If you haven’t seen RuPaul’s film Starrbooty, you are truly missing one of the most hilariously gross films of the decade. Starrbooty makes Pink Flamingos look like Mary Poppins!

Jeffrey Bennett welcomes you to his basement, circa 1988:

BetaMaXmas! is a must-see – a YouTube mashup of pure genius.

Bill Ayers speaks up in the NYTimes about his true association with Barack Obama, and how the campaign to take him down using “Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time.”

I’ve linked to Ioz before, and I’ll link to him again:

the idea that the General Electrics of the world are going to let their marketing arms – which is to say, the television networks, movie studios, [and other] “content providers” that they own – act as judicious guides to the ethical policy implications of blowing up Wherethefuckistan is palpably ridiculous. Living in a realm of Platonic pure-form divided government counterbalanced by a free-press fourth-estate held accountable by informed enfranchised citizenry blah blah bloggity blawg is just the teetotaling post-Harvard civics-student version of staying constantly stoned: tethered to reality, and yet floating free of it. Complaining that NBC is in the tank for the defense industry is like complaining that Pravda was in the tank for the Red Army.

Dec. 2, 1942:  The first man-made controlled nuclear reaction takes place, underneath the grandstand of the University of Chicago’s football grandstand.

Dec. 2, 1957:  The first commercial nuclear power plant goes online, in Shippingport, PA.

Wired has an article, here:  http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/12/dayintech_1202

One interesting piece of historical nomenclature is that, at the Chicago experiment, there was a staffer prepared to cut a rope with an axe, to drop graphite rods into the reactor and stop the reaction.  This acronym, SCRAM, for Safety Control Rod Ax-Man, is still used for the emergency shutdown systems in modern reactors.

Really only of interest to those of you lucky (?) enough to be in & around the Boston area… the Globe highlights a bunch of local blogs, some of which are actually worth reading.

911-essay.com