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Remember back in 2017-2020 when everyone was aglow with the warmth and camaraderie of the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen? And then, well, Milkshake Duck happened. But not all is lost.... [more inside]
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:06 PM - 3 comments

Palm OS and the devices that ran it - a retrospective on the popular PDA and precursor to the smartphone.
posted by Stark at 12:54 PM - 11 comments

Paul Auster, the prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening. He was 77. [NY Times; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:22 PM - 6 comments

As part of Secret Base's Patreon based restructuring, Internet video troubadour and oddity explainer Jon Bois has ressurected his long defunct Pretty Good series with a three part video on the rise and fall of Henry Ross Perot's political party/personal vehicle - the Reform Party. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:14 AM - 8 comments

Part 1: From the S Dynasty to the Chin Dynasty. Part 2: From the Chu-Han contention, through the first Chinese golden age of the Han dynasty, to the Warring States, and the Northern and Southern dynasties. To clarify, this YouTube series is NOT about the actual history, but how Chinese history is interpreted through Chinese cinema. This is a continuing series from Accented Cinema. Previously from AccentedCinema. For those interested in the actual history, he recommends Cool History Bros.
posted by toastyk at 8:40 AM - 5 comments

Endangered Ocelots May Be Expanding Their Range in Texas. DNA testing of an ocelot killed in 2021 raises the possibility that the creatures may be roaming outside their established South Texas territory, which is currently their only stronghold in the country.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:15 AM - 22 comments

At the frame shop there is so much beauty, it can’t be real. Maybe this is the afterlife, I think. Or purgatory. ... When my boss stomps up from his frame-building cellar and sees me, he always barks: Are you still here? Which is literal, because I’m new and only working part time, but also existential because how am I still here—or back here? It’s been a year since I returned to Chicago, but it still doesn’t feel like real life from Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife by Wendy Brenner [Oxford American; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:20 AM - 8 comments

Shockingly, the 20th Anniversary of Marillion's album Misplaced Childhood is over twenty years ago! Anyway, FISH - Return To Childhood 20th anniversary tour of misplaced childhood [3h12m] is an odyssey, with Fish's solo career dominating the front half and a full playthrough of Misplaced Childhood and a rundown of other Marillion songs in the second half. It's a really delicious feast of this particular style of prog rock. If you're a fan of early eighties Genesis and don't know about Marillion/Fish, check this out. It's what you're looking for. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:46 PM - 13 comments

Hundreds of properties bought after Queensland floods start new life as green space. The collective size of the new green space being added to Brisbane's suburbs in the wake of 2022 floods is the equivalent of about 25 rugby league fields.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:13 PM - 11 comments

The long, strange, ridiculous saga of the NHL team formerly known as the Arizona Coyotes. Emily Kaplan and Greg Wyshynski of ESPN chronicle the poor decisions, bad luck, and outright chicanery that led to the NHL forcing the owner of the Coyotes to sell the team, which is moving to Utah.
posted by goatdog at 5:17 PM - 27 comments

The California man who hid for 6 months in a secret room inside Circuit City
posted by brundlefly at 12:43 PM - 33 comments

You might call this kind of defiantly ahistorical setting the Magical Multiracial Past. The bones of the world are familiar. There is only one change: Every race exists, cheerfully and seemingly as equals, in the same place at the same time. History becomes an emoji, its flesh tone changing as needed. [more inside]
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 12:23 PM - 81 comments

A New York State forest ranger who worked in the Adirondacks, she died after falling about 1,000 feet from a peak at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska. (SLNYT gift link) [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 11:51 AM - 24 comments

Ken Klippenstein resigns from The Intercept. In his announcement released through his newsletter, Ken details some of the machinations between the management class controlling journalism, and the journalists out there trying to do the work. Klippenstein will continue publishing his work independently along with legendary editor and national security researcher William Arkin, as well as FOIA specialist Beth Bourdon.
posted by slogger at 11:04 AM - 27 comments

"So when you say judging, it’s not, this soil is great. This soil is bad. It’s classification and analysis, right?" (scroll to bottom for transcript). To prepare for the National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest, they spent three intensive practice days describing soils derived from glacial till, outwash, lacustrine sediments, and loess. They braved freezing temperatures, snow and sleet, high winds, pits partially filled with water, and muddy conditions before the weather finally cleared up for the two competition days.
By the way, did you know there are state soils? (folder of pdfs for all states & PR & VI) and New Jersey’s is named Downer. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:24 AM - 14 comments

The Jazz Lincoln Center Orchestra feat. Wynton Marsalis [1h43m] "The South African Songbook is a musical celebration of South African democracy, 25 years after apartheid's end. With special guests Nonhlanhla Kheswa, Melanie Scholtz, Vuyo Sotashe, McCoy Mrubata, Nduduzo Makhathini and Thandi Ntuli." [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:35 AM - 1 comment

The Top Six Lessons I Had to Learn From Reality TV Because Chabon Said No About the Couch Thing
posted by BWA at 9:02 AM - 12 comments

Keep truth human - take this short quiz from the Canadian Journalism Foundation to find out if you recognize AI generated, false news content.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:46 AM - 26 comments

A discovery about how a circular trough filled with lighter fluid can create looping mini-flames leads to a fascinating set of experiments and an explanation of excitable media. [more inside]
posted by Stark at 8:20 AM - 12 comments

Jerry Seinield is a Lazy Hack Out of Touch with the Real World - and Who Can Blame Him? Paste Magazine's brief riposte to the New Yorker's Jerry Seinfeld interview in which Mr. It's About Nothing feels that comedy has been killed by "the extreme left" and "P.C. crap."
posted by Kitteh at 8:19 AM - 86 comments

JZD Slušovice was a collective farm established in 1952 in the village of Slušovice in the south east of Czechia, at the time in central Czechoslovakia. When 27 year old František Čuba was appointed chairman of the coöperative in 1963, he decided to use the pretext that the farmland wasn't productive as a reason to branch out into alternative. And so, over the next 25 years the small village turned into an industrial powerhouse, developing amongst other things, a holiday resort and the first Czechoslovak Personal Computer. [more inside]
posted by ambrosen at 8:19 AM - 3 comments

A Doctor at Cigna Said Her Bosses Pressured Her to Review Patients’ Cases Too Quickly. Cigna Threatened to Fire Her. Nurses in the Phillipines are doing the initial reviews, and making major mistakes. Cigna wants their reviewing doctors to take about four minutes to check the reviews and decide if warranted, or if it should be approved, and penalizing doctors who do the work to know what's really going on. [more inside]
posted by mephron at 6:41 AM - 35 comments

Kiwi takes a nap in Far North woman's chicken coop (New Zealand/Aotearoa).
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:07 AM - 21 comments

Even as stars among her contemporaries have faded into relative obscurity, Niedecker's poetry pitched resolutely between — between avant-garde experimentalism and ethnopoetics, between the gnomic and the manifest — has sustained, across the decades, stalwart devotion. Her position within the canon of twentieth-century American modernism may seem to be in flux, shifting between various contexts — Objectivism and ecopoetics, white settler colonialism, geological and geopolitical history, the artistic legacies of the New Deal and the Popular Front, midcentury feminism, Thoreauvian hermeticism transplanted to the Midwest. Her work can feel both elusive and profusive, her poetic evolution traced across fugitive volumes produced by tiny presses and now appearing in Selecteds and Collecteds rife with textual variations. In our attempts to locate Lorine Niedecker, we do not seek to pin her down but rather to let loose the frustrating delights and joyful contradictions of her art. from Locating Lorine Niedecker by Brandon Menke and Sarah Dimick [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:26 AM - 2 comments

WDR BIG BAND - The Prince Experience | Konzert [1h40m] "The WDR BIG BAND plays the music of PRINCE together with internationally renowned guests Liv Warfield (vocals), Cassandra O'Neal (vocals, keyboard), Ricky Peterson (Hammond B3), Paul Peterson (vocals, bass), Mike Scott (E -guitar), Kirk Johnson (drums) and Luis Ribeiro (percussion). Vince Mendoza, Composer in Residence of the WDR BIG BAND since 2016, has specially arranged PRINCE's compositions for the WDR BIG BAND. The concert was recorded live during the Bonn Jazz Festival (August 2023)." Song list in video description." [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 2:54 PM - 12 comments

The Book of Miracles unfolds in chronological order divine wonders and horrors, from Noah’s Ark and the Flood at the beginning to the fall of Babylon the Great Harlot at the end; in between this grand narrative of providence lavish pages illustrate meteorological events of the sixteenth century. In 123 folios with 23 inserts, each page fully illuminated, one astonishing, delicious, supersaturated picture follows another. Vivid with cobalt, aquamarine, verdigris, orpiment, and scarlet pigment, they depict numerous phantasmagoria: clouds of warriors and angels, showers of giant locusts, cities toppling in earthquakes, thunder and lightning. Against dense, richly painted backgrounds, the artist or artists’ delicate brushwork touches in fleecy clouds and the fiery streaming tails of comets. There are monstrous births, plagues, fire and brimstone, stars falling from heaven, double suns, multiple rainbows, meteor showers, rains of blood, snow in summer. [...] Its existence was hitherto unknown, and silence wraps its discovery; apart from the attribution to Augsburg, little is certain about the possible workshop, or the patron for whom such a splendid sequence of pictures might have been created.

