THE WRENS have a video for their new song, "Marked Up."

ELLIOT SMITH: An entire album's worth of unfinished recordings and outtakes from From A Basement On The Hill has leaked.

SHEARWATER stopped by the World Cafe for a chat and mini-set you can stream on demand via NPR.

HALEY BONAR does the four free songs thing for Daytrotter, one previously unreleased.

ANDREW BIRD gets a profile + tracks at NPR's All Things Considered.

HEARTLESS BAST^RDS were "Out at Sea" in their network TV debut from the Ed Sullivan Theater.

M WARD talks to Ann Powers at the L.A. Times about his arrangements, re-creating songs and more.  He also got profiled in The New York Times, with emphasis on his old skool leanings.

NEKO CASE is also profiled in The New York Times Magazine, with a multimedia sidebar.

PATRICK WOLF talks to Spinner about his two upcoming albums, and to BlackBook about how he got Tilda Swinton involved.  He's currently streaming a sampler.

LOS CAMPESINOS! Gareth Campesino talks to Boston Globe about the exclamation point and more...

WEEKEND BOX OFFICE: The Friday the 13th remake headlines with 42.2 million (on a 19 million production budget) for the biggest weekend of the year to date.  That take was about twice the amount most predicted.  This weekend is again up more than 25 percent year-over-year.  Valentine's Day ensured enough people were into He's Just Not That Into You for it to rake in another 19.6 million.  But Taken was close behind, making 19.25 million on a mere six percent drop.  Confessions of a Shopaholic debuted in fourth with 15.4 million -- not bad considering that Isla Fisher had start-studded competition and the movie got poor reviews.  Coraline rounds out the Top Five with 15.3 million on a mere nine percent drop.  It has made back its reported 35 million production budget, and should do alright next weekend, but may run into trouble when the Joans Bros. show up in theaters two weekends hence.

JESSICA SIMPSON admits: "I've had times when my pants split right down the middle when I bent down to reach a note."

MICKEY ROURKE says he'd rather be stuck on an island with only the company of "a gorilla" than hook up with Courtney Love. Video at the link.

AMY WINEHOUSE was admitted to a hospital on Friday after collapsing while struggling with addiction on her never-ending vacation in St. Lucia.

MUSIC & LYRICS? Hugh Grant is reportedly "off again" with sometimes steady Jemima Khan, having been... caught canoodling not one but two women at an NYC club last week.  Was that before or after he was... wait for it... caught canoodling with Drew Barrymore?

KATE MOSS is pregnant with her second child, according to the uber-reliable News of the World.

WATCHMEN released a trailer for "Tales of the Black Freighter," a comic read by one of the charcters in the Watchmen graphic novel.

HEIDI KLUM is too heavy and too short to be a runway queen? Karl Lagerfeld and Claudia Schiffer dosn't know who she is?

GREY'S ANATOMY creator Shonda Rhimes says T.R. Knight and Katherine Heigl are not leaving the show.

PRESIDENTS DAY is recognized now instead of Washington's birthday, But in 1776, David McCullough notes that when Washington took command in July 1775, he thought he would be home at Mount Vernon by Christmas. McCullough catalogs Washington's blunders -- many of them nearly fatal to the Cause -- but concludes: "He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, nor a gifted orator, not an intellectual... He had made serious mistakes in judgment. But experience had been his great teacher from boyhood... and above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake, and he never gave up." That, as much as anything, is why Washington is usually ranked among the greatest of US presidents.

OUR FRIENDS, THE SAUDIS: King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia fired the head of the controversial religious police force and the country's most senior judge in a wide ranging shake-up of the cabinet and other government posts.

PAKISTAN: Two missiles fired from American drone aircraft killed more than 30 people, including Qaeda and Taliban fighters, near the Pakistani border with Afghanistan on Saturday, according to a Pakistani intelligence official and residents of the area. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Sen. Intell Cmite,  exposed a Pakistani partnership on Predator launches that the US had tried to keep quiet.

WINSTON the CAT loves bananas. Really. But SFW.

500-LB MANATEE RESCUED from a pond at a private golf club in North Palm Beach.

A DEAD GATOR turns up in a yard in Ypsilanti Township.

A SNAKE turns up in an Indian toilet. Pics at the link.

A BABY MEERKAT turned up in North Wales.  Hakuna Mutata.