Reagan’s body is being prepared for burial at Gates, Kingley & Gates Funeral Home, about five blocks away from our house and less than a block from our hospital, where we’ll be delivering our baby in the next week or so.

When we walked by the area earlier today, four full blocks of Arizona were closed down, with news crews swarming the area since 2pm today. I’ve never heard so many helicopters.

June 13, 2004: An anonymous comment in this entry inspired the launch of the new Republican 2004 presidential ticket: Vote Bush/Zombie-Reagan.

As predicted, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was camcorded and leaked online today, moments after the Friday matinees ended on the East coast. The NFO file released by UTi indicates that this may be their last release because of “not so recent but still evident events.” (Arrests? Increased security?)

The sample image distributed with the movie pokes fun at Warner Brothers’ attempt to thwart piracy by issuing military-style night-vision goggles to theater ushers. I guess it didn’t work very well.

June 5, 2004: Here’s a 50 second sample (MPG, 8.1 MB) of the bootleg video. As you can see, the video and audio aren’t very good, and the aspect ratio is bad.

High demand forced the official Fahrenheit 9/11 trailer offline, so I’m mirroring the high-quality Windows Media trailer right here.

• WMV: Fahrenheit 9/11 Trailer – High Quality (25 MB)

Update: Apple is hosting the Quicktime trailer, and the official site is hosting both trailers again.

Five days after the assassination of John Lennon, radio engineer Rob Grayson compiled a montage of every Beatles song in alphabetical order and aired it following a ten minute period of silence.

• MP3: Rob Grayson’s “Beatles A-Z” (16 minutes, 9.1MB), from December 13, 1980.

The production effort involved is impressive, done entirely on tape. You can read more about it on the Rob Grayson Collection. Some of the comments are good, as well.

The Lennon tribute is a small part of Reel Radio, a massive archive of pre-1989 Top 40 Radio audio clips. Many are hour-long unedited radio broadcasts, like this Alan Freed broadcast from March 23, 1955, or these two Don Steele broadcasts from a couple months after I was born. Try using the search engine to find a clip from your year of birth.

Unfortunately, the clips are all in RealPlayer format, so be sure to install Real Alternative before you go, so you don’t have to deal with that bloated piece of crap.

Wayne White, a Chattanooga-born artist living and working in Los Angeles, buys mass-produced thrift-store/garage-sale lithographs and paints amazing 3D word-art onto them. His use of typography is stunning, reminiscent of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library covers.

The Clementine Gallery in New York has two high-quality photo galleries of his work, from 2002 and 2004. My personal favorites: I Love the Whole Fucking World, Take Your Forms Wrestled form the Void and Get the Hell Out, Painting that Came to Life Only to be Mocked-Forgotten, and Luv Hurtz.

In his professional life, he’s an acclaimed commercial artist, famously known as the art director for Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time,” the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight Tonight,” and the Snapple bottle puppet commercials. He was also the voice of Mr. Kite and Randy on Pee Wee’s Playhouse, where he was a set designer and puppet maker. ArtForum reviewed his artwork in late 2002. More information, including more images and a bio, is available at the Western Project.