Definitely Not L.A.

The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival begins this weekend, and, after sitting out a year, pianist Henry Butler, a Monroe favorite, returns to perform.  Check out these heartbreaking pictures from his home, post-Katrina.

He’s no Matthew McConaughey on the bongos (fortunately) and certainly no Yeltsin, but hail to the Cut-up in Chief:

Jack White already at work on Raconteurs follow-up.

Dylan to grunt and squeak and squawk with the animals at the Toledo Zoo Amphitheater Thu July 12.  Ticket presale May 1. 

Stephen Colbert declared Greatest Living American.

Is Spidey 3 the first $500,000,000 movie?

Hollywood’s latest bad idea, a sure-to-be defanged remake of Paul Bartel’s 1975 classic Death Race 2000, is in the works, with hackmeister Paul W.S. Anderson at the wheel.  Jason Statham’s on tap to star, and I’ll bet you a bag of red licorice it’s gonna be awful. 

The original, a DNLA favorite, starred David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone as participants in a futuristic (erm, it was set in 2000) cross-country race during which drivers racked up points by taking down pedestrians, with bigger numbers for infants and seniors.  (It’s a satire, softies.)  It inspired a controversial early videogame (little crosses popped up with each “score”) called, oddly enough, Death Race, and I’m imagining this PTA version as a dopey PG-13 action trifle less controversial than Sanjaya’s fauxhawk.

Love to be wrong, though.      

From a Huffington Post entry on global warming road-trippers Laurie David and Sheryl Crow’s encounter with Karl Rove at the WH Correspondents Dinner:

How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be touched by Sheryl Crow?

Yeltsin dead at 76.

To mark International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, we Evening News “community bloggers” are gathering at Munson Park around 1 pm for a lovely communal repast of our daily dry husk of bread and ladle of gruel.  Fortunately we have a chef in our midst who can do wonders with gruel with readily available ingredients like dandelions and road salt.