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The California man who hid for 6 months in a secret room inside Circuit City
posted by brundlefly at 12:43 PM Apr 30 2024 - 30 comments [22 favorites]

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 May 1 2024 - 8 comments [20 favorites]

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 Apr 30 2024 - 27 comments [19 favorites]

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 Apr 30 2024 - 78 comments [23 favorites (17 in the past 24 hours)]

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 Apr 30 2024 - 11 comments [13 favorites]

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 Apr 30 2024 - 12 comments [18 favorites (12 in the past 24 hours)]

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 Apr 30 2024 - 11 comments [11 favorites]

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 Apr 30 2024 - 3 comments [12 favorites (10 in the past 24 hours)]

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 Apr 30 2024 - 1 comment [10 favorites (9 in the past 24 hours)]

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 Apr 30 2024 - 21 comments [9 favorites]

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 Apr 30 2024 - 33 comments [21 favorites (8 in the past 24 hours)]

"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 Apr 30 2024 - 14 comments [8 favorites]

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 May 1 2024 - 4 comments [8 favorites]

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 Apr 30 2024 - 81 comments [7 favorites]

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 Apr 30 2024 - 18 comments [7 favorites]

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 Apr 30 2024 - 26 comments [7 favorites (6 in the past 24 hours)]

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 Apr 30 2024 - 11 comments [6 favorites]

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 Apr 29 2024 - 14 comments [44 favorites (4 in the past 24 hours)]

Kiwi takes a nap in Far North woman's chicken coop (New Zealand/Aotearoa).
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:07 AM Apr 30 2024 - 21 comments [12 favorites (4 in the past 24 hours)]

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 Apr 29 2024 - 12 comments [15 favorites (3 in the past 24 hours)]