Gary "Elvis" Schepers, standing behind Pate bassist Mike Kelly (left) and guitarist Jon Pratt (right), during a radio interview in Manitoba, Canada (1987).

GARY "ELVIS" SCHEPERS: I don't want to unduly alarm anyone, but the tuba player for The Service and Devil In A Woodpile -- not to mention o­ne of Chicago's best-known live rock soundmen -- is rumored to have been hospitalized recently. It sounded serious, though it's not something life-threatening. Nor did it sound like anything embarassing or titilating -- I'm just reluctant to repeat rumors until I have better confirmation (except about major celebs, natch). I'm working o­n it and will pass along any news I hear o­n it. Of course, if you know about it, you should drop me a line. In the meantime, did you know that Trouser Press founder Ira Robbins thought The Service's cover of Pate's "If You Will, I Will" resembled The Replacements?

I'M STILL GETTING OVER Christmas at Carmen and Dave's, but rest assured I have links for you this Boxing Day...

HAPPY HANUKKAH with THE LEE VEES: Get into the Festival of Lights with this combo pairing a member of Guster and from the Zambonis. You can stream four from MySpace or download a freebie from iTunes. You can also stream or download two gigs in multiple formats from the Internet Archive.

DOWNLOAD PRICING is under investigation by New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer.

SEASON OF THE LIST: Stereogum posted its Readers' Top 20 poll in two parts. DJ Monster Mo at BTAE posts his 25 Favorite LPs. There's Top Ten from The Sacramento Bee . Beta (music) has lists for its Top 50 albums and the ten best singles. Wiredset has Top 25 lists for albums and singles. There are staff picks at LAist. There's a Top 15 list at Chartattack. Janie Stevenson posts her best music picks at the Toronto Sun. MusicOMH also lists for both albums and singles. In The New York Times, Jon Pareles picks his Top Ten, which has the same number o­ne as the list from Entertainment Weekly. And I may have to check out some of the Top Ten Roots Albums listed by the Philadelphia City Paper.

SEAASON OF THE LIST (JAZZ SECTION): I rarely post jazz stuff, but there's a "best of" posted at I Love Music. The Village Voice has lists from Francis Davis and Nate Chinen. The Philadelphia City Paper has a jazz list, as does Fred Kaplan at Slate.

RHETT MILLER: The Old 97s frontman talks to Chart Attack about the Vaugniston movie, his upcoming solo album and politics.

YEAR IN REVIEW: Londn's Guardian looks at 2005 as the year of a grassroots revolution in the record industry.

DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS have a "Feb. 14," an advance track from A Blessing and a Curse, available as a free download. Frontman Patterson Hood has four live shows posted in multiple formats at the Internet Archive.

WHAT WOULD D. BOON DO? Political cartoonist David Rees -- creator of Get Your War o­n, among others -- writes that he owes the late Minuteman frontman his livelihood.

THE ALARM frontman Mike Peters has been diagnosed with cancer for the second time.

PETE DOHERTY-KATE MOSS UPDATE: The troubled singer talks to the BBC about his love for ex-girlfriend Kate Moss and his o­ngoing battle with drugs.

STING: Send your aunt a Christmas card next year, willya?

DANCING LEADS TO SEX: I think Pate fans believed this already, but now there's a study backing it up. And now that a number of you have kids yourselves, be careful about the dance out at the barn.

JESSICA ALBA: Heading into the coldest part of the year, I thought I might help everyone battle Seasonal Affective Disorder with some warm-weather screen caps from the apparently awful Into The Blue. Consider it today's public service link.

KING KONG vs. ASLAN: Narnia expanded into more theaters over the holidays, which -- along with a shorter running time -- could knock the mighty Kong from atop the weekend box office (though Kong appears to win the per screen average.) things magazine has a cool, link-rich piece o­n Kong, including a discussion of "how the climactic dog fight adopted the visual language of Italian futurism."

ANDY SAMBERG: His sendup of gangster rap videos, "Lazy Sunday," broke up the audience at NBC's Saturday Night Live and became an instant Internet hit. If you haven't seen the Narnia rap, try the SNL page or Who Is The Monkey. It's also a free download at iTunes.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN: Who better to ask about gay cowboys than Randy Jones, the stetson-wearing, lasso-throwing gay cowboy from the Village People and an adviser o­n the film.

DAVID DUCHOVNY and his wife TEA LEONI have dreamed up a plan to turn their six-year-old daughter Madelaine West off Santa Claus by framing him for giving her a set of bad gifts. The truth is out there, Maddie!

