After catching up this morning, all I have been able to think about is my top five summer albums. So, here goes:

Neil Young, After the Gold Rush

It's a short album and not my favorite Young, but it screams summer to me. Especially "Southern Man" and "Cripple Creek Ferry." It also makes me think of drinking lots of beer at the lake - but so do all the albums on this list.

Jayhawks, Hollywood Town Hall

I can think of some Jayhawk bootlegs I might throw in rather than this - but this is still a great summer album beginning to end. Kinda sad, though. It's more a driving back from the lake with no A/C and the windows open rather than a at-the-lake album.

Grateful Dead Europe 72

I can't even listen to this album (2 disc set really) if it isn't at least 85 degrees out and I don't have a camping trip planned. It *is* summer. "He's Gone," "Jack Straw," "China Cat ->Rider," and "Sugar Magnolia" especially.

Built to Spill There's Nothing Wrong with Love

Aaah. Just like in that list upthread. "Big Dipper" into "Car" makes me just about weep with the summer-ness of it all.

Just one more? Eeek!

Tribe Called Quest People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm

Because it is just so fun. You can't help but stir out of your hot-and-humid stupor when the frogs start chirping in "After Hours".

Honorable mention: Calexico, Hot Rail (I'm so glad I got this as my first album of theirs and that hayden put them on that mix and that I listened to people raving about them here - essential summertime music), any Gillian Welch or Split Lip and Exile on Main Street oh! and Steel Pulse for the essential-but-not-Marley summer reggae.

Also I have been on a giant Jesus and Mary Chain kick lately, especially Darklands. Not really summer-y but still loving it.

Finally, joe - the newsradio summer listening recs? Your brain scares me in a "how do you fit it all in there" kinda way.

I played "Letter from an Occupant" by the New Pornographers last week, and a friend of mine called to say that they sounded just like Abba. I found it hard to disagree.

Wrongest possible combination imaginable? (though never done) I'm thinking that Most Wrong would be Abba covering "Strange Fruit."

Barry Manilow. "Rock 'n' Roll All Nite."

Wrongest possible combination imaginable? (though never done) I'm thinking that Most Wrong would be Abba covering "Strange Fruit."

John Ashcroft singing "Down from Dover"?

My favorite necrophilia song is Robyn Hitchcock's "My Wife and My Dead Wife."

I'll vote for "Dig It Up" by Hoodoo Gurus.

"You can't bury love / ya gotta dig it up / ya gotta live it up."

John Ashcroft singing, period. (Although, now that I think about it, I'd almost enjoy hearing him tackle "Stagger Lee.")

John Ashcroft singing "Down from Dover"?

There's even worse (ETA: for Ashcroft to cover). But other than saying it's a disco song by a singer not known primarily for disco, I'll spare the sensibilities of the board.

We are talking about necrophilia and John Ashcroft at the same time. Coincedence? I think not.

Now I can't get the clip from Fahrenheit 9/11 of him singing that Eagles Soar song out of my mind. Oh God, get it out!!

Or NSYNC scatting their way through "A Love Supreme"?

Joined by special guest Jon Hendricks, no doubt. Here's one to horrify Hayden: Ted Nugent sings "Trouble Down South".

Your brain scares me in a "how do you fit it all in there" kinda way.

It almost exploded this morning. The French theater discussion in the lit thread prompted me to search for recent NY productions of Phedre because I knew there had been one. Sure enough, Willem Dafoe's Wooster group had done a production called "To You the Birdie". (I think I tried to get tickets but it was sold out.) Anyway, one of the first couple links was this not-so-glowing review, and it caught my eye because the woman who wrote it was a regular customer at a place I once worked.

"Plate of shrimp" number two, on this day when Ken Lay was taken into custody, was her first paragraph: a funny anecdote -- dealing with coincidence, coincidentally -- about Ken Lay. Didn't really have anything to do with the rest of the article, but it's amusing (see it below).

She scored the coincidence hat trick when she started talking about "Having played Phaedra... in a translation by Greek scholar Peter Arnot." Peter Arnot used to come to my tiny (400 students), ancient Greek-studying college every year to perform a Greek tragedy, which he had translated, using marionettes and doing all the voices himself. He was enough of a campus mainstay to be parodied by my friend Sasha, who dressed as Arnot and performed a 5 minute version of Euripides' "The Bacchae" using candy bars instead of marionettes. Pentheus was the Snickers. "He" dressed as a "woman" (i.e., Sasha slipped an M&M's wrapper over the Snickers) to spy on the revelers, but of course the Bacchantes spotted him and ripped him limb from limb. I still have fond memories of Sasha throwing bits of Snickers all around the theater.

And now that I've further convinced you that I'm just an odd duck I'll just quote the Ken Lay anecdote & slink away:

On Sunday afternoon as I was driving home "Le Show" came on the radio and before I could switch the station, host Harry Shearer began explaining how Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Lay had just sold their winter cottage, one of several Lay properties, for eight million dollars, the highest price ever exacted for a piece of Aspen real estate. The address of the cottage, as Harry Shearer said, "I’m not making this up," was Shady Lane. At the moment of hearing "Shady Lane," I was drawn to glance at the passing street sign, one of many signs I’d never bothered to notice along the route, and, I’m not making this up, the sign read Shady Lane. -- Joanna Rotté, Villanova Theater Prof.