Bail is Busted - How Jail Really Works
posted by lalochezia at 4:08 AM - 0 comments

A few handwritten pages with poems and photographs from The road is wider than long
During July and August 1938, as Europe prepared for war, Roland Penrose and Lee Miller (slideshow) drove from Greece through the Balkans.
This was his record of the journey and declaration of love for her.
LEAVE YOUR TONGUE STUCK TO THE BARK
This will avoid all danger
of not meeting next year.
(Previous Lee Miller).
posted by adamvasco at 3:23 AM - 0 comments

io9: "After making a mere $84 million at the U.S. box office, Star Trek Into Darkness is considered by some to be a disappointment. Perhaps the problem is that it was a touch confusing. To help our readers better understand it, we've compiled and answered these Frequently Asked Questions about the movie." (Maximum Possible Spoiler Warning)
posted by davidjmcgee at 12:27 AM - 51 comments

I know how much can be at stake when a man takes a four-hour walk: Everything. The incomparable Gary Smith relates the tragic tale of 2004 Olympic hopeful Albert Heppner. [more inside]
posted by MoonOrb at 10:52 PM - 3 comments

For the past three months, the Art Institute of Chicago has been putting their Launchpad videos, designed to provide more context of museum-goers at the Institutes, on YouTube. The short videos include modern artists recreating art using ancient, medieval, and newer techniques in mosaics, glassblowing, pottery, painting, silversmithing, marquetry, and coin production plus conservation of art. There are also a few videos focusing on individual pieces in the collection.
posted by julen at 10:05 PM - 2 comments

The (odd and funny) drawings of Will Laren.
posted by zardoz at 9:51 PM - 8 comments

"Every teenager out there feels invincible. And they'll never admit it. It's not the kind of invincible like Superman. It's the kind of invincible like - I'll see you in five months." [20-minute YouTube documentary by SoulPancake.]

At age 14, Zach Sobiech (previously) was diagnosed with bone cancer. Given months to live, he turned to music to say goodbye. Zach's song "Clouds" received 3 million hits, and inspired a celebrity cover video featuring dozens of actors and musicians. Zach died today at his home in Minnesota. He was 18.
posted by Sfving at 9:18 PM - 12 comments

"Everyone Only Wants Temps" - My stint doing "on demand" grunt work for one of America's hottest growth industries

It's not a pretty formula, but it works. With 600 offices and a workforce of 400,000—more employees than Target or Home Depot—Labor Ready is the undisputed king of the blue-collar temp industry. Specializing in "tough-to-fill, high-turnover positions," the company dispatches people to dig ditches, demolish buildings, remove debris, stock giant fulfillment warehouses—jobs that take their toll on a body.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:47 PM - 77 comments

Dance Of Reality is the first film in twenty-three years by Alejandro Jodorosky, visionary director of surreal masterpieces El Topo and The Holy Mountain, writer of the never-directed Dune film that is the subject of a new new documentary, and comics like Metabarons. Both Dance of Reality and Jodrowosky's Dune have premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. If that's too much, check out Everything Is Terrible's Holy Mountain remake made with dogs.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 6:44 PM - 9 comments

Polyamory as noisy iterated prisoner's dilemma. [more inside]
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 5:59 PM - 29 comments

Several Hours ago a massive tornado hit the town of Moore Oklahoma. The tornado is now being estimated by some sources to be to be an EF-5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. This means winds at or over 200 mph as well as a damage area of close to 30 square miles. [more inside]
posted by Podkayne of Pasadena at 4:52 PM - 203 comments

How Far Did PBS Go To Avoid Offending David H. Koch?
posted by indubitable at 4:23 PM - 40 comments

Flickr announces 1TB free for all users.
posted by blue_beetle at 4:00 PM - 159 comments

Ray Manzarek, keyboardist for The Doors, has died at the age of 74. Not a lot of links. Just a place to share your thoughts, your faves... and to remember.
posted by markkraft at 3:58 PM - 80 comments

Anthony Moore, known as Romanthony, has died at age 46. [more inside]
posted by Taft at 2:53 PM - 18 comments

59 marvelous photographs taken between 1903 and 1920 by Frédéric Boissonnas (1858-1946), a franco-Swiss photographer who loved Greece. This is him being hauled up to the Meteora monastery in a net. Boissonnas was also a mountaineer and was the first to scale Mt. Olympus successfully in 1913. During the first 30 years of the 20th century he became the most influential photographer in Greece, between the two World Wars. Traveling extensively, landscapes, everyday people and life in Greece were photographed in detail for the first time. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 2:21 PM - 8 comments

