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A day after the release of the declassified report on Russian hacking during the 2016 election, the New York Times is reporting this morning on the business deals of Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. In Washington, Congressional Republicans seem to be supporting Trump's campaign promise to build a border wall between the US and Mexico, even though it seems that American taxpayers will be the ones fronting the money to pay for it. Mr. Trump, with 13 days to go before he assumes the presidency, is tweeting about the "stupid" people, or fools, would think that [having a good relationship with Russia] is bad! He will purportedly give a press conference this week, on January 11, following President Obama's Farewell Address, on January 10. A number of confirmation hearings will also take place on the 11th. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:42 AM - 23 comments

"When Words Fail in Movies," "The Elevator," "A Homeless Ghost: The Moving Camera and its Analogies," "A Theory of Film Music" (a reply to the previously posted "The Marvel Symphonic Universe"), "The Revenant by Tarkovsky," "Fritz Lang," "The Dark Knight--Creating the Ultimate Antagonist," "Honolulu Mon Amour," and "Sound Unseen: The Acousmatic Jeanne Dielman" were just a few of the videos selected multiple times as "The Best Video Essays of 2016" (see also 2014 and 2015, previously). But one response chose to honor a series of parodies of the form: Why is Cinema, e.g. "Screenwriters! Do the Best Words Now!"
posted by Wobbuffet at 5:32 AM - 2 comments

Malaysian Muslim fashion brand Debellani promotes their newest jubah (long Muslim robe-like dress) line by asking: why be a lady when you can be a warrior?
posted by divabat at 2:29 AM - 3 comments

Is sugar the world’s most popular drug? 'It eases pain, seems to be addictive and shows every sign of causing long-term health problems. Is it time to quit sugar for good?' [more inside]
posted by dgaicun at 12:57 AM - 36 comments

All life travels the ribbon of asphalt that cuts through Mokong, Cameroon. The women carrying their onions to market atop their heads step aside when a car approaches. The occasional stray cow ambles down the center, chased by local herders. The men with logs balance jerkily, while an entire family wobbles precariously by on one bicycle. And children — so many children — dart across the pavement, keeping an eye on the cattle while kicking soccer balls back and forth. Vehicle in convoy of US Ambassador to UN kills boy in Cameroon. [more inside]
posted by ChuraChura at 5:23 PM - 17 comments

Manny Gutierrez (a/k/a Manny Mua) has a YouTube channel with two million subscribers, an Instagram with three, and as of a few days ago, is the face of Maybelline's new mascara. Per his instagram bio: "I think boys deserve just as much cosmetic recognition." [more inside]
posted by Sokka shot first at 4:31 PM - 20 comments

We’re going back to the kind of dangers we had during the Cold War. At 89, former U.S. secretary of Defense Bill Perry finds himself an unexpected prophet of doom: “Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War, and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.”
posted by bitmage at 3:48 PM - 46 comments

Cuttlefish are cute except when they're feeding [silent]. Seriously, that is some scary-ass shit there [music]. Want to know more about this terrifying creature? Of course you do! [voiceover, captions] [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:11 PM - 33 comments

for the next two hours I'm going to be playing a lot of music - a lot of electronica, techno, drone, weird, soundtracky soundscape, ambient kinda stuff. Some of it's quite scary, so I apologize in advanced. [more inside]
posted by rebent at 3:06 PM - 1 comment

It’s become cliché that unusually many prominent people died in 2016. Is this true? Jason Crease says yes, using Science! (well, statistics).
posted by chavenet at 1:51 PM - 27 comments

Two Google Home assistants are talking to each other on Twitch. (Direct Twitch link.)
posted by kmz at 1:25 PM - 126 comments

Lucky Peach ranks instant ramen - "after 17 packages of ramen, I couldn’t eat anymore. My feet were swollen like they’d been on a transcontinental flight. It had to stop somewhere."
posted by needled at 1:25 PM - 51 comments

Reverberation time of a balloon pop: reverb room vs. anechoic chamber (SLYT, 17 seconds) [more inside]
posted by lmfsilva at 12:57 PM - 10 comments

billy barr (who doesn't capitalize his name) has lived in a cabin in the Colorado woods for 40 years, and has been recording the snow levels twice a day, every day, all winter long. [more inside]
posted by brainmouse at 12:34 PM - 13 comments

