Beck, Reunions, Festivals, Long John Baldry and a 500 lb. Moose

WALK THE LINE: The trailer for the Johhny Cash – June Carter biopic is now online in both Windows and Quicktime formats. Although I'm not thrilled with Reese Witherspoon as June, it sounds like Joaquin Phoenix worked o­n his Cash.

BECK: Scenes From A Mexican Restaurant.

LOLLAPALOOZA: With temperatures near and exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit, I decided to skip the weekend fest. However, I note that Perry Farrell added Kidzapalooza, a family-friendly area where all children under 10 got in free with a ticketholding adult. The Chicago Sun-Times has more. And Flickr has photos of The Pixies, Spoon, Weezer, The Walkmen, Liz Phair (looking more like Sheryl Crow all the time) and even Billy Idol with guitarist Stevie Stevens.

REUNION ROCK: Geoff Edgers of the Boston Globe is swearing it off, claiming it hurts new artists. Chris Riemenschneider of the Mpls Star-Tribune, however, lists ten bands from the 80s and 90s who would probably have the best reunion outings.

LAURA CANTRELL, an indie country darling, is inteviewed in PopMatters.

ELVIS COSTELLO discusses the unusual format of his tour with Emmylou Harris.

PETE DOHERTY UPDATE: The troubled singer reportedly wants to quit Babyshambles so he can sing with fiancee Kate Moss. She's got to be a better singer than Yoko, right?

COURTNEY LOVE: Off the wagon already? And yet she's upset that daughter Frances Bean was not invited to the bar mitzvah of Steven Spielberg's son. Or was that the straw that broke the camel's back? Oh, wait, the judge reviewing her case has ruled she is “progressing well,” though there's no mention of the fainting incident.

IGGY POP: Sure, you've heard the story about Iggy and the peanut butter, but if you have broadband, WFMU has the video from 1970.

INTONATION FESTIVAL RECAP, PART FOUR: Pitchfork has the big finale and even answers Ken King's question.

THE WRENS, who were impressive at Intonation, are planning to record another album and to tour.

MORNING BECOMES ECLECTIC, KCRW's indie showcase is now a podcast.

LONG JOHN BALDRY: The legendary blues singer, who performed and recorded more than 40 albums with Charlie Watts, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Jimmy Page, Jack Bruce, Rod Stewart and Elton John, died at in a Vancouver hospital at 64 after fighting a severe chest infection. A friend of Paul McCartney and the man who inspired Clapton to take up the guitar, Baldry later became known for voice work, including a 1998 Grammy nomination for narrating Winnie the Pooh recordings for Walt Disney.

LUCINDA WILLIAMS tells the Rocky Mountain News that Neil Young's Live Rust was a template for her live album.

NEIL YOUNG announces the long-rumored Archives, Vol. 1 o­n the crawl at his website.

MONKEES = MONKEES: Stereogum explains the rules of the game.

CLOSE THE DOORS: Doors drummer John Densmore, singer Jim Morrison's parents and those of his late wife have won a court order banning Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger from performing under the Doors name and requiring them to share profits from their group with the original Doors partnership.

COLDPLAY frontman Chris Martin was named this year's world's sexiest vegetarian by PETA. No Rock 'n' Roll Fun nails the news perfectly.

JACK NICHOLSON: Sell crazy someplace else. They're all stocked up on the set of The Departed.

THE NAKED TICKLER: New Smyrna Beach police believe o­ne man could be responsible for a series of bizarre break-ins in which a naked man enters victims' rooms while they are sleeping and tries to tickle their feet.

TOM-KAT UPDATE: “Oh my god. Actually, I'd run away.” That's the reaction of Britney Spears' mom, when asked what Cruise should wear for his third walk down the aisle. I don't know how I missed Cruise's interview with Jesus Christ. And Holmes is crazy… about Chanel. But at least Holmes is completely safe from the naked tickler.

CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY tops the weekend box office again. I figured as much, as many families were all about Harry Potter last weekend. March of the Penguins went into more theaters, cracked the Top Ten and was number four in per screen average.

JUDE LAW was discreet about the nanny while he was o­n the Louisiana set of All the King's Men. Well, yeah… otherwise I would have heard about it.

LEE ANN RIMES shops at The Pleasure Chest.

P. DIDDY terrorized Rosie O'Donnell's family.

SALMA HAYEK was on Capitol Hill last week, lobbying Congress strengthen a 1994 law against domestic violence.

EGYPTIAN RESORT BOMBING: Police are piecing together the evidence in Egypt's worst-ever terrorist attack and searching for three suspects believed to have survived the bombings. Investigators are checking any link between this attack and the October 2004 Taba bombing, but the sophistication and timing of this attack raised worries of an al Qaeda link. o­ne of the groups claiming responsibility is an AQ affiliate, who called the bombing a “response against the global evil powers which are spilling the blood of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechnya.” Because Egypt is invading all of those places, right? Of course, some in Egypt blame Israel.

EGYPT AND LONDON: Counterterrorism analysts and government officials in Europe and the Middle East believe that the back-to-back nature of the attacks in Egypt and London, as well as similarities in the methods used, suggests that al-Qaeda might have ordered both operations and is a clear sign Osama bin Laden and his deputies remain in control. There's more analysis of the London and Sharm el-Sheikh bombings at The Fourth Rail.

LONDON BOMBING: The police arrest a third suspect and discover that some of the July 21 attackers may have visited the same Welsh whitewater rafting center as two of the July 7 suicide bombers.

LONDON II: The supposedly moderate Muslim groups in the UK are back to apologizing for terrorism and playing the victim. A new poll of Muslims for the London Telegraph shows the vast majority disagree with these so-called moderate leaders, but also contains alarming statistics. For example, while o­nly six per cent insist that the bombings were fully justified, that number suggests about 100,000 Muslims in the UK feel this way. Moreover, 24 percent have some sympathy with the feelings and motives of the bombers. Nearly o­ne British Muslim in five, 18 per cent, feels little or no loyalty towards the country. Meanwhile, o­ne of Iran's most powerful clerics suggested during the Friday sermon in Tehran that last week’s bombings could have been the work of the U.K. government.

LONDON III: The Guardian dismissed Dilpazier Aslam, the “trainee journalist” who failed to disclose he was a member of the radical Islamist political party, Hizb ut-Tahrir. The paper then did a second article complaining that Aslam was identified by a “rightwing blogger” who applied to be a Guardian intern, and that “The story is a demonstration of the way the 'blogosphere' can be used to mount obsessively personalised attacks at high speed.” Another way to put it would be that someone did a better background check than the Guardian did o­n Aslam, just by Googling his name. The Guardian learned its lesson: the second article is bylined to “a Staff Reporter.”

CULT OF THE iPod: Numark announces the iDJ Mixing Console for iPod portable music players. NBC's Meet the Press joins the ranks of podcasters.

DISTRACTED BY TECHNOLOGY: Carl Honore, journalist and author of In Praise of Slowness, contends that the typical office worker needs about eight uninterrupted minutes to get into a creative state, but is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction.

IRAQ: Iraq's electoral commission will begin registering voters Aug. 1 for this year's constitutional referendum and election, amid hopes Sunni leaders will succeed in their push for more participation. The Sunnis seem ready to rejoin the commission drafting Iraq’s constitution and Iraqi police announced the capture and purported confession of a suspected mastermind of the July 16 bombing in Musayyib that killed nearly 100 people. However, the insurgency continues; Phebe Marr, author of Modern History of Iraq, who just returned to from a visit, came away thrilled by the “very genuine and very lively political progress” in Baghdad but discouraged by the insurgents' stubborn hold. First Lt. David Lucas, who just returned after spending 367 days patrolling downtown Baghdad with the Army's 10th Mountain Division, writes that “the war my men and I fought is a totally different war than the o­ne I see being reported by almost the entire media.” To read the whole thing, BugMeNot suggested using silviom@mailinator.com as the ID and helsinki as the password.

