SHEILA LENNON'S SUBTERRANEAN HOMEPAGE NEWS

These lists are always a good browse. I didn't know Jimmy Cliff's The Harder They Come or The Traveling Wilburys were underrated — they got played a lot around my house — but that's what makes these compilations emotionally interactive.

You might discover some music that you simply missed, as I did with this one:

Dread Zeppelin: Un - Led - Ed (1990)

As the name would imply, Dread Zeppelin was a band that played nothing but reggae versions of Led Zeppelin songs. Interesting concept, eh? Oh yes, their lead singer was an Elvis impersonator named Tortelvis. Long before studio technicians were mashing up songs, Dread Zeppelin was mashing up genres in an acid fueled blender with tongue firmly in musical cheek. However, the joke carries through the entire album – and carries well. In the past decade there have been reggae homages to Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, but none show the same reverence for their subject as Dread Zeppelin. From the introductory Black Dog, which includes a nice segue into Hound Dog, through a version of Your Time Is Gonna Come that stands comparison to the original to the closing drum beat of Moby Dick, the album stands on its own as a "reggae" classic and not as a one-off joke. Given the bizarre concept, Un-Led-Ed is an easy album to overlook and underrate.

Planarity Flash Game: Imagine a wire toy. You've been instructed to flatten it, or, as the game instructs, "Arrange the vertices such that no edges overlap."

It's easier if you try to hold a 3-D image of the wire toy, and drag the vertices intuitively. (Let your hand do it without too much brain meddling.)

It's starts off easy enough. That's a screenshot of Level 1 at right.

Day 3: Transcript of today's White House press conference at which press secretary Scott McClellan offered more like this: "And let me just say again that anything relating to an ongoing investigation, I'm not going to get into discussing. I've said that the past couple of days."

I'm having better luck streaming these at whitehouse.gov than at C-Span.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night, using clips of past statements by Rove, McClellan and Bush, brilliantly brought up to speed anyone who just got here. The montage of McClellan saying "ongoing investigation" seemed endless. Watch it here.

Over at (Brown PhD) Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo Cafe, Larry Johnson, a former CIA agent who was in Valerie Plame's "class" at the CIA, writes about her history (The Big Lie About Valerie Plame), including,

...Valerie Plame was a classmate of mine from the day she started with the CIA. I entered on duty at the CIA in September 1985. All of my classmates were undercover--in other words, we told our family and friends that we were working for other overt U.S. Government agencies. We had official cover. That means we had a black passport--i.e., a diplomatic passport. If we were caught overseas engaged in espionage activity the black passport was a get out of jail free card.

A few of my classmates, and Valerie was one of these, became a non-official cover officer. That meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed.

The lies by people like Victoria Toensing, Representative Peter King, and P. J. O'Rourke insist that Valerie was nothing, just a desk jockey. Yet, until Robert Novak betrayed her she was still undercover and the company that was her front was still a secret to the world. When Novak outed Valerie he also compromised her company and every individual overseas who had been in contact with that company and with her....

Finally, does anyone recall why George H.W. Bush, the current President's father, fired Karl Rove from his campaign in 1992? The L.A. Times rcounts (Uproar Has Roots in Rove's Vast Reach),

...(Rove and George W. Bush) came together during young adulthood, when an ambitious former Texas congressman, George H.W. Bush, held the job of chairman of the Republican National Committee. It fell to the elder Bush to investigate allegations that Rove had used dirty tricks in a campaign for president of the College Republicans. The RNC chairman eventually cleared Rove, and was so impressed by the young operative that he hired him as an assistant.

Although Rove was an advisor ostensibly working behind the scenes, his name continued to be associated with public controversy. During George H.W. Bush's second presidential campaign, Rove was fired from the campaign team because of suspicions that he had leaked information to columnist Robert Novak — the same columnist who first reported Plame's CIA role in 2003, citing anonymous administration sources.

At the time, Bush's campaign was in trouble, and there was concern that the president might not even win his home state of Texas. The Novak column described a Dallas meeting in which the campaign's state manager, Robert Mosbacher, was stripped of his authority because the Texas effort was viewed as a bust.

Mosbacher complained, expressing his suspicion that Rove was the leaker. Rove denied the charge, but was fired nevertheless....

Daily set up: The Daily Show moved to a larger studio with a new set. Dana Stevens at Slate doesn't like it (Talk Show Feng Shui).

When Stewart and indie journalist Matt Taibbi chatted last night, giant letters spelling "The Daily Show" paraded between their two stationary heads. I found it distracting and irritating. Of course we watch motion. I had to deliberately ignore the scrolling letters to concentrate on the humans. Like bad Flash, it detracts from substance.

My colleague Dave Reid just e-mailed with the news that Robert Luskin, Karl Rove's lawyer, was a Providence Journal reporter in the '70s.

Simple, elegant poaching: How to poach an egg. Egg lover Rob Manuel.tests recommended methods of poaching an egg. I've never tried the winning method, but the result even looks like a winner. It involves plastic wrap, called "clingfilm" here because the egg lover is British, as is the site, b3ta.com. (No, that's not a typo, it's a cutesy "e.")