HEY, HO, LET'S GO: End of the Century, the critically-acclaimed documentary on the Ramones, airs on PBS this week, along with a short on Joe Strummer. Find out when it's airing where you live and more at the Independent Lens section of the PBS website.
THE MOUNTAIN GOATS: Amazon is streaming four cuts from The Sunset Tree for those with the Windoze Media Player and posting John Darnielle's rather esoteric list of music you should hear. The Big Ticket has a download from the disc and another leak from the forthcoming Sufjan Stevens disc noted here yesterday.
TICKET BROKERS: Rolling Stone looks at state of the art scalping: “As of Monday afternoon, April 11th, ticketsnow.com was selling 292 seats to Springsteen's New Jersey show — almost nine percent of the 3,300 seats that went on sale to the public — with some going for as much as $2,565 apiece.”
BONO stayed at Bill Gates' mansion when U2 played Seattle. Gates is a fan of U2 and Bono's activism, but his loyalty only extends so far…
ON THE PITCHFORK: A big thumbs-up to The Best Party Ever, by The Boy Least Likely To. “The album's best song, the dreamy “Paper Cuts”, channels Brian Wilson via Summerteeth-era Wilco through the lens of Aztec Camera.” That seems likely, based on the streaming samples at the band's site.
STEVEN TYLER of Aerosmith is moonlighting as a tour guide.
THE HUFFINGTON POST: Excerpts of Arianna Huffington's celebrity group blog will be syndicated by Tribune Media Services. The PR-savvy Huffington keeps announcing more bloggers, including Nora Ephron, Diane Keaton, Norman Mailer, David Mamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Michael Medved, Harry Shearer and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who must be mad that the reintroduction of the Today Sponge story is passing her by). The New York Times notes that Huffington has hired away Mr. Drudge's right-hand Web whiz, Andrew Breitbart, who used to be her researcher. Breitbart gave a further statement to writer-blogger Roger L. Simon.
GETTIN' BLOGGY WITH IT: fishbowl NY connects a piece in Slate on newspaper's decisions to offer online content for free or by subscription with an academic piece calculating the ratio of blog-links to circulation — which essentially measures the “blogginess” of online newspapers.
VIDEO KILLED… well, just about everything. The ever-so-bloggy Christian Science Monitor focuses on education: “For all of their pedagogical virtues, video presentations tend to appeal more to emotions than to logical reasoning. Unless viewers make the effort to pose critical questions while they watch – and also make time to reflect on what they're seeing – some experts worry the shift from print- to video-based instruction could be coming at a cost of less comprehension.” But the same issue arises in other situations, such as the “CNN effect” on foreign policy, such as President Geowge H. W. Bush's decision to intervene in Somalia as well as President Clinton's decision to leave Somalia, and so on.
SAUDI ARABIA: Matt Welch notes that the cozy photo op with President Bush and Crown Prince Abdullah sends a very bad message abroad. Indeed, with the chief justice of Saudi Arabia's Supreme Judicial Council encouraging young Saudis to go to Iraq to wage war against Americans, a little less smooching for the cameras in Crawford might have been appropriate.
WEIRD ADS: Seth Stevenson rails in Slate: “I don't think these ads work as pieces of marketing. And I've grown immune to them as pieces of entertainment. So, why are they all over my TV?”
BURIED TREASURE: Two men dug up nine tin cans containing old money and certificates valued at over one hundred grand in a backyard in Massachussetts.
AMERICAN IDOL: Matt Drudge reports that Fox is threatening to sue ABC over the Primetime Live expose set to air next Wednesday. As Drudge puts it in classic Drudge fashion: “FOX believes ABC has interviewed a half a dozen losing contestants — contestants who will claim AMERICAN IDOL producers and judges somehow manipulate the show's outcome!”
LEBANON: Michael J. Totten explains why the the success of democracy there matters far beyond the country's borders: “A victory by Lebanon's democratic opposition will deliver a blow against Syria, a blow against Iran's Hezbollah proxy, a blow against dictatorship, a blow against terrorism, and a blow against hate.”
A WOULD BE CAR BURGLAR in California locked himself in the trunk. “Genius, pure genius,” said Fresno County Sheriff's Lt. Louis Hernandez.
JUSTICE BEHIND THE CHEDDAR CURTAIN: A Wisconsin judge ordered an Appleton woman convicted of theft to decide whether to spend 90 days in jail or donate her family's Packers tickets next season to charity.
CULT OF THE iPod: Sirius Satellite Radio CEO Mel Karmazin continues to pusue his dream of an MP3 player with satellite radio.
JUICED GIRLS: American girls, some as young as 9, are using steroids to get the toned, sculpted look of models and movie stars, experts say.
