Billboard.BIZ

INDEED, IT IS NOT OVER: Your best-selling album of 2007? Daughtry. Top single? Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry". Tons of interesting Billboard charts linked.

I DON'T REMEMBER THIS BEING PART OF THAT ATARI ARCADE GAME: How much should one provide one's New York Times Sat-Sun home delivery carrier as a holiday gift, when an envelope is provided annually for such purposes by the carrier and, one year, one found oneself receiving increasingly intermittent and inaccurate service from a previous carrier for not having gifted promptly?

SO THE ISLAND'S ACTUALLY JUST A HOSPITAL: The most shocking thing about ABC's spring schedule is that they're yanking almost everything that doesn't have new episodes. Grey's Anatomy? Gone. Pushing Daisies? Gone. Private Practice? Gone. Brothers and Sisters? Gone. Dirty Sexy Money? Gone. Of note for folks around here--Lost goes in to Thursdays at 9 starting 1/31, replacing Grey's in the "flagship" slot. (And to keep it away from Idol.) It gets the odd pairing as a leadout--Eli Stone, Greg Berlanti's midseason drama about a young lawyer who starts having visions (I suspect SpyDaddy + Berlanti + Lawyers alone = substantial ALOTT5MA tune-in).

reality blurred + Saleisha's modeling experiences and work with Tyra raise questions about her win

YES, I ALREADY MISS JASLENE'S MY LIFE AS A COVERGIRL SEGMENTS MORE THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE: But to win America's Next Top Model, should you just maybe not be so successful that you've already been featured in a Wendy's commercial and done runway work on a previous cycle of ANTM?

This was not a great season -- cycle two (Yoanna/Shandi/Mercedes/Xiomara/TinyJenascia) remains the pinnacle, with cycle seven (CariDee, Melrose and the twins) high up there. But even a pretty-good season of TyraMail is better than most other reality shows.

THINKING OUTSIDE THE ENVELOPE: F/X, apparently eager to prolong the long-overdue retirement of the "box" analogy as a way of distinguishing one's own thinking from boring, rote, uncreative adherence to convention (conventions like using "box" analogies, for example), has adopted a shiny new stupid promotional campaign: There Is No Box.

Leaving aside the fact that, as our children all know, it's not a box, the FX World is a cold and uninviting place. Witness a typical Saturday in this dystopia: You wake up and tap a barrel of Special K for breakfast over the newspaper, where you read that Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg have been arrested for indecency. You drive down to your local big-pile store, where you buy some gifts, including the Wire: Season 4 bagged set. In the afternoon, you spend some quality time reading to your kids, puzzling over the enduring appeal of a story about a behatted feline who unseals a burlap sack to release the bloodied and exhausted Thing One and the wet carcass of Thing Two. After making a coinpurse of Annie's Organic Arthuroni Mac + Cheese for the kids and tucking them in for the night, you settle down with a sack of Franzia for the Mayweather-Hatton slapping match. Ah, slapping -- the sweet science.

SO LONG, IT'S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YA: I think last night's 30 Rock was the last one they got in the can before the strike. The plots dragged, but the throwaway lines were great, so I'm happy. My favorite: in keeping with the show's role as network television's most subversive parody of race relations and liberal hypocrisy about the same, Liz Lemon's home town is "White Haven."

ROCK, ROCK, ROCK AND ROLL RECESS: In May of 1974 Jon Landau reviewed a concert of a guy so utterly unheralded at the time that he was the opening act for Bonnie Raitt at a tiny club in Cambridge (where I grew up). Landau famously wrote:

“I saw my rock-and-roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock-and-roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.”

When I was volunteering at my son’s school recess on Wednesday I saw something similar. It began like something you’d see in grainy black and white footage documenting the early days of Beatlemania. The vast majority of the third grade came out of the building in a screaming pack. Soon I noticed that they all appeared to be chasing a boy named Isaac.

I started to worry about the safety of Isaac and the other kids. I asked my son Liam what was going on. “Isaac promised us that he would sing at recess!” he replied.

Eventually the crowd more or less calmed down. Isaac and a few other children hopped up on the edge of one of the circular cement planters. Holding his hand near his mouth as if he were holding a microphone, one lad yelled “Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for my friend and the world’s greatest singer, Isaac!” Isaac sang! I confess that I couldn’t make out the words well enough to tell you what song he was singing, but he clearly had the crowd in the palm of his hand. Then a few other kids sang.

The highlight of the scene for me took place when it was a boy named Alex’s turn to sing. He started with an apology. “I’m just going to sing the chorus of this next song.” Then, with a dashing smile like an altar boy doing something the nuns might not approve of, he announced “I’m gonna sing a song by the group Kiss.”

He began to sing in a clear and melodic voice:

“I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day”

The crowd started to clap their hands in time to the music with their hands above their heads. A moment later about 60 3rd graders were singing along at the top of their lungs:

“I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day”

As the song petered out, the crowd gave Alex a huge round of applause. The bell announcing the end of recess rang.

To paraphrase Landau’s august pronouncement, these children made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.