» Dinosaurs stepping slowly out of tar: In what seems like a never-ending process, the Big Four decided to sell their souls to some devilish website with a menacingly hi-tech name, reportedly after spending two years trying to figure out what the "i" meant in those fancy new interweb names. This specific case: Social networking site imeem has struck an agreement with Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner to stream music from their artists.

» Jack White told the Los Angeles Times that, because of Meg White's acute anxiety, he wasn't sure if they'd ever tour again. It does, however, look like we will be getting some old Hank Williams songs via Jack White in the near future. This project, headed by Bob Dylan, sounds a lot like the one taken on by Billy Bragg & Wilco, in which they took unfinished Woody Guthrie songs and put them to music, with good results: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. One must wonder if Wilco will play those two albums when they play their entire catalog in their hometown over five nights.

» The only steroid-free Hall of Fame?: The inductees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame have been announced. They are: Madonna, Leonard Cohen, Dave Clark Five, John Mellencamp and The Ventures. For me, the Cleveland, Ohio museum serves mostly as a delayed top-sellers list. This announcement does, however, strike a chord with my recently-reinvigorated Leonard Cohen fetish. It started with his music but has recently moved to his two novels, Beautiful Losers and The Favorite Game, which this author heartily recommends.

» And then there is the non-inductee Spice Girls, who feel they've already explored all there is to be explored in music. They've taken a page out of Richard Branson's book and started an airline... well, one plane, one renamed plane... Actually, it was just a renamed Virgin plane; So, instead of just taking a page out of Branson's book, they took a page and a plane. But before you give them shit in your mind for their trying something new, remember the OutKastian aphorism about musicians' extracurricular activities: "You're telling me that if you made a song and it was jammin', we weren't supposed to listen to it?"

» No Hindenburg jokes, please: It's true, every middle school kid and his dad wanted it to happen. Led Zeppelin returned and, according to NME, there was no crashing and burning, quite the contrary, actually. More news in visually interesting shows... and blimps.

» On Film, in short: U2 in 3D (You could be seemingly-nearly-touched by BONO! BONO! BONO!); Sigur Ros announce the limited theatrical release of their documentary, Heima, which chronicles a tour of free shows in their homeland; Moby, in his super-coolness, may save some from the usual ugliness of copy-free/copy-left music by offering some of his own music freely availible to low/no-budget filmmakers.

» The Rest, in short: A little version of Baby Jesus this winter: Flight of the Conchords finish will soon give birth to their full-length release; B. Spears was too sick to try to get her baby (&career?) back; Keys, Tunstall, Etheridge and Minogue play music for the Earth, Peace, Gore, and probably the Children too; Further proving that price or perceived value sometimes has nothing to do with utility, we learned that some unknown telephone bidder/fool dropped 48k for a piece of Samson's John Lennon's hair.

» Obits, in short: Ike Turner, 76; Quiet Riot singer Kevin Dubrow, 52 (accidental cocaine overdose); German composer and electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen, 79; "Easy rocker" Dan Fogelberg, 56 (prostate cancer); Irish singer-songwriter Christie Hennessy, 62.