MLK DAY: The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't set out to be a great man. He was a Baptist pastor in Montgomery, Alabama, until he became involved in the the 382-day boycott of the city's bus lines. Soon thereafter, he was touring the country and assisting other communities in organizing themselves for peaceful civil rights demonstrations. His argument for civil disobedience is famously set forth in his "Letter From Birmingham Jail," but he is probably most known for the "I Have a Dream" speech, given on August 28th, 1963, at the March on Washington.
THE GOLDEN GLOBES: Sideways, The Aviator, Million Dollar Baby and Desperate Housewives were the big winners. William Shatner also takes home a Globe for Boston Legal. Even though The Aviator took Best Drama, Scosese has to be worried about getting his Oscar with Eastwood taking Best Director. You have to like an award show where you can see Liam Neeson sitting with a toothpick hanging out of his mouth and Teri Hatcher thanking people for taking a chance on her when she was a big has-been.
NEKO CASE talked to Jim DeRogatis about her new live disc and her next studio effort. CARL WILSON (not the late Beach Boy) takes a hard look at charity rock. ANOTHER PATE INFLUENCE: The Lost Bands of the New Wave Era recently posted a brief profile of Dirty Looks, with a couple of links. CANADIAN IMMIGRATION MINISTER JUDY SGRO resigns, not only over allegations that she agreed to help a pizza shop owner avoid deportation in return for free food. Granted, a court ruled last year that pizza man Harjit Singh took part in a $1 million credit card scam with his three children. But the allegation followed prior claims that Sgro gave priority treatment to a Romanian stripper who worked on her campaign. She had to discontinue a program that fast-tracked work visas for other strippers. HAS YOUR CHILD CONSIDERED A CAREER IN EXOTIC DANCING? Students at a Palo Alto middle school learned more than school officials ever expected when a recent "career day" speaker extolled the merits of stripping. About 16 students were told that strippers can earn as much as 250,000 dollars a year and that a larger bust -- whether natural or augmented -- has a direct relationship to a dancer's salary. FORTHCOMING TRACKS FROM SON VOLT, RAVEONETTES, KINGS OF LEON, and more can be streamed from NPR's All Songs Considered VIDEO PROMOTED THE RADIO STAR? Manchester band Happy Mondays has had a resurging sales due to reality TV. Meanwhile PopMatters examines "The O.C. Effect." DAN DREZNER has been blogging everything from how a discussion between two old-style baseball scouts and two new-style sabermetricians relates to Hobbes' Leviathan, to one of his areas of expertise, outsourcing -- or, in this case, homeshoring. JANE GALT had a wonderful question of the day last Friday. SEX BOMB, MY BABY, YEAH! The Pentagon rejected the development of an "aphrodisiac" chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Provoking widespread homosexual behaviour among troops would cause a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale, the proposal said. The proposal was undoubtedly classified as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," but what would Flipper say?
I COULD SEE How this could give you a headache. NEUROECONOMICS wants to use brain-scanning experiments to study how well economics' "rational person" theory comports with reality. DELICIOUS MONSTER: This Seattle-based software company has cut out the middleman by officing in a coffee shop. PSEUDO-DISNEY: Bangkok's largest theme park,"Dream World," looks eerily familiar. Meanwhile a Disney World fan saddened by the removal of "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" is creating a CGI version of the attraction. THE JOY OF LAZINESS is a book with a point, but probably an overstated one. ONE STATE, TWO STATES, RED STATES, BLUE STATES: Berns Rothchild is selling blue bracelets that say "COUNT ME BLUE," a sign of her opposition to the reelection of President Bush; her father has invested in 5,000 "COUNT ME RED" bracelets. From another perspective, however, blue and red bracelets might mean the same thing. SPACE.COM has pics from the European Space Agency's Hguyens probe of Titan. UPDATE: Open source processing of the Titan images is even cooler. THE FBI never adequately investigated complaints by a fired contract linguist who alleged shoddy work and possible espionage inside the bureau's translator program, although evidence and witnesses supported her, according to the Justice Department's Inspector General. GUIDED BY VOICES attempts "Sympathy for the Devil;" The Copy, Right? blog has it for download, though I must add that it's not from the Dec. 30th show to which Liza refers. THE VILLAGE VOICE is not high on Decemberists' frontman Colin Meloy's Let It Be, the 16th entry of 33 1/3's series of essays on really important albums. A PHOTOGRAPHIC HiSTORY OF MICHAEL JACKSON'S FACE, complete with commentary. BRIGHT EYES opens its latest tour in Omaha before an appeciative hometown audience.
CULT OF THE iPOD: Mercedes-Benz USA, Volvo, Nissan, Alfa Romeo and Ferrari join BMW and Mini Cooper in offering iPod integration with their automobiles. DARTH VADER AND MR. POTATOHEAD: Synergy!
|