Karl 
THE MOUNTAIN GOATS' new disc is out today. The New York Times pours on the love. on the Pitchfork, the review is good, but not gushing. In honor of the release, Chromewaves posts the band's version of “The Boys Are Back In Town” for download.
LEGAL MUSIC DOWNLOADERS are frustrated by restrictions placed on songs they have bought from online stores. Imho, one way of reducing illegal downloading would be to avoid alienating legal downloaders.
JEFF TWEEDY: The audio from the “Who Owns Culture?” panel featuring the Wilco frontman and Professor Lawrence Lessig talking about music, remixing, artistic freedom and the law is now available as a stream or a download.
SUFJAN STEVENS! Teaching the Indie Kids to Dance returns with a leaked download of “Come on Feel The Illinoise,” from the Illinois disc due in July. It is not the Slade or Quiet Riot tune. Blogger Keith does a decent job of explaining what it does sound like.
ELTON JOHN plans to marry his long-term partner David Furnish once civil partnerships between gay couples aree allowed in Britain after December 5th. Had the U.K. passed such a law earlier, it would have just been Five Weddings, which would not have been as funny.
BONO: The new Washington Examiner gives you some of the quotable rock star, excerpted from “Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas,” which hits bookstores this week. Mr. Vox keeps it going with criticism on foreign aid for Canadian Prime Minister Martin, who is currently scrambling to keep his minority government alive amid growing anger over a Liberal Party cash-for-favors scandal. And he greenlighted the sample for Fugee Pras Michel's “Haven't Found,” which you can stream from Stereogum.
EXPLODING TOADS invade Hamburg, Germany by the hundreds. So bad has the death toll been that a lake in the Altona district of Hamburg has been dubbed “the pond of death.”
IRAQ: Arthur Chrenkoff has his usual round-up of under-reported good news from Iraq, including an uncharacteristically positive piece from the BBC. Shia Iraqi hitmen admit they were paid to join the Sunni insurgency by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. Sunni politicians have dropped their demand to include former members of Saddam Hussein's party in Iraq's new Cabinet, while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney exhorted top Kurdish and Shiite politicians to come together, in thehope that formation of the government will put a damper on the insurgency.
IRAQ II: The New York Times (via the Contra Costa Times) recycles complaints about the armoring of Humvees, when they could be complaining about the rise in fatalities caused by rollovers of armored Humvees instead. Two MilBloggers, Jason Van Steenwyk and Greyhawk, both of whom spent time in Iraq (Jason was in the area at issue before the Marines), comment on the story and add perspective.
BLOGS AND BUSINESS: Henry Copeland of BlogAds blasts BusinessWeek and its cover story on blogs (linked here yesterday), complete with visual aids.
BLOGS are becoming so widespread that David Byrne has one. Even a superhero has one. And so does Darth Vader, at least until Lucasfilm's lawyers show him the true meaning of the Dark Side.
SPEAKING OF GEORGE LUCAS, he plans to further devalue the Star Wars franchise with a live-action TV series.
BRADGELINA UPDATE: Page SixSixSix's exclusive (linked here yesterday) that Brad Pitt and Jolie were spotted together in Africa has been confirmed by London's Sun and People magazine. The pictures are all over the 'net.
CHILD SUPPORT: Maine officials are coming after a 35-year-old man who they said owes thousands in back child support for a child that is not his. They say the man failed to file a court motion three years ago that would have relieved him or any financial responsibilities for the child.
THE PARENT GAP: Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of the Progressive Policy Institute worries: “The past two presidential elections revealed a growing 'parent gap.' In 2000, Al Gore lost married parents by 15 points and John Kerry widened the gap, losing them by a whopping 19 points.”
