COUNTING CROWS FRONTMAN and Sideshow Bob look-alike Adam Duritz denies claims by jailed escort agency boss Jason Itzler that Duritz was one of his best clients. Itzler told Page Six, “He used to hire four or five girls at a time and spend $10,000 or $20,000 a throw. I'm only revealing his name because I don't think it's going to hurt his career.”
U2 is thinking about POP: The Special Edition. That's all we need: Bono channeling George Lucas.
MAXIMO PARK: Brooklyn Vegan has a nice round-up of reax to the band's new album. Sterogum likes it.
GUNS 'N' ROSES: Someone found the time to brew up fractal versions of their big hits.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: There's a nice — and if true, very funny — account of how he got into the music biz up at Metafilter.
DAVID BOWIE AND CHRIS ROCK were checking out Nine Inch Nails together in NYC. Even I would have paid to see Rock rocking to “Head Like A Hole!”
ON THE PITCHFORK: A music-oriented summer reading list.
REVENGE OF THE SITH fails to halt the overall box office slump. Receipts for the weekend were down 3.5 percent from the same weekend last year. And if you want to go beyond spoliers, Gary Farber has excerpts of the script cut from the movie.
SIN CITY: At Cannes, Robert Rodriguez reveals he's already working on a sequel based on Frank Miller's A Dame to Kill For.
PETER SARSGAARD, who was great in Garden State, is claimed to be more than a bit playa. He's now dating Maggie Gyllenhaal — couldn't happen to a nicer gal.
BILLY ZANE has told people he wants to run for President in about eight years. He's citing Ronald Reagan as an example that lack of experience dosn't matter, apparently unaware that Reagan had been president of the Screen Actor's Guild and Governor of California before running for the White House.
DENIS LEARY gives the graduation speech at Emerson College, beginning with, “I didn't prepare a bunch of stuff to say to you guys because I know you want to get out of here and get drunk…”
CELEBRITIES face the piñata syndrome — an instaiable hunger for celebrity gossip so instaiable that everyone form 60 Minutes to internet bloggers are getting in on the act. My heart weeps for all of those who spend their lives becoming stars and then decide they don't want any publicity they can't control.
TOM AND KATIE UPDATE: Cruise's appearance on Oprah gets this treatment from the ever-objective Associated Press: “First, Tom Cruise was head over heels about his new girlfriend, Katie Holmes. Then he was giddy. Now, he's just plain batty… A starry-eyed Cruise got down on his knees and repeatedly jumped up on the couch like a Robin Williams comedy act.” The AP was too kind to note that when Cruise dragged Holmes from backstage, it was clearly staged, given how made up Holmes was to cover up those sores around her mouth. Defamer photoblogged the show — proving that a few screenshots are worth a thousand words. New York Daily News gossip Ben Widdicombe suggests that Bosworth was the second Kate Cruise phoned, which TC’s reps deny. Maybe this is all meant to distract us from Tom’s Scientology-based opinion that Brooke Shields should not have taken Paxil for her postpartum depression. Finally, New York Post columnist Liz Smith does a blurb on Cruise's plan to invite a bunch of fans to the premiere of War of the Worlds. The NYP headline is: “Cruise Offers Fans Hot Seats.” Not that there's anything wrong with that.
ONE HUNDRED ALL-TIME BEST MOVIES, as chosen by Time magazine's critics. They cheat, lumping sequels and trilogies together when it suits them.
THE SIMPSONS for the blind. Homer, Marge, Bart and Lisa, that is — there could be no point to having Jessica Simpson for the blind.
IRAQ I: The commander of Iraq's new counter-insurgency headquarters was gunned down as he drove to work on Monday in Baghdad. Meanwhile, rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who led bloody revolts against American forces last year, suggested that he would forgo military efforts and work to ease rising sectarian tensions throughout Iraq. Shockingly, this was reported by The New York Times.
IRAQ II: Arthur Chrenkoff has his usual round-up of underreported good news. Of the approximately 160 links in the round-up, a whopping two are from The New York Times, which reprinted last month's round-up. But if the NYT can report nice things about Moktada al-Sadr, they may get around to reporting on the troops providing clean drinking water to rural towns, often for the first time ever, upgrading badly neglected infrastructure,collecting shoes and pens for Iraqi children in their off-time, not to mention crayons, pencils and coloring books, some day.
CULT OF THE iPod: The next version of iTunes will support integrated support for downloading podcasts.
ROBOT SWARMS: Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have received a grant from the Defense Department to develop robot swarms for conducting large-scale search operations, such as for a bomb in a city.
DAILY KOS founder Markos Moulitsas Zúniga is unhappy: “One of the key problems with the Democratic Party is that single issue groups have hijacked it for their pet causes. So suddenly, Democrats are the party of abortion, of gun control, of spottend owls, of labor, of trial lawyers, etc, etc., et-frickin'-cetera. We don't stand for any ideals, we stand for specific causes.” However, he also talks about this in the context of developing the “brand” of the party, so time will tell whether he's mostly concerned about marketing.
