IS RAGNAROK UPON US AT LAST? By Odin's beard, they've finally woken the dreaded world serpent of Nordic myth... Apparently, old listening posts set up to detect Soviet subs during the Cold War have detected a series of sounds determined to be large, biological, and situated deep in the ocean. Whatever it is, scientists agree that it sounds too big to be a whale. Maybe it's Chessie, the Chesapeake Bay monster -- where's she been hiding since 1987, anyway?! Here's a more smartpants look at the technology from our friends at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.

GET YOUR GROOVE ON The new reviews section of globalvillageidiot.net [my favorite source for offbeat music news and selections], includes this review of the new Cristina Branco CD, "Corpo Illuminado," which I bought back in February. "A new album from Cristina Branco is a joy indeed. The queen of new fado has never been in more sublime form than she is here, as her musical relationship with guitarist Custodio Castelo deepens and matures. The sheer emotion in her voice communicates itself with an undeniable ache, and in "Tu Tens De Me Acontencer" she conjures up the spirit of the great Amalia Rodrigues herself. Some beautiful songs, with lyrics that stand as pure poetry, and world-class backing mean she's the standard by which all fadistas have to be measured now. The woman is gold." Right they are.

REMAINING U.S. CEOs MAKE A BREAK FOR IT Sure, it's hit and miss, but how believable is this: "Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense." You're almost convinced it's true, aren't you?

DESPERATE FOR ATTENTION You might notice an ever-changing blurb-and-link down there by the counter. It's part of a running ad exchange administered by Blogsnob, which is, er, an ad exchange service for weblogs. It randomly tosses ads for other sites up on my weblog, and randomly tosses ads for my site up on other weblogs. Now you know.

BOB MASSEY, C'EST MOI Nothing too exciting here at the homepage of the truly outstanding Gena Rowlands Band, which is the creative wellspring of Bob Massey. But after a chuckle or two in appreciation for potential album titles, take eight minutes to download and listen to "Kong Meets His Maker" and "Garofalo, c'est moi." You'll be amazed, perhaps almost brought to tears. And I'm not joking.

ALL BAD THINGS COME TO AN END If you lived through the early 90s in Virginia -- the days of Governor George Allen, the homeschooling, fundamentalist candidacy of Mike Farris, and Oliver North's run for Senate -- living through 2002 is like dancing in a spring shower. Democratic Governor Mark Warner sits smiling as the Republican Party implodes. The latest: ol' Vance Wilkins was shown the error of his groping ways, and resigns as Speaker of the House.

BY THE MAKERS OF DEATH Cat and Girl is another online comicstrip I enjoy. Believe me, they are far and few between. This break from serious news items has been brought to you by the makers of Pop Rocks.

DEATH IS A COMIC The New Adventures of Death puts a smile on my face with its gentle humor. Or maybe it's just the soft color palette.

FOREARMED IS WHICH ARM AGAIN? The nonpartisan Counil on Foreign Relations has a spiffy site -- Terrorism: Questions & Answers -- in which they strip down hosts of basic and complex questions about our crumbling world and try to answer them in something more understandable than either the Queen's English or the President's.

WHO IS MNM? The Borowitz Report breaks a major story with the startling revelation that major public figures are taking Eminem's criticisms to heart. "Mrs. Cheney's decision to take Eminem’s profane attack in the spirit of constructive criticism was echoed by the electronic musician Moby."I never realized how lame I was until I heard Eminem astutely mention it on his CD," Moby said. "He's really given me a lot to think about – and to work on.""

SMALL MIGHT BE BEAUTIFUL A January article in New Scientist (thanks, Liz!) looks at a concerted effort to rebuild Afghanistan in small, but significant ways. For instance, in a country that has virtually no electricity infrastructure, does it make more sense to take 20 years to build one, or to take six months to begin to build small, localized grids? I'll try to dig out some follow-up on these projects, but this is a good read -- both from a generalized development perspective, as well as for perspectives on the challenges that continue to face Afghanistan.