MIKE MYERS and his wife, Robin Ruzan, have called it quits after 12 years.

SCARLETT JOHANSSON has asked for a part in Woody Allen's next film for Christmas. I'll bet that would make Soon-Yi Claus very un-jolly.

GWYNETH PALTROW views breast enhancement following a pregnancy as "reconstructive surgery." She also says her husband, Coldplay singer Chris Martin, reminded her of her late father. No "daddy issues" there.

KIRSTEN DUNST should learn that a hangover is not the same as a handicap.

NICOLE RICHIE: You know you're o­n the Skeletor diet when the French Hotel starts worrying about you.

TEN GREAT HOLLYWOOD ORGASMS: A list at YesButNoYes puts Meg Ryan in second place.

KEIRA KNIGHTLEY is hopeless at cooking. She may want to consider trying a restaurant.

IRAQ: An Iraqi court has disqualified prominent Sunni candidates because officials suspect that they were high-ranking members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Otherwise, Iraqi blogger Mohammed writes that the various parties are trying to negotiate a compromise unity government. Frans van Anraat was found guilty of war crimes by a court in The Hague and sentenced to 15 years in prison yesterday for helping Saddam Hussein to acquire the chemical weapons that he used to kill thousands of Kurdish civilians in the Iran-Iraq war. The Army is hastening efforts to hand over command of military posts to the Iraqis. In the L.A. Times, Joshua Muravchik writes that Pres. Bush's strategy of promoting freedom and democracy, including by means of war in Iraq, deserevs some of the credit for a possibly tectonic shift toward liberty across the Muslim world, as reflected in a new report from Freedom House, a nonpartisan organization founded by Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Wilkie.

IRAQ II: David Ignatius of the Washington Post writes that the "military blogs coming out of Iraq are some of the most interesting reading I've found this holiday season." In the L.A. Times, Robert Kaplan writes that if you want to meet the future political leaders of the United States, go to Iraq and meet the junior officers and enlistees in their 20s and 30s. But celebrities are much less interested in the troops than they used to be.

TERROR NETWORK IN EUROPE: A growing number of terrorism investigations in Britain, Germany, Bosnia, Denmark, Spain and France are linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. "Even before the invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi had a network in Europe that provided funds and recruits," a British source said. "The same pipeline will sooner or later pump the other way, from Iraq to Europe."

THE CULT OF THE iPod has seized control of Vice-President Dick Cheney. Dave Winer has pod predictions for 2006.

SURVEILLANCE: US News & World Report has a story o­n a (formerly) top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities. Some will claim this was as unconstitutional as the warrantless use of a thermal imager. Others will argue that it is as constitutional as the warrantless use of a drug-sniffing police dog.

SURVEILLANCE II: The New York Times reports that the NSA has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the U.S. as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after 9/11. Not surprisingly lawyers disagree over whether it's legal, though I suspect no o­ne has all the info needed to reach a definitive conclusion. I do find it amusing that papers like the NYT are pretending they don't know that similar programs started in the 1990s. And that some of those complaining now have known about it for a long time.

AL QAEDA'S top operational commander was solely focused o­n killing President Bush and Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharaf prior to his capture last spring. Al Qaeda's No. 3 leader, Abu Faraj Al-Libi, organized several failed assassination attempts o­n Musharraf before he was nabbed, but the plot to send assassins to the US to kill Bush was o­nly disclosed last week.

DODO FIND: Scientists said they likely have found a complete skeleton of the long-extinct Dodo bird. The last known stuffed bird was destroyed in a 1755 fire at a museum in Oxford, England, leaving o­nly partial skeletons and drawings of the bird.

CATS may be guided by the geomagnetic pattern o­n the Earth's surface. At least that's what it said in Pravda, which means truth in Russian.

CRYPTOZOOLOGY: Cryptomundo recaps the Top Cryptozoology Stories of 2005, many of which were noted here at the time.

BIGFOOT: The existence of the Sasquatch will be studied in Malaysia.

AS SOME OF YOU KNOW, I decorate more than o­ne Christmas tree each season. I know people who -- for various reasons -- won't be able to put up their own trees or be home for the Holidays, so I thought I would post a few of my tree (as opposed to my family's tree). This picture features a French-made astronaut and a moon-head (which always reminds me of the old McDonald's ad), as well as the Cat in the Hat. The valuable o­nes, however, are the goose (upper-right) and the Thomas Jefferson by Christopher Radko (lower-left). There are more pictures if you click the "Read more" link at the end of today's entry.

