In the past few months, I've personally witnessed everyone from Jay-Z to the Roots to Joanna Newsom interrupting their concerts to show Sen. Barack Obama some love - plus, of course, I've heard the billions of shout-outs that they and other musicians have offered him in interviews, songs, and videos. Now, just in time for the candidate's coronation by the punditocracy this week, we've got another musical endorsement on our hands. This one's from L.A. dreamer Ti$a, a.k.a. Taz Arnold of acclaimed left-of-center hip-hop collective Sa-Ra. And unlike many of the well-meaning tributes thrown Obama's way, Ti$a's "Vote Obama" is kinda fun regardless of your politics.

Not the song itself, necessarily. (It loops Ice Cube's "It Was A Good Day" over, and over, and over, pushing that classic sample to the brink of annoyance. There aren't much in the way of lyrics, either.) But check out that video (below)! It's a pure candy-colored psychedelic treat, featuring featuring lots of celeb cameos. (Kanye West, Chris Brown, um, Travis Barker...) I haven't seen such a weird and cool-looking piece of campaign propaganda since Mike Gravel's last viral opus.

So help me brainstorm here. What cabinet position do you think Taz deserves in January based on this fine piece of work? Undersecretary of Trippy Parades? Day-Glo Funkmaster General, perchance? I think even John McCain could agree on one of those...

Yes, PEHDTSCKJMBA. It's pronounced "pesskah-jumbah," roughly, and, as Tom Waits explains in the transfixing press-conference clip below, it's an acronym for the cities he'll be playing on this summer's "Glitter and Doom" tour: Phoenix, El Paso, Houston, Dallas...  PEHDTSCKJMBA can also stand for "People Envy Happiness; Dogs, Though, Sense Courage, Knowing Jubilation Means Better Assets," Waits informs us.
Really, you should just watch the whole thing as soon as possible. (Make positively sure to stay through the end - it's only 4 minutes long.) Waits deconstructs the meet-the-press ritual with his typical oddball panache, leading to a Q&A session that's about as surreal as any of Dylan's in Don't Look Back.

So what do you think of this bit of performance art? Does it make you any more interested in Waits' tour? And perhaps most importantly, as a friend of mine asked after seeing this clip, which is stranger: This stunt or the fact that Scarlett Johansson is actually releasing an album of Waits covers in a couple weeks? PEHDTSCKJMBA!

"No one in novels watches TV," a character declares early in Jane Austen Book Club author Karen Joy Fowler's Wit's End, by way of explaining why she no longer thinks printed literature is a truly living medium. There are several levels of irony included in that casual dismissal: This character happens to be a wildly successful novelist herself, for one. And Wit's End happens to be a novel in which lots of people watch a lot of TV. Fowler's characters chat casually about Lost, Prison Break, 24, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Battlestar Galactica, Bones, and more. She really does capture what it's like to be a post-millennial pop-culture junkie without beating the theme into readers' heads, and that alone makes me respectfully differ with the solid B that Wit's End received in EW recently. I wolfed it down over the course of two recent plane flights, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Wit's End has also gotten much attention for the way its plot turns on characters' use of Wikipedia, LiveJournal, and fanfic sites. The websites themselves come to life practically as vividly as some of Fowler's secondary characters. As io9's Annalee Newitz has put it, this makes the novel a kind of "science fiction in the present": "While there are no aliens here, or artificial intelligences who come to life, Wit's End manages to skirt the edges of science fiction themes beautifully, hinting at the ways our lives have become the stuff of science fiction without us noticing." And these big, explicit nods to the world that Web 2.0 has wrought aren't so different from those incidental TV references, are they? In both, Fowler is playing with the communities created by a popular medium - the incredible collective experiences shared by people who watch a series or user-edit a website.

I think the reason I like Wit's End so much is because it fits into one of my favorite kinds of entertainment: pop culture about other kinds of pop culture. The Truman Show was a movie about TV; the fourth-season finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm was a TV episode about Broadway (Mel Brooks' The Producers). Have any of you out there read Wit's End? And even if not, do you have any other favorite cross-media works of art like this?

It's official: my two favorite fictional worlds are colliding! Upper East Side meets L.A. West Side as Blair Waldorf ditches class at Constance Billard to hang (or perhaps even canoodle?) with leading man Vincent Chase. Okay, so it's not the Queen B herself but alter-ego, actress Leighton Meester (pictured), who will guest star on Entourage, but I'm pretty excited nonetheless. HBO has confirmed to EW.com that the Gossip Girl star will reprise her Entourage season 1 role as Britney Spears-esque pop tart Justine Chapin on an episode of the comedy. Meester has a knack for playing the virginal sexpot, so we can only guess what sparks will fly when she heads back to the left coast.

Iron Man and Batman face off, below.

I'm a Marvel...And I'm a DC on FunnyOrDie.com

There's existentialism! And be sure to stick around for the herpes reference. Totally worth it. Unlike... you know, actual herpes.

There are some people you just know you'd like. And Marion Ross, a.k.a. Happy Days' Mrs. Cunningham, is one of them. She didn't disappoint when she phoned PopWatch to chat about ABC's latest special, TV's All-Time Funniest (May 9, 8 p.m. ET), and answer reader questions. How did she get cast on Gilmore Girls? Will she return to Brothers & Sisters? Where can you see her in "the greatest fart scene since Blazing Saddles?" (Okay, you didn't ask that last one, but aren't you glad she brought it up?) Read on.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: If you had to submit one scene from Happy Days to secure your win as TV's Funniest Mother, which would you choose?
Marion Ross: Well, I had a wonderful one where I did a belly dance for Howard, to put some spunk back in the marriage. It is so funny. The writers said, "Marion comes down the stairs doing a belly dance." I thought, Did anybody ask me if I could do this?

That actually leads nicely into our first reader question: MRS. TAYLOR wants to know how hard it was - or wasn't - for you to perform that dance for Howard (Tom Bosley).
[Laughs] I remember it as not being a good day at all. When I see it, it looks very nice and easy. I had lines like, "Treat me rough... Treat me rough." But when you put on that costume, that helps.

BF asks, "What was up with the sexual tension between Mrs. Cunningham and the Fonz?"
[Laughs] Well, we just adored each other, that was all. [Henry Winkler] always made such a fuss over me, and it would fluster me so. The more flustered I would be, then the more he would do that to me. We're very, very close friends. I just adore him. We're bronzing the Fonz in Milwaukee in August. There'll be a statue of the Fonz in the park.

JAKEEM2007 is curious about what you think of today's more risqué sitcoms, and whether you're an avid watcher of any of them.
No, just Brothers & Sisters, which is not a sitcom. I think one of the problems is that we don't know the people on the new sitcoms, the characters. People feel they know us [on Happy Days] - that we're real, and that we really come from Milwaukee. I think it takes awhile to build up something like that, and these shows are faster. Although, I loved Friends. You felt like you were there with them, and you didn't want them to end. You know my daughter, Ellen Plummer, was a writer-producer on Friends. She said she would regale the writers' table with some dumb, dumb thing I had done and try to work it into the script. I'd think, Oh my gosh, I got to be careful what I say.

2CENTS asks whether you'd ever consider doing Desperate Housewives because  "a version of Mrs. C - even someone that dressed and acted like they were in the '50s would be so cool, and odd, and perfect for that show."
Well, you know, I did a spoof [on the 2005 TV Land Awards] where I played Bree. She killed her husband, and Tom Bosley was the husband. I think I poisoned him. I would love to be on Desperate Housewives. I think it would be so funny. I always wanted to be on Roseanne Barr's show. Like, knock on the door and just borrow a cup of sugar. Be as sweet and Mrs. C as possible. [Laughs] I would like to be on Monk. [PopWatch gasps] Is that a good idea?
Yes. What kind of character would you want to play?
Somebody quite insane. He would be trying to deal with me sensibly, you know, but I would be highly, highly neurotic and insane.