The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families, and the Work of Kinship [PDF] by Micaela di Leonardo: "The kin-work lens brought into focus new perspectives on my informants' family lives. First, life histories revealed that often the very existence of kin contact and holiday celebration depended on the presence of an adult woman in the household... Kin work, then, is like housework and child care: men in the aggregate do not do it. " (Originally published in Signs, Spring 1987.)
posted by amnesia and magnets at 12:32 PM - 5 comments

Almost six months after she was hired, the shop had an opening for a full-time mechanic. Layton wasn’t moved into the position, as she’d been promised. Instead, the store hired a young man who hadn’t gone to bike school, and whose experience came from volunteering at the same bike shop where Layton had previously worked. “On his first day,” she says, “he overtightened a seatcollar on a carbon seatpost and cracked it, smashed it. I fucking would have known not to do that.”
posted by Atreides at 12:26 PM - 34 comments

Last week, we had our 2016 report on what people stuffed up their bums, and what sorts of medical attention they needed to help fish those items out. This week, Pornhub.com is out with their annual deep data dive into the many ways that Pornhub content was accessed by Pornhub users, and what sorts of things those users preferred (and/or did not prefer). And say what you will about 2016: despite many, many other worthy distractions, people streamed an unbelievable amount of porn from Pornhub last year. [more inside]
posted by mosk at 9:50 AM - 168 comments

Feed Your Kids Peanuts, Early and Often, New Guidelines Urge [The New York Times] “Peanuts are back on the menu. In a significant reversal from past advice, new national health guidelines call for parents to give their children foods containing peanuts early and often, starting when they’re infants, as a way to help avoid life-threatening peanut allergies. The new guidelines, issued by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases [Full Text] on Thursday, recommend giving babies puréed food or finger food containing peanut powder or extract before they are 6 months old, and even earlier if a child is prone to allergies and doctors say it is safe to do so. One should never give a baby whole peanuts or peanut bits, experts say, because they can be a choking hazard. If broadly implemented, the new guidelines have the potential to dramatically lower the number of children who develop one of the most common and lethal food allergies, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the institute’s director, who called the new approach “game changing.””
posted by Fizz at 9:18 AM - 78 comments

The owners of a convenience store in Toronto have been plagued by a rash of thefts. Local squirrels have been stealing chocolate bars from the store, and have been caught on video. This wouldn’t be the first time squirrels have been fingered as thieves. In 2013, residents of Kentish Town in Greater London were puzzled when soap and shower gel began going missing from their bathrooms. The culprit was squirrels. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:05 AM - 34 comments

Jill Saward, campaigner against sexual assault, has died aged 51. Saward was the first woman to waive her right to automatic anonymity and campaigned for the rights of rape victims. [CN: rape, sexual violence] [more inside]
posted by threetwentytwo at 8:57 AM - 6 comments

danah boyd discusses how a wide spread way of media literacy was probably more harmful than helpful. "[T]oo many students I met were being told that Wikipedia was untrustworthy and were, instead, being encouraged to do research. As a result, the message that many had taken home was to turn to Google and use whatever came up first. They heard that Google was trustworthy and Wikipedia was not."
posted by katta at 7:49 AM - 99 comments

I remember specifically, when I created the intro to “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” I’d done it with a technique that I’d long been hoping to try out, which was basically just to sort of build yourself a Mellotron by recording a sustained note on each track of the multi-track and manipulating them in a wave to create combinations of harmonies. I’d been longing to do that for years, and I actually got to do that one night at Electric Lady and put it on the intro of “Waiting for a Girl Like You.” The band came in in the morning and I played it for them, and there was sort of a silence and then the bass player said, “It’s a bit like massage music, isn’t it?”
posted by josher71 at 6:16 AM - 25 comments

What is aluminium? It a silvery-white metal which is abundant in the Earth's crust. The Wright Brothers were early adopters of aluminium in engine construction. Now, aluminium is used to make cans, window frames, aircraft, fireworks and foil. Controversially, aluminium has also been used to make cricket bats. The ease of use of aluminium, and the flexibility properties especially when alloyed for strength or security for use in items such as coins, has helped make it the most widely used non-ferrous metal. Also, aluminium is often used to make kitchen utensils such as pots and pans. Finally, the sounds made by the manipulation of thin aluminium surfaces can have pleasing ASMR characteristics.
posted by Wordshore at 6:04 AM - 71 comments

