THE WEEKEND STARTS HERE:

...WITH A FORAY into the widely recognized phenomenon of Friday catblogging, just because I enjoyed these photos of my co-clerk Debbie's felines, Malcolm and Ella.

FRIDAY TIMEWASTER: Test your knowledge of 80s lyrics.

THE FLAMING LIPS will be spending the autumn playing headline dates o­n a Carnival cruise ship, for the first ever Xingolati Groove Cruise. The Lips are great live, but that's a tough gig. After all, that quintet o­n The Love Boat manages to sound like 20 musicians.

RICHARD THOMPSON, Live from Austin, TX rates a 7.6 o­n the Pitchfork: "On this CD, Thompson could be a guitar salesman demonstrating his product. See how simple it is to sound like three guitars at o­nce. Now you too you can mimic a banjo or a slide guitar in your home or office."

LES PAUL is recording an album with Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Santana and more, then a bluegrass album. The man who dreamed up multi-track recording and the father of sorts to Jon Pratt's guitar has even more to say in a wide-ranging interview with Modern Guitars magazine.

JONATHAN DEMME, who brought Talking Heads and Robyn Hitchcock to the big screen (and even gave a cameo to The Feelies playing Bowie and The Monkees before directing their video for "Away") is going to shoot a Neil Young concert at the Grand Ole Opry.

HOMES OF THE STARS: Jimi Hendrix's house is in danger of demolition. Johnny and June Carter Cash's home is on the block.

YOUR MOMENT OF SITH: James Lileks delivers a definitive review of Episode III. Meryl Yourish interviews Darth Vader, who claims "Lucas got almost nothing right, not even my name," which we discover is Leonard.

THE CASTING COUCH: Movie producer Chris Hanley says it's alive and well in Hollywood: "Almost every leading actress in all of my 24 films has slept with a director or a producer or a leading actor to get the part that launched her career."

STEVE McQUEEN went AWOL from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, but also rescued five Marines in a training accident, and took advantage of military educational benefits to study at the Actors' Studio. That's just o­ne of many stories in U.S. military documents released o­n Thursday.

NERDS MAKE BETTER LOVERS. I hear this all the time, but I guess some folks didn't know.

THE LODI TERROR PROBE expands; we all know how uncomfortable that can be.

THE STORY OF THE SEX PISTOLS, in comic book form.

JONATHAN RICHMAN doesn't do an interview with The Huntsville Times.

WITH A REBEL YELL, Billy Idol gives a Lamborghini Gallardo a makeshift sunroof with some sort of power tool.

SIMON "SI" WARONKER, founder of Liberty Records, o­ne of the top indie labels of the 1950s and early '60s, died in his sleep Tuesday in Los Angeles at age 90. During the rock 'n' roll era, Liberty was the home of singer-guitarist-producer Eddie Cochran, teen idol Bobby Vee, rocker-turned-pop vocalist Johnny Burnette and surf duo Jan & Dean.

LIVE 8: Ordinary Africans are questioning whether Western extravaganzas like the Live 8 concerts, however well intentioned, can help. Sir Bob Geldof is playing the expectations game: "It will be, not for me but for everyone involved, a glorious failure."

COLDPLAY: Critics clash over the band in the Telegraph. Art experts decode the cover of the new album, which will almost certainly be added to this gallery of coded covers.

DAVE GROHL AND PETE DOHERTY: The Foo Fighters frontman tells the troubled ex-Libertines singer to just say no, man.

CRAIG O'NEILL is the man. Not The Man, mind you; after all, The Man can't bust our music. No, Craig is the exact opposite of The Man. He's the man as anti-Man.

NANO-BOTS: The new science of claytronics will use nanotechnology to create tiny robots that can turn into any shape. Intel's robotics expert, Jason Campbell, says: "The more you look at it, the more likely it seems we will be able to manufacture these things. I think there's a good chance we'll get to see it. Now whether that's five or 20 years, I don't know." Expect a round of hype about "grey goo."

THE UNITED NATIONS cannot find its blueprints that give comprehensive details of how to build and test equipment essential for making nuclear bombs.

BAD INTELLIGENCE: U.S. spy agencies failed to recognize several key military developments in China in the past decade. Critics of the study say the report looks like a bid to exonerate analysts within the close-knit fraternity of government China specialists, who for the past 10 years dismissed or played down intelligence showing that Beijing was engaged in a major military buildup.

IRAN has plans to install tens of thousands of advanced centrifuges at its huge underground nuclear plant near Natanz, which eventually would enable the nation to enrich uranium nearly twice as fast as anticipated, Western intelligence officials say.

TOM-KAT UPDATE: Cruise used The Tonight Show for damage control, poking fun at his meltdown o­n Oprah, though he faced stiff competition from Russell Crowe, who went o­n David Letterman's Late Show Wednesday to apologize for throwing a tantrum and telephone at a hotel clerk. Cruise's second ex-wife, Nicole Kidman, thinks he ought to stop mixing the private with the public. Don Imus apparently apologized for a sidekick's o­n-air comments that actor Tom Cruise is gay. Katie Holmes admits she has looked into Scientology and thinks it's "wonderful." And if you want to know why everyone is joining in making fun of Cruise the Hollywood Reporter has an excellent explanation, in which Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have supporting roles.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ GERMAN to figure out the subject of this Bild story about the heiress named after a French Hotel.

SPACE: The final frontier. In advertising.

IRAQ: President Jalal Talabani averted a crisis Thursday by promising Sunni Arabs a big say in drafting the constitution.

BOLIVIA: The nation's high court chief took office as president late Thursday during an emergency congressional session, setting the stage for early elections aimed at curbing violent protests.

GLOBAL WARMING: The White House is defending Philip Cooney, a lawyer and former lobbyist with the American Petroleum Institute and now chief of staff for the White House Council o­n Environmental Quality, who changed descriptions of climate research approved by government scientists. Rep. Henry Waxman and Sen. John Kerry have asked the General Accountability Office to probe the matter. If they do, I hope the investigation includes the long history of policymakers changing or pressuring scientists to alter the wording of the summary of reports of the Intergovernmental Panel o­n Climate Change (IPCC), up through 2001, where the National Academy of Sciences later found that the "change in emphasis appears to be the result of a summary process in which scientists worked with policymakers o­n the document." Maybe scientists like Chris Landsea can testify about the politicization of the IPCC. But somehow I don't think Waxman or Kerry would care to hear what they have to say.

IT'S SUMMER, AND THAT CAN ONLY MEAN THAT IT'S CARNIVAL SEASON: You really don't want the carnival owner's son to be the sole technical investigator in two unexplained fatalities o­n the same piece of equipment. You can track lovely stories like this through the ptly-named Ride Accidents site. o­n a lighter note, you can download Ice Cream Truck Music and check out hamburger-blogging, hotdog-blogging and pizza-blogging through WFMU's blog.

A GREAT WHITE SHARK attacked a teen surfer off New Jersey's Surf City o­n Sunday. The kid needed a bigger board.

A KILLER COW was arrested and detained by Nigerian police o­n Thursday.

PHOTOSHOPPING M.C. ESCHER... at Worth 1000.

ROBOTS were hitting fastballs, drawing portraits and more at the 2005 Robot World Expo in Japan.

BILL CLINTON may have gotten some prank phone calls after a Delray Beach busboy found Jimmy Buffett's cellphone and kept it for a week. Of course, the busboy didn't make those calls, but his friends may have.