When you hear Cecil Taylor perform, you never forget it. He's a force of nature at the piano, with a furious attack and a sound all his own.

"His piano is an orchestra," says Ben Ratliff, music critic for The New York Times. "Cecil has been with us for so long. And every once in a while he does these amazing, galvanizing solo piano performances. And you go see them, and you think, like, 'Wow. What was that? That was amazing.' And I can't get that anywhere else in the world. And that's unique."

When Facebook makes its initial public offering Friday on the NASDAQ, the stock will be priced at $38 per share, a price that's expected to bring in between $16 billion and $18.4 billion to the company. CNBC reports:

"[The price makes] it one of the most lucrative offerings the Street has ever seen. With that valuation taken into consideration, Facebook goes public with the highest valuation — in the $100 billion range — of any company on record at the time of its IPO."

Battleground states like North Carolina are where the action is when it comes to presidential contests. Thus, they are where political tactics like, say, the anti-Obama ad campaign featuring the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, first reported by The New York Times Thursday (and now disowned by virtually everyone the Times linked to it), are most likely to be rolled out.

Several news outlets are reporting that computer giant Hewlett-Packard will announce the elimination of 25,000 to 30,000 jobs. All Things D reports that the announcement will come from CEO Meg Whitman when the company announces its quarterly earnings next Wednesday.

All Things D reports:

Sgt. J.P. Huling, a Marine from Ohio, was killed this month in southern Afghanistan.

It wasn't a roadside bomb or a Taliban sniper that killed him. It was another sergeant — an Afghan soldier known as Sgt. Zabitollah, who like many Afghans went by one name.

It was a grim coincidence that brought these two sergeants together on May 6, a Sunday afternoon, at a mud-walled compound along a desolate stretch of road in a remote corner of Afghanistan.

We've heard from Alt. Latino co-host Felix Contreras in the past, but here we'll hear from the show's other half, Jasmine Garsd. Garsd was raised in Buenos Aires and connected with the Argentine rock scene in her teens. She moved to the U.S.

Zeus' music sounds as if it's being beamed straight out of the '70s, but a shared interest in making music that recalls The Band isn't what brought the Canadian group together. Most of Zeus' members were brought into Jason Collett's backing band, and from there decided to play together outside of their work with Collett.

The Syrian opposition is in disarray, the AP reports.

The head of the Syria's main opposition group, the Syrian National Council, said he would resign and some members of the group threatened to leave it "amid rampant infighting."

The AP reports: