For contemporary American audiences, the zither begins and ends with the soundtrack to the 1949 film The Third Man - which famously featured the instrument in its opening. (See the credits at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4JpDUMXBqo.) The tune was a number-one hit in the United States in 1950.

But the stringed instrument has a rich history in Europe and Asia and dates back more than two millennia.

Throw Me the Statue's debut album, Moonbeams, was largely built by one man, and you can hear it in the synthesized beats, the emphasis on front-loaded keyboards, the occasionally oddball instrumentation, the aggressive processing, and a complete disregard for the concept of "enough."

In an attempt to fight the peer-to-peer file-sharing that often beats traditional CDs to record-store shelves, two hot acts have tried to regain the upper hand. Originally set to debut in early April, Grammy Award-winning duo Gnarls Barkley surprised everyone with the full digital release of The Odd Couple last week and the Downtown Records CD in stores. Also speeding things up and keeping secrets are Jack White's Raconteurs, wrapping up the recording of Consolers of the Lonely just weeks ago, and rush-releasing the album this week on the Third Man/Warner Bros. imprint. With the nontraditional success of Radiohead's In Rainbows, followed by Nine Inch Nails' million-and-a-half-dollar estimated earnings for Ghosts I-IV in its first week as five-buck download, artists big and small have enacted the ultimate revenge against pirates and monolithic record labels.

Since his big-screen debut in 1981's Ragtime, and particularly since his 1983 breakthrough in Terms of Endearment, Jeff Daniels has been one of America's most familiar and sought-after character actors, with memorable roles in such films as The Purple Rose of Cairo, Something Wild, Arachnophobia, Speed, Dumb & Dumber, Pleasantville, The Hours, The Squid & the Whale, and Good Night, and Good Luck.