Each week we produce a piece, for the web or the radio, drawing from a questionnaire NPR Music has been circulating among women musicians since March. This week we wanted to give you a statistical snapshot of the over 700 responses from women who have sent us their stories. Also, pie charts.

You can read every single response here, but the highlights compare where musicians come from to where they live now, the reasons they chose their instruments, their role models (for better or worse) and occupations (musical or not).

This isn't close to the end of the data we've got at our fingertips — if there's anything else you want to hear about, tell us.

We're also making all the information submitted to us available to anyone researching women musicians (or anything related), so if you're interested in access, write us at heyladies@npr.org.

Over at the Wait Wait... blog, our good friend Ian Chillag wrote a post yesterday about Scribe, a new tool from Google that offers suggestions to help writers complete sentences, word by word. It's like Mad Libs where the computer writes every word.

As Ian noted, some of the choices Scribe makes are a little odd. He took the opening words of a few famous political quotations and let the "Google Robots" play speechwriter. Here's one of his results:

• "Give me liberty or give me anything what would it be too much for them to become more involved in their children?"

So, did we plug some famous song lyrics into Scribe? You bet we did. Let it be said by nobody that The Record lets an opportunity to have computers write our blog posts pass us by.

Bloomberg/Bloomberg

An Overstock warehouse in Salt Lake City. After all, CDs and records are products. Might shipping and distribution have more to do with release dates than anything else?

When we asked around yesterday, one suggested reason that records come out on Tuesdays in the United States was to maximize time in stores before Billboard magazine releases its charts — which happens every Wednesday.

But we wanted more solid answers, dammit! So we emailed Glenn Peoples at Billboard in Nashville. His initial response confirmed our earlier speculation that it has something to do with shipping the same stock to stores all over the country. Peoples also said that Neilsen SoundScan reporting periods — the basis for Billboard's album chart — run from Monday to Sunday each week. His message concluded, in part:

"In the end, I actually don’t know. I probably heard about the reasons at some point, but I don’t remember."

But with that, Mr. Peoples forwarded our request to some of his colleagues. Again, some seconding of our initial report. Then, bingo!

"Release date used to be Monday, but, when shipping product to retailers via UPS, some stores would get their shipment early in the day ... while others at the end of the route, might not get it until the end of Monday.

So, in order bring everything in line and give everyone a fair shot at "first day sales," the "street date" was moved to Tuesday. But, everyone still got product on Monday. This switch from Monday to Tuesday happened — we think — around 1990. Sorry I don't have an exact date."

A second Billboard staffer followed up:

"I think it was well before 1990, maybe it even occurred in the 1970's."

Mystery solved? Can it be that the romance of "New Music Tuesdays" — the eager anticipation of music fans; the radio and web hullabaloo — all comes down to the sweat and strain of humping product?

courtesy of Camras

"Klingons" on "the planet Qo'noS" were "invited" to the performance of the "first authentic Klingon Opera" via this "decommissioned telescope."

Opera devotees and sci-fi fans are a match made in Valhalla: opinionated lovers of spectacle and fantasy whose temperaments can be as overblown as some of their favorite characters. If they ever hooked up (is there a profile trait on eHarmony for geekdom?), the perfect night out might involve tickets to see a Klingon opera.

There actually is a Klingon opera they could see. It's called, 'u,' and it premieres tonight at the Zeebelt Theater in The Hague, here on Earth (in Holland). It will also be presented at the Qetlop in Farnsberg, Germany exclusively for the Klingons of the Khemorex Klinzhai Fleet. If your iCal is synced to the home planet Qo'noS, these dates apparently coincide with the end of the summer solstice in the year Kahless 846.

[Yes, we realize that Klingons are actually human actors dressed up with prosthetics and make up and that the opera in question is more an artifact of extreme nerdery than a genuine work of an alien culture. Still, due to a gnawing fear of retaliation by people who have access to home-made weapons that look like they could chop off our blog-writing hands, we are treating it as the latter. -Ed.]

The groundbreaking work, which translates to "universe" or "universal," is the first authentic Klingon opera to be performed on the planet Earth. It's produced by the Klingon Terran Research Ensemble (KTRE), a Dutch group. NPR spoke with some of those responsible for the upcoming performances when they were still in the early phases of work shopping the piece.

Nominations for the 11th annual Latin Grammys were announced this morning in Los Angeles and, as in years past, the list of nominees reflects a wide and eclectic view of contemporary Latin music. There was a mix of newer names sprinkled among the more well known.

Of particular note was the nomination for Album Of The Year of Spanish vocalist Bebe, for her album Y. She's more of an alternative artist, but she's rubbing shoulders with mainstream pop nominees Miguel Bose and Alejandro Sanz.

Another surprise was Spanish vocalist Concha Buika’s nomination for Song Of the Year for her track "Si Me Hizo Facil." It's unusual because her album was recorded with Latin jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, who is much older than Buika, and because the album is dedicated to Chavela Vargas, a legendary singer famous for her traditional Mexican music.