AUTHOR KEITH THOMPSON, who supported Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern and Howard Metzenbaum, explains why he has left the Left, or vice versa.
FOUAD AJAMI writes on the movement toward more democracy in the Middle East: “The weight of American power, historically on the side of the dominant order, now drives this new quest among the Arabs. For decades, the intellectual classes in the Arab world bemoaned the indifference of American power to the cause of their liberty. Now a conservative American president had come bearing the gift of Wilsonian redemption.” Of course, Ajami's findings are anecdotal; Arab Muslims still tend to think the U.S. is the problem, rather than part of the solution.
OUR FRIENDS, THE SAUDIS: Sunday's Washington Post carried a nice editorial asking President Bush to stand up for democratic reformers jailed in Saudi Arabia. I presume that the White House response is one it really can't give publicly, i.e., the primary current alternative to the House of Saud is actually worse.
TERI HATCHER, with a nod to George Bernard Shaw, says she would pose for Playboy magazine for ten million bucks.
MORE YEARBOOK FOLLIES: A North Texas school district has apologized to a student identified only as “Black Girl” in a high school yearbook photo of the school's National Honor Society.
DID YOU KNOW THAT ISU — the birthplace of Pate– is also home to the NASA Food Technology Commercial Space Center?
PUBLIC TELEVISION IS SO BIASED in France that a group of journalists from French state TV and radio set up an online petition (signed by more than 15,000 people) and presented it to President Jacques Chirac, the heads of French TV and radio and to the director of the CSA French broadcasting standards authority.
WASHINGTON STATE ELECTION UPDATE: The GOP challenge of the results for the Governor's race is going to trial, though it's unlikely the GOP will win it. The poll results in the story are of more interest. only 39 percent want a new vote for governor; 56 percent oppose it. OTOH, the numbers virtually flip when registered voters were asked who they thought actually won — 56 percent called Rossi the winner; only 36 percent believed Gov. Gregoire won.
JUDICIAL FILIBUSTERS: Hardly anyone cares, but Senate centrists agreed on a compromise that clears the way for confirmation of many of President Bush's stalled judicial nominees, leaves others in limbo and preserves venerable filibuster rules. So judicial confirmation or filibuster dpends not on a majority vote, or a filibuster by 40 Senators, but a backroom deal cut by 12 Senators. Now there's an exercise of minority rights. Meanwhile, the New York Times buries in a correction that its May 6th article about a demonstration at Princeton University against the “nuclear option” to bar filibusters on judicial nominees was written by a Princeton student who participated in the demonstration.
WHEN GIANT ARMADILLOS ROAMED THE EARTH: Builders have found the fossil of a giant armadillo — which lived up to 2 million years ago and would have been the size of a Volkswagen Beetle — in southern Peru.
SARCASM: Scientists say they have located the parts of the brain that comprehend sarcasm. That's just peachy.
AFGHANISTAN: Here, the New York Times lede was, “President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan spoke Monday with President Bush about the treatment of Afghan prisoners held by the United States. But Mr. Bush made no commitment on when he might be willing to give the Kabul government control over prisoners taken by the military.” Compare that lede to this: “Afghan President Hamid Karzai yesterday rejected US criticisms of his antidrug efforts, called international help in the fight 'half-hearted,' and demanded justice for prisoners abused by US troops. However, he said on the eve of a meeting with US President George W. Bush that the prisoner abuse detailed in a leaked US Army report should not reflect on the United States as a whole.” What does it say when the more balanced lede comes from Al-Jazeerah? Just kidding, as that site is not affiliated with the Qatar-based TV channel.
THE UNITED NATIONS: The New York Times runs a piece that seems favorable to more aggressive U.N. peacekeeping in the Congo. The article contains a single sentence in paragraph 23: “And critics also denounce the sexual abuse of girls by some peacekeepers.” The U.S. is wants the U.N. Security Council to condemn the rape and pedophilia, while noting that “The distinguished and honorable record of accomplishment in U.N. peacekeeping is being tarnished by the acts of a few individuals.” Somehow, if the story was about U.S. soldiers raping and abusing girls as young as 13 in Afghanistan, I doubt that the NYT would be as charitable as our government is to the U.N.
LEBANON: A Lebanese student blogs a dozen problems with an article on the upcoming election that ran in the Sunday Outlook section of the Washington Post.
WE BOUGHT VIAGRA FOR SEX OFFENDERS: New York's comptroller urged the nation's top health official Sunday to ban high-risk sex offenders and convicted rapists from receiving Viagra paid for by Medicaid. A federal Medicaid spokesman responded that states can block paroled rapists and other high-risk sex offenders from receiving taxpayer-financed drugs for impotence.