Clarity is important for water, and it's also true for charity.

When Scott Harrison founded charity: water in 2006, he was targeting people who were "disenchanted with charity," he said in an interview last week. "Most of my friends said the main reason they weren't giving to charity is because they didn't know how much of their money was actually going to go to people in need."

Harrison's solution was to connect donors to their gifts. "We'll never do a [water] well unless we can get a GPS, a photo, a name, and population ... and publicly place them all on Google Earth for transparency," he said.

And 100 percent of donated money from the public goes to water projects in developing nations. Harrison didn't have this worked out initially but has developed the concept of "The Well," in which benefactors give $1,000, $2,000, or $5,000 a month to support the charity's operational costs. That allows the organization to use public donations exclusively for water projects.

charity: water also places an emphasis on design. "I wanted charity to look like Apple," Harrison said. "Why shouldn't we be telling stories with sophistication, with elegance, with authenticity? And telling them in a newsy way?"

Water for Christmas, a local fundraising campaign for charity: water, will be bringing Harrison to the Quad Cities for a number of events November 21 through 23, including an Iowa Quad Cities Chamber of Commerce dinner. (See the schedule here.) Water for Christmas has raised more than $100,000 for charity: water in the year it's been active.

With its cryptic name, a fearless sound, and darkly dreamy cover artwork, there can be little doubt of the influence of the prog-rock titan The Mars Volta on the instrumental quartet Zechs Marquise. And it should come as little surprise that it's also a family influence.

Zechs Marquise will perform at Mixtapes in East Moline on Monday, and two of its members - brothers Marfred and Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez - are the siblings of The Mars Volta mastermind Omar Rodriguez-Lopez. (Marcel also plays with The Mars Volta.)

The shared genetics and tastes are evident on Zechs Marquise's studio debut, Our Delicate Stranded Nightmare. The music of both The Mars Volta and Zechs Marquise is a shadowy, dense, free-flowing stew flavored with the salsa music of their parents as well as jazz but based mostly on psychedelic and progressive rock. Both bands often float around without anchors.

That's frequently a curse for The Mars Volta, whose albums since De-Loused in the Comatorium have retained the aesthetic of that debut yet have felt airless and closed. It seems like a blessing on the Zechs Marquise record, which has a patience often lacking in The Mars Volta.

On Todd Snider's 2009 record The Excitement Plan, the song "Greencastle Blues" details the singer/songwriter's bust for marijuana possession, and it features his signature dark wit: "The number one symptom of heart disease is sudden death," for example, and "Some of this trouble just finds me / Most of this trouble I earned."

But in the performance and the words, there's also a complicated melancholy: "How do you know when it's too late to learn?"

In a recent phone interview, the 43-year-old Snider -- who co-headlines a show with Robert Earl Keen on Sunday at the Capitol Theatre -- made light of the bust. "I'm too old to be caught smoking pot," he said. "I don't think I'm too old to be smoking it, but too old to be caught smoking it."

Snider's songs tend to be like that -- funny, but rarely merely funny, with humor aspiring to truth.

Should we consider Spike Jonze's and Dave Eggers' adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are a disappointment?

It is certainly not a miserable failure. It received good reviews, won the box office when it debuted, and also topped the Box Office Power Rankings in its opening weekend.

But its gross dropped 57 percent its second weekend. Thirty-five movies have opened in wide release atop the box-office top 10 this year, and 20 lost a lower percentage of revenue than Wild Things: