1.  Fall Out Boy and others to cover the songs of The Nightmare before Christmas.

 Yes, that's right ladies and gentlemen.  Not only is The Nightmare before Christmas getting another theatrical release (this I have no problem with) and is now complete with 3-D effects but the soundtrack will be available as a double disc.  The first disc will contain the original Danny Elfman music and the second disc will have covers of the Elfman tunes done by such bands as Panic! at the Disco, Fall Out Boy, Marilyn Manson, She Wants Revenge and Fiona Apple.  Now, this could be interesting or it could be sheer and utter crap.  I'm leaning towards crap. 

2.  Elton John thinks he is going to record a hip-hop album

 More crap.  More utter crap.  I'm okay with people changing and growing and branching out to do different things.  But, do it first in the privacy of your own recording studio. (Especially, if this is an option because you have your own recording studio.) Stop subjecting the world to your half-baked notions of what could be interesting or your lame attempts at sticking with the zeitgeist and being all hip and fresh.  Actually, This applies to Madonna as well. Hey lady, with your limber disco dancing and continuing to draw the ire of the world's religions. Hey!  You're stretchy!  But you're music sucks, so stop "reinventing" yourself and, I don't know, have some tea. 

3. My thesis is going in to be bound in two weeks

 I spent about two hours today sifting through recordings to make sure I had notes on all of my "discourse markers" which included, I kid you not, more than sixty occurences of the phrase "you know".  As is common with such things, once you've heard one you've more or less heard them all.  Of these more than sixty occurences, well over half of them have the exact same phonological output, which is just fancy talk for I listened to the same thing over and over and over again.  I wish this would mean that I was thousands of words closer to my word limit.  It does not.  I still have a long way to go.

 4. The U.S. detained a man who could barely walk or hear at Guantanamo Bay

Although he was recently released, we held an Afghani man who needed a walker to leave the prison without charging him with a crime or even telling him why he was there.  Apparently, the captive whose name is Haji Nasrat Khan is at least 71, although that's just an estimate because he himself didn't even know his exact age.  I know that old people tend to be the last bastion of old school hatred and hellfire religion, but its my experience that what they do with that hatred and religion is sit around and make their kids and grandkids uncomfortable and angry by constantly nosing in on what they're doing and then telling them they're wrong and they'll burn for it.  They are, in general, not the sort of people you find making explosives in airplane lavatories.  Given that, I wonder what sort of intelligence value the man had for the military that they felt the need to keep him captive.  To quote the recently released Khan, "How could I be an enemy combatant if I was not able to stand up?" 

Well, that's it.  I'm going back to listen to more formulaic sequences and to hopefully nibble away at my word count.