The Augsburg Book of Miracles: a uniquely entrancing and enigmatic work of Renaissance art, available as a 13-minute video essay, a bound art book with hundreds of pages of trilingual commentary, or a snazzy Wikimedia slideshow of high-resolution scans.
posted by Rhaomi at 11:53 AM - 15 comments

A team of cavers helped rescue a 50,000-year-old kangaroo fossil.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:35 AM - 13 comments

A Series of Headaches is a video from the London Review of Books following printer Nick Hand as he prints a page from the magazine using methods as close as he can get to those used to print the First Folio of Shakespeare plays. The page selected is an old LRB article about the First Folio by Michael Dobson [archive link]. The video is made in conjunction with Folio400, a website with lots of information about the First Folio, as well as a series of articles on it.
posted by Kattullus at 8:29 AM - 11 comments

After WB's success with Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs, there was Freakazoid!. Originally conceived by Bruce Timm as a straight laced superhero gig, Steven Spielberg kept pressing it to be more and more zany. How zany? Get your freak on with every episode at the Internet Archive, or talk about anything you like, it's your Monday morning FREE THREAD. [more inside]
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:50 AM - 79 comments

By all appearances, Widell certainly seemed to be thriving. She took business lunches at Mahogany Prime Steakhouse, a leading Tulsa destination. She was a member of the Summit Club — "Downtown Tulsa's Only Private Social Club" — perched atop the Bank of America Center, with its panoramic views of the Arkansas River. She hobnobbed with the local elite and claimed to have more Airbnb listings than anyone else in the city. She cut her hair short and, to her husband's annoyance, swapped out her conservative style for big sunglasses and more "flamboyant" fashions. Widell, who hadn't had much growing up, also projected an image of benevolence. She made a point of hiring people with criminal records to work in her warehouse, and she talked about buying a church that had just come on the market and turning it into a women's shelter. But then investors started asking questions. And soon enough, Widell would be turning on the very people she'd promised a second chance. from The fall of the Queen of Airbnb
posted by chavenet at 1:44 AM - 29 comments

Strippers' bill of rights bill signed into law in Washington state. The new law requires training for employees in establishments to prevent sexual harassment, identify and report human trafficking, de-escalate conflict and provide first aid. It also mandates security workers on site, keypad codes on dressing rooms and panic buttons in places where entertainers may be alone with customers. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:22 PM - 30 comments

The Crucial Role of Herbaria in Science by Dr. Cassandra Quave. Podcast episode (on Youtube) includes Dr. Quave's WaPo opinion piece. In February, Duke University announced that it was shuttering its herbarium, to widespread dismay from scientists across the globe. With one of the nation's largest collections of algae, lichens, fungi, and mosses, Duke's herbarium is "highly unusual" for its depth and variety. It's also where the Lady Gaga Fern is held, named for the artist's outfit at the 2010 Grammys which looked exactly like the sexual stage of a fern gametophyte.
posted by spamandkimchi at 6:42 PM - 6 comments

Entertainment Made By North Korea [5h30m] is an overview of... entertainment made by North Korea. It begins well before the founding of the country to give the cultural background, and then gets into post-Korean War entertainment. It's an interesting history lesson combined with a fascinating glimpse into a world not seen much outside it's own borders. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:43 PM - 14 comments

Enty’s Hollywood was a dark and messy world, uglier and more menacing than the glamorous town imagined by outsiders. The authenticity of this vision — and, in turn, the authenticity of his scoops — was bolstered by how pathetic he came across in his own accounts. Enty described himself as a 300-pound heavy-drinking entertainment lawyer who had been married six times, lived in his parents’ basement in L.A., and was bullied by his famous clientele — a zhlub with the right connections and a nose for dirt. In reality, Nelson didn’t live in his parents’ basement, and he hasn’t been married six times — only three. from The Man Who Gossiped Too Much [Vulture; ungated] [CW: well, almost everything]
posted by chavenet at 12:56 PM - 6 comments