Micro-dosing: The Drug Habit Your Boss Is Gonna Love The small brown vial came to me via a chain of custody that shall not be discussed and with the assurance that the clear liquid therein was, according to some guy who told the guy who gave it to me, a precise dilution of LSD. If the stories I'd heard were true, taking a tiny bit of it, a micro-dose, had the potential to make my workday more productive than ever... I squeezed the dropper gently, putting a clear drop into a mug of water on my desk, and drank it all in a single gulp. Then I began to worry that I was about to trip balls.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 4:30 AM - 116 comments

The upcoming transfer of power in the United States will be a time with much pomp and music, with people singing along to "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "God Bless America," but "Hail to the Chief" remains instrumental, even though there are lyrics, as sung by the Mormon Tabernacle. And if we sang those lyrics, we'd be missing its origin as a song to celebrate Roderick Dhu, or Black Roderick, a fictional medieval Scottish outlaw, which was re-written a number of times before becoming the song that Julia Tyler, wife of President John Tyler, requested for presidential entrances. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:20 PM - 15 comments

Activist Imani Henry discusses gentrification with the blog Brokelyn. Previously: An excerpt from D.W. Gibson's The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the Twenty-First Century. More: "Everything is going to become another Park Slope because that’s the way that this works.” Gentrification in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. And for your listening pleasure, WNYC and The Nation's "There Goes the Neighborhood." From ProPublica: is your apartment rent stabilized? and one of the mechanisms that got us here. Plus, your guide to New York State tenants' rights.
posted by the_blizz at 7:57 PM - 31 comments

From the director of Mad Max, The Road Warrior, Beyond Thunderdome, and Babe: Pig in the City comes a new masterpiece. MAD FEET: FURY ROAD
posted by mbrubeck at 5:48 PM - 14 comments

In a first for a sitting President, Barack Obama has published a 56-page paper/commentary in the Harvard Law Review: “The President’s Role in Advancing Criminal Justice Reform” [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 5:38 PM - 45 comments

Cr1tikal/Penguinz0 and fellow The Official Podcast member Kaya Orsan (previously) have riffed on the recent terrible Russian children's film Children Against Wizards, made with support from the Russian government (parts 1, 2, 3). They don't understand a word of it, but understanding it can't possibly make it worse, right? ...Right? (English subtitles available for latter video. Contains references to drugs, suicide, religion and politics.)
posted by BiggerJ at 5:37 PM - 4 comments

"Everyone thought I was just a crazy kid,” Casher said. "I mean, here I was with a 60-piece orchestra playing wah-wah guitar. All the first-call players like Bob Bain and Tommy Tedesco were saying, ‘What is this kid doing playing first chair?’ Well, it was because I had the wah."

50 Years Ago, the Wah-Wah Pedal Was Born in a Hollywood Hills Garage (previously)
posted by mannequito at 4:15 PM - 12 comments

To celebrate Hayao Miyazaki's 76th birthday today, why not take a look at the 100 best anime movies of all time according to Paste Magazine and discover some of anime's other great directors?
posted by MartinWisse at 3:10 PM - 66 comments

Shelters have a hard time finding adoptive families for elderly pets, animals with disabilities or chronic medical conditions, large animals that need special facilities, and working animals who have outlived their usefulness. Some people have stepped up to provide permanent care for these animals, so that they can live out their lives in comfort and security: 10 Animal Retirement Homes [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:05 PM - 22 comments

[I]n the middle of so many discussions of the causes of this year’s events (economics, backlash, media, the not-so-sleeping dragon bigotry), and of how to respond to them (petitions, debate, fundraising, art, despair) I hope people will find it useful to zoom out with me, to talk about the causes of historical events and change in general. Historian Ada Palmer writes about the history of the idea of progress, the role of individuals in history, the (simulated) Papal election of 2016, and what it all means for us here in 2017. [more inside]
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:14 PM - 11 comments

Faced with a declining listener-ship, in the wake of competing formats like streaming media, Norway announced that it will cease broadcasting on the FM bandwidth in 2017, in favor of the DAB+ standard, which employs AAC-based encoding at 48kbps. [more inside]
posted by Smart Dalek at 12:36 PM - 47 comments

Queen Elizabeth II cannot die. You might be wondering what happens when the Queen dies. It's simple: we don't really know, but there are plans afoot.
posted by blue_beetle at 12:33 PM - 173 comments

I grabbed it by its tail, and it came down on, starting literally up by my shoulder, like a drill press it landed on my arm, and every bite was breaking flesh. It was literally like an unsewing machine. It was literally unsewing my arm coming down, and I was pouring blood. The testimony of someone who actually bought one of those little monkeys advertised in the back of comic books. [more inside]
posted by marxchivist at 11:15 AM - 96 comments