"In the past inequality in South Africa was largely defined along race lines. It has become increasingly defined by inequality within population groups as the gap between rich and poor within each group has increased substantially." Is this what's led the BBC to report a growing sense of insecurity among poor (chiefly Afrikaans-speaking) whites? Or are they just blatantly misreading the statistics? [more inside]
posted by theweasel at 2:02 PM - 21 comments

How to ensure food and drink water safety during a flood or other natural disaster, courtesy of the FDA and the USDA.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:12 PM - 12 comments

A judgmental survey of America's state birds, with suggestions for improvements.
posted by Iridic at 11:59 AM - 158 comments

"YOU SOLD ME OUT AND SHATTERED MY DREAMS TONIGHT; ALL I WAS LOOKING FOR WAS 75 MINUTES OF ONE OF YOUR PEERS' TIME" It started when Tim Heidecker (previously) tried to set up a creative meeting between an old friend—Tom Scharpling (previously)—and an unnamed "high profile player" at the Adult Swim TV upfronts. But then the meeting fell through. [more inside]
posted by Atom Eyes at 11:33 AM - 59 comments

George RR Martin created the series, then let it hang around for decades without resolution. In the last couple of years however, there's been renewed interest, new novels and a screen adaption in the works. No, not Game of Thrones: Wild Cards! [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:22 AM - 27 comments

The Royal Horticultural Society has temporarily lifted a ban on garden gnomes - normally deemed too "tacky" - at the Chelsea Flower Show. Garden historian Twigs Way charts the public's long love-hate relationship with these figurines.
posted by marienbad at 11:01 AM - 23 comments

Rebound. A simple physics game with 2 controls. How far to the right can you go? [more inside]
posted by garlic at 10:06 AM - 30 comments

Tumblr's $1.1 Billion price-tag instinctively seems very high to most of us, but without context, numbers this huge are often literally unfathomable to the masses. To help readers gain perspective on the huge numbers commonly tossed around by the media, researcher Glen Chiacchieri has created Dictionary of Numbers, a Google Chrome extension that automatically adds context to huge numbers printed in the web pages that you read. [more inside]
posted by schmod at 7:57 AM - 50 comments

Guitar Warfare. Because sometimes a guitar bandit needs to be flattened. [slyt | via]
posted by quin at 7:27 AM - 19 comments

Late Friday night, a young man named Mark Carson was killed, shot point blank, in Greenwich Village. Carson's death was the 22nd anti-gay hate crime in New York so far this year, and the fifth this month. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:59 AM - 86 comments

Finnegans Wake, Joyce's famously unreadable masterpiece (read it online here), was considerably more readable in one of its earlier drafts. Watch Joyce cross out decipherable words and replace them with less decipherable ones! Watch him end, not with a whimper, but with a slightly less impressive whimper! Sadly, Shem's schoolbook, which in the finished version is a House of Leaves-esque compendium of side columns and footnotes, was not written until much later (according to the footnotes of that section). The introduction to this draft by David Hayman, who assembled it, is worth a read.
posted by Rory Marinich at 6:39 AM - 50 comments

Since February of this year, Autostraddle ("News, Entertainment, Opinion and Girl-On-Girl Culture") has been running a very interesting series of articles about trans experience (primarily focused on trans women) called Trans*Scribe. [more inside]
posted by jiawen at 10:43 PM - 35 comments

Structural Archaeology

Geoff Carter's radical view of building in the ancient world, especially the archaeology of the lost timber built environment of Southern England. It is new research into of prehistory of architecture

With the ultimate conclusion that Stonehenge is the remains of a roofed shelter. [more inside]
posted by Mitheral at 10:14 PM - 74 comments

"That was sort of a triumphant, 'fuck you,' to build a bike with no seat and keep riding." The experience of custom bike-builder Ezra Caldwell is chronicled in a 12 minute documentary by the folks at This Is Made By Hand, and also on Ezra's own blog, teaching cancer to cry. This Is Made By Hand, previously. [more inside]
posted by MoonOrb at 9:40 PM - 14 comments

The Long Swath is a satellite image by NASA's Landsat Data Continuity Mission that captures, in a single continuous image, a strip of land 120 by 6,000 miles stretching from South Africa to Russia. The image can be explored in Gigapan, Google Earth, and fly-over videos and high resolution images.
posted by carter at 7:35 PM - 7 comments

Daniel Dennett's seven rules for thinking. "A deepity (a term coined by the daughter of my late friend, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum) is a proposition that seems both important and true – and profound – but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading, it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading, it is true but trivial. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth from the second reading, and the devastating importance from the first reading, and thinks, Wow! That's a deepity."
posted by Sebmojo at 5:56 PM - 102 comments

The autonomous town of Marinaleda, Spain is doing well.
posted by artof.mulata at 5:49 PM - 14 comments

