Lullatone are a half-Japanese, half-American duo based in Japan who make music that can probably best be described as twee folktronica; a recent EP of theirs is titled "Little Songs About Raindrops". And now, you can make your own with their Raindrop Melody Maker Flash web toy, which looks a bit like a pastel-coloured Tenori-On:
posted to MetaFilter by acb at 4:35 PM on June 4, 2009 (9 comments)

At 14 months, Spanish infant Osel Hita Torres was brought by his parents to Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama decreed him to be the reincarnation of the recently deceased Lama Yeshe. Torres became Lama Tenzin Osel Rinpoche, and spent most of his life growing up in a gilded cage in the Tibetan exile capital, venerated as a living deity and isolated from the corrupting influences of the world. But then he escaped.
posted to MetaFilter by acb at 9:05 AM on June 1, 2009 (66 comments)

Photos from the Neverland Ranch auction A while ago, Michael Jackson was short of cash, and decided to auction off the contents of Neverland Ranch, his combined palace/fun park, down to the last vanity painting and statue. A guy named Paul Scheer went along with a camera, took photos of some of the more peculiar items and put them online. It's certainly a unique collection.
posted to MetaFilter by acb at 4:08 PM on April 27, 2009 (56 comments)

In the 1980s, songwriter, artist and cultural critic Momus recorded a number of albums for the legendary indie label Creation Records, combining influences as diverse as Jacques Brel, Serge Gainsbourg, Pet Shop Boys-style synthpop and Balearic acid-house. These have largely languished in Sony Music's vaults over the past few years, occasionally fetching hefty prices on eBay. Now, Momus has taken the step to commit auto-piracy and release his Creation albums online, for free; over December, he will post MP3s of all six albums to his LiveJournal blog, each with freshly written liner notes. The first one, 1987's The Poison Boyfriend, is here.
posted to MetaFilter by acb at 3:26 AM on December 9, 2008 (15 comments)

Second Great Depression? We should be so lucky. Or so Dmitry Orlov says. Orlov, an engineer who watched the collapse of the Soviet Union, argues that the United States is well into a similar process of collapse. In Orlov's model, collapse is divided into five stages: financial, commercial, political, social and cultural. The first one is currently happening, and the next two are guaranteed to follow; as for cultural collapse, that happened a long time ago, but people were to narcotised by consumerism to notice. And things look set to get very, very dire indeed, with runaway hyperinflation, shortages, the breakdown of political institutions, the fragmentation of the US, and, if the "social collapse" stage is reached, roaming gangs and ethnic cleansing.
posted to MetaFilter by acb at 8:08 AM on December 3, 2008 (65 comments)