• Gummi Dinosaurs.
• Preschool Education Snacks with a dinosaur theme.
• The dinosaurs (h)ate all your candy. I have no idea what this is.
• The collision of chocolate, commerce, dinosaurs, and human young.

"The Hindu Times" could not be an intrinsically worse song if it took a How To Be An Intrinsically Worse Song course at night school. I can only imagine Noel Gallagher, after a morning hangover cure and a couple of divorces, leaving the kitchen table and going to his writing desk (which, as it happens, is his kitchen table, making the entire journey, much like his band, mildly amusing but ultimately pointless), and thinking: "Hey, I've had a %&*$?"^ing great idea. I'll write an ode to rock and roll! It'll show people that the Gallagher bro --- er, Oasis, just must be the best band in the world, and then they'll love us again. That'll be greeeaaaat!"

• "Push It"
• "Temptation Waits"
• "Androgyny"
• "I Think I'm Paranoid"
• "Special"
• "Cup Of Coffee"
• "Til The Day That I Die"
• "Not My Idea"
• "When I Grow Up"
• "Hammering In My Head"
• "So Like A Rose"
• "Shut Your Mouth"
• "Parade"
• "Stupid Girl"
• "Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)"
• "Vow"

• "Supervixen"
• "Girl Don't Come / Can't Get You Out Of My Head / Get Busy With The Fizzy"
• "Milk"
• "Only Happy When It Rains"

Yes, the performances are all great, and yes, Gondry proves that he can make a better than average feature (he even gets to add a few signature special effects here and there), and yes, this is a film that will leave you wondering what dimension Kaufman is from and that's all well and good, but if you think about it as you're walking out of the theater, you'll realize that these guys probably had the collective talent to reinvent the wheel and they chose instead to rotate your tires. But hey, you need your tires rotated every once and a while.

I need a favor of you.

Tomorrow I am launching a new project I've been working on for quite a while, along with Melly of Daily Sardonicism and Mig of Feral Living. We call it Raising Hell.

What is Raising Hell?
Raising Hell is a new perspective on family life. If Erma Bombeck and Ozzie Osbourne had a bastard child and added caffeine, it would look a lot like Raising Hell. Raising Hell looks like a typewriter and sounds like a lawnmower. Raising Hell is red meat at a vegetarian restaurant. It's the dispeptic hippopotamus at the tea party. Raising Hell is about finding love and beauty in chaos and panic. Raising Hell: a new genre of parenting.

[disclaimer: neither Ms. Bombeck nor Mr. Osborne are affiliated with Raising Hell in any way]

Raising Hell is stories and anecdotes.

It is questions posed to readers.

It is a forum for people to give unsolicited advice, seek like-minded parents and laugh at us and our children.

While Raising Hell does not promote any parenting style in particular, and we certainly are not posing as experts or advice-givers, we are about one thing: non-conformist parenting. We are the parents who let our kids be themselves, the parents who let our kids have blue hair, the parents who think it's funny to tell emabarassing stories about their kids.

And it's also about you, and your stories. Even if you aren't a parent. There will eventually be a venue for relatives and friends of people with children to tell their stories. There will be an opportunity for people who have chosen to not have children to tell why. There will be room for you to vent about the snot-nosed, crying kids that ruin your restaurant experience or bitch about your mother constantly harping on you to give her grandchildren. We are open-minded and open-ended. We will talk about adoption and home schooling and gay parenting and bad parenting. We will share ideas and tell each other stories and compare notes on schooling and dating and pre teens and toddlers.

We are Raising Hell. Won't you join us?

We launch tomorrow morning, (April 21) at www.rhzine.com.

"The Night I Fell in Love," from the synth-pop duo's Release, due April 23, tells the story of a homosexual boy who falls in love with a rap star backstage at his concert and follows him to a hotel room for a "private performance." The slow-grooving song does not reference Eminem or his Slim Shady or Marshall Mathers monikers, but the lyrics clearly spell out the star's identity.

"I said we could be secret lovers/ Just him and me," Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant sings on the tune. "Then he joked/ Hey man, your name isn't Stan, is it?/ We should be together." A later verse says, "I asked why have I heard so much about you being charged with homophobia and stuff, and he just shrugged."

Tennant, who is homosexual, said in a statement that if Eminem's music is going to be provocative, he is going to be provocative back.

"I must be huntin' treasure, 'cause I'm diggin' yer chest."

"You're just the tasty wench I've been keeping me eye out for!"

"Hey, sexy -- how about a Jolly Rogering?"

1. He has a lime green website.
2. His lyrics are rarely more pretentious than "I love / New York City / Oh yeah / New York City."
3. Three words: "Ready To Die."
4. He drops balloons on the crowd. (I grabbed one as a souvenir.)
5. His bassist is a bald-headed, sheep-sideburned sex god who grimaces after every backing vocal he sings, rolls his eyes into his head, and pelvis-swirls against his instrument; one of his guitarists is a 6 and a half foot curly-haired pirate in a Hawaiian shirt who never, ever stops smiling; and his keyboardist (!) looks vaguely like an angry Peter Buck.
6. The herky-jerky robot arm.
7. A gigantic, maniacal smile that looks like it should be covered in your blood.
8. Three more words: "I Get Wet."
9. This line of review from somewhere I forget: "To hear 'Party Hard' is to refuse to believe your ears, and honestly, when was the last time a rock single did that to you?"
10. He ROCKS SO UNBELIEVABLY MOTHERFUCKING HARD IT'S INSANE.
11. I needed to put an eleventh reason in here just to make sure you know that it's impossible to only love him for ten reasons. So many others go unmentioned.

Taking a populist stance in the hometown of Disney World, Gore called the Democratic party "the party of Main Street USA" as opposed to the GOP, "the party of the pirates of Enron."

The Pirates of the Caribbean and the Main Street USA are Disney attractions.

"The lyrics on the last album didn't have much of a direction," Howlett says. "This time the lyrics and the music have more of an equal role. We've come from a dance scene where lyrics aren't very important. We've really tried on this record to make and ask ourselves what we're about."

The songs that they've come up with thus far include the likely first single, "Baby's Got a Temper," which Howlett describes as a very aggressive track, with vocals by Flint. And "Nuclear," whose lyric -- "You say you've got guns, but you ain't seen mine" -- Howlett describes as "a piss-take on bands that think they're punk rock, but are too poppy to ever be punk."

He's a starving long-haired biologist who hasn't had sex in three years. She's a patriotic caffeine addicted barfly with a golden retriever named Bill. They have blogs.

My general standpoint on TF sex is that they're all gender neutral, just with different styling & personality types that sometimes read as female or male to a human audience. Of course, that's hardly any fun from the fanfic point of view, so yes of *course* Tracks is gay, Starscream is bi and Soundwave is straight as a board. Now on with the fun.

And don't worry about me, OK? I'll be fine, honestly. I'm just going to let this last month in NYC glide by, and then I'm going to recharge my batteries over the summer; and when I come back here in September, this place is going to be made my bitch, or by God I will die trying to make it so.

1. The material doesn't at all gel with the rest of the band's output from this time period, either sonically or lyrically;
2. It seems to put an unnecessary full-stop on U2's career, emphasizing that ATYCLB was their last "great" album and that once you've bought the two Best Of collections you need nothing else. They should have been leaving ATYCLB unanthologized as a teaser for things to come -- a sort of "We've got enough great material coming for a third Best Of" kind of statement.

1. "Discotheque." As sissy-ass as the band appear to be, trying to forget this track -- which they do seem proud of -- would be unforgiveable and they'd be accused of hypocrisy. Besides, it rocks like a mofo (ironically, a song which doesn't stand a chance in hell of making the list).
2. "Until The End Of The World." A perennial live favorite -- I think it's been played at every one of their shows since the release of Achtung Baby.
3. "Gone." Has also ascended into a live track to be reckoned with -- check the Boston DVD.
4. "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)" Some mellow acoustica is required on all Greatest Hits packages.
5. "Please." It's a wrenching, amazing song, and the band seems to feel it's developed new relevance in the wake of Sept. 11th. Its inclusion could endanger "Gone," though, since it seems unlikely they'd support Pop with three tracks and Zooropa with only one. If that's the case, then expect "Numb" (or, if they really felt like throwing a curveball, "The First Time") in place of "Gone."