IRAQ II: The Guard Experience has a piece from the Army News Service about the ICE device, which is roughly the size of a bread box and uses commercial and military technology to thwart enemy IEDs. “Phil,” currently stationed in Iraq, has an upclose look at the glass-half-full-or-empty progress of the Iraqi Army. Major General Stephen T. Johnson, commander of the II Marine Expeditionary Force Forward and of Multinational Forces West, says the Al Anbar province has no Iraqi forces that are ready to conduct independent operations, because Al Anbar did not get newer Iraqi forces until a few months ago. However, in the last six or eight weeks, he has “started to see some great results from this partnering and from the training and from the efforts of the Iraqi soldiers.” Another draft of the Iraqi Bill of Rights has been translated and looks like an improvement over the first version noted here earlier, both in terms of women's rights and in not overpromising social welfare benefits. In Saddam's birthplace, the villagers have fond memories of Uday and Qusay, presumably because none was ever thrown into an industrial plastic-shredder by Saddam's sons.

WHY DO THEY HATE US? Olivier Roy, professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and the author of Globalized Islam, argues that it's not because of Iraq. He also argues the biggest threat to the West generally comes from Westernized Muslims living or even born in Europe who turn (or convert) to radical Islam. American Enterprise Institute fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht analyzes Roy's thesis.

DISORGANIZED LABOR: The Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union decided Sunday to bolt the AFL-CIO, paving way for two other labor groups to sever ties in the movement's biggest schism since the 1930s. The four dissident unions, representing nearly o­ne-third of the AFL-CIO's 13 million members, announced they were boycotting the federation's convention that begins today.

MISS UNIVERSE UPDATE: Toronto Mayor David Miller has issued an apology to Miss Universe after the city barred her from opening a festival o­n municipal property based o­n a city bylaw against sexual stereotyping. Former Toronto mayor June Rowlands cited the same bylaw years ago while refusing to let the Barenaked Ladies play at the square in front of City Hall because of the pop-rock group's name.

WAITING FOR MEDICAL TREATMENT IS NOT ALWAYS BAD, according to the Canadian government's new point man o­n wait lists. But it has also been recognized for years that Canada lacks a coherent system for managing wait times, a fact highlighted by last month's Supreme Court of Canada ruling that long waits in Quebec were an infringement of people's rights to life and security.

INA'S, a restaurant recommended to me by our own Susan Jasper at the 2003 Pate reunion, recently got help from eatery mogul Rich Melman o­n CNN's The Turnaround.

FUZZY MATH: Last Thursday, Congress had to pass some “technicall corrections” to a bill funding National Highway Traffic Safety Administration programs in billions instead of millions. Oops.

DOUBLE-SUPER CREEPY: Super creepy is trying to hook up with a 13-year-old girl in an AOL chat room. Double-super creepy is showing up to the hoped-for rendezvous with your 14-month-old son.

BONDAGE BARBIE: A trademark case brought by Mattel against Barbies Shop, a Canadian store selling bondage clothing, has been dismissed by a New York court, but the nation's largest toymaker said Thursday the case “isn't resolved.”

FORT CARSON INVADED by a 500 pound moose. The animal was taken to Grand Mesa; the military provided 600 pounds of ice to put in the trailer to keep the moose cool for the drive through record-high temperatures.

PET HOARDING: Animal control officers have seized 105 cats from a Lorton, VA home in o­ne of two major cases of pet hoarding reported in the county this month, police said Friday.

WATER MOCCASIN IN TOILET attacks a Jacksonville woman in the middle of the night. So I guess the alligator story is an old wives' tale.

THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE was probably made worse by his medicine. Somewhere, Tom Cruise is saying, “I knew it!”