Karl THE WEEKEND STARTS HERE:
“Memorial Day has become a paganistic ritual of the passage of spring, when the good people of America open their swimming pools, fire up their barbeques, forgetting or ignoring the real reason for this day's observation.”
Remember. At the very least, watch television.
KATHRYN ROTH-DOUQUET, who served in the Clinton White House and the Department of Defense, is also a military wife whose husband left for Iraq two months ago. She writes:
“I once helped to elect a president of the United States, which is admittedly a much flashier experience than being a military wife. But the sense of privilege that I felt at being part of that American pageant — from walking through the empty West Wing of the White House on inauguration day to flying on Air Force one — was no greater a feeling than the one I feel today, in a different role for my country.”
MODERN MEMORIALS are becoming more personal. “Part of it is a protest against the anonymity of mass death, ” says Edward Linenthal, a professor of religion and American culture at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Given that one of the memorials noted is staged weekly by Veterans for Peace, another part may be the post-Vietnam desire of some who oppose war to show support for the troops. And I warn slh that the article also discusses a unique memorial at Fort Stewart, GA.
THE FRIDAY TIME-WASTER is also your moment of Sith.
EMMYLOU HARRIS talks to the St. Petersburg Times about working with Conor Erbst (Bright Eyes) and Elvis Costello, who gave her a 40GB iPod he had programmed with every kind of music available. She calls it the Elvis Shuffle.
BOB MOULD is ticked that his forthcoming album has leaked onto the 'net. You can stream a little bit legally from Yep Roc Records and there's an allegedly Bob-approved download at Fluxblog.
BELLE & SEBASTIAN: Push Barman to Open Old Wounds, a collection of the band's non-LP output from 1997-2001 (save one track), gets the big 9.2 nod on the Pitchfork. It's a record we've been listening to and enjoying.
THE SAXOPHONE may be dead as rock instrument now, but it was much bigger in the Eighties than you remember.
REVENGE OF THE SITH: George Lucas is casually thinking about a prequel to Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Please, somebody stop him. The feds busted a peer-to-peer network that posted Episode III on the 'net. Matthew Baldwin remembers when he met Darth Vader at a shopping center and learned that evil really is as evil does.
CATS: A cat owner bought some cheese for his cat Huggy on eBay for the low, low price of $916 a kilogram.
DOGS travel thousands of miles looking for a new home; the only problem is, they speak Chinese.
CATS AND DOGS: Touring Club Italiano is publishing its third edition of In Italy with dogs and cats, which awards Italian restaurants and hotels “paws” for homemade dog food and vet service. But if you think this suggests that Italians cater to their pets, you would be mistaken. The guides are meant to encourage Italians to take their dogs and cats on holiday rather than dump them on the roadside as they head to the beach for summer vacation — a problem in Italy.
BABY OPOSSUM APPEARS IN TOILET: The discovery has hampered the Hamblen family's effort to get their daughters potty trained.
A BAD CASE OF CRABS: A 50,000-strong swarm of spider crabs gathered off a Melbourne, Australia beach this week, covering a stretch of seafloor the size of a football field and likely “scaring the hell” out of local fish. The reason for the mass swarming was unknown, but it was likely that the crabs were looking to get it on.
IRAQ: More than 1,000 U.S. troops have swept into Haditha — a city on the road to Syria, after terrorists damaged the hospital, knocked out the electricity and prevented police from entering. Tens of thousands of Iraqi security personnel are to form a tight cordon around Baghdad involving hundreds of checkpoints in a bid to stem a spate of deadly car bombings. Bill Roggio has more on Operation Thunder.
IRAQ II: Austin Bay wonders whether Abu Musab al -Zarqawi is rumored to be wounded because “at this point in time Zarqawi may be more valuable to Al Qaeda as a 'mythic warrior' or 'ghost.'” Bill Roggio strikes again with an analysis of ” The Struggle for Zarqawi's Throne.” The Christian Science Monitor looks more broadly at the presure building on the enemy.
JESSICA SIMPSON is so married that she will give you the finger.
TIM ROBBINS takes a verbal beating from New York Daily News gossip Lloyd Grove.
BRADGELINA UPDATE: Angelina Jolie calims she's not dating anybody, including Brad Pitt: “To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive,” she says. “I could not, could not look at myself in the morning if I did that.” Maybe she could date Katie Holmes. Or Tom Cruise. What am I thinking? She's Angelina Jolie — she could date Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise!
BRITNEY SPEARS. Ritz-Carlton Hotel pool. Morning sickness. Or maybe just some bad Chee-tos.
SCENT OF A GRAPEFRUIT: Forget plastic surgery — a Chicago researcher says the smell of grapefruit can make women appear to men to be about five years younger than they are. Male sexual arousal can be elicited by a scent combining lavender and pumpkin pie, supporting the theory that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. Female sexual arousal can be elicited by a scent combining cucumber and Good & Plenty; the punchline writes itself.
THE REV. JESSE JACKSON, THE DNC and two groups connected to Jackson have agreed to pay a total of 200 grand in civil fines for campaign finance violations in the 2000 elections. That's right; the 2000 elections. The speed with which the Federal Election Commission acts — a product of the fact that the FEC's budget is controlled by the people it is supposed to regulate — is one of the reasons I chose not to return to the agency after law school.
ROD STEWART: Is he getting married again to give the baby a name?
BONO PHONED CRITIC GREG KOT about a bad review of a U2 concert, but the two ended up discussing the philosophy of pop music.
COLDPLAY guitarist Jonny Buckland is comfortable with his anonymity, apparently seeking to be known as “the sane one.”
THE CUTE ONE is branching out into electro music.