"Tom can go to hell, for all I care."
"When he does, I hope he takes his cat."
--A woman and a man in line at the Cheese Board Pizza Collective

Dear Comics Fans,

We have just been informed this week that our book trade distributor has filed for bankrupcy (Chapter 11). They will continue to operate and hopefully recover – and we will support this all we can (as our industry needs them, and they are good people) – but unfortunately, this has happened at a time when they owed us an enormous sum of money (over $80,000.00 minus returns). And to make matters worse, the most recent check they cut us, for almost $20,000.00, bounced this week, in turn causing the last 30 checks we wrote to printers, conventions, cartoonists – practically every aspect of the business – to bounce (or be held) in turn.

To put it bluntly, even with all the hard work we've put in over the years, if we don't raise $20,000 this month, it could realistically force us to suspend publishing operations for the foreseeable future. It's hard to believe but a big domino has fallen right on top of us at the worst time possible. So, that leaves us no choice but to be honest and ask for your help.

If 400-500 of you can find it in your hearts to each spend around fifty bucks on our core list of books below, this would literally pull us through – We mean that. We've got such a strong future schedule, and so many cool things to announce soon (including two more Alan Moore projects and two Film & TV projects), that I'd hate to think that we'd have to pull the plug right before we just were about to arrive.

In any event, if you can find it in your hearts to help us out, we will be eternally grateful. We'll be manning the phones personally on this "drive," and we'll also be sure to keep you informed -- hopefully letting all of you know in three-to-four weeks that everything's okay (with your help, that is…).

Actress Jennifer Connelly is getting something off her chest: She claims she got her role in "A Beautiful Mind" because of her breasts.

Gossip reporter Baird Jones claims Connelly is telling friends that Ron Howard cast her in the film to thank her for going topless in the 1997 film, "Inventing The Abbotts," which he co-produced.

• It may, in fact, be possible to overdose on music. Every waking moment of my life since roughly 4:30 yesterday has been accompanied by some piece of pop / rock / techno / whatever music (all spewed from the iPod) and I think I've become quite sick of sound in general. That said I'm quite sure I'll soon be posting a giant list of all the crap I have dumped onto Adam right now because frankly, even if the sight of it already makes me ill I'm still fiercely in love with it. Ah, my first experience with the joy of a complicated relationship.
• And speaking of which, suddenly several potentially sexual and/or romantic avenues seemed to have opened to me at once. I'm quite taken aback, as this is a situation which has never before in the history of time occured for me. Not only are there apparently people out there who are attracted to me, but by God, this fact has actually been brought to my attention, either by the persons in question or by various foreign arbiters (And no, J.M., I'm not just talking about you either -- fascinating, eh?). It's like grade school all over again, except nobody actually liked me in grade school and if they did, I probably didn't play on their team. I will now commence to do absolutely nothing about this, and probably ignore all the persons involved, and die alone and virginal. Well, probably. Since now that I'm faced with this state of affairs I have absolutely no idea what to do about it.
• I really, really owe Paul a CD and it's sitting here right next to my computer in a pretty green sleeve and yet I have not gotten off my fat (if, apparently, attractive) ass and mailed it. So I'm sorry P. You may now make requests of additional music from me and I shall oblige.
• I still do not have a printer or any kind of imaging software connected to / installed on this Powerbook. It's making web design and schoolwork (in that order of importance) very difficult indeed. That's why this site did not undergo a redesign as promised on April 1st; I was dissatisfied with the quality of the principal image and have therefore decided to wait until I can unleash the design you beautiful folks deserve. (In other words, fear. Feeeaaar.)
• I have to write a sonnet tonight for Creative Writing and boy oh boy am I truly and incorrigibly bad at writing poetry.
• I really, really, really want a big fat steak.

Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's interim leader, accepted a check today for $10 million from Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, right.

Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will soon create uniforms that will shield U.S. soldiers from bullets and poison gas, heal wounds and allow them to leap over 20-foot walls.

MIT won a U.S. Army competition for a $50 million contract to develop an Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, where the uniforms will be created within the next five years. A total of 100 students and 35 professors from MIT's schools of engineering, science and architecture and planning will begin the project next month.

Norrath, the setting for the online game Everquest, has been found to be the 77th richest country in the world, sandwiched between Russia and Bulgaria.

Online gaming has attracted millions of players and their rise in popularity in recent years is mainly down to improved graphics and more players to interact with.

Research carried out in the United States shows that virtual internal markets, combined with illegal online trading on auction websites, mean that Norrath has a gross national product per capita of $2,266, bigger than China and India.