25,000 CHRISTMAS LIGHTS, computer-synched to music by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, broadcasted by a low-power FM transmitter so that people driving around to view decorated homes can listen o­n their car radios. There's video -- with the music -- at the link. (Thanks, Debbie!)

BONO and THE GATESES may be Time magazine's Persons of the Year, but Paul Theroux, an author who knows Africa pretty well, is not a fan of any of them: "There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of o­ne at the moment." And then he gets critical.

PITCHFORK has quietly become to this generation what Rolling Stone magazine was in the 1960s, but the Toronto Star wonders how long they'll be able to resist the "lame-ifying" forces of big money.

SEASON OF THE LIST: PopMatters lists the best 50 albums, the best 20 reissues, the best ten electronic albums and the best ten jazz albums. There's a Top 50 Singles list o­n the Pitchfork. The Underrated blog has its "Top 25 (er 28) Songs of 2005." There's a Top 20 list from Questionable Content. A Top 50 Albums countdown has started at Stylus. And there's o­ne at Rolling Stone, too.

ASOBI SEXSU: Chromewaves turned me o­nto this NYC band's mix of J-pop, noise-pop and shoegaze music. You can stream a few from MySpace, or download their cover of "Merry Xmas, Baby (I Don't Wanna Fight Tonight)," which sounds more like the Raveonettes with the female vocal.

IRON & WINE/CALEXICO: Joey Burns talks to the AP about bringing guests like Sufjan Stevens, Mike Watt and the Shins' James Merecer o­nstage and jokes that it was an "Internet hookup" that first got the bands together.

HEAVY METAL has gone to the dogs.

THE HOLD STEADY'S Craig Finn and Tad Hubler are interviewed o­n video by Spacelab at First Avenue in Minneapolis. And they talk about Minneapolis, too. Not to mention Cheap Trick and Triumph. Also, there are clips of the band playing.

CLEAR CHANNEL COMMUNICATIONS is staffed with geniuses who set up a concert, theatrical and sports portal at livenation.com without noticing that livenation.net is a hardcore p0rn site.

BILLY JOEL is movin' out of his pad in Miami.

JACKO may be saved from bankruptcy by Sony Music, as a foreclosure o­n some 270 million worth of loans by Fortress Investments would put Sony farther away from owning his half of the company.

MORRISSEY answers more fan mail, managing to opine that the US food industry is "more of a threat to the American people than so-called 'terrorism' is. Am I bleating o­n? ..." (Well, now that you mention it...) He also seems to advocate a nuclear attack o­n China for trading in dog and cat fur.

PETE DOHERTY-KATE MOSS UPDATE: The supposedly sober supermodel unveils a clean-cut image in a new TV ad for Virgin Mobile.

BRADGELINA UPDATE: I guess we can figure out whose side Madame Tussauds is taking... Meanwhile, more tabloid rumors about engagement rings and a Buddhist-style ceremony at Pitt's Malibu mansion make the rounds.

ORLANDO BLOOM and KATE BOSWORTH were also spied checking out engagement rings.

JESSICA SIMPSON may have hubby Nick Lachey sitting for a 300K tell-all with OK! magazine.

KING KONG: The Box Office Prophets -- while still optimistic -- turn Monday Morning Quarterback.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN was mocked by Nathan Lane o­n NBC's Today show, lecturing the fictional gay cowboys: "You're in the middle of nowhere! Get a ranch with the guy! Stop torturing these two poor women and get a room! What's the problem?"

TOM-KAT UPDATE: The ever-reliable Perez Hilton has more than o­ne source claiming that Cruise and Homes slept in separate bedrooms in NYC. Gawker analyzes People magazine's "Star Tracks."

SCIENTOLOGY: The L.A. Observed blog hooks you up to a bunch of L.A. Times stories o­n Scientology and Cruise's recruitment that some (meaning me) might find hair-raising. ALSO: Lisa Marie Presley, Priscilla Presley, Danny Masterson, Giovanni Ribisi, Leah Remini, Jenna Elfman, Catherine Bell and Marisol Nichols attended the grand opening of a new state of the art museum -- Psychiatry an Industry of Death.

CATE BLANCHETT returned to her native Australia o­n Sunday to appeal for calm following the recent race riots in Sydney.

DENIS LEARY and his Rescue Me co-stars and writers were dancing naked Irish jigs in the downstairs bar of o­no at the Hotel Gansevoort in NYC. Apparently, alcohol was involved.

SCARLETT JOHANNSON'S dress for the UK premiere of Match Point was banned in Britain. And E! channel gossip Ted Casablanca hears from more than o­ne source that Match Point director Woody Allen was enormously "taken by" Scarlett. Enough so that Soon-Yi was dropping by the set.

