THE WEEKEND STARTS HERE:
FRIDAY TIMEWASTER: N-Game.
FRIDAY TIMEWASTER II: Music-Map (Thanks, Ken King)!
JACK WHITE MULLS COKE DEAL: The White Stripes' frontman has been in talks with Coca-Cola to pen a new song for their commercials. “They want a new 'I'd Like To Buy The World A Coke' and believe Jack is the only artist who can deliver them something that will be equally timeless,” a source told NME. Why not? The band and soda already share the same color scheme…
SEE THE VELVET UNDERGROUND play “Sweet Jane” at Max's Kansas City.
BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE announces U.S. tour dates, with the lovely Leslie Feist as the opening act.
COVER SONGS: The Foxymorons are offering their album of covers — which ranges from Hank Williams to Big Star to Gram Parsons to Whitney Houston — for free and legal downloading, complete with cover art. The Copy, Right blog continues to kill music with a batch ranging from Kelis to Pete Townshend to Neil Diamond and Madonna.
BELLE AND SEBASTIAN plan to release their seventh album, The Goalkeeper's Revenge, in January.
ALT-POP: Douglas Wolk attempts to dissect the oxymoronic genre.
THE KNITTERS get a nice write-up in L.A. City Beat. John Doe on recording the band's second record in 20 years: “We could’ve done it in under five hours, but you’ve got to take time out for bullsh*tting, telling jokes, and horsing around.”
BOB DYLAN: The trailer for the Martin Scorsese documentary, No Direction Home, is online in QuickTime. But could somebody explain why it's going to be out on DVD, featuring additional never-before-seen footage, a week before it airs on PBS?
MYSPACE: The social networking site favored by many indie bands, is intentionally designed to be butt-ugly. So is eBay.
TALKING BACK TO 80'S MUSIC: Number 45 in a series at Protein Wisdom.
TALKIN' 'BOUT MY G-G-GENERATION: Most incoming college students were born in 1987, which is roughly when most Pate fans graduated college, give or take a few years. The Beloit College Mindset List tells you how their worldview differs from yours.
FEMALE DJs are making it in a man's man's man's world.
BRADGELINA UPDATE: Pitt is renting a place in the Hamptons to be near Jolie, who is filming The Good Shepherd in New York. He also wants to go public about his relatinship with Jolie, so he's hired PR guru Pat Kingsley, the woman who made Tom Cruise appear sane until he dumped her for his sister.
VAUGHNISTON? Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston were caught canoodling at a Dwight Yoakum concert by a tipster to The Superficial.
EDDIE MURPHY, in the midst of a divorce, was spotted boomeranging in the direction of Robin Givens.
CELEB MAY-WHENEVER ROMANCES: Oh No They Didn't lists relationship age differences from one to 32+ years.
YOU'VE GOT TO SEE THE BAY-BEE: Jerry Seinfeld is a Dad for the third time. Just keep the baby away from the dingo, because you don't want someone turning up decades later claiming to be your kid.
BRITNEY SPEARS' husband gets a job. Sha na na na, na na na na na.
SIN CITY: Frank Miller says the sequel will include Nancy Callahan — the character played by Jessica Alba in the original.
MARY-KATE OLSEN may become the new face of Calvin Klein. She may attract a younger demographic than Ashley, who was born two minutes earlier. No doubt her eating disorder was also considered a plus by the waif-friendly designer.
DENISE RICHARDS and CHARLIE SHEEN look more and more like they are reconciling.
ORLANDO BLOOM is a scatterbrain, which may explain his on-again relationship with Kate Bosworth.
JOHN CLEESE is having parts of his colon removed… and wants to auction them on his web site. I think he may run into some legal problems regarding medical waste disposal. But it's the thought that counts.
ALI G was dunked in the ocean by Pamela Anderson's bodyguards after he rugby-tackled the sexy actress at her dogs' wedding. Dude.Man.Phat has pictures.