For more than two years, the world of lost media has been flummoxed by 17 seconds of grainy audio uploaded to a small name-that-song site. Tentatively titled "Everyone Knows That (Ulterior Motives)" based on the apparent lyrics, the clip's energetic retro 80s vibes defied all attempts by music ID apps and various hive-minds to track it down, soon becoming the holy grail of the "lostwave" community of enthusiasts for obscure unidentified "rare grooves." The search inspired articles, video essays, Youtube and TikTok memes, ambitious reconstructions (including multiple music videos), and whole wikis, but the song itself remained unsolved... until now. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:52 PM - 23 comments

Yangyang Cheng explores the historical evolution of how we think about science, its capitalization, politicization, and securitization, & how the US' competition with China is restricting the future of scientific research:

"To understand the present woes in scientific collaboration between the United States and China and to conceive of a better future, one must go back in time to trace the evolution of this transpacific relationship."

posted by ndr at 3:59 AM - 3 comments

For generations of science fiction and fantasy aficionados, saying the name Harlan Ellison is like uttering a dark spell. Ellison’s writing — primarily in short story format — is fantastic and provocative, but his reputation for contentiousness was equally potent, often overshadowing the art itself. And for younger genre fans, the name Harlan Ellison might not mean anything at all. If you’re into science fiction and fantasy and came of age in the new millennium (and his 2014 Simpsons cameo went over your head), there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Ellison. from The Unexpected Resurrection of Harlan Ellison [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:50 AM - 89 comments

Extensive Desert Lava Tubes Sheltered Humans for 7000 Years, Archaeologists Find. Formed after volcanic activity, the underground caves periodically hosted early humans and their livestock in Saudi Arabia, facilitating cultural exchange.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:50 PM - 10 comments

Bryats Band. 'Vesnyanka' українська Інді-фолк (slyt. 3:44)
posted by clavdivs at 5:49 PM - 3 comments

Synthony is apparently an EDM orchestra. I mean, like, that's what it is. It's a DJ mix being played live by an orchestra. With singers and other things. Like, I can't describe this adequately, here: SYNTHONY - World Premiere - Full Length Show [1h55m] Performed by Auckland Philharmonia.
posted by hippybear at 1:49 PM - 19 comments

Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.” [...] “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said [last October], after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts.

TNR: The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco: "If Balaji Srinivasan is any guide, then the Silicon Valley plutocrats are definitely not okay." [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:12 PM - 94 comments

The World's Largest Wildlife Crossing Will Help Animals Walk Safely Over Eight Lanes of California Traffic. The 210-foot-long bridge across a busy freeway in Los Angeles County is expected to be finished in 2025.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:13 AM - 7 comments

The Millennial CAPTCHA [SLMcSweeneey's]
posted by May Kasahara at 6:49 AM - 63 comments

The RIGHT Way to Pronounce "GHIBLI" Finally Clarified!
posted by ShooBoo at 6:45 AM - 28 comments

The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV "Mid TV, on the other hand, almost can’t be bad for some of the same reasons that keep it from being great. It’s often an echo of the last generation of breakthrough TV... Or it’s made by professionals who know how to make TV too well, and therefore miss a prerequisite of making great art, which is training yourself to forget how the thing was ever done and thus coming up with your own way of doing it... Mid is not a strict genre with a universal definition. But it’s what you get when you raise TV’s production values and lower its ambitions. It reminds you a little of something you once liked a lot. It substitutes great casting for great ideas."
posted by gwint at 6:04 AM - 37 comments

Wallace was Black. The men who helped him were white. One might imagine that such a scene would have been jaw-dropping in Depression-era Texas, where white hostility toward people of color was common. But the West Texas cowboy culture of the time was distinctive. Men of different races often supported and respected one another. And no cowboy was more respected than Wallace. In fact he was one of the most remarkable figures in our history. from The Former Slave Who Became a Cowboy, a Rancher, and a Texas Legend [Texas Monthly; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:58 AM - 8 comments

The global transition to LED lighting seems to be having some concerning impacts on the natural world and human health.
posted by blue shadows at 10:43 PM - 18 comments

Think snakes are scary? These lizards have evolved to make snakes the snack. Snakes and lizards in the Australian outback are locked in a battle of survival. Which is predator and which is prey comes down to strategies they've evolved to resist deadly venom, a study suggests.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:14 PM - 4 comments

Brutalist Churches. [more inside]
posted by kaibutsu at 7:52 PM - 47 comments

Pulp Fiction cast on meeting Quentin Tarantino and changing film history | TCMFF 2024 [30m] "John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, and Harvey Keitel reunited at the TCM Classic Film Festival to celebrate the 30th anniversary of PULP FICTION."
posted by hippybear at 4:28 PM - 44 comments