Timely cover? I’m sure Time magazine wants to avoid showing up on this weblog’s “Clone Covers” feature, but how can they justify not having Madrid on this week’s cover? They opt, rather, to promote a feature about stay-at-home Moms. Should the word “news” be removed from their description as a newsweekly? On the other hand, while their cover (like the story) is difficult to view, Newsweek clearly made and the only correct decision this week.

Free & legal downloads: I know this must be so last century’s news, but I just ran across the Free Downloads page on Amazon.com and discovered they have around 250 bluegrass tracks for free, including ten from Allison Krauss and ten from Doc Watson. For those who think bluegrass musicians are all twang, I recommend downloading the song “Harvest Time” from the incredible CD “Into the Cauldrin,” recorded by mandolin greats Mike Marshall and Chris Thile. And try this jazz-bluegrass fusion piece called G Forces by fiddler Stuart Duncan.

Madness: Let the office pools commence.

RSS geeking: (Apologies up front to all those who have no idea what the following is about. Frankly, neither do I (much). If for some reason, it piques your interest, you can find out more about RSS and Atom on this page at Fagan Finder and lots other places. Learn about it and if you don’t already, set up a news aggregator. It will save you more time than you can imagine.)

Jeff Jarvis observes that the RSS file of his weblog, BuzzMachine, gets more traffic than his html page (the one you see with a web browser)…and says there need to be better statistics-tracking auditing features before RSS jumps to the major leagues for commercial websites. While I go weeks without checking the statistics of this weblog, I have day-job (as Jeff calls it) responsibilities with websites that need such features. As for BuzzMachine, I just wanted to let Jeff know that I go to the news aggregator I use, NetNewswire, throughout the day to read what Jeff posts. So, Jeff, be sure to count several dozen of those RSS hits as pageviews from me.

Also on the syndication front, recently I stopped getting an RSS feed from another of my favorite weblogs, Gary Price’s ResourceShelf and assumed that because the site is managed with Blogger, that his XML feed had been converted to the Atom format. (If that last sentence makes no sense to you, don’t worry. I’m probably misstating the situation.) Anyway, my desire to get an RSS feed of Gary’s website led me to the Atom-to-RSS syndication-feed-hack offered at the website, 2RSS.com. Ironically, I don’t recall what I did to set it up, but this feed of ResourceShelf is now working for me as an RSS feed. I suppose I could solve all this if I were to pay for the “heavy” rather than free “lite” version of NetNewsWire (or perhaps update to a newer version), but I thought it was pretty cool that the work-around actually worked for someone whose geek quotient is as low as mine.

Marthette vultures update: In an attempt at humor, this writer says, “We yearn for a new leader, someone to soothe us in our hour of need (or hour of “want” or hour of “too good to pass up”). Who will be our new Duchess of Stuff? Let’s consider some possibilities among some well-known style mavens….Kathy Ireland….Jennifer Lopez….Roseanne Barr….Oprah. (Previous “Marthette vultures updates” here and here and here and here.)