REFORMERS IN IRAN Perhaps another useless nod, perhaps an indication that reform is not yet dead in Iran. A brief article on this week's election of an outspoken reformer who has been elected first deputy speaker of Iran's parliament.

IRAN ON BUSH The unreasonable nature and dogmaticism of its clerical leadership aside, Iran does have a valid role to play in the world, and some leadership that might ultimately take it out of the shadows. Iranian President Mohammad Khatami has long been viewed as one of those leaders. In a piece in the Guardian, Khatami asks a question that begs answering: "Is it right to present - in the age of dialogue among cultures and civilizations - such a perilous rationality that 'anyone who is not with us is against us?'" Much of the rest of the article takes what feels to me a slightly misdirected view, but if you asked me if I'd rather have a dialogue with Iran or Saudi Arabia, taking into consideration both the attitudes and actions of those countries' public and private communities, I'd take Iran in a second.

JOT THIS DOWN Ooh, now someone else can do the hard work. Here's a site that gathers dozens of glimpses at all things related to whatever President Bush is calling his crusade these days.

ART IN BRIEF Summarize an art event -- a performance, gallery opening, lecture -- in 150 words? C'est impossible. Or however it's spelled. Not if you're putting out "Radar," Baltimore's latest arts publication. A timely article for members of Richmond's art community who are dismayed or overjoyed (count me among the latter) at the demise of 64 Magazine. I rank among the handful who'd argue that "it's better than nothing" is a not valid statement.

WHAT'S GOING ON IN IRAQ? Sometimes, an outsider's view provides a clearer perspective than you might suspect. The St. Louis Post-Disptach sent writer John Sawyer to Iraq, and he emerged with a four-part series on life within the Axis of Evil. It's a simple look from someone who appears not to be colored by too much back story, and it provides a useful perspective on a country worth understanding better. Especially if Dick Cheney is going to become their Vice President, too.

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL "Roughly 20 years into the pandemic, 40 million people on the planet are infected with HIV, and three million died from it last year (20,000 in North America)," according to Scientific American magazine in this feature on the continuing search for an AIDS vaccine. Long, informative -- and simultaneously frustrated and hopeful -- this article provides a snapshot of where the scientific community is in the quest.

GET A PIECE OF THE ROCK Kate Sullivan's Rockblog is well-written, thoughtful, sometimes amusing, sometimes pointed, and usually about music. I met it today, and will likely frequent it regularly. Because I am underexposed to music gossip, and this seems like a reasonable place to boost those ultraviolet rays.

HUNGER, POVERTY AND ACTION UN Secretary General Kofi Annan makes a strong case in his speech to the World Food Summit in Rome yesterday. In addition to bringing a high-level look to the linkages between hunger and poverty, agriculture and trade, Annan called for real, actionable steps to be taken to deal with the 800 million chronically hungry people in the world. Some of those steps include removing trade barriers, eliminating farming subsidies, and looking for ways to manage our ecosystems in a sustainable manner. This speech is a clear, articulate and important message.

COMING HOME AGAIN Two staffers at Refugees International pull a lot together in a few short paragraphs to demonstrate why the next few months are hugely critical for Afghanistan, as close to a million refugees cross back into the country from Iran and Pakistan to find a large gap between their optimistic expectations for the future and the reality on the ground.

OOPS. THEY DID IT AGAIN This from today's Loya Jirga: "Only three days ago, the assembly looked set to be a dramatic, if chaotic, clash of interests and unresolved political conflicts, with the untested 1,500 delegates on the floor - a broadly representative combination of officials, the elite, warlords, shopkeepers and tribal farmers from around the country - having the opportunity to play a decisive role." That was three days ago. Today, the cry in Kabul appears to be that the fix is in, and that Hamid Kharzai was pre-selected to lead the transitional government. (Having two senior U.S. officials standing behind the king as someone else read from a prepared statement that the king fully supports Kharzai... well, that's not very reminescent of the old Soviet era, is it?)

