YOUR WEEKEND STARTS HERE:
FRIDAY TIMEWASTER: Today, we're kickin' it old skool adventure style in the Crimson Room.
DYLAN DAYS kick off today in Hibbing, proving that Bob Z is the exception to the rule that you cannot be a prophet in your home town.
NEIL YOUNG is thinking about rapping, but asks people to shoot him if he starts.
MR. MOJO RISEN? Rodeo photographer Gerald Pitts insists Doors singer-songwriter Jim Morrison didn’t die in July 1971 and that he has current photographs and film footage to prove it. Pitts says Morrison staged his death because of a French conspiracy to kill him, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix with narcotics because they were all Vietnam war protestors. Hey, the story is scheduled to run on A Current Affair today, so it must be true.
NO ROCK AND ROLL FUN: The Toronto Eye tips its cap to the British blog from which I steal more often than I credit it. So let me note a recent xrrf post which links you to scads and scads of free, legal downloads of cool music.
THE PERNICE BROTHERS will release their new album, Discover a Lovelier You, on June 14th. And Joe Pernice has posted a QuickTime movie of his version of MTV's Cribs.
“YOU MIGHT BE AN INDIE-YUPPIE IF…:” Stereogum announces the winner of his contest.
…AND NOW, your moment of Sith.
JACK KEROUAC: An unpublished and long-forgotten play by the Beat legend, recently discovered in a New Jersey warehouse, will be excerpted in the July issue of Best Life magazine.
YEARBOOK UPDATE: Boynton Beach High School officials will use stickers to cover the yearbook photo of a high school senior wearing a collar and leash after the guy's mother complained.
QURAN DESECRATION AND NEWSWEEK: In The New York Times, columnist David Brooks notes (as I already have) that “The rioters are the real enemy, not Newsweek and not the American soldiers serving as prison guards.” Brooks also dismisses the notion that the Newsweek fiasco was not influenced by bias, because he once worked at the magazine: ” The people who run Newsweek are not a bunch of Noam Chomskys with laptops. Not even close. Whatever might have been the cause of their mistakes, liberalism had nothing to do with it.” However, ABC News White House correspondent Terry Moran sees “a deep anti-military bias in the media. one that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong. I think that that is a hangover from Vietnam, and I think it's very dangerous. That's different from the media doing it's job of challenging the exercise of power without fear or favor.” BTW, Linda Foley, the International President of the Newspaper Guild and president of Communications Workers of America recently repeated the charge that our troops target journalists for murder, albeit with no evidence to support it. PLUS: Instapundit excerpts Marty Peretz from The New Republic, so you don't have to subscribe.
QURAN DESECRATION II: Now, Amazon.com has to deal with it.
THE U.S. IS 85 PERCENT JEWISH, according to 14 focus groups conducted last December and January among college-educated Muslim men and women in Egypt, Morocco and Indonesia for the Council on Foreign Relations. They were only 83 percent off.
TARA REID races a sausage and loses; that's hard to believe.
TOM AND KATIE UPDATE: Cruise has taken Holmes to the Chocolate Factory. No word on whether she had the fizzy lifting drink.
THE ODD COUPLE: No, this is not about Cruise and Holmes. Prof. Glenn Reynolds (the Instapundit) agrees with Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (of the Daily Kos): they will stop linking to The New York Times op-ed pages once they go subscription. The New York Post, which recently instituted a free registration system, scaled back the amount of personal info it sought after people like Matt Drudge threatened to stop linking to NYP material. As I suggested from the outset, the NYT may find it is making a grave error.
SUPER-SUE ME: A company that gave office space to Super-Size Me director Morgan Spurlock in return for a share in the company that made the hit film about eating fast food is suing him for 40 million dollars. Spurlock's attorney believes the suit is meritless.
HOWARD DEAN: Arizona's top Democrat — Gov. Janet Napolitano– steered clear of the DNC chair during his visit to the state. He was rebuked by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) for comments about House majority leader Tom DeLay. Democratic congressional leaders Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi have urged Dean to restrain his rhetoric, to organize rather than inflame. Dean could probably get away with annoying DC Democrats (and burnish his outsider image), except that DNC fundraising — which was going to be his strong suit –has lagged. I don't think Dean has a serious problem, as this is a non-election year. But if he is seen as non-serious next year, it probably will be serious.
THERE IS POWER IN A UNION: Hundreds of thousands of prostitutes working in Spain urgently need labor rights to prevent them from being exploited, one of Spain's most prominent union leaders said on Wednesday.
PORN STAR MAREY CAREY (who ran for Governor in the CA recall election) coughed up five grand for two tickets to a National Republican Congressional Committee event. Carey is keen to meet presidential policy advisor Karl Rove: “I know that he’s against gay marriage, but I think I can convince him that a little girl-on-girl action now and then isn’t so bad!” AFAIK, Rove is not on record as being against girl-on-girl action, so long as the women are not married to each other and are hot.
SOCIAL SECURITY: The Democratic plan for shoring up the program's long-term solvency is to not have a plan — and some seem upset that Congressman Jerry Wexler (D-FL) has offered a plan. Of course, it's also fair to note that President Bush actually has not offered a plan as such either, though he has proposed individual savings accounts and supported the notion of progressive indexing of benefits.
UZBEKISTAN: Gateway Pundit is all over the story, including a link to video of a rebel leader on horseback.
DEMOCRACY IN SYRIA? Michael J. Totten, recently returned from Lebanon, writes that Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution is reverberating powerfully inside Syria. He also provided a link to an interesting post by a student at the American University in Beirut about the role of the U.S. in the region.
SMART DRUGS: Ronald Bailey reports that we are already well advanced in the enhancement era of neuropharmacology. According to University of Pennsylvania neurologist Anjan Chatterjee, “This is coming regardless of your view of whether or not this is a good world, a bad world or somewhere in between.”
SMART SHOES: Sports shoes that decide whether their owner has done enough exercise to warrant time in front of the TV have been prototyped in the United Kingdom.
CLOVER AND BOK-BOK: Two orphans have formed an unlikely bond on a South African game park although horns and a love for horse pellets are about the only things they have in common.
MORE FUN THAN A BARREL OF MONKEYS: Researchers have found a new species of monkey in Tanzania. The highland mangabey is a medium-sized monkey, with a long tail, long brown fur, a black face, hands and feet; adults make a distinctive, loud, low-pitched “honk-bark” call. Although Reuters reports that this is the first new species of monkey identified in 20 years, a moment with Google reveals that the Arunachal macaque was discovered in India in December 2004 and that Callicebus bernhardi and Callicebus stephennashi were discovered in Brazil in 2002. At that time the BBC reported that 13 new species had been found in Brazil in the prior decade. And don't even get me started on the minkey.
A BABY GORILLA at Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo is back in her mother’s arms following an emergency medical procedure to treat a rare bone disease, zoo officials said Thursday.
A LESSER PANDA is proving a hit at a zoo near Tokyo as it can stand on two legs like a human being for about 10 seconds, an unusual feat for the species, zoo officials said.
PLEISTOCENE PARK: A Russian scientist wants to recreate the ecosystem of the Mammoth to help fight global warming.
GOOGLE IS DESTINED TO DIE IN FIVE YEARS, according to the wishful thinking of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
TV OVER THE INTERNET will bring you the wonder of hog-cooking class for under two bucks.
A BOAT WITH NO NAME: Based on The New York Times story, might I suggest the “Sloop John B?” The “Edmund Fitzgerald?” And like any good tale of the sea, someone ended up with an eye patch.