NICOLE RICHIE loves the Skeletor diet.

ELIZA DUSHKU may become as well-known for her dress as she is for anything o­n her resume, though her catsuit in Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back isn't bad, either.

STACY'S MOM refuses alimony from Rod Stewart.

DAVID GEFFEN has sold off over 100 million worth of irreplaceable works of art in six months.

DARYL HANNAH may have Lyme disease.

CARMEN ELECTRA felt obligated to sleep with the high bidder o­n a charity date for the National Prostate Cancer Coalition -- and was relieved when he was disqualified. The bidder might also be relieved... if he ever heard the penne pasta story.

REESE WITHERSPOON was probably smiling as an arrest warrant was issued for a photographer who allegedly struck a 5-year-old child with his camera while trying to take pictures of Reese Witherspoon and her children at an amusement park.

IRAQ: The residents of Tal Afar now cheer US troops. The reporter contrasts this with Fallujah, but AFP reports that Fallujah is improving and "could well be a model of civil-military relations for the restive cities further west, especially Ramadi." The local leaders there have figured out that working with the US forces is ultimately the best way to get them to leave. Key Sunni Muslim leaders in Anbar province have concluded that their interests lie in cooperating with the US as protection against neighbors like Iran and Syria. These Sunnis want a reduction in military raids and an increase in development projects. The reconstruction element of the current strategy may be key -- in Pakistan and Indonesia, direct contact with Americans o­n a humanitarian mission, including military personnel, has has a large positive impact o­n how these countries view America and terrorism.

IRAQ II: As the US emphasizes reconstruction, there is a push for Iraqi Army units to take greater responsibility in providing from the planning and execution of missions. Iraqi blogger Omar writes that the now-governing religious Shiites probably won the largest bloc of seats in parliament, but not enough to form a government itself. They will be forced to join up with other parties or risk that a coalition of Kurds, Sunnis and secular Shiites will form the government. In the Washington Post, Jackson Diehl looks at the impact of Iraq's drive toward democracy elsewhere in the region. And the AP reporter embedded with the Army's 101st Airborne Division has figured out that a boring day is a good day. But in bemoaning that "when the history of the Iraq war is written, there won't be any letters from soldiers to their friends and family to chronicle their days in the field," he's overlooking e-mail and blogs.

HERE WE SEE THE PANTOMIME COW, enagaged in a life or death struggle for jobs running major world powers. Or it could just be Madame Tussauds again.

NSA INTELL: Yesterday, I noted that the press has largely missed the President's inherent legal authority under the Constitution to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance. Today, let's take a detached look at the politics of the issue. Before 9/11, when Bill Clinton was President, hardly anyone cared about the Echelon program, which we know eavesdrops o­n US citizens and has listed innocent people as possible terrorists. But after 9/11, if George W. Bush wants to eavesdrop o­n phone numbers found in al Qaeda's rolodex, Rep. John Lewis and Sen. Barbara Boxer think it may be an impeachable offense? If you were a politician, would you rather be arguing the side that foiled at least two major terror plots, or the side defending the privacy of people who -- as far as we know now -- have suffered no ill effects of the eavesdropping? If you can see how that might look to the generally apolitical center, you can understand Bush's immediate, aggressive pushback o­n the issue. And I wouldn't be shocked if Bush had a poll taken o­n it over the weekend, would you?

WHY I LOVE POLLS: Speaking of polls, CNN reports: "Iraq speeches, election don't help Bush." ABC News and the Washington Post report: "Bush's Support Jumps After a Long Decline; Americans Optimistic o­n Iraq, Economy."

TERROR IN SPAIN: Spanish police arrested 15 people o­n Monday who are suspected of recruiting al Qaeda fighters to send to Iraq.

LOST IN GERMANY: Two German women won a lawsuit against a casino after their husbands gambled all of their savings away. For their part, the husbands are no longer allowed to use the words "nest" or "egg."

PANDA REUNION: Sure, it happened last month, but it's still cute now. Perhaps they will match Basi, the Chinese panda who just celebrated her 25th birthday.

CHINESE WHITE DOLPHINS are getting refuge in the southeastern province of Fujian.

GIANT SQUID: Trapped in a block of ice!

GOATS may chew Kudzu for the City of Chattanooga, TN.

JACKASS PENGUIN snatched from a zoo o­n the Isle of Wight may die if not returned promptly. And yes, "jackass" is s type of penguin -- it makes a braying sound.