TERI HATCHER is back to complaining she can't find a man. Hey, she had her chance; I'm not dating her. That's final. Unless she calls.
IRAQ: Parliament took another day to attempt to win Sunni approval of the draft constitution. Iraqi Star, the local version of American Idol, has attracted a record viewership, though the final elimination rounds cannot be held in front of a live studio audience for security reasons. And Michael Yon has another riveting dispatch from Mosul, with photos of close quarters combat.
IRAQ II: Col. Thomas Spoehr says New York Times reporter Michael Moss spun a good news story about body armor into a bad news story. Mustang 09, blogging from Baghdad, noted this also. PowerLine details how AP reporter Angela Brown is airbrushing the facts when it comes to antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan. So when Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter writes that insurgents in the al Anbar province have fought the U.S. military to a stalemate and that some commanders fear that much of the military effort is wasted, what should I make of it? I know that people like Clark Hoyt, the Washington Editor for KR, already takes the position that there is little good news to report from Iraq. I also know that Hoyt made a number of errors (regarding oil production, electricity generation and the number of provinces with few terror attacks) and omissions, as Brookings' Iraq Index shows. Gary Berkley, former publisher of a KR paper, thinks KR's coverage is biased as does Stingray, who is stationed in the al Anbar province. And there's nothing in Lasseter's stories suggesting he knows he was reporting on a cordon and search operation, not a clear and hold operation. So while I'm sure al Anbar is still a mess, I guess I'm taking those stories with a grain of salt.
ORGY ERUPTS at the trendy Bistro Du Vent in NYC.
POLICE NAB SEX OFFENDER SLEEPING WITH 15-YEAR OLD in Tennessee. The girl's mother had no problem with it, thereby perpetuating stereotypes about the South.
I DON'T LIKE MONDAYS: Britons are more likely to commit suicide on Monday than any other day of the week, according to researchers from the Office for National Statistics. This result held even for pensioners, who don't have to go to work. Sometimes, there are no reasons.
L.A. GATOR UPDATE: Lake Machado is now being scoured by three alligator wrestlers and a cameraman from Gatorland of Orlando, FL, in hopes of catching the crafty Carlito, who has already eluded Colorado-based gator wrangler Jay Young.
TWENTY-NINE CROCODILES BUST OUT of a wildlife farm east of Beijing. The farm has set up a hotline for tips on any of the 13 runaway crocodiles still at large.
NEW BIOTERROR THREAT posed by Vietnamese Catfish.
TORTOISE has surgery, gets underbelly patched with fiberglass. I wonder if that came with TrueCoat… Anyway, it's probably better than using Bondo.
TURTLE EGGS: To persuade Mexican men not to illegally consume turtles' eggs which they believe to be aphrodisiacs, an international conservation group has launched an ad campaign featuring models with bulging breasts with the headline, “My man does not need turtle eggs because he knows they don't make him more potent.” The National Women's Institute, while behind the effort to end consumption of turtle eggs, feels the campaign portrays women as sex objects.
KILLER WHALES have learned to set traps to catch seagulls.
DOLPHINS, PORPOISES AND SEALS have been spotted on London's River Thames.
HOMELESS BEAR ARRESTED for begging in Siberia.
ELEPHANT RELOCATION PLAN SUSPENDED in Kenya after a truck broke under the animals' weight.
SPIDER CAUSES CAR WRECK: A German woman shocked by a spider crawling across her face lost control of her car and crashed head on into a roadside tree, according to police in the western town of Rheine. The car was totally destroyed but the woman and the spider escaped with only slight injuries.
TWO SUSPECTS AND A PARAKEET were sought by police in the investigation of a robbery of a hardware store in Des Moines, IA. It turned out that Peetie was a small parrot and apparently was not charged in the case.
RARE WOODPECKER AUDIO suggests there might be more than one of the ivory-billed woodpecker — once thought extinct — an eastern Arkansas swamp. Woodpecker audio at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Much less rare Woody Woodpecker audio at Frogstar.