Lately, I've had some doubts about the level of discourse here on Metafilter. To remedy the situation, here is that great American essayist and thinker, Mr. Edgar Allan Poe, on diddling. [more inside]
posted by Nomyte at 12:16 AM - 9 comments

"Great war novels inevitably follow great wars, and in literary circles following World War II, everyone was wondering what would be the successors to A Farewell to Arms and All Quiet on the Western Front — and who would write them. But when John Horne Burns, age 29, in his small dormitory suite at the Loomis School in Windsor, Conn., on the night of April 23, 1946 (Shakespeare’s birthday, at that), finished The Gallery — 'I fell across my Underwood and wept my heart out,' he later recalled — he was convinced he had done just that, and more. ‘The Gallery, I fear, is one of the masterpieces of the 20th century,' he wrote a friend." (SLNYT) (via) [more inside]
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 7:32 PM - 22 comments

Amazingly detailed replica of the Friends Apartment made of paper. By artist Bruna Salvador Conforto. She also did a replica of Lorelai and Rory Gilmore's house in Stars Hollow. Made of paper.
posted by sweetkid at 7:09 PM - 18 comments

"Bored of being in a dark room, she flips on the light, opens the door and bails. This particular episode takes place at 1am. This is why we keep doors locked with her around. We don't need her harassing the neighbors..." Julius Escaping.
posted by codacorolla at 6:48 PM - 74 comments

Second Avenue Subway: New York's Excavation Project Looks Like A Moonscape (slide show)
posted by slogger at 6:43 PM - 33 comments

Some Notes on Attunement: A voyage around Joni Mitchell (or pdf). Author Zadie Smith discovers Joni Mitchell.
posted by TrolleyOffTheTracks at 6:11 PM - 40 comments

Cooking For Freedom

A few days before I met Ahmed Jama in Mogadishu, three Islamist gunmen from Al Shabaab — al-Qa’eda’s Somali branch — burst into his new restaurant wearing suicide bomb jackets. They sprayed the place with bullets and then detonated themselves.

NPR: At His Own Risk, Somali Chef Creates Gourmet Haven In War-Weary Mogadishu [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:05 PM - 8 comments

Dave Lamb and MorganEve Swain are Brown Bird, a band from Rhode Island with a dark, rootsy, foot-stomping sound. Although Brown Bird has been around since 2003, they have enjoyed a recent increase of popularity, culminating in the April 2013 release of a new album, Fits of Reason, and a national tour to promote it. Just weeks into the tour, though, Lamb was diagnosed with leukemia, and the tour (and the band) were put on hiatus while Lamb undergoes chemotherapy. [more inside]
posted by quiet coyote at 5:56 PM - 4 comments

Babies Laughing About Rubber Bands SLYT
posted by Ipsifendus at 5:53 PM - 22 comments

Mechs done in the style of Richard Scarry by comics artist Evan Palmer.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:42 PM - 10 comments

The most well known of New Zealand's World War II home-built tanks was the Bob Semple tank, designed by New Zealand Minister of Works Bob Semple. There was only one made, but it served its purpose of "showing the people that something was being done to meet the enemy. It rumbled around, took part in parades, and inspired confidence." One problem: the tank, built on a Caterpiller tractor and armored with corrugated steel, would momentarily pause while changing gears, unless it was already headed down hill. During parades and public shows, its driver was instructed to change gear as little as possible, to prevent people from thinking their tank was stalling. The other New Zealand-built tank was the Schofield tank, built on the chassis of a Chevrolet heavy-duty truck, with the ability to drive quickly on wheels, then operate on treads, the transition only taking 7 to 10 minutes. Two prototypes were made, but neither the Bob Semple nor the Schofield tank were mass produced, as New Zealand started receiving tanks from abroad by 1943.
posted by filthy light thief at 5:27 PM - 15 comments

The Secret History of Privacy. "Something creepy happened when mystery became secular, secrecy became a technology, and privacy became a right..." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 5:15 PM - 15 comments

Dead men tell some tales - a visit to the Hellfire Caves, home of one of the most infamous Hellfire Clubs.
posted by Artw at 4:38 PM - 6 comments

In this video, Cheryl Misak delivers a lecture mostly having to do with the relationship between the accounts of truth given by C.S. Peirce and F.P. Ramsey. [more inside]
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 3:56 PM - 6 comments

...no background checks needed. Coming to (or already in) an airport near you: Holograms serve as "virtual assistants" giving instructions in multiple languages. via
posted by agatha_magatha at 3:45 PM - 27 comments

"Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities." -- PC Gamer's Crap Shoot looks at (semi-)obscure pc games, featuring big budget failures, extinct for a reason subgenres and godawful erotic games (movies) but also lost classics and beloved eighties masterpieces.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:32 PM - 22 comments

In commemoration of the 19th edition of its Colors series, Field Notes brand notebooks offers this video of the Night Sky. [more inside]
posted by Apropos of Something at 1:05 PM - 30 comments

The Restart Project encourages community engagement in repairing broken electronic equipment. This one year old charity enables "restart parties" which bring together consumers with broken electronic equipment and volunteer repairers, in an attempt to address our modern culture of "passive, flabby consumers of technology". When recycling is the second best option.
posted by walrus at 12:59 PM - 22 comments

To kick off each week the staff of NPR's "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!" posts Sandwich Mondays on The Salt blog, to look at some of the more... unusual sandwich offerings from America's commercial kitchens. This week, they recreate Wendy's nine patty T-Rex burger, which recently went extinct.
posted by zarq at 12:54 PM - 56 comments

There is a joke here somewhere about Bears, Rights, Arms, the Right to Bear Arms, Bears Arms and holy crap camera work. SLYT Cats and dogs are cute, but how about a black bear? Cute bear climbs tree to see what the heck the hunter is doing on the blind in the tree. [more inside]
posted by JohnnyGunn at 12:38 PM - 68 comments

Picture this. You're one of the 3 million-ish users of Duolingo, doing online Italian lessons so you can talk to your Italian boyfriend in his own language. Halfway through one of your daily lessons, you're given the sentence "Lui ti ama" to translate. "He loves you" -- cute coincidence. But then it starts getting stranger.
posted by pont at 12:11 PM - 47 comments

The Council of the European Union recently released a proposal to amend the General Data Protection Regulation. Scaling back from becoming the most strict privacy regulation in the world, the amendment greatly favors corporate interests while reducing the rights of data subjects. [more inside]
posted by ChipT at 11:25 AM - 8 comments

India to send world's last telegram [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 10:43 AM - 65 comments

What Daleks, xenomorphs and slasher movies tell us about palaeoart. [more inside]
posted by brundlefly at 10:19 AM - 9 comments

Feathers, photographed and scanned. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by aniola at 10:02 AM - 14 comments

When it comes to unappealing couples that have been featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, Arch Hall Jr. and Marilyn Manning are near the top of the heap. Their appearance in Eegah provided rich fodder for Joel and the bots. And yet, only one year after the release of Eegah, Hall and Manning would find themselves together again in radically different roles. [more inside]
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 8:57 AM - 15 comments

Disclaimer (Autoplay MP3): "Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and a psychologist, Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes." Favorite themes include responsibility and revenge, agency and utilitarianism, dishonesty and character, empathy and offensiveness. [more inside]
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:51 AM - 2 comments

The lasting effects of the Vietnam draft lottery. Men who were more likely to be drafted in the Vietnam war were more antiwar, more liberal, and more Democratic than those who were protected from the draft. Moreover, these attitudes persist into adulthood. [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:50 AM - 114 comments

Foster was a longtime model-airplane enthusiast, and one day he realized that his hobby could make for a new kind of weapon. His idea: take an unmanned, remote-controlled airplane, strap a camera to its belly, and fly it over enemy targets to snap pictures or shoot film; if possible, load it with a bomb and destroy the targets, too.