THE END OF ANALOG TV? According to MSNBC, “Depending on the outcome of discussions in Congress, television as we know it may end at exactly midnight Dec. 31, 2006.” Congress left a loophole in the Telecom Act of 1996 and could let the cut-off date slide, but powerful lobbyists now are pressing legislators to set a “date certain” for the analog lights-out. Color me skeptical — what member of Congress wants to be blamed for turning off peoples' television or making them buy a new TV or converter?
TV SWEEPS PREDICITION: on the strength of American Idol, buyers believe Fox will edge past CBS to win the adults 18-49 viewer race for the sweeps period (April 28-May 25)–and for the season as well. That could leave CBS and ABC duking it out for second place, while NBC takes fourth. Advertisers also predict that CBS’ CSI finale, directed by Quentin Tarantino, will overtake NBC’s finale of The Apprentice 3.
HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY: Cinema Confidential interviews Zooey Deschanel, who reveals she was the biggest fan of the book in the cast and the only one with a computer or an iPod. Her boyfriend just got her “into this band called the Raspberries.”
DALEKS: A Dalek is set to appear in the current run of Doctor Who in the U.K. Their return was almost ruled out completely by a lengthy dispute between the BBC and the estate of late Dalek creator Terry Nation, but the dispute was resolved last August. The new model seems even more dangerous than the original.
GOOGLE is worth more than companies like Viacom, Disney, General Motors, Ford and Hewlett-Packard?
AFGHANISTAN: The United Nations' top human rights investigator in Afghanistan has been forced out under American pressure just days after he presented a report criticising the U.S. military. At least, that's what a number of media outlets are reporting. However, I would note that Cherif Bassiouni (also a professor at the DePaul University College of Law) told WBBM radio Monday morning that he thought the problem was not with the troops so much as with the CIA and private contractors working at the Afghan prisons.
TOGO: As noted yesterday, the snap election in Togo was fraught with danger. The country’s two main political rivals acted to avert further bloodshed yesterday, agreeing to form a government of “national unity” following disputed presidential elections on Sunday. All sides in the election, for the west African nation’s first new leader in nearly four decades, alleged fraud and intimidation, and there are fears of more bloodshed when the results are announced later this week.
BOB KERREY, who left the Senate to become president of the New School University in New York, may be regretting it. Students have hired lawyers to sue the Kerrey administration for violating students contracts, false advertisement and defrauding students out of millions in tuition fees.
WILL FERRELL is set to star in a Land of the Lost comedy feature based on the 1974-77 television series created by Sid and Marty Krofft. But where is my H.R. Pufnstuf movie? Or The Bugaloos?
BADA-BING: Federal agents on Monday began a round-up of reputed Chicago mob members in connection with more than a dozen unsolved murders dating back to 1970. It is the largest number of organized crime figures brought down in a single indictment in Chicago history. And many have cool nicknames.
CLAW HAMMER ATTACK: In Connecticut, police have arrested a man who injured a friend with a claw hammer because he wanted to see “what it would be like to kill someone.”
RUSSIAN PRESIDENT PUTIN (formerly of the KGB) called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest political catastrophe of the last century” in his state of the nation address. Worse, he did so in the context of complaining that it left tens of millions of Russian people living outside Russia, in breakaway republics formerly under Soviet control. As much as I try to avoid Hitler analogies, that's the sort of concern Hitler cited in invading the Sudentenland and later Poland.
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION is becoming an issue outside the border states.
DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES' lawnboy Jesse Metcalfe is afraid of being seen in public with his rumored new flame, pneumatic bad girl Tara Reid? If he isn't, he will be.
AL-JAZEERA AND AMERICAN TV: Dorrance Smith, a former ABC News producer who spent nine months in Iraq as a senior media adviser to Ambassador Paul Bremer, raises questions about journalistic ethics in U.S. networks' working relationship with the Qatar-backed channel.
BREACH OF PROMISE TO MARRY is a claim rarely seen in courtrooms today, but an Indian who became a man to marry a female relative and was dumped after the surgery looks to sue for “breach of trust” in India.