NINEDAVES wonders if there's any job you've turned down in your career that you regret.
I have turned down a lot of smaller movies that are just absolutely pornographic, and then I turn around, and I see some actresses that I know very well took 'em. I think Well, I'm still glad I didn't take it. I don't care. These young boys that write these scripts think it is so funny to have a sweet, clean lady like me in one of these scandalous little situations. I can see 'em fall down writing this. I don't want to be made sport of.
Can you give us one example of a movie that you turned down?
No, I can't. [Laughs] Because someone else took it! But, you know, right now I am in Superhero Movie. I play Leslie Nielsen's wife. Terrible things happen to me in this movie, and I love being in this because here's this young boy, Drake Bell. He's a big star, and I never heard of him in my life. So, I thought, I have to keep up with what's going on. I have the greatest fart scene since Blazing Saddles in this movie. [Snorts]
We love a good fart scene. What happens?
You have to go to the movie. I'm not gonna give you this free! [Laughs]

Fine. RAE would love to know how you liked working on Gilmore Girls.
I loved being on Gilmore Girls. I was proud of myself because that wonderful Amy Sherman-Palladino sent me the script with a note saying, "I know you're not old enough to play this part, but we'd love to have you do it," but I was too busy at the time. So my agent said, "No, she's too busy, she can't do it." But on Saturday morning, I woke up and said, "Oh, that's too good a script," so I personally called up the studio and said, "Listen, why don't we shoot this another week? I have to go away on Tuesday." "What are you doing Monday?" "Nothing." "Okay, it's Saturday. We'll send out the hairdresser to get your gray wig. Wardrobe lady will come out on Sunday, and figure out something. Monday, you can start. You go away and do that other thing, then you'll come back." I was so pleased that I made such an effort because otherwise I wouldn't have gotten to do that, and I love that show. I love that Lauren Graham. I love everybody. Of course, I didn't have much time to learn the lines, and you have to talk very fast. Ed Herrmann [Richard Gilmore] would walk me around, and say, "You can do it. You can do it. You can do it!" [Laughs]

Moving on to another great show, SNARF hopes you'll reprise your role as Ida, Nora and Saul's mother, on Brothers & Sisters. Any chance of that happening?
Yes! I just talked to [the producers], and they want me to come back [in season 3]. I said to them, "I think she drinks, don't you? I think that Grandma drinks a little bit." [Laughs]

What else are you working on?
I'm going to be doing a new play called The Last Romance, written by Joe DiPietro, who wrote I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, in Overland Park, Kansas [from Sept. 4 through Nov. 9]. It was written for me and my beau, Mr. Paul Michael, so this is a thrill. It's very funny, and then it's very touching. And in June, my hometown, Albert Lea in southern Minnesota, is renaming their cultural theater in my name. So Paul and I are going to go and do Love Letters to help raise money for the new sign on the theater. And then I'll speak to the high school graduation class... So, it's a busy life.

Honestly, I don't see what Mal's so peeved about. Saffron's a lovely girl...

It's not too late to tune in to tomorrow's Pangea Day, an international film event on which short films contributed by people around the world will be broadcast live simultaneously. Pangea, a term you may remember from fifth grade geography (as Pangaea), was the name of the original recipe continent before the land mass split into extra tasty crispy America and Everywhere Else. The four-hour program begins at 2 p.m. EST. Watch it online or on TV, or on your high-tech video phone or mosey on over a hosted event in your area. One of many trailers is below.

When I was a kid, there was no country music in our household - except for one song, Eddy Arnold's truly immortal 1955 smash, "Cattle Call," which somehow got a pass. Like a lot of children of the second half of the 20th century, I grew up with parents who had made the transition from farming to suburbia and who probably rejected country, consciously or unconsciously, as an unnecessary reminder of the rural lifestyle they'd worked so hard to get away from. But my father had an inordinate love for "Cattle Call," which featured Arnold breaking into a falsetto yodel between verses about howling coyotes, wide open prairies, and a cowboy who's "lonesome" but also has a "heart (that's) a feather in all kinds of weather." For somebody who'd actually grown up among the cattle, that had to have been a nice, wistful tonic at the end of a hard day of being a CPA, and we nearly wore the grooves off that record. After Eddy Arnold died Thursday, just days short of his 90th birthday, I had "Cattle Call" running through my head all day - but, as I half-joked to friends, there was nothing unusual about that; I often have "Cattle Call" running through my head.

