Karl Bade 
THE MOUNTAIN GOATS' Halloween show was attended by dressed as their favorite MG tune. The Village Voice had a backgrounder that also reviewed the band's prior gig at the Bowery Ballroom.
LEGAL INDIE DOWNLOADS OUT THE WAZOO at Spacelab. Dungen, Metric, The M's, Deerhoof, Wolf Parade, Iron and Wine, Fruit Bats, BMRC, Spoon, an entire Flaming Lips album and many, many more.
100 SONGS ON ONE CD: someone is killing music with songs under 74 seconds long.
NEW DAY RISING gets second thoughts from a 25-year-old at Stylus magazine who used to think it was terribly pasteurized and in no way subversive.
NINE INCH NAILS: I was never a big fan, but Trent Reznor may have a future as a music critic.
AUDIOSLAVE is mining the RATM and Soundgarden catalogs on the current tour.
BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE: Kevin Drew declares the band's new album is no longer self-titled: “Go get a pen. Go write your own f—ing title down. It's called 'Choose Your Own Title.' We're giving the choice back to the people because it's getting taken away from them.” Drew also notes that the album's concept drifted from the political to the personal. As of presstime, you can stream the album from overseas.
BELLE AND SEBASTIAN are organizing a compilation album to raise money for children's charities, including Snow Patrol.
ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS are all over the Pitchfork, with a review of three recent EPs and an interview with Antony. It's not my bag, but he's good copy.
ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: London's Guardian joins in the praise for the band's latest album, Feels: “More accessible than their earlier work, its rich, acoustic songs simultaneously melt your heart and set it racing.” At Metacritic it's scoring an average 81 from critics and 8.6 (out of ten) from users. SPIN has a legal MP3. And you can stream a few via the band's label.
DEBBIE HARRY is thankful she never had enough money for a serious drug habit, because substance abuse would have ruined her music career. And you don't want to know how old she is.
JUKEBOX JURY: Seattle Weekly plays with Rockrgrl magazine's 's Carla DeSantis. It's an all-girl line-up, from The Runaways and Patti Smith to Britney Spears.
U CANT TOUCH THIS? Oh, yes you can, if the price is right.
PETE DOHERTY-KATE MOSS UPDATE: The shamed supermodel reportedly has hired two SAS minders to keep the troubled singer and his friends away from her. The SAS is the British equivalent of the Delta Force. And we are reminded that after Moss' 1998 stint in rehab, a friend asked what she had learned, to which Moss replied, “A lot about alcohol.”
MADONNA: Big into Kabbalah, but her nine-year-old daughter is going to be a nun?
LOHAN LOWDOWN: Li-Lo is ready to go public with news that she is dating Jared Leto. And ladies, as the man has no career, I think we know what he has going for him.
HOLLYWOOD wants total control over your television. I thought they would have given up after The Outer Limits.
REJECTED BOND GIRLS: Listed at McSweeney's.
FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE COOKIE MONSTER, then they came for Mr. Potato Head…
TOM-KAT UPDATE: Star magazine claims that Cruise and Holmes are enmeshed in negotiating a prenup agreement. Which is the sort of story both might like leaked to quash those rumors that the two already have an agreement. ALSO: Tom-Kat duets on “Mustang Sally” and “Old Time Rock and Roll” at the big Scientology soiree in Britain, which reminds me that Cruise thrashed on a couch in Risky Business, too. BONUS: A Chinese fan of Cruise realized her dream to meet the movie star and even was invited to play a character in his new film Mission Impossible 3 after Cruise read her book My Love for You, Tom Cruise – A Desperate Chinese Girl's Confession.
THE FRENCH HOTEL knows how to pick 'em! New boyfriend Stavros Niarchos III offered a homeless man outside a Benjamin to dump a soda on himself, which the man did.
YES, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus; his name is Rupert Murdoch.
WARREN BEATTY and ROB REINER are working against ballot propositions championed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Are they testing the waters for running against the Governator himself?
WOODY ALLEN may marry Soon-Yi Previn and offers this portrait of his relationship: “All the women I went out with were basically my age. Now, here, it just works like magic. The very inequality of me being older and much more accomplished, much more experienced, takes away any real meaningful conflict.”
EVA LONGRIA: Cityrag wants the Desperate Housewife to get together with Eva Mendez. I've heard worse ideas.
BRADGELINA UPDATE: Pitt is furiously denying UK tabloid reports he has wed Jolie in a secret Buddhist ceremony. He also spotted a peeping paparazzo, but the photog eluded police. Jolie is the woman lesbians would most like to marry, according to a new poll by Gaydar Radio.
EDU-BLOGGING: The new Carnival of Education is online… at the Dayton Daily News, no less.
THE SUPREME COURT: I would hope that the DNC has better criticisms of Judge Alito than innuendo of mob ties based on his Italian heritage. How about his lousy trumpet playing? How about his chairing an undergraduate task force at Princeton that recommended the decriminalization of sodomy, accused the CIA and the FBI of invading the privacy of citizens, and said discrimination against gays in hiring ''should be forbidden?” How about voting on the pro-choice side in all but one of the abortion cases he heard as a judge? The L.A. Times reports that those who know Alito say he keeps “an almost allergic distance from discussions of ideology or politics.”
RIOTS IN PARIS have now been going on for a week. Yet you can still read stories from Reuters, London's Times and others that completely avoid mentioning that the rioters are Muslims. If only France would pull out of Iraq… ALSO: Muslims rioted for days in Denmark, too.
IRAQ: Bill Roggio rounds up coverage of efforts to divide the insurgency and the “removal” of al Qaeda facilitators near the Syrian border. AFP has a story on the battle for hearts and minds near the border waged by the US and Sunni fundamentalists.
JIMMY CARTER, appearing on NBC's Today show, said that the Bush Administration's prewar claims that Saddam had WMDs were “manipulated, at least” to mislead the American people. one wonders where he gets that claim, which was unanimously rejected by the Senate Intelligence Cmte (Conclusions 83 and 84) and the bipartisan Robb-Silberman Commission (Conclusion 26). But I suppose that if I was Jimmy Carter yesterday, I would have rather talked about anything besides the anniversary of the takeover of the US embassy in Iran, where Islamic militants took 52 American hostages. After all, falling down on the job at the modern onset of Islamic extremism doesn't look any better now than it did in 1979, especially with the hardline Iranian government purging moderate ambassadors while preparing a new round of conversion of uranium.
THEO VAN GOGH: Yesterday, politicians, relatives and religious leaders in the Netherlands marked the anniversary of the brutal slaying of the director and critic of radical Islam.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: They don't come much stranger than the former Reps. Pat Schroeder and Bob Barr… who have joined forces against Google.
SONY COPY-PROTECTION scheme exposes users to threats from hackers and virus writers. It's worse than root canal to remove. And installing the Sony program on a machine running Windows Vista — the beta version of the next iteration of Microsoft Windows — breaks the operating system spectacularly.
MY SPACE: Wired magazine is calling the social networking site “The Hit Factory.” The site is getting more hits than Google. And bands using the site are selling hundreds of thousands of albums.
LITTLE RED PANDA is on the loose in Birmingham, Britain's second-largest city. The panda has broken out of a nature preserve twice in two weeks.
RABID VAMPIRE BATS kill 23 people in Brazil. And the BBC couldn't break this story in time for Halloween?
CZECH APES get their own reality TV show.
DEER stops at a nurse's station after smashing through two glass panes and entering a hospital. The deer was injured, so where should it go? SEMI-RELATED: Wayne Goldsberry killed a five-point whitetail buck that crashed through a bedroom window at his daughter's home Friday. At this time of year, a buck that sees its reflection in a window often charges, believing it is fighting off a rival.
