From the New Orleans Times-Picayune, on Lindsay Lohan’s party habits in the Big Easy:

There you have it, folks. When Tara Reid says you’re partying too much, surely it’s time for some self-reflection.

Q: What do the following people have in common?

• Kobe Bryant
• Elizabeth Taylor
• Jay Leno
• Nick Carter
• Stevie Wonder
• Barry Gibb
• Diana Ross
• Chris Tucker
• Larry King
• Maury Povich
• Deepak Chopra

A: They are all on Michael Jackson’s defense witness list; it’s like a Love Boat/Fantasy Island episode gone horribly, horribly awry.

Presumably, each will testify that Michael never rogered ’em up the back door, not once, despite ample opportunity. (Except for Gibb, who will rant about growing up on the streets of Sydney, naturally (extra points if you get the ref (HDANCN?)).)

We may, of course, be certain of at least one question that will not be asked:

“Mr Wonder, did you see anything out of the ordinary at Mr Jackson’s ranch?”

I’m here all week, folks. Try the veal.

From the LA Times today:

WASHINGTON — The latest chapter in the legal history of torture is being written by American pilots who were beaten and abused by Iraqis during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. And it has taken a strange twist. The Bush administration is fighting the former prisoners of war in court, trying to prevent them from collecting nearly $1 billion from Iraq that a federal judge awarded them as compensation for their torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s regime. […] The case abounds with ironies. It pits the U.S. government squarely against its own war heroes and the Geneva Convention. Many of the pilots were tortured in the same Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers abused Iraqis 15 months ago. Those Iraqi victims, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, deserve compensation from the United States. But the American victims of Iraqi torturers are not entitled to similar payments from Iraq, the U.S. government says.

Richard Clarke’s January, 2001 memo to Condoleeza Rice on the threat posed by al Qaeda is now public. In it, he issued clear warnings about the group, and suggested strategies for dealing with them — and he asks for a meeting to review the threat and courses of action. Said meeting was delayed until September 4, 2001.

In 1990, thieves disguised as policemen staged a daring robbery of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Gardner’s will states that the museum must remain just as she left it, which is part of its charm — she mixed periods and styles as she saw fit, creating a unique presentation of art and antiquities. The museum cannot therefore rearrange the art, nor can they buy new works — let alone replace those stolen by parties unknown 15 years ago. Instead, there are blank spaces on the walls, filled only with white cards stating what had been there, and that the work in question had been stolen on March 18, 1990. Mrs-Heathen-To-Be and I visited the museum in November, and learned the story then.

Now it appears that the FBI is investigating former Vivendi head Jean-Marie Messier in connection with the robbery.

(via Metafilter)

The World Press Photo gallery from last year. Great stuff here.

Arthur Miller died Thursday night at his home in Roxbury. He was 89. Miller won the Pulitzer and a Tony for “Death of a Salesman” in 1949.

Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) sent ol’ George a letter on the subject wondering exactly why a guy with no journalism experience or credentials had a White House press pass under a pseudonym despite being employed only by a GOP mouthpiece, not a news organization. Other than to pitch softball questions to Scott, that is.

Well, there’s one more bit. “Gannon” has withdrawn to private life based on a bit of investigation by the blogosphere. It appears he didn’t care for some of his domain registrations being made public we guess.

Best. Lede. Evar.:

SALEM, South Dakota (AP) — The mix of nude dancers, orange juice and black-and-white independent films wasn’t in Bob Rieger’s original business plan.

The WaPo has a bit on the ongoing life of — and BOC appreciation of — the More Cowbell SNL sketch (4.5mb). Reproduced to stave off link rot:

Blue Oyster Cult, Playing Along With ‘More Cowbell’ By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 29, 2005; Page C01
There was something missing the other night when Blue Oyster Cult, the ’70s stadium rockers, kicked into their signature song, “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” in a gig at the Rams Head Tavern in Annapolis. Fans of the band, and of “Saturday Night Live,” knew exactly what the song needed: More cowbell. Ever since April 2000, when “SNL” first broadcast a skit parodying “Reaper’s” recording session, the 29-year-old rock anthem has been inseparable from the humble cowbell. And perhaps from Christopher Walken’s portrayal of “legendary” record producer Bruce Dickinson, who repeatedly pleads in the skit for “more cowbell.” In fact, a kind of cult has sprung up around the Blue Oyster Cult bit and its two magic words. “More cowbell” appears on T-shirts, coffee mugs and buttons, and the spoof is still discussed and debated on Web sites across the Internet. It has become a stock witticism in clubs and bars as bands begin to play (indeed, one group in Upstate New York named itself More Cowbell). Snippets from the skit pop up regularly on the radio. When the cable entertainment channel E! named its 101 Most Unforgettable ‘SNL’ Moments last fall, “Cowbell” ranked among the top five. For those who’ve never seen it, the sketch’s hilarity probably defies a printed description (it’s best to see it for yourself at mknx.com/v/cowbell.wmv). Suffice to say, Will Ferrell, who wrote the skit, plays a band member named Gene Frenkle whose specialty is the cowbell (and whose shirt fails to cover his flopping gut). Walken, ever intense, is the producer who is determined — good taste and common sense notwithstanding — to get more cowbell into the song’s recording. He urges Frenkle to “really explore the studio space” while whaling away on his cowbell — which Ferrell does, in a breathtaking bit of physical comedy. Despite the obvious irritation of the rest of the band, Walken’s Dickinson persists. “Guess what?” he says between takes. “I got a FE-ver, and the only prescription . . . is more cowbell!” Walken, an actor who has specialized in portraying the slightly unhinged, has described the six-minute sketch as career-defining. “People . . . I don’t know . . . I hear about it everywhere I go,” he told the Orlando Sentinel in October. “It’s been years, and all anybody brings up is ‘cowbell.’ I guess . . . you never know what’s gonna click.” Among the more amused viewers of the bit are the actual members of Blue Oyster Cult. “We didn’t know it was coming,” says Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser, co-founder and lead guitarist of the group. “We all thought it was phenomenal. We’re huge Christopher Walken fans.” He adds, “I’ve probably seen it 20 times and I’m still not tired of it.” Roeser says the TV sketch accurately portrayed the look of the band in its mid-’70s heyday, but took some artistic license with a few details. For example, “SNL” player Chris Parnell, portraying the group’s lead singer, is referred to in the skit as “Eric.” That presumably would be a reference to longtime band member Eric Bloom, but it was actually Roeser, not Bloom, who was in front of the group when it made “Reaper.” And while there really is a record producer named Bruce Dickinson, he had nothing to do with the recording of the song. (Dickinson did work on some of the group’s later releases.) What’s more, the cowbell skit is presented as an episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music,” a real show that chronicles the lurid rise and fall of real-life bands. But Blue Oyster Cult never really was a “Behind the Music” kind of band. “We did our share of drugs, but we never really [expletive] up,” Roeser says. In fact, after a break in the mid-’80s and a few lineup changes, the group (featuring three of its members from the 1970s) has toured continuously, and plays about 80 to 90 dates a year. Roeser said people still ask the band about poor Gene Frenkle, whose image appears in a still frame at the end of the sketch with the words “In Memoriam. 1950-2000.” Roeser breaks into a laugh. “That’s a total fiction,” he says. “They made up that character.” Fact is, there is a cowbell on “Reaper.” If you listen closely to it on oldies radio, you can make it out in the background. But it was an afterthought. The song was recorded without it, and was added as an overdub at the last minute. According to former BOC bassist Joe Bouchard, an unnamed producer asked his brother, drummer Albert Bouchard, to play the cowbell after the fact. “Albert thought he was crazy,” Bouchard told the Asbury Park (N.J.) Press in 2000. “But he put all this tape around a cowbell and played it. It really pulled the track together.” During its show at the Rams Head on Thursday night, the five-member group dusted off its hits from three decades ago, including “R.U. Ready 2 Rock,” “Burnin’ for You” and “Godzilla.” Then, after a long guitar preamble, it snapped into its set-closer, “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.” The familiar sweet notes swooped and soared, drawing the mostly middle-aged crowd back to its headbanging youth. Of course, it could have used . . . well, you know. © 2005 The Washington Post Company

Widely blogged but still cool: these pix of Tiger Woods shagging balls into the Gulf from atop Dubai’s tallest hotel.

(If the link rots, here’s the shots in order:

• Tiger1.jpg
• Tiger2.jpg
• Tiger3.jpg
• Tiger4.jpg
• Tiger5.jpg

If anyone knows the photo credit, I’ll happily run that, too.)

Mike points out something that ought to make everyone’s blood boil about how we’re treating our wounded troops.

There are several, but here’s the best one:

THINGS I’D PROBABLY SAY
IF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION WERE JUST
A WEEKLY TV SHOW AND I WERE
A REGULAR VIEWER.
By Eric Maierson “Now, see, you can’t just go and do something like that. That would be illegal.” “Boy, someone’s gonna get fired for that.” “Wasn’t that the one who made all the mistakes? Why is she getting promoted?” “Come on, in real life you’d never get away with something like that.” “They really expect us to believe that?” “Am I the only one confused here?” “Does this make any sense to you?” “Why is this still on?”

Or, at least, wherein we point you at someone else’s tribute. David Edelstein at Slate gets it right, and smacks down the McNews for their absurd reduction of Carson’s style and legacy:

Sometimes it’s easier to begin an appreciation by saying what a person emphatically was not. Consider this passage about Johnny Carson from an editorial in USA Today, which is wrongheaded on nearly every count:

But what made Carson so unusual wasn’t just his success, but how he achieved it. His monologues were not biting or cynical, as is often the case with today’s TV. His conversations with guests put the focus on the interviewee, not the interviewer. He didn’t win laughs at the expense of others, like Jay Leno does in his “Jaywalking” segment, which shows people unable to answer easy questions. If anyone was the butt of Carson’s humor, it was Carson himself.

You’d think that Carson was some sort of egoless saint of television, when at his peak he was precisely the oppositeÑwhich is why, of course, so many millions of us watched him so faithfully and took the news of his passing, at age 79 from emphysema, so hard.

Besides, BoingBoing has already done the “clever” part for us; we’re just giving directions:

• Cory Doctorow Debunks DRM
• The EFF publishes a list of technologies and products we wouldn’t have if the RIAA/MPAA cabal got their way
• Cory explains why Big Media’s claim that “if [consumers] don’t put up with DRM, they’ll just stop releaasing content” is so much hooey