Monday: Give us liberty and give us trivia! The beloved revolutionary sweethearts of the Rat City Rollergirls, the Derby Liberation Front, will pit their mighty subversive minds against their fans in a trivia showdown tonight at Goldie's on Airport Way. Any fool can buy into this meeting of the minds for $5, but you should be part of the elite few that plunk down an extra $10 to get the added brainpower of a DLF skater on your very own team, for that way lies victory ... not to mention some pretty sweet Rat City and DLF swag.

Tuesday: DJ Maga Bo's Web site calls the music created by the Rio de Janiero-based producer "a divine (s)mashup of batucada, rai, capoeira, bhangra, and skewed electronic beats in a borderless conundrum of gritty street sounds." Usually, when I read something like that on a musician's Web site, I suspect that the webmaster (A) owes the artist some money; (B) actually is the musician in a cunning disguise; (C) has been sniffing glue; or (D) all of the above.

As it turns out, I'm wrong across the board. Maga Bo's music really does sound like a gritty smash-up conundrum of, erm, that thing he just said. It's a deeply percussive sound that owes just as much to American hip-hop as it does to Brazilian dance music -- and by the way, you can absolutely shake your butt to it. You ought to head to Nectar tonight and do just that.

Wednesday: On the topic of dance beats without boundaries, tonight the Showbox at the Market welcomes the Flying Dutchman of trip-hop, Morcheeba. The group may be down to its core duo of multi-instrumentalist Ross Godfrey and DJ Paul Godfrey -- original vocalist Skye Edwards left the fold in 2005 -- but their new album, "Dive Deep," sounds fine, if a little bit dated. It's easy to forget sometimes that the whole trip-hop thing happened more than ten years ago -- but then, I guess that the world will always need music to style hair to.

Thursday: It has been often stated that in New York, London, Paris and Munich, everyone is talking about pop music. Over the course of the next four days, dozens of noted pop writers and experts the likes of Angela Conyers-Benton, Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau and Holly George-Warren will bring that ongoing conversation to Seattle in the form of the Experience Music Project Pop Conference. Presumably, these great minds will tell you how to live in a discotheque, and in doing so forget about the rat race.

Also: "Everybody Hates Chris?" Yeah, right. I don't know anyone who doesn't think Chris Rock is one of the funniest comics working today, in film or onstage. (Then again, my social circle is kind of small.) The brilliant satirist that Comedy Central recently named "the fifth-best stand-up comedian of all time" is doing two nights of performance at the Paramount.

Friday: Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds perform tonight at KeyArena as part of "Seeds of Compassion," a five-day event whose basic purpose is to make the world a better place. Before the show, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama will have a dialogue on compassion in the media. Regular tickets are sold out, but you could still get in by becoming a Seeds of Compassion sponsor.

By the way, I agree that the media needs to be more compassionate. But that won't stop me from saying that Dave Matthews hasn't put out a consistently good album since "Under the Table and Dreaming." I'm sure the Dalai Lama will back me up on this.

Saturday: Bob Crawford and brothers Seth and Scott Avett are the Avett Brothers, a bluegrass ensemble that does for its genre what Nirvana once did for punk rock. While the Brothers' sound features all the elements you'd expect of a bluegrass band (banjo, gee-tar, upright bass and classic country harmonies from here to Christmas), these things are just the flesh on the skeleton of one of the best rock bands working today. They're almost single-handedly bringing that down-from-the-mountain sound into the here and now. Get that 21st-century pickin'-and-grinnin' feeling tonight and tomorrow at Neumos.

Sunday: Those Ellen Page withdrawals can end now, junior. The indie-fresh warrior waif of "Juno" returns to the screen as an intelligent but self-absorbed (Juno?!) young Republican (d'oh!) in director Noam Murro's comedy "Smart People." Dennis Quaid, Thomas Haden Church and Sarah Jessica Parker also star in what is -- let's face facts, people -- the only halfway-decent-looking film likely to emerge from Hollywood until the "Iron Man"/"Indiana Jones" juggernaut arrives.

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