THE WEEKEND STARTS HERE:

...with MY MORNING JACKET!  Breakfast on Tour has video of eight new MMJ songs from the band's upcoming Evil Urges LP -- performed live in Houston -- for your viewing and listening enjoyment.

VAMPIRE WEEKEND singer-guitarist Ezra Koenig talks to the L.A. Times about being a "blog buzz band": "You'll hear about bands on blogs now," he observes, "because that's just a new form of media. Yeah, some bloggers really got behind us, which is awesome. But I think that before, like, 90% of any blogs wrote about us, we had a piece in the New York Times. So does that make us, like, 'a newspaper band'?"

STEPHEN MALKMUS & THE JICKS stopped by The Current for a chat and mini-set you can stream on demand via MPR.  Malkmus also talks to the Nashville Scene about new drummer Janet Weiss, his parents' record collection and being "the Pavement dude."

THE INDIE ROCK 25:  Entertainment Weekly compiles its list of the adventurous artists and albums that defined each year from 1984 to the present outside the major label sphere.

BOB MOULD is pressured into a round of "Who'd You Rather Dü?"

THE MUSIC EXPLO SION sync their way through the classic "Little Bit O'So ul."

MOUNTAIN GOATS mastermind John Darnielle does a presser on the difference between songwriting and writing prose.

FOURTEEN OVERBLOWN CHARITY/ADVOCACY SONGS, besides "We Are The World" (with embedded videos) courtesy of The A.V. Club.

TIFT MERRITT brings her country-Americana to Studio 4A for chat and mini-set you can stream via NPR.

AMY WINEHOUSE, nekkid.  More like a Wendy O. Williams duct tape special, really.

THE CUTOUT BIN:  From Strauss to Billy Bragg, from Muddy Waters to the dBs, from Johnny Cash to The Kinks, to AC/DC unplugged and the arrival of spring announced by Thin Lizzy, this Good Friday's fortuitous finds can be jukeboxed or streamed individually on the Pate page at the ol' HM.

BRITNEY SPEARS is worth 120 million dollars to the US economy, according to big business magazine Portfolio.  After an exhaustive study, the magazine has published statistics that make the pop wreck a boost to American finances.

JAMIE LYNN SPEARS, Britney's 16-year-old knocked up sister,  is living it up - shopping, hanging out with her friends and behaving like any other normal teenage girl with less than three months left before she becomes a mom.

NOW SHOWING:  This weekend's wide releases include Drillbit Taylor, an Owen Wilson comedy currently scoring 21 percent on the ol' Tomatometer, plus the horror flik Shutter and Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns, which were either embargoed or not screened for critics.

JENNIFER LOPEZ's babies are finally going public in this week's issue of People, but several sources familiar with the early stages of bidding among the many interested magazines said that the arrangement wasn't an easy deal to strike.

BRADGELINA:  Jolie is said to be "ecstatic" to be expecting a boy and a girl, according to the Daily Mail.

THE McCARTNEYS:  I think I forgot to note that Heather Mills, after being awarded £700/hr. in her divorce from Sir Paul McCartney, responded by throwing a glass of water over the hair of Sir Paul's lawyer.  Mills may not have cared for the High Court ruling, which stated that Mills had a "warped perception" of the world, "indulged in make-believe," was "not just inconsistent and inaccurate but also less than candid" and criticized her "explosive and volatile character."

OWEN WILSON & KATE HUDSON are definitely rekindling their romance in Miami, according to the NYP's Page Six.  On Monday, the duo "ate off each other's plates" at a local restaurant, according to a source.

LINDSAY LOHAN's ex boyfriend Calum Best denies that images making the rounds are from a sex tape of them.  Meanwhile, the ever-reliable Star magazine claims two Hollywood lesbians are fighting for her affections.

RYAN PHILLIPPE, a/k/a Reese Witherspoon's ex, told Jay Leno he has stopped Googling himself: "Some of the stuff that you see when you are someone who is known is so depressing. Just the comments. People make really hateful comments sometimes, because there's anonymity and you can get away with it."  And that's even before you get to movie critics.

WHY IS THIS SATURDAY DIFFERENT FROM ALL OTHER DAYS?  Because ABC has its annual showing of The Ten Commandments.  A critic once called it "sublime hootchy-kootchy hokum," a description that can't be improved upon.  Most people will immediately think of Charlton Heston as Moses, but the grand DeMille spectacle also featured acting from Edward G. Robinson and Anne Baxter that is so over-the-top that Yul Brenner starts to look good by comparison.  And while Robinson's Dathan never actually spoke the line "Where's your Messiah now?" at the Red Sea in the movie, it  -- like "Play It Again, Sam" (not spoken in Casablanca) -- has become part of a part of our culture. The line actually comes from Billy Crystal (sample), originally a bit from the Oscars, iirc. It later turned up o­n The Simpsons, with Chief Wiggum playing Dathan to Ned Flanders' Moses.

GLOBAL WARMING:  Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.  But some 3000 diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years.

OUR FRIENDS, THE SAUDIS plan to retrain its 40000 prayer leaders - also known as imams - in an effort to counter militant Islam.

IRAQ:  A growing number of foreign fighters are leaving or attempting to flee Iraq as US and Iraqi forces have weakened AQI and forced its members from former strongholds, US military officials say.  The departure of some fighters doesn't mean al-Qaeda is quitting the fight, said Brig. Gen. Brian Keller, the chief intelligence officer for the US command in Iraq.  Gen. David Petraeus said Iran continues to support Iraqi insurgents and Syria is allowing foreign fighters passage into Iraq.  The NYT looks at Mosul as a test of the reborn Iraqi Army.

IRAQ and the MEDIA:  Canada's Globe & Mail does a genre piece on the Anbar Awakening: "While U.S. political leaders like to highlight President George W. Bush's 'surge' strategy of more U.S. troops on the ground to explain the relative calm, local commanders say much of the credit has to go to the Sahwa, as well as a decision last year by radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to impose a temporary ceasefire on his militia, the Mahdi Army."  Yet the same reporter also quotes one of the Awakening's leaders: "We have suffered for two years from al-Qaeda in Anbar. Most of Anbar was destroyed," said Sheik Ali al-Hatem, the head of Iraq's powerful Dulaimi tribe, explaining his decision to help form the Sahwa, or "Awakening," councils. There was another reason too, he confesses: "The American army right now is the power on the ground. We have to be realistic."  The Awakening likely would not have happened without year after year of gritty, relentless patrolling by US troops that convinced the tribes the American military was, as one tribal leader said to Bing West, "the strongest tribe."  Similarly, al-Sadr's ceasefire has a little something to do with the way the Mahdi Army got its rear end handed to it in any engagement with the US and the realization that the US wasn't leaving immediately.

JERRY the DACHSHUND plays fetch with himself.  Awww...

PANDA is a miniature seeing-eye pony in North Carolina.  Awww...

THE MOUSE-DEER of Sri Lanka finally has been photographed to a ‘publishable standard' under truly wild conditions.  Awww...

A 75-LB STINGRAY killed a Michigan woman Thursday when it flew out of the water and struck her face as she rode a boat in the Florida Keys, officials said.  Oooh!