Meaningless Radiohead update:

For the last week, Radiohead has been posting strange codes of box characters with rotating hands on its blog, Dead Air Space. Naturally, obsessive fans are speculating the boxes are lyrics from their long-overdue new album.

Man, Radiohead. First you string us along by delaying the album relentlessly, and now you’re trying to create even more buzz by inventing an entirely new language and leaving us no clues to decode it. This album better be fucking better than Sgt. Pepper’s for God’s sake, because this has gone on long enough.

Hollywouldn’t: Jack Bauer

“”24″” star Kiefer Sutherland gets the Hollywouldn’t this week for getting his second DUI since 2004 and randomly jumping into a Christmas tree. On the video circulating around YouTube and celeb gossip sites like www.thesuperficial.com, you can see what happened. This is somewhat how the video goes:
Random guy offscreen: “”Hey Kiefer, you’re a pirate, man.””
Kiefer: “”That would explain everything.”” Then he jumps into a Christmas tree and knocks it over.

To be honest, I hate celebrity gossip, but the only reason I listed this video is because it’s funny anyway. If it were a fat man or a person suffering from Downs Syndrome jumping into that tree, it would be on Ebaum’s World.

Weekly Apology: CD City

Never heard of it? Then it’s probably your fault that one of Tucson’s best music stores is closing this month. With its myriad of indie, punk, electronic, jazz and other assorted underground CDs for dirt cheap, CD City was a great place to go when you were wandering around Campbell and Fort Lowell.

Pity that nobody our age really wanders around there, unless they want to go to Rubio’s for a fish ketchup taco or visit a distant Bank of America. All right, there’s a Hollywood Video there, too. But probably the coolest part about CD City was its bargain bin in the back that featured old ’90s albums nobody listened to 10 years ago and soundtracks from Disney TV movies. You could search in that thing for hours!

But in addition to being huge and full of wonders, its discount bin was also visionary. Not once, throughout the relentless three and a half times total I’ve been there, have I seen Pearl Jam’s Binaural. Not only does CD City have a large selection, they’re also paving the way for discount bins everywhere to rid the music store world of that wretched CD forever. Thank God.

It’s sad that such a local treasure has to tank, but in hindsight, CD City was just ahead of its time. Maybe in 20 years, when we’re all getting drunk at Old Chicago and remembering our glory days, we’ll wish that we had a quality CD store so we could buy things to upload into our iBrains. Then we’ll all be at a loss.

Random Review: Photographs on the UA homepage

Sometimes they’re amusing to look at, but usually they’re just downright disturbing. Perhaps the worst offender is the Photoshopped image of the three disembodied heads floating on top of a green fantasy world that includes a Teletubby sun, a white silhouette of a man with a long stick and Saturn in all its glory. Underneath, it says, “”A masterpiece of business and art.””

Who got the idea for this, anyway? Can you imagine someone sitting in front of a computer and saying, “”I wonder what it would look like if I cut out three guys’ heads and superimposed them on a background still from a Lemon Jelly video.”” Were they stoned? Then I could understand.

Another strange one is that homage to the class of 2011 that cuts out three faces and a picture of a crowd and molds them into numbers. It makes the people look like demons! If I was a poor freshman and I saw my nose poking out of the side of a “”1″” like that, I’d drop out or consider violence.

But the worst one of all is that defamatory picture of the poor smiling lady that says, “”Regents’ Professor First to Identify Date Rape.”” Yeah, we know it wasn’t her, but putting the word “”rape”” next to any picture of a person has got to stigmatize them. Maybe they could have cut pieces of her face and molded her into a number or something, just anything, so people wouldn’t recognize her.

Animal of the Month (Redux): White Koala

The most perceptive of you might point out that we’ve already had an animal this month: the yeti crab. But this one is just too cute to pass up. This rare little baby was found by police and sent to get treatment at an Australian hospital for chlamydia in his eyes. Yeah, yeah, sounds like a prostitute. Ha ha, GET OVER IT! In its honor let’s just take a minute and make some sounds. Aww, heeeee, baby baby! Wawa weewa, yowa cuta babby.

Ok, there, I got it out of my system. Anyway, Mick the Koala was thought to be albino, but doctors have confirmed he’s just a rare white breed. After restoring his sight, doctors have reportedly returned him to the wild at an undisclosed location so poachers can’t get him. But the best part is, there’s a video. Just look up “”Mick White Koala”” on Google and a plethora of sites come up. You need to see it.

The runners up for Animal of the Month include the cuties at the Seeing Eye Horse foundation, a dog humping a duck at www.kscakes.com and an elephant using its trunk to search for and then eat feces inside the anus of the elephant standing next to him. Just look under “”poop”” on YouTube and it’s on the first page. Don’t ask me how I found it.

Quote of the Week:

“”She speaks to them in weird, creepy, baby voices, in made-up languages, which they just don’t get. All it does is unsettle, upset and scare them. Often she would scream and cry uncontrollably. Imagine what that is like for young children.””

– Britney Spears’s bodyguard, Tony “”Fat Tony”” Barretto, at a hearing Monday over the custody of Spears’s two kids. In his testimony, Barretto also told about the time he had to rescue a drugged-up Spears from a trashed hotel room where she was crying uncontrollably and singer Howie Day was sleeping in his boxers on the bed.

compiled by Andi Berlin