The music world is in mourning

And Neuman of the Kaiser Family Foundation noted that the polling turned around for Part D within a few months after seniors had enrolled in their drug plans. The share of Americans with an "unfavorable" view of the program shot up to 50 percent in December 2005, right at the height of the enrollment stumbles, and just 28 percent had favorable views.By June 2006, just after open enrollment ended, the two views were essentially tied. And by November, 42 percent had favorable views of the program, Kaiser found. Its popularity has skyrocketed since then.Obamacare could still recover with the public in a similar way, Leavitt said — but only if the administration gets the website problems under control and continues its recent steps to update the public on its progress.

The music world is in mourning over the death of Lou Reed, the indescribably influential singer, composer and bandleader. He was one of the first to marry rock insouciance with high-art ideas: reducing the form of a guitar band to its absolute minimum, while sounding unprecedented and scary and occasionally even lovely.  He put raw drones and white noise into the rock-instrument canon, and wrote about smack addiction and transvestism 40 years before "Molly" and rappers in Givenchy kilts seemed edgy.But Reed was devoted to not giving a single damn about anybody's opinion of his work. So it's kind of fitting that he ended his career on a Metallica collaboration album, "Lulu," that was uniformly despised by the music press, and left fans of both feeling cold and confused.

It was the second LP in his career — the first was 1975's "Metal Machine Music" — that made fans and critics wonder if he was just yanking all of our chains."Metal Machine Music" has since gained back some interest as a pioneer of industrial and noise music. But while writers are remembering the incalculable highs of Reed's career, it's worth remembering that his antagonistic streak was genuine, and not always in appropriate, critically beloved ways."Metal Machine Music" has a much better reputation now than at its release. Early reviews claimed it would clear any room of humans that tried to listen to it, and reams of books about the worst albums in rock history and most famous career-self-immolations have put it near the top.