The funny thing is, "Cattle Call" was completely unemblematic of Arnold's career - at least the second, more successful part of his career, when he set aside anything resembling an agrarian image, was seen almost exclusively in tuxedos, and established himself as more of a pop crooner. He was the original king of country crossover. My dad would buy Arnold's later records but always be confounded by how little these cosmopolitan-sounding songs resembled the Western-themed hit he loved; never mind that Arnold's transition from hillbilly icon to formally dressed gentleman roughly mirrored the farm-to-city transition our family had made. Not very many fans considered Arnold's switch to a slicker style selling out, though. Though he had his first No. 1 country hit in 1947, he had his biggest run of hits in the 1960s, after he'd adopted the smooth "Nashville sound," which involved strings and background chorales - crossing over to pop success and becoming the Rascal Flatts or Shania Twain of his day. In the end, many consider him the most successful country singer of all time, if you combine record sales (85 million sold) with radio successes (145 chart hits, including 28 No. 1s).

Of course, today he's remembered a lot less than a lot of country legends whose success wasn't nearly so great. If you'd taken a poll last weekend at Stagecoach, the country music festival in California, it's unlikely Arnold's name would have rung a bell with more than a tenth of the general attendees. And even in hepper or more knowledgeable country circles, Arnold tends to be an afterthought these days. Part of that's surely due to him having outlived his commercial peak by so many decades - refusing to die young does diminish one's legend, right? - and having lived the kind of business-savvy, unrambunctious lifestyle that doesn't lend itself toward biopic development. (He was married to the same woman from 1942 until she preceded him in death just two months ago.) And part of it's because some folks, whether they were around at the time or are just working up their biases now, never got over the way that once-rough hillbilly music got some of its edges sanded off by the sound popularized by Arnold, producer Chet Atkins, and the Anita Kerr Singers. He was the first country singer to become renowned as a Vegas headliner - not the kind of legacy that Hank Williams worshipers necessarily revere. But as journalists and historians like CMT's Chet Flippo have pointed out, the new, pop-friendly sounds of Arnold and his ilk helped keep country alive at a time when it was in danger of dying out. And, all survivor factors aside, a lot of those records are pretty good, too. The Hank Cochran-penned "Make the World Go Away," a defining 1965 No. 1 country hit which made the pop top 10 in both America and Britain, perfectly encapulates a sentiment common to everyone who's ever bred cattle or just eaten them. "Make the world go away/And get it off my shoulders/Say the things you used to say/And make the world go away..." Did any troubled, wishful lyric ever better express the appeal not just of love but of music itself?

Though he retired from live performance after one last Vegas gig in 1999, Arnold released his final album, After All These Years, just three years ago, when he was 87, after a long time-out. Surely this made him the oldest singer still signed to a major label, and its very release attested to his importance in Nashville. Joe Galante, the head of SonyBMG Nashville, has a great sense of country history, but he also hasn't been the least bit sentimental about keeping "heritage" artists on the roster when they aren't selling records anymore. But clearly he knew that a career like Arnold's deserved a final grace note, and it got one. Now the world has gone away for the singer, and he's gone to that great cattle call in the sky... where, no doubt, even as those spurs jangle and dogies are rounded up, Arnold is riding the range in a tuxedo.

Aniston, shmaniston. Who needs to hear  about John Mayer's love life when we can have him show us where the real magic happens? (That would be in the recording studio, you pervs).

In a new Judd Apatow-produced clip on FunnyorDie.com, "Makin' Music With John Mayer," the singer walks us through a typical day, while wearing a Bluetooth headset on each ear, riding a scooter and dropping pearls of wisdom like "People matter, but celebrities matter more." Bonus points for the Kristen Bell cameo, but warning, cubicle monkeys: keep your headpones on, the language is super NSFW.

Makin' Music with John Mayer on FunnyOrDie.com