Our pals at Archie McPhee’s have listed what they believe are the “Worst Celebrity Product Licenses of All Time.” Deservedly holding the top spot: Supremes brand white bread!

Carl Franzen at the Atlantic compiles other sites’ “Odd, Overreaching ‘Decade’ Lists.” Among them is Billboard’s list of “One Hit Wonders of the 2000s.” This one’s a particularly odd list, mainly because the pop charts have become so meaningless. Back when commercial music radio meant something, the Top 100 chart meant what you’d be allowed to listen to on the ol’ AM/FM. But now, the likes of Gnarles Barkley and Macy Gray can carve out decent careers for themselves without returning to the top of singles-sales.

If any medium besides periodical print was turned totally upside down these past 10 years, it was music. Here’s former ROKRGRL publisher Carla DeSantis’s list of  “Top 10 Trends from the Past 10 Years that Changed Music Forever.” Included: The decline and pending doom of the compact disc, the TV-soundtrack-song mania, American Idol, and the seemingly contradictory trends of the female train-wreck diva and the Lilith Fair-esque folkstress.

We didn’t learn about it until today, but Bob Kondrak passed away late last month at age 61. He was an avid photographer, an early documentor of the Seattle punk scene. His son Kuri currently DJs around town.

Also recently deceased is Serbian novelist Milorad Pavic, 80. Pavic became an international success with his novel Dictionary of the Khazars, a nonlinear revisionist history of the western world.

His works dealt deftly with the clashes of races, religions, nationalities, genders, and schools of philosophy over the tumultous centuries, and treated all the parties in said conflicts with equal humanity. But when it came to his own time and place in history, Pavic chose sides, defending Milosovec’s violent but futile drive to hold onto the mini-empire that was Yugoslavia.

Whom do you believe?

Brian Eno, who says the “long tail” of online media means infinite artistic styles are in circulation at once, result in “the death of uncool”?

Or Lee Gomes in a year-and-a-half-old Wall St. Journal essay, refuting the whole Long Tail theory and insisting that “hits and blockbusters remain every bit as important online”?

… so here it is so you can blame me first. It’s a steadicam music video in which a lot of Shorecrest High students dance backwards and lip-sync to Outkast’s “Hey Ya.” (“Dad, what was a ‘Polaroid picture’?”)

Was intrigued (if not completely satisfied) by the new Prisoner miniseries, which finished a three-night run on AMC Tuesday. It was well produced and exquisitely acted, even though the ending explained too much. (I won’t spoil it for you future BitTorrent DVD viewers.)

The old show mixed Swinging London iconography with Cold War politics, 007-esque spying with Big Brother paranoia.

The new show mixed Matrix psycho-techno-babble with corporate oppression, social-gaming fantasies with the suffocating terror that is Reagan-Bush era “family values.”

And it was fun to hear the Brian Wilson music samples. Because most of those were from Smile, which had been composed at the time of the original Prisoner series but not finished until 2004, they added a time/space distortion field that perfectly fit the story’s psycho-consciousness distortion field.

I know, it seems like just a little over nine years ago when we were pooh-poohing the “Y2K Bug” and hunkering down for a big night of decade- (and millennium-) launching glory.

Now, this pathetic excuse for a time period has only 44 days left.

At media outlets everywhere, that means it’s time to crank up the crackpot pundits for a round or 12 of retrospection.

F’rinstance, here’s NPR’s gaggle of music critics attempting to compile themost important 50 CDs of the decade, in alphabetical order by artist.

Nor’Westers will be pleased to find Death Cab for Cutie, the Decemberists, and the Postal Service on the list. I’m pleased to find the Strokes’ Is This It, produced by erstwhile Seattle music legend Gordon Raphael, on there.

Feliks Banel offers fond recollections of the late great KJET, the AM modern-rock station that ruled a small but eventually-influential portion of Seattle’s listening audience from 1982 to 1988.

Mount Holyoke College prof Douglas J. Amy insists that “Government is Good,” and has a whole detailed site all about why.

Cenk Uygur, meanwhile, explores the other side of this ideological divide, and decides today’s big business power-grabbers aren’t interested in democracy or even capitalism; but that’s only to be expected from “corporatists.”

Political PR maven Jonah Sachs insists progressives have gotta stop being so damned rational. He argues that public opinion in this country isn’t swayed by analytical arguments but by emotional appeals.

Guess who uses social-media sites the most? That long-neglected demographic caste, the stay-home moms.

Paul Krugman wrote it weeks ago, but I’m still trying to get to the end of his long essay asking the musical question, How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? The answer to his query’s easy, really. Economics is either the most or second-most fraudulant “science” out there (competing with sociology). Economic theory has less to do with the world most of us live in and more in common with the virtual worlds created by or for role-playing gamers

Henry Gibson, who passed away Monday, had a long and solid acting career ranging from Nashville to Magnolia and Boston Legal. But he’ll always be known as “the Poet” on the original Laugh-In. Gibson was a prime example of that show’s basic premise. Laugh-In was suit-and-tie guys (what we’d now call the Mad Men generation) looking gently askew at Those Darned Hippies. Saturday Night Live, by contrast, WAS Those Darned Hippies.

At least Gibson died without the tragic career footnote faced by Peter, Paul and Mary co-singer Mary Travers. She faced her cancer-ridden final months with the indignity of having one of her group’s hit songs reworked into the unauthorized political hatched-job “Barack the Magic Negro.”

Some clever publishers, with permission of the bands being referenced, are putting out an Indie Rock Coloring Book. (I know, some of you snarkers would color all the pages pale, white, or the colors of dingy discount sneakers.)

One of his former lawyers says it just might have been the same thing that did in his first wife’s dad.

The ultimate tabloid celebrity was also the ultimate mess of contradictions, as you’ve long known. He was a devout student of classic R&B who had a series of nose and chin reconstructions, straightened his hair, and wore whiteface makeup on and off stage. He was a self-made sex symbol whose mark of “toughness” was to shriek in an attempt to reach the high notes of his early fame. He was a creator of effortless-sounding music whose life was rife with chaos, drug/alcohol abuse, and music-industry sycophants. He was a beloved entertainer who was accused of some of the most heinous crimes. He’d attained unlimited wealth (or the closest thing to that any African-American man has ever had), then spent the last third of his life scrambling to avoid total financial collapse.

In all the TV, radio, and online chatter in the first hours since his demise, I’ve been reading and hearing the wildest tales. Given what we know about his life, even the wildest of these rumors seem believable, whether or not they’re true.

My favorite quotation about Jackson came in a Facebook message from ex-Seattle semiotician Steven Shaviro: “MJ, in his musical genius and in his sad racial and sexual confusions, epitomized American civilization more than anybody else ever did.”

…and best wishes to top local music producer Conrad Uno (Young Fresh Fellows, PUSA, and more). He and his lovely bride Emily Bishton renewed their wedding vows at Safeco Field on Sunday. The here-linked Seattle Times article mentions almost nothing about Uno’s musical career.

…today to Bob Bogle, Ventures founding guitarist and NW rock legend. His band got into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame just last year. His distinctively crisp, cool instrumental sound is eternal.