Karl 
WILCO: Did you know that can download the Australian bonus CD attached to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot from Wilcoweb?
DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS are putting the finishing touches on their as-yet-untitled sixth studio album, due next spring. Patterson Hood says, “Lord knows I've got a backlog of songs, but when we went into the studio I pretty much ignored it. Everything else we've written since we started recording.” Hood also has a solo album coming out; you can download some demos at his site.
THE DECEMBERISTS: Someone is killing music with three live tracks of unreleased songs on a faux page at PureVolume. And Colin Meloy thinks that the band, unlike The Arcade Fire, hasn't been successful enough to worry about a backlash.
THE ARCADE FIRE: Lead singer Win Butler thalks to the Chicago Tribune from a cellphone while shopping for an acoustic guitar in Portland.
THE STROKES: Stereogum notes yet another leak from the upcoming album.
PAUL McCARTNEY gives Ben Okuly permission to marry Melissa Steele: “Well, that's a first for me,” McCartney quipped of the in-concert engagement. “And I hope it's a last for you, Ben.”
THE ARCTIC MONKEYS: *Sixeyes notes that the next big thing's label has a half-dozen legally downloadable demos. Get them now, thank me later.
BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE: Jim Ray of MSNBC joins the list of those finding that the band's self-titled album grows on you. There's audio at the link, too.
MAXIMO PARK frontman Paul Smith is profiled in London's Guardian: “To get over the girls, he turned to drink. To get over the drink, he turned to music.”
COLDPLAY frontman Chris Martin is interviewed by Ricky Gervais in glorious Quicktime.
FIVE OTHER GIRLS, FIVE OTHER PLANETS: Someone at Oh No, They Didn't has posted The Only Ones’ “Another Girl, Another Planet” and six covers, including The Replacements (natch) and The Mighty Lemon Drops.
SILVER JEWS: On Friday, I noted that Tanglewood Numbers is doing alright at Metacritic. The blog of a band named Johnny Domino is killing music with two of the new SJ tracks and an old one.
PETE DOHERTY-KATE MOSS UPDATE: The radio station for the University of East Anglia has banned Doherty and his bands, Babyshambles and The Libertines, after Babyshambles canceled a string of confirmed gigs at UEA.
MADONNA is promoting Confessions on The Dancefloor with confessions off the dancefloor, such as the revelation that she “got married for all the wrong reasons.”
LOU REED was a presenter at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards in NYC, where someone asked him, “'Do you live here?” After much laughter, Reed sighed, “Fame is fleeting.”
IRAQ: Bill Roggio looks at “flypaper” and “bleedback:” “There is no singular answer to the question of whether Iraq is a training ground or a killing field for al Qaeda, as the answer is that Iraq is both.” He also reviews ground raids in the Qaim region on the border with Syria, credited to an increase in local intelligence. London's Telegraph headlines a report US troops fighting losing battle for Sunni triangle, which seems to be based on observations in Duluiya and Dour — two small towns in Saddam's home province. On Saturday, the AP reported that US troops are maintaining high morale in Baqouba, which is in the same area, but on Sunday, someone changed the headline of the same story to “U.S. Troops Try to Maintain Morale in Iraq.” There's good news about security improvements in the middle of an AP story titled, “Iraq Insurgency Shows No Signs of Abating,” but it's sandwiched between speculation from experts as to how things could get worse. Michael Yon reports on the referendum, which he spent alongside the top enlisted man for coalition forces in Iraq.
BRITNEY SPEARS feels the pangs of conscience and decides not to sell pictures of her baby to a celeb mag. Of course, they leaked to fan sites like TangibleBrit.com, but the pop tart is threatening legal action against anyone who publishes them, causing a big apology from TangibleBrit.com. However, Spears' legal team must not be very adept at the Internet, as it missed a bunch of other sites that copied the pics from TangibleBrit. ALSO: K-Fed is fed up with the couple's sex life taking a back seat to his baby.
VARIETY'S ICONS OF THE CENTURY is online in their entirety, in alphabetical order. Plenty of musicians and moguls.
CAMERON DIAZ helped lead a lecture on environmentally friendly design at Stanford University. The AP added, “Diaz's latest film, North Country, opened Friday. By the time you read this, maybe the AP will have figured out that Diaz is not in that movie.
NICHOLAS CAGE seems to be in the market for a custom chopper. Perhaps starring in Ghost Rider, the screen adaptation of the motorcyle-riding comic book antihero, put him in the mood.
SYRIA: A U.N. report implicating senior Syrian officials in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri increased pressure on the government and ignited renewed demands that Lebanon's pro-Syrian president step down. And that's after the U.N. doctored the report, removing the names of President al-Assad’s brother, brother-in-law and other high-ranking Syrian officials. Michael J. Totten blogs and photoblogs the reaction in Beirut. Publius Pundit has a good round up of blog coverage.
ZOMBIES lurched through the streets of Madison, WI on Saturday, following similar incidents in Seattle and Vancouver.
SEVEN SPOOKIEST MOVIE HOUSES: Nominees are posted at Cinematical.
HALLOWEEN: Sadly, I've missed the confirmed delivery deadline for Haunted Memories portraits that change as you pass by, and it’s also too late to get a creepy Burger King mask.
BE AFRAID… BE VERY AFRAID: Celine Dion is planning to have a second child after her contract with Caesar's Palace ends in 2007.
THE WEEKEND BOX OFFICE was nothing to shout about. I saw Capote, which will almost certainly get an Oscar nomination for Philip Seymour Hoffman.
AFGHANISTAN: President Karzai condemned the alleged desecration of the bodies of two dead Taliban fighters by U.S. troops, but he said mistakes happen in war and Afghans shouldn't let it mar their impression of the U.S. The New York Times somehow missed the second part.
CAROLYN MURPHY, SI swimsuit coverbabe, is the star of a sizzling sex tape apparently stolen from her ex-husband, Jake Schroeder. And it seems that Jake really doesn't care: “She barely lets me see our daughter, Dylan. The most I see Dylan these days is in the pages of Vogue — something Carolyn promised she'd never do. Carolyn is as fake as her new t – ts. She's just about the almighty dollar.”
SARAH JESSICA PARKER has taken to dressing like The Beatles circa Yellow Submarine to please her two-year-old son.
CHARLIZE THERON doesn't want to overwork, so she hasn't read a movie script since her Oscar win last year. Strangely enough, she did read the script for Aeon Flux and decided to do it anyway.
DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES: Felicity Huffman's bar dance to KC and the Sunshine Band's “Boogie Shoes” was undoubtedly a special treat for fans of her prior series, the late and lamented SportsNight.
JOAQUIN PHOENIX is getting more Oscar buzz for his portrayal of Johnny Cash in Walk The Line: Long after shooting finished, “I remember my girlfriend saying, 'Why are you …? Stop talking like that!'” Phoenix says, suggesting a Cash drawl. “I was like, 'Like what?'”
HURRICANE KATRINA: Contradicting another bit of conventional wisdom, it turns out that wealthy, predominantly white neighborhoods had high death figures and massive property damage.
TOM-KAT UPDATE: Cruise's popularity has plunged steeply in the past few months, according to Genius Insight, a New York-based marketing and research firm. The poll showed that he dropped from the 11th most liked celebrity to the 197th; he now ranks among the top five most controversial actors (those who are heavily disliked and liked), along with David Spade, Tom Green, Pauly Shore and Ashton Kutcher. Meanwhile, Holmes is knitting things for the baby: “It's amazing. I'm so happy. I feel great. I'm beaming.”
CULT OF THE iPod: The inevitable iPorn is turning up. Porn drives technology — VCRs, cable TV, the world-wide web, etc. Just imagine the potential for a gadget that can be handheld.
BROADBAND BY BALLOON was successfully tested in Sweden.
NANOTECH meets biotech: Biomedical engineers have erected some of the tallest of towers on the tiniest of scales by getting biological molecules to do the labor. The research is one step toward creating functional nanostructures out of biological materials. ALSO the Speculist has a podcast with with Christine Peterson of the Foresight Nanotech Institute, which includes a sneak preview of the Advancing Beneficial Nanotech conference.
THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT: Rolling Stone has an article about the uneasy truce between soldiers and socialists that threatens to split the movement. But both factions are gearing up to publicize the 2,000th military death in Iraq.
OIL-FOR-FOOD SCANDAL: IHC Services, which did big business with the U.N. procurement department, had links both to Saddam's old sanctions-busting networks, and to a businessman known for his ties to a figure designated by the U.N. itself as a financier of Al Qaeda.
CHIMPANZEES chat with each other over dinner. The finding could lead to better understanding of the origins of human speech. There's audio at the link.
RAT GROOMING is becoming all the rage.
COUGARS seem to be returning to the Midwest.
PYTHON INVASION feared in Florida. By December, researchers plan to tag a handful of pythons with radio-tracking devices to map their slitherings. As early as next year — if funding comes through — they hope to start trapping pythons and dispatching them by lethal injection.