"My intentions here are simple: avoid discussions about what exactly constitutes Chinese photography, evade overwhelming information, and instead visually examine the role that such photographs play in shaping China’s image" (English, French, Chinese). Some whimsical — Alain Delorme Totems, others moving — Song Chao Miners, Migrant workers and Hold.
posted by unliteral at 4:52 PM - 5 comments

Lee Buchheit, fairy godmother to finance ministers in distress

Lee Buchheit, a lawyer at US firm Cleary Gottlieb, has been present at all the major debt crises of the past three decades. His reputation among investors is as a fearsome and aggressive litigator, but finance ministers in distress see him as something of a fairy godmother.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:12 PM - 5 comments

Web2.Hell collected the names and taglines of real web2.0 start-ups that somehow were actually funded. "Remember Nothing! Zukmo Everything!" "Unlike on other sites, your posts must be one word long!" (The phenomena of baffling name choice lives on in current day successes like Snotr, LiveMocha, Magoosh, Squidoo etc., etc., etc.)
posted by blankdawn at 2:56 PM - 51 comments

On June 6th, 2013, Mel Brooks will be presented with the 41st AFI Life Achievement Award, but this post is about his Tomato and Onion Omelette. Bon Appétit talks cooking, coffee, and career with Mel Brooks, Omelette King.
posted by Room 641-A at 2:19 PM - 22 comments

What It’s Like When A Label Won’t Release Your Album
posted by reenum at 12:44 PM - 40 comments

Yahoo Inc.'s board has approved a deal to acquire blogging startup Tumblr, people familiar with the matter said Sunday. Yahoo has agreed to pay $1.1 billion in cash for the company, one of the people said. Tumblr would continue to operate largely as an independent business, the people said. Yahoo! acquired Ludicorp and Flickr in March 2005. The reported acquisition cost was $35 million. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 11:17 AM - 214 comments

BATTLE OF THE PRAIRIE CHICKENS (slyt). [more inside]
posted by mudpuppie at 10:07 AM - 11 comments

"Our research shows that people love two things: failed Microsoft technologies and obscure Javascript libraries. Naturally, we decided to combine the two." Thanks to Smore, you can now put Microsoft Clippy (or one of its friends) on your websites.
posted by barnacles at 8:25 AM - 33 comments

Improv Everywhere: for our latest mission we posed as city workers providing a ridiculous solution to the “texting and walking” epidemic in New York.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:14 AM - 39 comments

Men Getting High: Falsettists, Countertenors, Pop, Rock, and Opera
posted by rollick at 4:45 AM - 31 comments

As Hegel presumably remarks somewhere, all great Tory crises appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as farce, the second as farce. -- Chris Brooke presents a history of "swivel eyed loon" as an insult used against a certain kind of rightwing Tory. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 3:42 AM - 50 comments

Animated Aliens in 60 Seconds. (with some barely intelligible NSFW language) [more inside]
posted by fuse theorem at 12:00 AM - 14 comments

Sexts From Marxists (SLTumblr)
posted by SkylitDrawl at 9:11 PM - 23 comments

The thrill and rush of possibly winning started to wear off after about the twentieth losing ticket. Each card had a couple of “Life” symbols on them, and every time you got a second you just dreamed of seeing the third one under the remaining graphite. However it never appeared and never will and it just kind of turned depressing. How could people put themselves through this humiliation and teasing every day of their lives?
The classic criticism of the lottery is that the people who play are the ones who can least afford to lose; that the lottery is a sink of money, draining wealth from those who most need it. Some lottery advocates . . . have tried to defend lottery-ticket buying as a rational purchase of fantasy—paying a dollar for a day's worth of pleasant anticipation, imagining yourself as a millionaire. But consider exactly what this implies. It would mean that you're occupying your valuable brain with a fantasy whose real probability is nearly zero—a tiny line of likelihood which you, yourself, can do nothing to realize. . . . Which makes the lottery another kind of sink: a sink of emotional energy. [via]

posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 8:33 PM - 148 comments

Most people visit the city of Burlington, Vermont, for the pleasant waterfront of Lake Champlain, the quirky shops and restaurants on Church Street, and the various cultural benefits that come with being a university town. Those are all the right reasons. I, on the other hand, went to Burlington for the flying monkeys... [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:40 PM - 12 comments

How one episode of a TV show, became a movie.

Take Barney Fife, Otis Campbell, Clara Edwards, Homer Bedloe, Grandma Walton, Darren Stevens 2.0, and the oldest motherfucker who ever lived. You know what you got there?

[more inside]
posted by timsteil at 6:55 PM - 21 comments

Where are my dragons‽ Because if I didn't, some other munchkin would have.
posted by cjorgensen at 5:57 PM - 12 comments