THE MOUNTAIN GOATS' bassist is keeping a photo tour diary. But go back a bit and you will find that when the MG's played the M-Shop in Ames, they obviously lodged at the Memorial Union.
TOM-KAT UPDATE: Former New Yorker editor Tina Brown joins the skeptics after Cruise's hysterical declarations love for Katie Holmes on Oprah. And it's not just Tina: “As I watched the performance with my 14-year-old daughter, she remarked equably: 'This would be so sweet if it wasn't so fake.'” A People magazine poll shows 62 percent of readers dismissing the Tom-Kat liaison as a publicity stunt.
PODCASTING pioneers Dave Winer and Adam Curry (yes, that Adam Curry) are having a spat over getting credit for the technology. Both MSNBC and ABC News are working on podcasting.
WEB RADIO: The Village Voice lists picks to click.
MR. GRINCH, you're under arrest. In Wheeling, West Virginia, government attorneys Wednesday defended a law which permitted the police to arrest a man for wearing a Grinch mask in public. Although the attorneys referred to cases of bank robbery and alluded to the Old West, they avoided one reason that West Virginia probably enacted the law — the Ku Klux Klan. The reason to not mention it is to avoid giving anyone the idea of challenging the law as violating the First Amendment.
UNUSUAL CARDS picked the right name for its site.
LI-LO: At the recent Cartier party in Beverly Hills, Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie and Nicky Hilton went straight to the bathroom, where they stayed for 30 minutes, according to the National Enquirer.
VIAGRA FOR SEX OFFENDERS: Senator Hillary Clinton said the news was deeply disturbing and runs contrary to the purpose of Medicaid, though this fiasco apparently resulted from confusion over directives issued by the Clinton Administration in 1998, notifying states that their Medicaid programs must pay for Viagra, but they may eventually drop the requirement if a new monitoring system shows the drug is subject to clinical abuse or “inappropriate use.”
GITMO A GULAG? Yesterday, I noted that Amnesty International's claim that the U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay is a “gulag” is not only wrong, but counter-productive. The Washington Post agrees:“It's always sad when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its bearings and joins in the partisan fracas that nowadays passes for political discourse. It's particularly sad when the institution is Amnesty International, which for more than 40 years has been a tough, single-minded defender of political prisoners around the world and a scourge of left- and right-wing dictators alike… Turning a report on prisoner detention into another excuse for Bush-bashing or America-bashing undermines Amnesty's legitimate criticisms of U.S. policies and weakens the force of its investigations of prison systems in closed societies. It also gives the administration another excuse to dismiss valid objections to its policies as 'hysterical.'”
TARA REID got a proposal of marriage from… Tommy Lee; of course alcohol was involved. No word on any marriage plans, though the pair seems to have been practicing for the honeymoon. Reid talked to E! online about her new gig hosting the Wild on… travel show; I will never beat Golden Fiddle's punchline.
THE WHEELS OF MILITARY JUSTICE: For those upset about the length of time the military has taken to investigate charges of misconduct at places lke Gitmo or the prison in Bagram, Afghanistan, please take note that it took more than a year for the system to clear U.S. Marine Second Lt. Ilario Pantano of murder charges for killing two suspected Iraqi insurgents. A hearing officer concluded that one witness' accusation that Pantano shot the detainees while they were kneeling with their backs to him was not supported by other testimony or evidence. Witnesses testified that Pantano's main accuser was a weak Marine who was bitter about Pantano removing him from a leadership role within the platoon.
GIMME CLOSURE: The wheels of civilian justice sometimes turn even more slowly. Nearly 36 years after a man was stabbed to death during a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway, investigators have closed the case, dismissing a theory that a second Hells Angel took part in the killing.
SEN. SAM BROWNBACK: A few days ago, I linked to a piece by author Keith Thompson, in which he asked, “Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today's best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?” Thompson noted Brownback's work on the Sudan, but now the staunchly religious conservative is spearheading a resolution apologizing on behalf of the U.S. to Native Americans for past injustices.
RUDE AND ABRASIVE AT THE U.N.: Did you think this was going to be about John Bolton, President Bush's pick for Ambassador to the United Nations? Nope, it's about Sen. John McCain, the revered moderate icon who nonetheless does not take well to having the German Ambassador to the U.S. condescendingly explain that “As older societies, we tend to think of ourselves as more experienced in the way societies evolve…”
EVER SEEN AN ART-O-MAT? There's one in the Oak Park Public Library (allegedly) that neither Sylvia nor Debbie has ever mentioned to me! Check the Gallery, as each machine is different. Of course, you can get much more than art out of a vending machine.
THE FRENCH may doom ratification of the European Union's proposed Constitution.
QURAN DESECRATION: The New York Times reports: “An American military inquiry has uncovered five instances in which guards or interrogators at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba mishandled the Koran, but found 'no credible evidence' to substantiate claims that it was ever flushed down a toilet, the chief of the investigation said on Thursday. All but one of the five incidents appear to have taken place before January 2003. In three cases, the mishandling of the Koran appears to have been deliberate, and in two it was accidental or unintentional, the commander said, adding that four cases involved guards, and one an interrogator. Two service members have been punished for their conduct, one recently.” The AP report is basically the same. So Newsweek was wrong to report that the report would confirm the “toilet” allegtions. Instead, the preliminary report confirms what was already known (and noted here over the past week) — that during the start-up at Gitmo, there were a handful of incidents and that the military corrected the problem. And like the hysterical hype of Amnesty International, the bogus Newsweek story takes the focus away from more serious allegations.
THE FINAL JEOPARDY TUNE made about 70-80 million bucks in royalties for its composer, Merv Griffin.
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in Keene, New Hamphire. And it's not about the Rolling Stones tour.
