Since The Wire is gone forever, my Sunday night television schedule is completely vacant — sorry, Paul Giamatti in a wig wasn't enough to tempt me. Instead, I finally tore the plastic on Runnin' Down a Dream, Peter Bogdanovich's epic, two-DVD documentary covering the entire career of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Since it clocks in at four hours, I didn't get through the whole film, but halfway through the first disc, record producer-turned-executive Jimmy Iovine said something that caught my attention.

In his still-thick New Yawk accent, Iovine opines that an artist's third record is typically their strongest. To paraphrase him: A debut LP usually features compositions that the musicians has been tinkering with for a decade, so the songs are amazing, but the recording is raw and unpolished. The follow-up LP usually suffers because it's rushed and put together in less than a year, thus the famous sophomore slump. Then, with their career on the line, musicians works extra hard to make the third album be a keeper. Iovine's examples? Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, Patti Smith's Easter, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' Damn the Torpedoes.

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Today we got a huge poster for Indiana Jones And the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in the mail. I've seen the trailer and read countless articles about it over the past few months, but seeing the lobby-ready poster made it really sink in — this fucker's finally coming out. Indiana Jones 4 and Rocky 6 were two frequent topics of conversation at my sixth grade lunch table. The questions were endless: Could Rocky still box after the life-threatening brain injury he sustained in Russia fighting Ivan Drago? Is Indiana Jones immortal after drinking from the cup of Christ? Why did Rocky Jr. age so much between parts four and five? Now that Rocky 6 has happened and Indiana Jones is a mere two months away (both distant dreams back in 1995) what else am I sick of waiting for? Here's a list:

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Hanging in my cubicle here at Rolling Stone's stately world headquarters is the cover of our June 24th, 1999 edition: a portrait of Jar Jar Binks reading RS’ first Star Wars issue. It was, of course, an awful idea. It turned out that everyone — even pre-schoolers — hated Jar Jar Binks, almost as much as they loathed the awful child who played Anakin Skywalker. But the cover — with its stone-classic cover line, "Jar Jar Superstar" — remains a thing of beauty.

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We get a lot of stuff at the office. Much of it is awesome: tons of CDs, t-shirts, posters — even the occasional $40,000 stereo. Last year, I got sent a spray can of Diddy’s fragrance, Unforgivable. I have kept it on my desk ever since, mostly because I think the name is hysterical. Is he serious with that? Do you want to smell "unforgivable"? As it turns out, Unforgivable smells unforgivably bad. One night, I jokingly sprayed some at a colleague to ward him off. He almost threw up. For hours thereafter, people would walk by my office, assume a horrified expression, and ask where that awful odor was coming from. At this point, it's like mace. If someone pisses me off, I just hold up the can as a threat and they'll do anything I say. Thanks Diddy. You're the man.

Above is the album cover for Madonna's new album Hard Candy. Seriously. There are many questions (for example, "Is she feeling okay?"), but the main one is this: What is Madonna the champion of? Candy? Straddling? She's taping her hands — does she want to challenge UFC Lightweight Champion B.J. Penn? (Let's hope not, as I'm pretty sure he'd snap her arms off.) The mind reels.

I ran into Mike Watt backstage at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Monday night. Watt is an old friend (and one of my all-time heroes) and he'd just come off stage with the Stooges after killing on covers of Madonna's "Burning Up" and "Ray of Light." Watt's got deep history with Madonna — back in '86 he covered "Burnin' Up" with the Sonic Youth side project Ciccone Youth, and in the '90s he fronted a band called the Madonnabes. But black-tie is not Watt's style (he was decked out in a blue mechanic's jumpsuit) and he told me he felt "weird and out of place" at the swanky Waldorf-Astoria event. Watt skipped the dinner and cocktails to stay in his room at the Waldorf (which he renamed the "Waldork") working on a new song for Funanori, his awesome, trippy collaboration with Go Team! guitarist Kaori Tsuchida. In an email the next day, Watt filled me in on his multiple other new projects, including a new Black Gang album with guitarist Nels Cline, a Stooges tour this Spring and a collaboration with Tobacco from Black Moth Super Rainbow. "He's into synths and electronics mostly, stuff that's really new me," Watt wrote. "It's teaching much — which I think is important for a fifty year old punk rocker!" For anyone in L.A., Watt's got a gig tonight at Safari Sam's with his stellar trio the Missingmen. His only regret about the Hall of Fame night? "I found out later I might've been able to meet John Fogerty," he wrote, "which would've been incredible for someone like me." I asked if he got to meet Madonna. "I was too afraid to talk w/her," Watt wrote, "but she shook my hand."

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies are the only forum in rock where bitter ex-bandmates are forced to come together publicly. Sometimes they temporarily bury the hatchet and perform one last time (Talking Heads, the Mamas & the Papas, the Velvet Underground), but often the shit hits the fan. Everybody expected last year's Van Halen induction to devolve into a steel cage match, but instead nobody named Van Halen or Roth showed up and the only massacre was Paul Shaeffer's take on "Why Can’t This Be Love." Things got pretty uncomfortable in 2005 when former members of Blondie started bitching out Debbie Harry onstage, and in 1993 John Fogerty left his stunned Creedence bandmates at the podium and performed with Bruce Springsteen. John Paul Jones had one of the great Rock Hall lines when he thanked Jimmy Page and Robert Plant for "remembering my phone number." We haven't seen fireworks recently, but here's a look ahead at some potentially wonderfully awkward moments:

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Britney Spears premieres her new animated video today, which made me think of this. The above clip is the opening to Kingdom Hearts 2, a video game for Playstation 2 that combines that the Final Fantasy game series with the Disney universe. The video is a delightfully trippy piece of Japanese video game animation, but the song underneath it is truly awesome: it's by Utada Hikaru, a Japanese dance-pop singer who has apparently sold forty-one million albums worldwide. Since only dorks like myself have gotten the chance to experience "My Sanctuary" (a haunting piece of jagged disco), I now share it with the universe. Clearly, Britney has an uphill battle ahead of her. Now I'll go back to playing Dungeons and Dragons.

There are thousands of albums available online for as little as one cent (which is far more satisfying than downloading for free, for some reason). Some of them are gems. Here is one of them.

What It Is: The only major label release from Girls Against Boys, a Washington, D.C.-bred, keyboard-heavy post-hardcore band who put out a series of excellent albums in the early 1990s (including Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby and House of GVSB).

What the Idea Was: Girls Against Boys combined two things that record executives were excited about in the mid-'90s: alt-rock and dance music. Their dangerous-sounding low end dance beats seemed like a natural fit for an industry who thought the Prodigy was going to be the next big thing.

Why It's Only a Penny: By the time this album came out in 1998, both the alt-rock and electronica bubbles had essentially burst. It doesn't help that the album sometimes sounds like a parody of a Girls Against Boys recording and contains the lyric "Kiss my soundsystem/Eat my headache." Also, it's called Freak On Ica.

Why It's Worth the Shipping: "Psycho-Future" and "Push the Fader" are hard-hitting, sludgy workouts that are interrupted by jagged shards of post-punk guitar. Had this album come out a few years earlier, these guys could have totally opened for U2.

A couple of months ago I got the chance to talk to veteran actor and director Clark Johnson, whose turn as Gus Haynes, the acerbic city desk editor of the Baltimore Sun, was the moral core of the final season of The Wire. Along with directing the series finale last Sunday, Johnson directed the show's premier episode six years ago. "I'm either a great visionary or a show-killer," Johnson said with a laugh. "It’s either a glass half-empty or half-full kind of thing."

Johnson had this to say about his character Gus Haynes: "He’s Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen all grown up and bitter. Jimmy finally gets over the bitter phase and is wiser now because he’s an editor. And to be an effective editor, you’ve gotta have a finely tuned bullshit meter. Otherwise, you become a suit. And Gus is like, 'What’s with those glasses Clark Kent? I see right through you.'"

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