MY DEAR VAN GOGH I remember being fascinated in the early 90s when Cliff Edwards, an affable professor I know, published a book called "Van Gogh and God," about Van Gogh and... you guessed it... God. He'd planned to follow it up with a look at the painter's letters to his brother Theo, and I don't think it ever materialized. Well, now the Van Gogh Museum is working to publish all of Van Gogh's letters, a rich trove of insightful and well-written missives penned off during the artist's lifetime. And this Radio Netherlands report tells all.

DOES BUFFY HATE GAY PEOPLE? The Sacramento News & Review tackles an odd sort of question with a well-crafted article: Did the death of Tara (the good, gay witch on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") portend yet another kill-off of a realistic gay character on television, or was it just a convenient plot device? Or perhaps the former was the natural consequence of the latter. At any rate, writer Jennifer Greenman provides a smash-up summary of the one show that combines kitch and realism in some oddly entrancing way, delves into issues of sexuality in television, and gives it all a healthy real life spin.

HITTING THE PAVEMENT My affection for Pavement (the band) stems from both their music and those lingering, tenuous connections with various band members (through accidental shared dating, shared roomates, and high school groupie experiences). But I was never in the least connected to Spiral Stairs (aka Scott Kannberg), whose new venture seems to be demonstrating that he wasn't just that guy who played guitar. Or at least he's moved past being that guy. His new band, Preston School of Industry, has just released what apparently is a (cough, cough) Pavement recording on Matador. Or a Preston School recording that is at once acclaimed and dissed for sounding like a Pavement record. And so our friends at Philadelphia's City Paper sit the boy down for a chat.

SLAVERY IN THE WORLD "Over the past year, at least 700,000, and possibly as many as four million men women and children worldwide were bought, sold, transported and held against their will in slave-like conditions." So starts the introduction to a State Department report delivered to Congress in May. Some 50,000 of them are brought to the United States, primarily for the purpose of sexual exploitation. The State Department organized an office to combat this last fall, and this report is both brutal in what it reports is taking place in the world and hopeful in some of the actions described to combat it. The introduction paints a pretty clear picture, and the entire report is available online, as well.

IN AWE OF AMIS Martin Amis wrote this curious and compelling piece for the Guardian newspaper. It is partly about what writers did or didn't do after or in response to September 11 ("A novel is politely known as a work of the imagination; and the imagination, that day, was of course fully commandeered, and to no purpose."), partly about religion ("To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever."), and partly about the wave of desolate existentialism that swept across much of the world for varying periods of time last fall. Two passages struck me firmly, and the whole thing is worth a visit. The passages, then:

"Imaginative writing is understood to be slightly mysterious. In fact it is very mysterious. A great deal of the work gets done beneath the threshold of consciousness, without the intercession of reason. When the novelists went into newsprint about September 11, there was a murmur to the effect that they were now being obliged to snap out of their solipsistic daydreams: to attend, as best they could, to the facts of life. For politics - once defined as "what's going on" - suddenly filled the sky. True, novelists don't normally write about what's going on; they write about what's not going on. Yet the worlds so created aspire to pattern and shape and moral point. A novel is a rational undertaking; it is reason at play, perhaps, but it is still reason."

"After September 11, then, writers faced quantitative change, but not qualitative change. In the following days and weeks, the voices coming from their rooms were very quiet; still, they were individual voices, and playfully rational, all espousing the ideology of no ideology. They stood in eternal opposition to the voice of the lonely crowd, which, with its yearning for both power and effacement, is the most desolate sound you will ever hear. "Desolate": "giving an impression of bleak and dismal emptiness... from L. desolat-, desolare 'abandon', from de- 'thoroughly' + solus 'alone'."

AH, MCSWEENEY'S Every now and again, I remember to visit McSweeney's on the web, usually after I get an email from Mike about an upcoming One Ring Zero show. I'm rarely disappointed. (By McSweeney's; I never seem to make it to a ORZ show in NYC.) Today, a brief collection of notes exchanged between a receptionist and a cleaning man.

