Karl WELCOME TO CHICAGO:
…as captured in “lost” photographs by the legendary Stanley Kubrick. The State Lake theatre is long gone; there's a Borders there now.
KIRSTY MacCOLL: The reissue of her Titanic Days album, which adds a dozen tracks on a bonus disc, rates an 8.2 on the Pitchfork.
SASQUATCH: The festival was heavily photographed by Ice Cream Man. Plenty of Pixies pics; Wilco, Bloc Party and more, too.
THE KERRVILLE FOLK FESTIVAL is blogged by Richard Laurence Cohen. He paints with words, which is just as well, based on his description of “Camp Nekkid.”
SOMETHING CORPORATE singer Andrew McMahon has been diagnosed with Acute Lymphatic Leukemia. Thankfully, McMahon's doctors expect him to make a full recovery.
COLD WHITE PEAS: The New York Times opines on the sad state of the music industry.
OASIS frontman Liam Gallagher calls U2 “wankers.” Hey, who isn't? The occasion of Liam's outburst was hearing that the U2 study video footage of themselves after gigs.
IRAQ: Austin Bay, who heads off to Iraq and Afghanistan this Friday, has analysis of Syrian involvement in the insurgency, based on a good piece in the Washington Post linked there. The number of active-duty soldiers getting divorced has been rising sharply with deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq; the trend is severest among officers. Iraq's would-be founding fathers are hunkering down to draft a constitution, as an alliance of influential Sunni Muslims said that it would not take part unless its community was given a fair number of seats on the committee working on the project. U.S. officials are negotiating with Sunni Arab leaders to pull insurgents into the political process. A. Heather Coyne of the U.S. Institute of Peace writes that the media's focus on dramatic events in Iraq, whether they be attacks or elections, obscures slow and steady progress Iraqis are making on the securty and political fronts.
BOLIVIA IS WRACKED with violent protests demanding nationalization of the oil and natural gas industries. Publius has an extensive round-up.
THE WORLD TRADE CENTER MEMORIAL is being steered away from 9/11 to focus instead on man's inhumanity to man, while the actual Memorial Center will be much smaller, all out of sight and underground, according to Debra Burlingame, the sister of the pilot of American Airlines fight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon. Jeff Jarvis says that the memorial is being turned into the Why They Hate Us Pavillion.
OH LORD, STUCK IN LODI with suspected Al Qaeda terrorists.
BRADGELINA UPDATE: Both Pitt and Jolie (in a black leather Versace dress, no less) faced the photogs outside the premiere of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Their now-infamous photoshoot for W magazine, based around the concept of a dissolving marriage, turned up on the web.
MRS. ROBINSON UPDATE: Sterogum has some funny Graduate trivia, including a tidbit Roger Ebert would probably like to forget.
GETTING INTO YOUR GENES: A study in Nature claims that a woman's genetic make-up accounts for at least a third of her ability to climax during sex and may even account for as much as 60 percent. only 14 percent of the women studied reported always achieving an orgasm.
AT THE DRIVE-IN: A German city is rushing to install a series of drive-in wooden “sex huts” in time for next year’s soccer World Cup and an expected boom in the local sex trade.
SWIMMERS' COMPETITION: Men who view pornographic images of two men and a woman produce better-quality sperm than men viewing pornographic images of just women, suggesting that men may be capable of subconsciously increasing semen quality when faced with the possibility that their sperm will have to outrun those of other men in a woman’s reproductive tract.
TOM-KAT UPDATE: Katie Holmes' whirlwind romance with Tom Cruise is taking its toll on her friendships and career. Page Six reports that it's the Scientology. After a week of budget negotiations, Paramount has finally greenlighted Cruise's Mission: Impossible III.
RUSSELL CROWE is in full-on damage control mode following his assault arrest for throwing a phone at a hotel clerk. “One thing that I don't want to do is imply that I'm trying to make out it's somebody else's fault,” Crowe said. “It's not, I know it's my fault, I've got to face up to it and deal with it.”
OWEN WILSON is not impressed by the Dalai Lama and thus will notreceive total consciousness on his deathbed.
MAN SAVES DRIVER FROM BLAZING AUTO, then sues him. It's like the Bizzaro version of The Incredibles.
EDU-BLOGGING: The latest Carnival Of Education is online.
GOT TO BE A MACHO MAN? A study led by French marketing and style consultants claims that Macho man is an endangered species, with today's male more likely to opt for a pink flowered shirt and swingers' clubs than the traditional role as family super-hero. However, a Harris Interactive survey shows that women want the “man” back in “manly:” “61 percent of women surveyed said they would rather see a man's hands rough and working hard than well-manicured, a slap in the face to the extreme-makeover, suave-guy crowd.”
