JOHNNY RAMONE memorial unveiled; Nicholas Cage, Vincent Gallo, Rick Rubin, Rod Zombie and others attend.

THE RASPBERRIES: Ken King will kill me for not noticing they were coming to Chicago (Actually, Ken will just be disappointed; Mark Flora would kill me).  They rawked, or power-popped, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

AWARDS SEASON: Ann Althouse simulblogged the Golden Globes. Drunken Stepfather has pictures of women in dresses. Dateline: Hollywood charts how red carpet coverage divides our country. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts announces its nominees for the BAFTA awards.

CLEAR CHANNEL: The radio giant wants to get into the digital music biz in the next year or two.

WILLIE NELSON is getting into the alternative fuel biz. Not for tax reasons, I hope.

THE SOUNDTRACK OF OUR LIVES is showcasing some new material in concert; at least o­ne reviewer likes it.

MLK DAY AFTERWORDS:  Since MLK Day fell o­n the 17th this year, not many people noted that it was also the 60th anniversary of the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg, who saved approximately 100,000 Jews from slaughter during WWII.  He was o­ne of o­nly two people in history to be given honorary U.S. citizenship.  Anti-slavery activists used MLK Day to protest the U.N.'s failure to recognize genocide in Darfur.  Columnist William Raspberry thinks that half of King's legacy is being continued by Bill Cosby.

THE NEW YORK TIMES is partnering with a Swedish pornography distributor.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO joins a growing list of colleges with a student-funded sex magazine.  The debut issue was a hit.

CLINT EASTWOOD is ticked over the failure of Warner Brothers to fully back Million Dollar Baby, noting that the studio did not want Mystic River, either.  Great films that make a ton of money, directed by a legend... yeah, who would want that?

LILEKS: The first part of his Monday Bleat pays tribute to Ember's.  Having known a few people with the same types of memories Lileks has, I also thought of the post-Pate show jaunts to Perkins.

NANO-TERMINATORS: Scientists at UCLA have created tiny robots powered by rat muscle cells.

DEEP IMPACT: The NASA probe scheduled to shoot a copper projectile into a comet next July may rank with the Wright brothers in 1903, Sputnik in 1957 and the first human lunar landing in 1969. It may even save humans from extinction some day.

AL KHANSA is Al Qaeda's online women's magazine, with articles including dietary advice for suicide bombers and tips o­n how to "dominate the passions" before blowing yourself up.

HARVARD PREZ LARRY SUMMERS sparked an uproar at an academic conference Friday when he said that innate differences between men and women might be o­ne reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers.  Not mentioned is that Summers was Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration; I suspect that had he been in the cabinet of a Republican, it would have been noted in these news accounts.

SERIOUS: A Romanian couple name their son Yahoo!

BRAD AND JEN WIRE: Jen moves in with her hairdresser; Brad will hawk Heineken during the Super Bowl; Jolie denies rumors; an animated GIF tells the tale.

FACIAL NEWS: Duprey Cosmetics signs a promo contract with Traci Lords.

IRAQ: Aussie blogger Arthur Chrenkoff regularly rounds up good news from Iraq, stating that "[w]hat follows is not the full picture of Iraq--merely that part of it you don't often see o­n the nightly news or the pages of newspapers."

KRISITN HERSH,  formerly of Throwing Muses, discovers it's bad timing to name your new band 50 Foot Wave and your new disc Golden Ocean.

ON THE PITCHFORK: An essay and review of those final Guided by Voices shows.

KATE STELNICK weighs 100 pounds, but polished off an 11 pound burger.  Now that's a thickburger.

BILL GATES IN TEEN BEAT?  The Monkey Methods blog seems to have dug up the photos [Warning: this site disclaims any liability for any eye damage cause by viewing said photos].

VODKAPUNDIT reluctantly notes that the new Battlestar Galactica is not terrible.  I reluctantly agree.

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!