staffer fired for wrongdoing in the affair claims that he acted on orders of higher-ups and is being scapegoated to take the heat off Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other bigwigs. And it appears he has documents to back his claim.
JACK-FM: The supposed iPod-random format has, without notice, replaced the oldies stations in NYC and Chicago.