RELATIVE RELATIVISM: Richard Lawrence Cohen explains it. I was taken by his example (expanded upon by his son in the comments) of the merits of Mozart and Indonesian gamelan music.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, SOMEBODY STOP HIM: George Lucas is doing a cameo on The O.C. a week before the rollout of Revenge of the Sith.
HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY: The sci-fi comedy took a long, strange trip to get to your local cineplex this Friday. Decades, really.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: Palestinian Boy Scouts playing bagpipes.
RECORDED TERROR ATTACKS SOAR IN '04: Most of the increase involved an increase in violence in Kashmir, which is claimed by India and Pakistan. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) wrote Secretary of State Rice that the large increases in terrorist attacks reported in 2004 may undermine administration claims of success in the war on terror. The article suggests that the government is devoting more resources to counting them. Also, imho, just as there were more battles after the U.S. got diretly involved in WWII, the direct engagement of the U.S. in places like Iraq has undoubtedly increased the number of attacks, but says little about whether the U.S. is winning the war.
ISLAMIC SCHOLAR CONVICTED of exhorting his followers in the days after 9/11 to join the Taliban and fight U.S. troops. He becomes the 10th person convicted in the government's prosecution of what it called a “Virginia jihad network.” Two were acquitted.
SISTER SHOT OVER PHONE PHOTO: A Jordanian man shot dead his divorced sister after seeing her photo on his friend's camera-equipped cellphone in the latest “honor” killing in the kingdom, hospital officials said Monday. Those found guilty of honor killing usually face a maximum sentence of one year in jail under Jordanian law. In America, that's called a misdemeanor… among other things.
MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL UPDATE: I recently noted that her comments partially blaming the U.S. for 9/11 sounded like she was asking for a spanking. Well, she had to turn the comment feature off on her web site. I would be tempted to suggest that she's trying to drum up controversy to publicize her new film, but her comments seem consistent with her prior statements over the past few years.
CAMILLE PAGLIA has a new book on her favorite poems, which gets a generally good review from The New Criterion Prof. Ann Althouse has related thoughts on Joni Mitchell's “Woodstock.”
THE COLLAPSE OF BIG MEDIA? Former TV Guide critic and co-creator of Entertainment Weekly Jeff Jarvis rounds up several pieces on trends in advertising, circulation and viewership that should be a major wake-up call to conventional media. Whether it will be is another question.
“PORNOGRAPHY,” shrugged Scott Timsit, a dark-haired 16-year-old in wire-rimmed glasses, “is just part of the culture now. It's almost like it's not even, like, porn.” An article in the L.A. Times has the subhead, “If it's corrupting them, the data don't yet show it.” But I think the story itself may suggest the exact opposite.
GLOBAL WARMING: Novelist Ian McEwan writes that “reports from a range of scientific disciplines are telling us with certainty that we are making a mess of the earth, we are fouling our nest, and we have to act decisively and against our immediate inclinations.” But he adds: “The environmental movement has been let down by dire predictions, 'scientifically' based, which over the past two or three decades have proved spectacularly wrong. Of itself, this does not invalidate dire scientific predictions now, but it makes the case for skepticism — one of the engines of good science. We need not only reliable data, but their expression in the rigorous use of statistics.”
WHAT'S SCARIER? Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds or the news that Michael Bay is remaking it? I ask because my parents took me to see the original when I was three years old and I am told I laughed through it. Which explains a lot, doesn't it?
HATE HOAX: Police say an African-American female student has confessed to sending threatening letters targeting fellow minority students at her small Christian university, apparently to convince her parents the school was too dangerous for her to stay.
IRAQ: In February, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi narrowly escaped arrest by U.S. forces by diving from a SUV, but the troops seized a top henchman, recovered Zarqawi’s laptop computer and seized over one hundred grand of his money. The laptop confirmed two way communication with Osama bin Laden and suggests that Zarqawi is in worse physical condition than previously believed and recovering from a wound to his stomach.
IRAQ II: U.S. investigators have found that American troops who shot dead an Italian agent at a Baghdad checkpoint on March 4th committed no wrongdoing and will not be disciplined, an Army official said on Monday. But Italy disagrees with key findings in the preliminary report by the U.S. military investigators and has balked at endorsing it, added the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Giuliana Sgrena, the anti-war journalist rescued by the agent, described the conclusion of the leaked report as a “slap in the face.” However, Ms. Sgrena's own ever- shifting accounts of the shooting make me skeptical of her opinion. I'll wait to hear what the Italian investigators say.
A.J. SOPRANO allegedly dated and assaulted a 41-year-old fitness guru?
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER SEX ED CASE: A former teacher’s aide accused by prosecutors of stripping naked in the classroom, touching herself in a seductive manner and having sexual contact with seven students, both boys and girls between the ages of 11 and 15, was charged today with nine criminal counts. She also is charged with choking a 13-year-old girl to the point where an ambulance had to be called.