Hey look. It’s John Lennon and Bob Dylan in the back of a cab. Two of the greatest songwriting talents of the past century. Stoned out of their minds. AWESOME. I wonder if this is an outtake from No Direction Home?

Nellie McKay was pissed at Columbia Records for making her condense Pretty Little Head (Out January 3), and she let everyone at a recent show know about it, and The LA Times was happy to relay the message to the world at large. Now it appears Sony has capitulated… but in exchange, they are installing spyware ALL over her CD. You can hear one of the tracks from the new album on her website right now in a variety of streaming media formats (via Largehearted Boy).

The Fader gets some inside info on the new Drive-By Truckers album from Patterson Hood. A Blessing And A Curse is due out in April of next year.

Bob Mould tells The Washington Square News he thinks music audiences are all reunion-ed out.

My Blog Is Poop has some suggestions on how to assemble a proper blogger year-end list.

PopMatters wants to help you with your Christmas shopping with a handy-dandy gift guide.

Thoughts on the alternate ending stunt on Veronica Mars this week? I thought the original was good, the alternate WAY over the top. I can’t imagine they’d allow either scenario to pull the overall plot too far from the other – there’s no way they could have filmed different versions of every episode left in the season. I just hope that the VM audience is sharp enough to not get sucked in by the more sensationalist ending, but I guess we’ll just have to see. Or maybe they’re not going to listen to the audience’s opinion either way, and this is just a test to see how vicious Veronica Mars fans are. It was also fun to see Alyson Hannigan and Charisma Carpenter get catty at each other again, what with Veronica Mars being the natural sassy-girl show successor to Buffy – it even has Joss Whedon’s seal of approval, as given to Entertainment Weekly.

I have survived the first cut in the Canadian Blog Awards, and am one of five finalists for “Best Culture Blog” with a block-rocking 9% of the votes (or 54 in total). Woot. Vote for me! It’s nice to get nominated for stuff, but someday I’d like to actually, you know, win. For a change.

You’ll note I’ve added one of those comment spambot protection thingees – I apologize for the extra step in leaving me pithy remarks, but I was getting deluged with comment spam.

np – Explosions In The Sky / How Strange, Innocence