An accessible but detailed overview of the history and current implementations of military drones. [more inside]
posted by latkes at 7:13 AM - 41 comments

Character designer veteran Phil Postma has a blog, Minion Factory, where he often likes to explore the possibilities of Pixar-like reinterpretations of such things as Superman, Star Wars, Star Trek, and Pulp Serials (and much, much more).
posted by Atreides at 7:12 AM - 28 comments

The whimsical and awe-inspiring light art of Darren Pearson. Just how does he capture those skeletons on camera? Previously.
posted by Mooseli at 7:06 AM - 6 comments

Perhaps slightly obscurred by its charmingly primitive web design, my new favorite website is a fantastic reference resource for delving into American speeches that have changed history as well as discovering new amazing ones. [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb at 6:32 AM - 5 comments

The Troy McClure Credits Supercut (SLYTPHT*)
*Single Link You Tube Phil Hartman Tribute [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:47 AM - 44 comments

In the mid-1920s, Claude Friese-Greene filmed The Open Road, a record of his journey through Britain, using the 'Biocolour' technique first developed by his father William. Eighty years later, the BFI produced a digital version of the preserved and restored film. We've seen London in 1926 previously on MeFi, but there's plenty more of The Open Road to see, including weavers in Kilbarchan (1:16), farmers harvesting with oxen in Cirencester (0:52), Glamorgan coal-miners (0:46), and more. [more inside]
posted by Catseye at 2:46 AM - 7 comments

Minneapolis foursome City of Sound make music that's part Mars Volta, part Death From Above 1979, and all experimental madness, listing influences like Radiohead, Led Zeppelin, and The Beatles. Both their albums, L'Implosion and Creatures, can be heard in full on their Bandcamp page.
posted by cthuljew at 12:32 AM - 5 comments

Mirage Men is a book and documentary by fortean investigator and author Mark Pilkington on governmental manipulation and general mindfuckery of UFO investigators. "In 1983, while researching a documentary on the subject of UFOs for HBO, [Linda Howe] was engaged by Richard 'Rick' Doty, an agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), initially with the promise of helping her investigate an alleged UFO landing near Ellsworth Air Force Base. But Howe's meeting with Doty took an unexpected turn when the AFOSI agent suddenly produced a manila folder, saying she could take a look at it but, not remove it from the office or make notes. Within it was a document titled "Briefing Paper for the President of the United States of America on the Subject of Unidentified Aerial Vehicles", which listed a number of alleged UFO crash retrievals by the government, as well as paragraphs that became "emblazoned" on Howe's mind concerning how they had discovered that Homo sapiens was a species created by extraterrestrials through genetic manipulation of primates." [more inside]
posted by artof.mulata at 11:05 PM - 45 comments

Paris Apartment opened for the first time in 70 years Including intriguing links to a scandalous Belle Époque art wold romance and a $3 million dollar painting. Subject of this AskMe last year but includes additional photos. [more inside]
posted by DarthDuckie at 11:01 PM - 23 comments

For the first time, James Joyce's Ulysses will be read around the world in one day. Today. Which is Bloomsday. The reading, organized by the James Joyce Centre, draws upon volunteers from 25 countries. Previous readings of the book include the excellent RTE (Irish public radio) version from 1982, now made freely available. And a short excerpt read by Joyce himself.
posted by storybored at 8:55 PM - 29 comments

Sly Stone's history of drug addiction and eccentricity is well known. But, a recent California Court of Appeals ruling details how a series of ill advised business deals left Stone destitute. [more inside]
posted by reenum at 5:10 PM - 40 comments

Why I Am No Longer A Skeptic

That's right: the nerds won, decades ago, and they're now as thoroughly established as any other part of the establishment. And while nerds a relatively new elite, they're overwhelmingly the same as the old: rich, white, male, and desperate to hang onto what they've got. And I have come to realise that skepticism, in their hands, is just another tool to secure and advance their privileged position, and beat down their inferiors. As a skeptic, I was not shoring up the revolutionary barricades: instead, I was cheering on the Tsar's cavalry.

