THE RAVEONETTES… with Ronnie Spector! Teaching the Indie Kids How to Dance has it for download. There’s also a link to their cover of “My Boyfriend’s Back.”
REMEMBER: Kathleen Edwards will be on Morning Becomes Eclectic Thursday morning…
THE HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN may have been unearthed by archeologists in New Orleans. If that news puts you in the mood, you can download 250 versions of the song.
BECK talked to The Guardian about Strokes clones and his rental car.
JUKEBLOG is a beta test of a MP3 blog recommender.
ROBERT JOHNSON: Sylvia Hauser tipped me to a nifty Page One article in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal about how two photos of the legendary Mississippi bluesman became the subjects of a convoluted, 15-year (and counting) legal tug of war between a blues historian and relatives of Johnson, who died penniless and without a will in 1938. The article requires a subscription to read online, but an Associated Press story about the copyright fight I linked in December is archived at the Blues4U News Wire. Sadly, that article lacks the detail and flair of the WSJ piece: which contains grafs like this:
“To understand the spell that Robert Johnson casts over devotees of American music, just travel here to the Mississippi Delta, a fertile expanse of northwestern Mississippi that spawned a strain of blues that became a foundation for rock 'n' roll.
“Dedicated fans have placed gravestones for Mr. Johnson in three separate rural cemeteries outside Greenwood, after puzzling over the sketchy tale of his burial in an unmarked grave. He had been poisoned, the story goes, at the age of 27 by a jealous juke-joint owner whose wife caught the singer's eye. on a recent winter afternoon, guitar picks, cigarettes and coins lay scattered around all three gravesites.”
These sites were on Sylvia's itinerary when she went on sabbatical last Fall. I'll see whether she has any photos or whether she used all the film on her then-future fiancee.
BONO is buying a piece of Tomb Raider Lara Croft.
HOGZILLA: A team of National Geographic experts has confirmed south Georgia's monster hog, known to locals as Hogzilla, was indeed real — 7 1/2 to 8 feet long, and weighed about 800 pounds. The confirmation came in a documentary aired Sunday night on the National Geographic Channel; it will be rebroadcast Wednesday and Saturday.
PUSS OF THE BASKERVILLES? A black cat-like animal approximately the size as a Labrador dog prowls the streets of London.
CHELSEA CLINTON partying like a Bush twin? Sure, it also happened while President Clinton was in office; it just wasn't reported in gossip columns.
BILL GATES argues that the PC era is just beginning.
WHO'DA THUNKIT? According to the Hollywood Reporter, “The number of broadband Internet access homes (33 million) now exceeds HBO subscriber homes (32 million) and satellite subscriber homes (24 million).”
MISFIT TOYS: The gallery at Toy Lab is right out of Toy Story or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
CBS NEWS UPDATE: Gawker notes that Mary Mapes, the producer who was fired after Dan Rather’s MemoGate, has sold her memoirs, while Josh Howard, the 60 Minutes Wednesday executive producer laid off in the wake of the memo debacle, is about to resign. Gawker seems to believe both are being well-paid.
BLOGGERS AS JOURNALISTS: A sophomore journalism major at the University of Texas at Austin calls blogging “the Dadaism of journalistic form.” He acknowledges that “blogs can levy accountability in an area sorely lacking it,” but then asserts that what “blogs offer increasingly is an irresponsible, rabid and at times maniacal fringe with a vitriolic bent that has little desire to represent truth or accuracy, only an at-all-costs battering ram for storming the gates of opposition ideology.” I would say that lunatic fringes existed before blogs. These fringes may now publish their ravings to a world-wide audience, but this allows those ravings to be challenged and debunked. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it, “A little sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
BELLE AND SEBASTIAN are thoughtfully compiling their copious EPs and singles onto a single CD.
MARIAH CAREY claims that on her honeymoon with ex-husband and ex-Sony exec Tommy Mottola, she was “running down the beach, miserable, crying and alone.” I wonder whether her forthcoming disc will feature a cover of Freda Payne's “Band of Gold?”
CULT OF THE iPod: Now there's an entire site for those wanting to listen to their iPods through their car stereo.
PODCASTING: After getting into some trouble for its early marketing practices in the blogosphere, Warner Brothers Records will sponsor podcasts of the Eric Rice Show and provide exclusive audio content from one of its bands. Much better than WB employees making anonymous posts to MP3 blogs — a case of honesty being the best policy.
RED HOT CHILI PEPPER Anthony Kiedis had to be subdued by eight security guards after a recent fashion show in Los Angeles.
IRAQ: Shopkeepers and residents on one of Baghdad's main streets pulled out their own guns Tuesday and killed three insurgents when hooded men began shooting at passers-by.
CAMP BUCCA: The woman booted from the military for baring her breasts during a wild mud-wrestling party at the U.S. Army's main prison in Iraq may appeal her general discharge because it will deny her some veterans' benefits. Which I mention because people somehow find this site while searching for nude mud wrestling on the 'net. And now I've mentioned it twice.
THE REAL INCREDIBLES: “Moriarty” of Ain't-It-Cool News took a behind the scenes tour of Pixar Animation Studios. And took plenty of pictures.
KYRGYZSTAN: As President Akayev orders a review of some parliamentary poll results amid growing protests over alleged irregularities, Russia's Foreign Ministry condemned the protests and rebuked the Organization for Security and Cooperation for declaring that the elections had fallen short of democratic standards.
ESTONIA: The government collapses after lawmakers said they had no confidence in the justice minister because of a controversial anti-corruption plan. Estonia was another “captive” republic of the Soviet Union. When I visited Tallinn (the capitol city), you could not help but notice that the language was more Finnish than Slavic and the architecture looked like something out of Pinocchio.
JAPANESE WWII SUB WRECKAGE discovered in the waters off Oahu. The submarine is from the I-400 Sensuikan Toku class of subs, the largest built before the nuclear-ballistic-missile submarines of the 1960s.