SLIM GOODBODY NO MORE Does anyone remember when Ahmed Zappa made Slim Goodbody cry on Conan O'Brien years ago? Well, that's not the point. The point is that the pizza you are eating spells doom. Or at least spells F-A-T. Four slices of Pizza' Hut's stuffed crust pizza contains two days' worth of saturated fat. Most of you are thinking that this can save you time -- eat once every three days! But it's pretty sick, when you give it the least bit of thought: a slice of pizza can do more to bring your body to a coronary standstill than one of grandma's homecooked breakfasts (you know, with the scrapple and all). Eat more brocolli. To hell with the 'Noid.

DC GROOVE FEST Here's why I'll find a way to spend two solid weekends in July in our nation's capital: Guided by Voices, Rachid Taha and Gillian Welch, all performing at the 9:30 Club within a week of each other. The best alternative rock, North African fusion and plain ol' country performers jammed into a room with beer. Yah. Did I mention Lucinda Williams arrives the following week?

UP WITH PEOPLE The Indepdendent (a UK newsie) has a feature where readers ask questions of really smart people, like today's session with Columbia's Simon Schama (art historian). He had several smart answers, but I particularly liked the same one that Arts and Letters nodded me toward. Asked if there was one place he'd like to go (timewise), he replied: "Amsterdam, 1660. The best bread; the best pictures; the most stunning streetscapes in the world; the most musical pubs; the glossiest dogs; the most dazzling women, the most arrogant men; no kings, no wars (for the time being), no bishops; Jews, books, harpsichords galore and... somewhere, Rembrandt van Rijn."

AFGHAN REPATRIATION They are coming home. Of almost 4 million refugees (both internally displaced within Afghanistan and those who fled the country), as many as 30% are expected to return to their homes by the end of the year. This would mark the single largest repatriation effort in modern times, and provides amazing testimony to a newfound optimism in a country that has known nothing but war since the 1970s. This UN High Commision of Refugees' page also provides links to some other current news about the refugee situation in the region.

WORLD REFUGEE DAY AND WOMEN A compelling photo essay honoring World Refugee Day (June 20) and recognizing the unique and painful impact that displacement puts upon women and children. From Kosovo to Sierra Leone, more than half of the world's refugees are women and children. These 20 images put a face to a small number of them.

TODAY AT THE LOYA JIRGA Ahmed Rashid of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting posts one of the Institute's planned daily updates from Kabul, where 1,500 representatives are meeting to select Afghanistan's leadership for the next 18 months (until elections). As the twice-delayed opening of the loya jirga indicates, confusion reigns. Rashid's interviews lead him to believe that no deal has been struck in advance, but notes that while the upside is that the process will be more honest and democratic, the downside is that chaos and confusion could lead to a fractured outcome. IWPR trains locals in war-torn regions to interview and report on the ground, and these daily updates are another excellent product of this organization.

RADIOLOGICAL REALITY This PDF format document from the Center for Strategic and International Studies is a scant 13 pages, but it outlines an exercise recently conducted in Washington by the Center. The exercise looked at the impact of a large "dirty bomb" exploding outside the National Air & Space Museum. The good news: Cesium 137, the likely source of radiological material, has a brief half-life and would primarily have longer-term health impacts. The bad news: thousands still die, and psychologically, Washington becomes a veritable ghost town. The pressures on the local health, rescue and police authorities is astronomical.

UN-UPDATE A busy social weekend and a hugely overwhelming workweek are conspiring to keep the backend of the site from being updated. Perhaps this week. In the works: the entire Caffeine archive, about 100 finished poems, graphics for most of the key sections, an updated list of CD and book reviews (about a dozen new ones) and, of course, the continuing web log updates. There's a UNHCR report out on the repatriation of refugees to Afghanistan that sounds pretty amazing, if I can find five minutes to track it down. Reams and reams of words. Patience, grasshopper.