Nuclear Friday: Refueling

Metaphors based on military technology sometimes enter popular usage and we forget their origins. Folks used to say “recharging my batteries” back in the late 20th century without knowing that the term came from WWII submarine crews. Diesel-electric submarines of that era had to surface and run their engines on full to recharge their batteries […]

Nuclear Friday: George Bailey Wants to Communicate

Watching It’s a Wonderful Life wasn’t much of a holiday tradition until the early eighties.Thanks to careless paperwork during film studio mergers, this film lapsed into public domain. TV stations that owned or could acquire a print of It’s a Wonderful Life smelled the profits, and thus a tradition of “Special Presentations” was born. As a result, George Bailey […]

Magnetic Memes

I suppose this isn’t so much of a thing anymore, but “Fuckin’ Magnets: how to they work?” This line from Insane Clown Posse’s late 2009 song “Miracles” somehow from among all the other ridiculous lines in the song became a meme in the atheist activist community back in 2010. I came across an instance of the “magnets” meme just […]

Nuclear Friday: Teens With Nukes

I had planned to write about cosmic ray spallation, isotope ratios in the atmosphere, and what they can tell us about global warming this week, but the holidays have intervened. As I have mentioned a few times on the board, my dad is dying. He’s fading fast and can no longer drive. This will be […]

Class Reunion

At work we always say we would be out of business if the 2003 film School of Rock had never been released. There are so few movies that are both good clean fun and also well written and directed that just about every kid has seen it since its release. School of Rock was a manifesto against the monolithic […]

Nuclear Friday: Double Feature

Today The Board will take a look at two classic Cold War films. They were released 18 years apart, and they could not be more different. One is a completely unrealistic paranoid fantasy, the other was a madcap comedy released in the Soviet Union as a publicity stunt to extend its run in the US. “Wolverines!” […]

SPELLBOUND and the Magical Therapeutic Insight

There’s a common trope in film and television that a person can have a magical therapeutic insight that changes everything. An insight that fixes everything. Understanding the origin of destructive behavior or limiting anxieties makes them melt away and a new life becomes possible. It was in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (with Freud himself as […]