Karl 
TOP 25 ONE-HIT WONDERS OF THE NINETIES, courtesy of Glide magazine, via Stereogum. Anyone who saw Trip Shakespeare play their first gig outside the Twin Cities at the M-Shop has to have a soft spot for “Closing Time…”
RILO KILEY'S Jenny Lewis talked to the Chicago Tribune, but ducked questions about her sitcom past.
GRANT HART tells the Winnipeg Sun why a Husker Du reunion is unlikely.
ON THE PITCHFORK: The lineup for the Intonation Festival in Chicago in mid-July. I may have to go see the Swedish psych-metal of Dungen! ALSO: An interview with The Hold Steady. I liked Craig Finn's comment: “I've said a number of times that people think of songwriting as a very personal thing: A guy gets up there with an acoustic guitar and he sings his heart out, bares his soul. What we're doing is more cinematic. No one goes up to Quentin Tarantino and goes, 'You must shoot a lot of people. You must do karate all the time.'”
BEN FOLDS may be getting mixed reviews for his latest album, but he got a rave for his concert in Boston over the weekend. Marc Hirsh also suggests that Folds owes less to Joe Jackson than he does to Randy Newman.
REVENGE OF THE SITH: Roger Ebert gives it three and a half stars. After noting George Lucas' inability to write dialogue, he proclaims that it “has more action per square minute, I'd guess, than any of the previous five movies, and it is spectacular.” Anthony Lane in The New Yorker is less charitable in a spoiler-laden review: “The general opinion of Revenge of the Sith seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes… True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.”
POLITICS OF THE SITH: I wasn't going to get into the political aspect –such as it is– of the movie, but apparently folks at the Cannes Film Festival have picked up on an anti-Bush gibe in the film, as though anti-Bush and even anti-America sentiments are not common at Cannes. Anyway, at one point, Anakin tells Obi-Wan, “If you're not with me, then you're my enemy,” which is taken — probably correctly — as a stab at President Bush's speech on terrorism. I would simply note that Obi-Wan's reply — that only the Sith see things in such black-and-white terms, is belied by the fact that the Jedi refer to the Dark Side of the Force as, well, the Dark Side of the Force. Anyone who sees the movie will be forced to admit that Darth Sidious has a more nuanced and morally relativistic view of the world than the Jedi Order in Episode III. All of which demonstrates that space opera is probably not the best source for political commentary.
ALCOHOL is worse for female brains, according to a University of Heidelberg study.
WEDDINGS AND NAME CHANGES are discussed at length on MetaFilter.
JACKO JUSTICE: Everyone has an opinion about the Michael Jackson trial, including Alice Cooper.
CATS AND DOGS: If you’ve taken your dog or cat to the veterinarian lately, you may have suffered sticker shock when presented with the bill.
CURB YOUR BLOGTHUSIASM: Laurie David just ruined some future episode of Larry's Curb Your Enthusiasm, didn't she?
RUNAWAY BRIDE: Leave it to the New York Post to dig up the 411 on Jennifer Wilbanks' sexual history. And in true Post style, the story refers to her oft-published picture as her “bug-eyed mug.”
THE FEMALE ORGASM may have no evolutionary function at all; it may be “just for fun.”
OIL-FOR-FOOD SCANDAL: A U.S. Senate investigation has concluded that top Kremlin operatives, including the highly influential chief of staff to Presidents Putin and Yeltsin, reaped millions of dollars in profits under the U.N. oil-for-food program.
GENE LOVES JEZEBEL jumps out of the “Where Are They Now?” file on June 6th.
QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE never sounded better; the picture tells the story.
KINGS OF LEON is doing a bunch of dates with The Secret Machines.
MUSIC DOWNLOADING: People in the UK buy more music per head of population than in any other country, and we already have the highest ownership rates of iPods and MP3 players in the world. But a survey shows that 96 percent of the downloading is being done by men. So, is music downloading sexist?
THE ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME: Prof. Ann Althouse blogged her visit en route to Ithaca. And while I've agreed with her on prior rock-related posts, she tosses out some odd opinions in this one.
VIDEO on VINYL (only $2500) and other video you play with a needle are noted at Kempa.com.
BRADGELINA UPDATE: Brad Pitt describes the reasons for his separation from Jennifer Aniston as “complex and multifaceted” and “not one thing.” Of course, even a casual glance at Angelina Jolie (if such a thing has ever existed) could tell you it was more than one thing.
NATIONAL SEA MONKEY DAY was Monday. Sorry I missed it; I feel like I have failed all of you terribly.
IRAQ: Scores of foreign fighters may have fled border towns ahead of the U.S. Marines' launch of Operation Matador, though that may be due to ongoing fighting between the different groups of insurgents themselves.. The Washington Post is interesting because it shows the general degree of professionalism of U.S. troops: Marines generally commandeered houses for the night, but before dawn, Capt. Bill Brown “got up and washed the tea glasses used by his Marines. He left them drying on the family's sideboard. It doesn't pay to make enemies, Brown said.”
IRAQ II: What are the lessons to be drawn from the standpoint of overhauling the U.S. military?
NEW CANCER DRUGS may be more effective by multi-tasking.
LINDSAY LOHAN launched a damage control operation over the weekend, but Go Fug Yourself is still talking about the amount of time Lohan spends in the bathroom, and Defamer refers to having “more Lohan-related news than we could cut with a credit card.” But damage control is clearly necessary when the normally fluffy People magazine begins a Lohan photo caption with, “Proving she does, in fact, eat…”
CULT OF THE iPod: Leave it to New Yorkers to turn the gadget into an instrument of brutal one-upsmanship. It makes Jack Black's “Barry” in High Fidelity seem dainty.
AFGHANISTAN AND NEWSWEEK: Editor Mark Whitaker, after telling The New York Times, “We're not retracting anything,” decided to retract its story about Quran desecration, which, imho, it had no choice about, as their single source collapsed on them. If this was not the case, Newsweek would not only be standing by its story, but also doing a story on how the government tried to pressure the magazine into the retraction. In the aftermath of the story, a frequent visitor to Kabul is being warned about the damage the story has done. Fortunately, it would appear that Islamic outrage over the story is not widespread in Iraq. As for Newsweek Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas chose to print a claim made by Bader Zaman Bader, who claimed he still had nightmares over the Quran desecration. Thomas failed note that when Bader was released, he said was interrogated 150 times by his American jailers but never abused, with no mention of Quran desecration.
NEWSWEEK REAX: There are some, apparently including ABC News' Nightline, that want to defend the story on the basis of other allegations lodged primarily by former detainees. As noted here before, the Al Qaeda training manual instructs its followers to complain of abuse if they are captured as a matter of routine. In this case, the allegations have been published before. But in 2002, when Guantanamo detainees protested the guards' handling of copies of the Quran (provided by the U.S., btw), which allegedly had been tossed into a pile and stepped on, an anonymous former interrogator confirmed that a senior officer delivered an apology over the camp's loudspeaker system, pledging that such abuses would stop. Interpreters, standing outside each prison block, translated the officer's apology. The NYT now reports that former Guantanamo translator Eric Saar doesn’t back the “toilet” allegations. Nevertheless, Newsweek is not responsible for the violence and deaths that followed its publication of an unsupported story that the government had confirmed these allegations — the blame lies with Islamic extremists who think murder is an appropriate response to being offended. I wish the defenders of Newsweek would put the blame there instead of assuming our soldiers are guilty.
JESSICA SIMPSON has separated from husband Nick? It's a story based on a single anonymous source, so you would be forgiven for thinking this ran in Newsweek, instead of Star magazine.
THERE'S A BIG GAP BETWEEN PRESS AND PUBLIC attitudes on a whole host of issues, according to a new University of Connecticut survey.
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT is renewed for another season.
AL QAEDA official Haitham al-Yemeni was killed in Pakistan by a Predator drone plane.
AL QAEDA: FWIW, Pakistani and U.S. intelligence believe that they are hot on the heels of Osama bin Laden, according to a report in the Asia Times.
KUWAIT APPROVES WOMEN’S RIGHT TO VOTE. For parliament. In 2007. The journey of miles beginning with a single step, one hopes.
THE NEW YORK TIMES plans to start charging $49.95 for access to it its Op-Ed page and certain of its top news columnists online. I think that will prove to be a grave error.
FEAR ON THE BAYOU: Is a serial killer loose near Houma, a town of 32,000 about 50 miles southwest of New Orleans?
TATTOO ARTISTS are concerned their art is becoming too mainstream.
KINKY DEMON terrorizes Tanzania!