LESS SKIN is back in for young American girls. Designers have been focusing on “ladylike and almost old-fashioned” styles inspired by the 1950s.
MARYLAND WOMAN BUSTED for driving her kids around in the trunk of her car.
THE DOWNING STREET MEMO: on Tuesday, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair forcefully denied that Bush manipulated intelligence to build support for war with Iraq, as some claim a controversial British government memo suggests. The so-called Downing Street Memo, originally published last month in The Sunday Times of London, had received scant coverage in the U.S. The key passage in te memo for Bush critics states that in Washington, “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Robin Niblett of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says it would be easy for Americans to misunderstand the reference: “'Fixed around' in British English means 'bolted on' rather than altered to fit the policy.” That would also be the suggested reading from the dictionary; just ask an English teacher. Phil Taubman, Washington bureau chief for The New York Times, has given additional reasons why he does not see the memo as a “smoking gun.”
PAGE TWO of the memo suggests that the U.S. and U.K. governments truly believed Saddam had WMD capabilities, or they would not have been thinking about what would happen “if Saddam used WMD on day one” or if he used them on Kuwait or Israel. As for the Bush Administration having decided to go to war as early as July 2002, any reader of the NYT (at least twice)the Associated Press, the Telegraph, or Haaretz, to name a few, knew that the U.S. had war plans ongoing. The Downing Street memo, imho, confirms what played out in the media at the time — that the U.K. wanted to try going through the U.N., a path to which the U.S. reluctantly agreed, though the resulting delay was probably disadvantageous, e.g., it gave Saddam and his thugs time to plan for an insurgency, perhaps destroy key evidence of crimes and weapons-related activities, etc.
CULT OF THE iPod: The British government is funding a program offering unemployed teens iPods if they complete courses aimed at helping them find jobs. The teens, that is.
JOHNNY CASH: The Man in Black's seven Sun Records have been put together in a limited edition box set, featuring all the original tunes and artwork, with a few bonus tracks tacked on for good measure.
DAVID BYRNE blogs on how he finds the ubiquity of music oppressive and suggests that some recording artists should not feel pressure to be performers as well.
YOU WANT MP3s WITH THAT? McDonald's has entered into deals to provide Wi-fi and media centers when you stop in for a Royale with Cheese.
AHHH… BACH… A previously unknown vocal piece by Johann Sebastian Bach has been discovered by researchers in Germany. He was probably saving it for the box set.
THE SOPRANOS may not be sleeping with the fishes as soon as expected. At the DVD release party for the fifth season of The Sopranos Monday, show creator David Chase again said he was mulling the idea of extending the show's run. Floating the rumor on the release date was purely coincidental, I'm sure.
HOWARD DEAN defended his recent statement that the Republicans are “pretty much a white, Christian party.” He's right: about 84 percent of Republicans are white Christians, compared to about 47 percent (possibly 57 percent) of Democrats. Another way of putting it would be that Sen. John Kerry's failure to make inroads with white voters cost him the 2004 election. Moreover, as Chairman Dean has called Republicans evil and brain-dead, adding that a lot of them “have never made an honest living in their lives,” identifying them as a white, Christian party may cause people in that group to conclude he was not being complimentary of white Christians, even if he did not intend it. It should also be noted that President Bush won 44 percent of the Hispanic and Asian vote, as well as a larger-than-average gain among Jews, winning 25% of the vote up from 19% in 2000. Perhaps Dean's strategy — if he has one — is to demonize Republicans in an attempt to slow the migration of minorities to the GOP.
RAINFOREST MYTH GOES UP IN SMOKE: The L.A. Times reports: Ever since saving the Amazon became a fashionable cause in the 1980s, championed by Madonna, Sting and others, the jungle has consistently been likened to an enormous recycling plant that slurps up carbon dioxide and pumps out oxygen for us all to breathe. Think again, scientists say… The Amazon is now a major source for pollution, as rampant (and mostly illegal) burning and deforestation, release hundreds of millions of tons of smoke and carbon dioxide each year. To be fairer than the L.A. Times, I think Madge and Gordon were against the legal deforestation of the Amazon, so I'd bet they would also oppose illegal deforestation.
SCIENTISTS had to endanger the endangered Devils Hole pupfish to save it.
A GERMAN WOMAN living with 43 goats was evicted from her rented house after the animals left “knee-high” piles of droppings around the garden and laid waste to the building's interior. However, a report from Mishawaka, Indiana shows that having 70 cats in the house is not much better: “Everything was covered in a lacquer of yellow urine,” said Eric Durcinka, executive director of the Humane Society.