That combination is like having a traditional bluegrass vocalist making an album with an older rock 'n roller dedicated to American roots music. Oh wait — that’s not unusual any more!

Vocalist Nelly Furtado's Spanish album, Mi Plan, was nominated for Best Female Pop Vocal Album. The nomination seems to put a stamp of approval, at least from her music biz peers, on her transition from recording in English to  recording in Spanish.

The 11^th Annual Latin Grammy’s will be televised live on Spanish language network Univision on November 11, 2010 live from Las Vegas.

Enlarge Bloomberg via Getty Images

An HMV employee stocks shelves in London on a Monday, which is release day in the U.K. So why is it Tuesday in the U.S.?

Bloomberg via Getty Images

An HMV employee stocks shelves in London on a Monday, which is release day in the U.K. So why is it Tuesday in the U.S.?

Honestly, no one seems to know for sure. It's more like a tradition with murky origins.

And it happens on Tuesday in the U.S. only — in the U.K. and France release dates are Mondays, in Germany it's Friday.

So if Tuesday isn't the universally accepted best day to offer new music to customers and there's no law or grand business wisdom about it, why does everyone put out albums on the same day?

One explanation is Billboard magazine, which publishes its charts on Wednesdays. If you release an album on a Tuesday, then you get the maximum seven days of sales counted toward your total (including a full weekend).

The other is inertia — distributors are all set up to shuttle stock out to stores over the weekend and on Mondays. Most only do runs a couple of times a week.

So "New Music Tuesdays" has seeped into popular culture.

We wanted clearer answers so we've been asking around this week — and everyone is giving us different answers. The one explanation people share is a hazy recollection of something happening before Billboard (so, pre-1950s). They just don't remember what that was.

From what we've heard, this is why every other day of the week doesn't work:

Monday: If stores are told to begin selling CDs on Mondays, distributors need to ship them by Sunday, and stores need to pay staff to unpack, inventory and stock over the weekend. That is a bummer. Also, Monday is a government holiday more than any other day of the week.

Wednesday: Stores and musicians can tell people the new CD is available to buy in the middle of the week, but it usually takes a bit for people to motivate themselves on over to their local record store. By Wednesday the week is almost over (I wish).

Thursday: For the reason above, Thursday is more too late.

Friday: Even more too late. But it is payday.

Saturday: It's harder to get press coverage that people see on the weekend.

Sunday: Who goes to record stores on Sunday?

Got any other theories as to why Tuesday became release day?

Aliya Naumoff/XL Recordings

The New Yorker said the album contains songs "to be sung inches from someone's ear." The Guardian praised its "understated charms." In a glowing review, Pitchfork called its songs "copiously tidy" (and vaguely suggested that listening to it might cause pregnancy).

The self-titled debut album from the London-based trio The XX seems to have been crafted to collide with eardrums at minimal impact. But in the eleven months since its release, the band's cooing minimalism won over enough fans to earn the most prestigious music prize in its homeland, the Mercury Prize for Album of the Year.

The young band (none of the musicians are older than 21) beat out shortlisted artists Biffy Clyro, Corinne Bailey Rae, Foals, Paul Weller, Wild Beasts, I Am Kloot, Dizzee Rascal, Kit Downes Trio, Mumford & Sons, Villagers and Laura Marling for the prize.

After the win, guitarist and singer Romy Madley Croft told reporters that the band was in "disbelief," but the win was just the latest in a long line of successes. Without a hit single or a dancefloor-ready sound, the XX has built its audience slowly but steadily. According to a publicist for the band, xx has sold nearly 200,000 copies.

Responding to the award, the Guardian's Alex Petridis wrote that it's worth remembering that the Mercury Prize is about selling records, and imagines that the award might actually boost the XX "into the mainstream."

Every September there's one huge day for new album releases. There's no rule about it, but tons of labels — major and independent, putting out both physical and digital-only releases — hold their biggest albums for the same day.

There are a few obvious reasons people selling music would want to hold albums that are ready in July or August for September: TV shows that feature performances are back with new episodes; people go out and buy albums since they're not on vacation anymore. Some theorize that labels overwhelm customers with new music on purpose. They hope you say, "Since I'm already here, I might as well pick up three CDs instead of just one." And the labels make the Sept. 30th deadline for Grammy nominations.

This year Super Tuesday happens next week on Sept. 14th. There are so many albums streeting that day that NPR is premiering 14 of them a week ahead.

But some albums buck the second Tuesday trend. We wondered why — so we asked an executive at one of the majors and the director of publicity for one of the biggest indie labels why they're releasing records this week that could be big for them. And then we asked one label why it stuck to the 14th.

Even at great record stores, you can't always find the albums you want. Sometimes the store has a particular specialty, sometimes the local audience doesn't support a genre, sometimes the price of an album doesn't justify the shelf space. Each Tuesday, we call record stores to see if they have three brand new CDs in their store.

This week, we checked on Robyn's second album release in the past 3 months, Body Talk Pt. 2, The Thermals' Personal Life and Interpol, the Brooklyn band's self-titled release. Since we're feeling all back to school about today, we called three stores in the college town of Ann Arbor, Mich.