The Morning News brings us an update: "In his fifth dispatch for TMN, aspiring rock star Gary Benchley learns it's not easy to date older women, considers giving up rock for branding, and, in a dark hour, composes the first rock tribute to Abu Ghraib."

If you haven't been following the life of the great Gary Benchley, Rock Star, until now, you must go back and start at the beginning. It's a very good place to begin.

Why does MTV2 show the Best of Sucker-Free Sunday on a Friday afternoon?

They're louder than ever. They're increased their decibel level by a good 10-20 since yesterday. It's like Cicada Emeril told them to kick it up a notch. Bam! Where's the calming Cicada Nigella Lawson when we need her?

One fell on me the other day. I walked out the back door, and one must have been sitting right on top of the door. It landed on my chest, at which point — I'm not ashamed to admit — I did a little dance. James Brown would've been proud.

On the Web, if you haven't seen Cicadaville, I'd recommend visiting for all your cicada-related concerns. The site's Cincinnati-based, but what's good for the Bengal is good for the banter.

Also interesting at the moment is Cicada.com, a site that has nothing to do with cicadas and everything to do with Cicada Consulting. The company's logo is the shadow of a cicada with wings fully spread. The logo resembles a butterfly and doesn't resemble a cicada at all. Learn the underwhelming story of how the company got its name.

Best of all, columnist John Kelly of the Washington Post is holding a cicada poetry contest. Find the rules and entry guidelines on this page, second item from the bottom.

New York Times op-ed: Nick Hornby has seen the future of rock 'n' roll, and it is Marah. Hornby writes, "There is still a part of me that persists in thinking that rock music, and indeed all art, has an occasional role to play in the increasingly tricky art of making us glad we're alive."

From the 20,000 Streets Under the Sky album dropping in June, Pigeon Heart is also now available from Yep Roc. It's a good morning. Punk with a banjo!

Hadn't heard Wilco's A.M. in a while, so that disc made the drives with me today. Strangely enough, the song in my head most of the way there and back was The Lonely 1, which wasn't on that album but the one after. No loneliness at fault, the acoustic chords just sounded familiar. But reading that Jeff Tweedy last night closed his first show back with the song, that was interesting.

(Metromix and Chicagotribune.com are experiencing technical difficulties at the time of this posting. Hopefully they'll be resolved soon.)

"I feel like I dozed off in the Lifeskills 101 class, and now I have to crib other people's notes," writes Strumpet22, my favorite of Nerve's new promo bloggers.

The mature-but-literate audiences-only site is trying a unique approach to boosting traffic and funds to its personals section. The site is hiring bloggers to date solely through the section and then report the results online. Strumpet22 and five others are the first bunch. Every two months, viewers are going to vote someone off the island.

Nerve editors, of course, plan then to replace the dismissed with new bloggers. Why? They don't explain. I imagine it's because they've got a great promo idea and they know it.

None of the first crew's work has yet lived up to Nerve's no-limits essence, but maybe that's what happens when you have to post your picture and face the accountability of an archive. Is that disappointing? I don't think so. Your coked-up exploits with the '99 Atlanta Falcons (or their cheerleaders) may have been fabulous — but do you have a sister who's, you know, normal?

Not normal normal. More like working at normal but falling short every day and being kind of happy you only got as far as you did. As my new fave described her blog getting started: "This reminds me of the time I arrived at Jenny Lucio's birthday party an hour early, and then sat around wearing a Smurfs party hat and a dour expression while the Lucios blew up the Moonwalk."

"My blog," she adds, "needs a Moonwalk."

I'd bet in 30 years the new Seattle library is as architecturally despised as the Northwestern Library. I just get a feeling.

Related: Wildcats, you know missed The Rock webcam. NU has also now posted time-lapse videos from the camera, with captures including a snowfall, a changing of the leaves, a Shakespeare at the Rock performance, and of course a painting.

Within the last week, I'm not really sure when, I had the pleaure of flipping through the channels and catching Just One of the Guys, the 1980s teen sex comedy that time almost forgot.

The plot: Teen girl wants a newspaper internship and sets her sights on winning a journalism contest. After her teacher rejects her first story, she decides she must overcome sexism and thus, for article purposes, pretend to be a teen boy at a different high school. Gender- and sex-based hilarity ensues. She likes a boy, but he thinks she's a boy too. A girl falls for her, also thinking she's a boy. Meanwhile, her boyfriend wants to know what's going on. And then there's her horny younger brother!

I decided the movie would make an awesome triple feature with 1989's Nobody's Perfect (guy pretends to be girl) and 1986's Soul Man (white guy pretends to be black guy). If only they all didn't suck.

Colin Powell's press aide Emily Miller made news this week by attempting to cut off Powell's interview with Tim Russert. The attempt was unsuccessful and then replayed verbatim on Meet the Press, complete with a scolding from Russert.

My own experience with Emily Miller came a few years back.

In the summer of 2001, I was interning for Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. Nothing big. Free labor and some clips for the resume. Near the end of the internship, I started reporting a story about privately funded travel by House staffers. I compiled a database of the publicly available travel records from 2000 and then sorted the data various ways to find what groups were paying for whose trips.

Rising to the top of the list for individual totals was Susan Hirschmann, then-chief of staff for Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas. Hirschmann had accepted $41,000 worth of free travel in 2000, the records showed, including one $27,600 jaunt for herself and her husband to London.

I called the group that funded the big trip and interviewed one of its leaders briefly. The group had a long-standing and positive working relationship with Rep. DeLay and his staff, the leader said. It was your basic money and access interview.

But later that afternoon, my editor came over to my desk, laughing and wondering what I had done. Apparently, he had just received a call from Emily Miller, who was then DeLay's press secretary.

Miller was angry. Steaming.

Reportedly, she demanded to know two things: "Who's this Pat Cooper? And what's he doing asking questions about my boss?"

Just finished reading Nick McDonell's Twelve, a city kid's guide to teenage nihilism. The hero is a drug dealer who doesn't use, the lone thirster for knowledge and questions and family on the Upper East Side; the villains are everyone else, mostly young, all falling short by situation (drugs, sex, adolescent leanings, the discomfort of being the lost generation).

Is this grab covering trod ground? Sure, but McDonell's still only 20 now, two years after the book's publishing. Most of his peer critics around the Web aren't too positive — everyone loves to call everybody else a phony (which must be why Holden confesses enough to beat them around every corner) — but I doubt many of them could write a book. Better books are none of my concern when reading one book. After ending a short story the same way I was his age (no, no blowing endings here), I know I couldn't write a better one at that point.

If McDonell can gain enough empathy to find his hero wrong and culpable once, I think he and his writing as an extension of himself would be better off for it. But whether he's a phony or not isn't the point. What he wants is no concern of mine.