John Del Signore

Brandon Lincoln Woodard, a 31-year-old California man enrolled in University of West Los Angeles Law School, was fatally shot in the back of the head while walking in Midtown Manhattan in broad daylight yesterday afternoon.

Justin Bieber attended last night's Phish concert at Long Beach. And Bieber liked it.

Screenwriter and photographer Nelson Lyon, a counterculture habitué who also wrote for "Saturday Night Live" during the 1981-82 season, died Tuesday of liver cancer. He was 73. Lyon's promising career was severely damaged in the early eighties after it was revealed that he participated in a three day heroin and cocaine binge that left SNL star John Belushi dead at age 33.

The Coen brothers are making a sequel to The Big Lebowski, a bunch of fuckin' amateurs "report."

For ages humankind has struggled to cope with the maddeningly flawed design of the fragile and all-too-easily bruised banana, the hemophiliac of fruits. Now, at long last, Colbert Report host Stephen Colbert has found the cure for America's banana blues, with the revolutionary new product BananaBunker. Colbert may not have invented it, but last night he introduced this "all-in-one" banana "protection system" to his vast army in this life-changing segment: The Colbert Report Get...

Joaquin Phoenix "returns" to acting in the first teaser trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson's hotly-anticipated new film The Master, which also stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Dern. Neither of those two stars are seen in the trailer, which features Phoenix being interrogated by a naval officer. It's been widely reported that Anderson's film is some sort of thinly-veiled biopic inspired by the life of creepy Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, and one could speculate...

Porn star Sasha Grey recently participated in the Read Across America program, for which the performer read a story to a classroom full of children. Then we made immature jokes about it on the Internets.

It wasn't until concertgoers arrived at the gates yesterday that they finally learned what classic album Phish would cover in its entirety during their "musical costume" set at Festival 8. Reviving a tradition that began in 1994 when Phish covered The Beatles' The White Album, last night the quartet staged an ambitious cover of the Rolling Stones' 18-song double LP, Exile on Main St. As in years past, the costume choice was a closely-guarded secret...

Last night Phish tore through the first two of eight sets which the quartet's scheduled to play during their three day "Festival 8" in Indio, California. The Halloween-themed bacchanal, taking place at the astonishingly beautiful Empire Polo Grounds (also home to the Coachella music festival), is a homecoming of sorts for Phish, which invented a new rock festival model in 1996—even before disgruntled audience members rioted at Woodstock '99 over the rapacious price of water. Phish was the first contemporary band to organize multi-day rock festivals which treated attendees like guests, not numbers. This novel approach inspired Bonnaroo, where Phish performed for the first time in June.