While performing in London earlier this week, the Dixie Chicks’ lead singer Natalie Maines said, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” The comments and the followup explanation stirred up some controversy back home, leading to boycotts from country radio stations and the largely-conservative country music audience.

The comments from the online forums show how polarizing politics can be to a community of fans. The unofficial Dixie Chicks news forum thread has 63 posts so far, almost entirely by estranged (and often insulting) former fans. That’s relatively civil compared to Usenet or the always incendiary Yahoo Message Boards. It looks like their official website is offline, and the rest of the fan sites are getting slammed this morning from too much activity.

Crispin “Hellion” Glover will be on Late Show with David Letterman tonight for the first third time since his disastrous appearance in July 1987, when he took the stage in a wig and big platform shoes, offered up a brief and bizarre interview, and delivered a high kick inches from Letterman’s face. The producers cut to commercial and he hasn’t been seen on the show since. Here’s a collage of eight screen captures from that episode. (If you have a video clip, send it to me!)

So it should be an interesting show tonight. Unfortunately, Dave’s out sick; maybe Crispin will try to jump-kick guest host Will Ferrell instead. (Or maybe he’ll sing “Ben.”)

I’ve included a full transcript below of the 1987 appearance below.

July 16, 2003: Consumption Junction has the video clip of the original Letterman appearance (careful at work).

The Google Dance has begun, and it looks like I finally overtook the Scott Baio fan club in a search for “baio.” Take that, Chachi! (If you still see the old results, try the Google Dance Tool to search all their servers.)

For all you Scott Baio fans ending up here, here’s a little something special for you. In the late 1980s, Chachi hosted a series of sex-ed videos targeted to pre-teen and teenagers. You can buy them online, and preview the video clips for each. That’s Edutainment!

Some RSS readers are vulnerable to security exploits and other annoyances embedded in RSS/XML feeds. This morning, Phil showed me a proof-of-concept sample for Newsgator, the Outlook-based RSS reader, triggered by VBScript code in an RSS feed that e-mails a random person in your Outlook address book.

Other readers may not be vulnerable to Outlook-style hacks, but they can still be screwed up by Javascript. Try subscribing to this RSS feed I created with your reader of choice. Syndirella displays the popup window and crashes on the Javascript alerts. How about other readers?

Just to be clear, I’m not saying this is a serious issue. Users only subscribe to trusted RSS feeds, and feed providers are extremely unlikely to put malicious code in their feeds. It’s just interesting that it works.

My friend Mat Honan and his wife Harper have been backpacking across Southeast Asia for the past five months. While staying in Laos, the country sandwiched between Cambodia and Vietnam, they contracted the dengue virus, or “break-bone fever.” His weblog entry is a gripping survival story.

I stayed home sick from work today with a head cold and sore throat; now I feel like a big sissy.

Congratulations to my good friend “Crazy Uncle Joe” Utsler on the birth of his new daughter, Zöe Alexis Utsler. Welcome to the world, kid!

I followed a link from Boing Boing this morning to this Tripod-hosted Disney website, but was instead prompted with an error: “The Tripod page you are trying to reach has exceeded its hourly bandwidth limit. The site will be available again in 1 hour!”

The site’s owner can then pay Tripod for bandwidth upgrades. But why can’t the end user volunteer to pay the upgrade fees, so they can get to the information they want? Similarly, readers of Blogspot-hosted weblogs can’t volunteer to “gift upgrade” their favorite websites to Blogspot Plus accounts; only the site’s owner can upgrade.

Is there a good reason for limiting their revenue like this? Is there some sort of privacy issue I’m not aware of? It seems like a huge oversight.

As discussed in Rob Malda’s journal, Slashdot is considering allowing early access to pending Slashdot stories for premium subscribers. But who cares about seeing one or two stories an hour, 10 minutes before it goes live?

A much better idea would be to allow paid access to the massive Slashdot submission queue, a business model made popular by Fark and FuckedCompany. This would allow eager newshounds and journalists to access a real-time feed of unedited story ideas and breaking news items, updated hundreds of times an hour.

I promised myself last year that I’d never go again, but the tentative lineup for this year’s Coachella Festival in Palm Springs is too tempting. How can I pass up seeing Badly Drawn Boy, Ben Folds, Ben Kweller, Cat Power, Gomez, the White Stripes, Ladytron, Tortoise, Sonic Youth, Polyphonic Spree, Soundtrack of Our Lives, Mouse on Mars, RJD2, El P, Amon Tobin and Stereo Total at a single event? Even at $140 for a two-day pass, it’s a deal.

Update: Goldenvoice posted the official set list. Looks like Cat Power was removed. (It’s probably for the best, since Chan Marshall has difficulty enough playing small clubs.)

For insightful commentary regarding the Google/Pyra buyout, look no further than the Yahoo Message Boards thread.

Yahoo Message Boards continues to be one of the strangest web-based communities ever. I’d love to see someone break down their user base to see if there are regular contributors, or if it’s completely composed of transient users clicking on news items.