Originally from Afropunk: Coachella , the über-fest hailed by music's intelligentsia and many progressives, set to take place in April has been making headlines (but not at music's most revered places) for its owner Philip Anschutz, "a climate change denier ... who has donated some of his billions to anti-gay organizations."
posted by kevathens at 11:08 AM - 17 comments

The best meme of 2016 — and let’s be real, probably any year — should be the one that was born from people arguing about dogs on the Internet. The Washington Post talks to @dog_rates and Brent Brant Walker , who had one of the best Twitter exchanges of the year.
posted by Metroid Baby at 9:07 AM - 77 comments

When a creature mysteriously turns up dead in Alaska—be it a sea otter, polar bear, or humpback whale—veterinary pathologist Kathy Burek gets the call. (contains some descriptions of animal gore) [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:02 AM - 5 comments

Nine months later, Lucy DeCoutere talks with CBC Radio about her experiences since the end of the Jian Ghomeshi trial (previously). [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 7:36 AM - 14 comments

Millennial Dan Nainan has been the go-to millennial in a whole lot of news stories in the past year. He was 35 in an AP story that appeared in the Chicago Tribune about undecided voters on Nov. 6, two days before the election. A few weeks later, he was 35 in a Vocativ story about Obama voters who wound up voting for Donald Trump. There he was again in Cosmopolitan in July. This time he was a millennial who swore off porn... Dan Nainan is known as a 35-year-old former Intel engineer who now makes millions as a comedian. The fact that he’s 20 years older is the least weird part of his story.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:51 AM - 98 comments

Check out the awesome snow and ice sculptures at the 2016 Harbin Ice and Snow Festival! [more inside]
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 5:58 AM - 11 comments

The Glare Varies for Two Actors on Hollywood’s Awards Trail [The New York Times] “Why do the two men find themselves in much different circumstances? Perhaps people think Mr. Affleck’s performance, and the movie in which he stars, is better. Maybe it’s because, as an Oscar nominee and the brother of the box-office star Ben Affleck, Mr. Affleck has attained a privileged status in Hollywood; the power surrounding him may make people reluctant to openly criticize him. Certainly a factor is the fact that there was unsettling new information revealed about Mr. Parker’s rape case in August — that his accuser later committed suicide — while there have been no new disclosures regarding Mr. Affleck’s cases. Or maybe, say those mindful of Hollywood’s checkered racial history, it is because Mr. Affleck is white and Mr. Parker is black. ” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:07 PM - 67 comments

...Fluff?
posted by jacquilynne at 9:06 PM - 153 comments

Trains race to and fro with no consideration of train loads. Trains shunt cars for fun. Trains respond to the whims of fat men in top hats. Trains are bricked up alive into tunnels to force them to work for the crony capitalist nightmare that is the island of Sodor. A subversive anti-capitlist screed or a good faith depiction of what happens when captial and aristocracy are too closely entwined or a classic depcition of false conciousness? And why are we running steam trains in this day and age? What the hell is going on on this island? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:00 PM - 69 comments

The FurKids animal and rescue shelter in Georgia is really trying to sell you on the concept of "cats" in their newest, low budget, pretty funny commercial. Warning: may make you want a cat.
posted by codacorolla at 8:46 PM - 34 comments

CHECK THIS OUT: PIGEONS VERY GOOD AT MONTY HALL. HERE'S THE PDF. HERE IS YOU CAN TRY IT, HUMAN. HERE IS BERT THE HUMAN DOING THAT DAMN DANCE WE ALL LOVE (THE PIGEON). HAVE A GREAT NIGHT EVERYBODY
posted by Greg Nog at 7:03 PM - 36 comments

[SLYT] When White Bear Mitsubishi's mascot joins the Minnesota Gophers' Goldy on the rink in Mariucci Arena to shoot a local ad, everyone wins! Except the white bear.
[via]
posted by not_on_display at 6:13 PM - 31 comments

Of course, the big question is: How do you become a superager? Which activities, if any, will increase your chances of remaining mentally sharp into old age? We’re still studying this question, but our best answer at the moment is: work hard at something. Many labs have observed that these critical brain regions increase in activity when people perform difficult tasks, whether the effort is physical or mental. You can therefore help keep these regions thick and healthy through vigorous exercise and bouts of strenuous mental effort. My father-in-law, for example, swims every day and plays tournament bridge. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 6:02 PM - 45 comments

The 8-Bit Beatles
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 4:37 PM - 30 comments