It's like I have A.D.D.

Maybe it was one of those days.

• Went to my third show by The Hold Steady last night. As regular readers of this site know, I'm more than a little obsessed. I like The Hold Steady the way my immediate ancestors like Judy Collins, and the ones before that liked Connie Francis. It was the band's final show of its current tour. Craig Finn seemed a tad inebriated -- as is his wont -- and the first half of the show the lyrics were harder to decipher than usual. More importantly, the band didn't play two of my favorite songs -- Knuckles and How a Resurrection Really feels. They did, however, debut a song about a poet friend of Saul Bellow that sounded like a song Bruce Springsteen would write if I liked Bruce Springsteen.Connie Francis, eat your heart out.
  
• I went with a friend who'd never seen a show at Webster Hall before. He compared it to the interior of the spaceship in Predator 2, but meant it in a good way. I haven't seen Predator 2, so I cannot verify.
  
• The Colbert Report gained its sea legs in no time. The first few episodes were a little wobbly. In tone and content, it's quickly become a funny and sophisticated satire of cable news, and much more polished than I'd expect in its early run.
  
• And I'm not feeling guilty for missing Nightline, a show I've watched regularly for years. With Ted Koppel's imminent departure, the show is turning into a scatterbrained replica of evening news. Nightline's skill is finding a serious issue and thinking the hell out of it for 30 minutes. They haven't covered Tom and Katie yet, but lately, the show hasn't been any better than 30 minutes of network news.
• I think it sucks that CNN dumped Aaron Brown, the only cable news anchor who conveyed a sense of smarts and authority. Anderson Cooper, Schmanderson Schmooper.
• Lastly, the European media has been all over a story about U.S. deployment of chemical weapons in Fallujah. Truly gruesome stuff. At this stage, though, it's hard to know what to believe. In a few days or weeks, though, this could make Abu Ghraib look like a pimple.