Referenced in The Cult Of Bayes' Theorem [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:41 PM - 177 comments

Chicago's hillbilly culture may come as a surprise. The great migration of African Americans from the South to Chicago is, of course, widely known and well documented; their impact on the south and west sides continues to be clear. The lesser known and somewhat later stream of white Southerners ("hillbillies" for short, though that's a pejorative, of course) had a big impact on the city's north side. [more inside]
posted by JimInLoganSquare at 4:35 PM - 23 comments

The NFL announced a change to its bag policy Thursday and beginning with the 2013 season, only clear plastic, vinyl or PVC bags will be permitted inside NFL stadiums. [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 3:45 PM - 120 comments

The first thing I did after I heard about the highly classified NSA PRISM program two years ago was set up a proxy server in Peshawar to email me passages from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
posted by From Bklyn at 2:16 PM - 49 comments

25 Things I'm Learning From Closing a Bookstore. (previously)
posted by telstar at 1:19 PM - 137 comments

The Houghton Library is Harvard's largest for rare books and manuscripts, and the tumbler currently showcases an image a day, with a link to the record in the online catalog for anyone who wants to know more about the source or come in to see it in person.

Teddy and Alice
Abraham's homework
Ingenious Headpieces
(street scene)
What's a holometer?

posted by the Real Dan at 1:04 PM - 18 comments

Fifty years ago today, Valentina Tereshkova became the first textile factory worker, first civilian and of course first woman in space. She completed 48 orbits, in the process amassing more space time than any of the American astronauts had logged. It would be almost twenty years before a second female astronaut got into space, slightly more than that for the first American woman. In total, fiftyseven women have flown into space, or roughly ten percent of the total number of astronauts.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:50 PM - 12 comments

Motor Trend has put a considerable amount of effort and money into their YouTube presence (autoplay) over the last year or so, and have pulled up a decent batting average for quality videos. However, one of their series stands head and shoulders above the rest: Roadkill (also autoplay). Starring Hot Rod Magazine's Editor in Chief David Freiburger and Staff Editor Mike Finnegan, Roadkill is a roughly 20 minute web series, typically posted the first Friday of every month, and is essentially two hot rod/muscle car guys taking on self-imposed amusingly bad ideas - such as throwing a dart at a map and trying to buy a car and drive home on only $1,500 - or occasionally chronicling the goings on at major Hot Rod Mag events like Hot Rod Drag Week. [more inside]
posted by Punkey at 10:26 AM - 18 comments

Oreo Wonderfilled Anthem. And during which show did The Martin Agency decide to roll out its new, optimistic, and wonder filled (yes I know) Oreo ad campaign? Why, during the sometimes dark and always cynical show Mad Men, of course. [more inside]
posted by TrolleyOffTheTracks at 10:20 AM - 35 comments

The Self-Transcendence race starts today. It's a run around the block, 5,649 times around the block. Runners cover 3,100 miles, running 6 am to midnight over 52 days, at least 60 miles a day over concrete. The best runners average 75 miles a day. All the runners seem to have the same mantra. The first race was in 1997, “The first couple years, the kids threw things at us.”
posted by Smedleyman at 9:53 AM - 34 comments

In a Sydney Morning Herald exclusive, an international team of archeologists have revealed the discovery of a hitherto unknown city in Cambodia.

Dr Evans, director of the University of Sydney's archaeological research centre in Cambodia, said the ''eureka moment'' in the discovery came weeks earlier when the lidar data popped up on a computer screen. ''With this instrument - bang - all of a sudden we saw an immediate picture of an entire city that no one knew existed which is just remarkable,'' he said.

Mahendraparvata, as the city is known, is estimated to be 350 years older than the UNESCO Heritage site of Angkor Wat, built on on Phnom Kulen before Jayavarman II descended from the mountain to build another capital. As Dr Evans said ''This is where it all began, giving rise to the Angkor civilisation that everyone associates with Angkor Wat." The news comes on the heels of the recent repatriation of looted archeological treasures back to Cambodia by the New York Metropolitan museum.
posted by infini at 9:10 AM - 13 comments