From concert promoter SFX:

"Riverbend Music Center [in Cincinnati] has been forced to cancel the Black Crowes/Oasis show scheduled for Thursday, May 24 due to the rising level of the Ohio River. Due to tour routing, Riverbend was not able to reschedule the event. Any tickets purchase may be returned for a full refund to the point of purchase. The Ohio River is once again rising and according to forecasts, may reach 45 feet by tomorrow afternoon."

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) held its award ceremony in Los Angeles on Tuesday (5/22). Tom Waits won the prestigious (we're given to understand) Founders Award, and he also performed.

The Song of the Year was Savage Garden's "I Knew I Loved You," by Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones.

Sonicnet reported that Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce, bassist and drummer, respectively, for the Smiths, have either joined or co-founded (the article doesn't say which) the band Specter, which also features frontman-namesake Jason Specter and guitarist Will Carol.

Specter reportedly will perform on Sunday (5/27) as part of This Night Has Opened My Eyes, a Smiths tribute show at New York's Don Hill's, named after a Smiths song about a woman who abandons a baby. (Admittedly, if you're going to name a celebration after a Smiths song, you don't have a whole lot to work with.)

In his interview in Wednesday's (5/23) Onion, talk-show host Conan O'Brien says:

There's this phenomenon now in America of just, "Yeah, woo!" People go "Woo!" If you ever watch Total Request Live, everybody does that. It's a phenomenon that depresses me. I think it's partly daytime talk shows like Jerry Springer and stuff. It's encouraged on so many shows. "Woo!" It's encouraged, so all they know is that when they want to be part of the show and they're having a good time, they want to "Woo" in the correct spot.

We, too, used to find that curious, until we moved to Los Angeles and learned that audiences of most TV shows consist of

A) people under the age of 18

B) people who are getting paid to be there.

The studios agree to pay $15-$30 a person to, like, a school's baseball team or a service group, and they come in and sit down, and if they're under 18, or if they're just easily suggestible, they Woo constantly, and those Woos are the only noise coming from the audience, as everyone else just sits there and watches the actors say unfunny things, and no one laughs, despite the presence of a comedian in the audience ineffectively pestering people to laugh, and the performers don't expect laughs anymore, and therefore pay no notice of the audience, and you wonder why there's an audience at all, since the producers are just going to add the laughs later, and it's just really sad.

(We read somewhere that those screaming girls in that footage of the Beatles' shows were paid to scream, but we can't remember if this was presented as fact or theory.)