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January 2005 Archives
January 31
Surgical Eyes - source of info about complications and their treatment from Lasik and other vision correction surgeries.
posted by Gyan at 6:43 PM PST - 35 comments
Hypothesis as thought-crime ...Now, however, a new brouhaha has erupted [at Harvard]and it seems impossible that Summers [the president]will emerge from this one without serious erosion of his moral authority. The trigger was a statement he made at a conference, suggesting that the reason there are more men than women in the mathematical sciences at top-flight institutions has to do with a small statistical difference in inate ability, which becomes a pretty large disparity when one looks at the 'high end' of the respective distribution curves...
The fatal words did not set forth his main theme, but merely constituted a brief aside, thoroughly hedged and qualified. Nonetheless, they touched off a firestorm of indignation, the most striking aspect of which was the intemperate response of a number of feminist scientists, who offered no counter-arguments, but simply declared the whole idea misogynistic and therefore forbidden intellectual territory.
posted by Postroad at 6:10 PM PST - 71 comments
TV Tickets! A great gallery of tickets to TV show tapings, some going back to the 1950s. Includes some fascinating commentary by Mark Evanier.
posted by braun_richard at 5:28 PM PST - 7 comments
Quicktime
virtual reality panoramas of thousands of picturesque places in the Western United States and Canada. Feast your eyes on
The Grand Canyon,
Death Valley,
Yosemite,
Mossbrae Falls,
Monument Valley, a
Ghost Town, the
Cascades,
Palm Canyon,
Joshua Tree,
Las Vegas,
Redwood Forests,
poppy fields,
palm groves, and
Bumpass Hell.
(via Highways West) (previous Mefi appearance)posted by euphorb at 11:49 AM PST - 8 comments
Pretty slick mind-reading trick... Perhaps wizened MetaFilter readers will see through its inner workings, but to me, this site just looked like magic. The page vanishes after a minute of disuse, so you may need to link more than once.
(My first post on MF.)
posted by humannature at 9:01 AM PST - 36 comments
Thinking with Type The online companion to the book of the same name offers a nice little online primer on the finer points of typography, including my favourite new online game: Dumb Quotes. Remember kids: only
you can prevent poor kerning.
posted by Robot Johnny at 8:42 AM PST - 15 comments
Pushing the open source agenda to the international stage. Brazilian Pop superstar / Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil, Grateful dead lyricist John Barlow and others participated yesterday in a World Social Forum gathering in Alegre, Brazil to urge a free open source software policy in the developing world. An open source constitutional discussed previously on metafilter
here.
posted by tidecat at 5:42 AM PST - 26 comments
MakePovertyHistory. "The gap between the worlds’s rich and poor has never been wider. Malnutrition, AIDS, conflict and illiteracy are a daily reality for millions."
This seems like an interesting endeavour, with people like Nelson Mandela involved, as well. I'm a bit of a cynic about this because one of the biggest endorsements has come from
Gordon Brown. He's a
known quantity, and I wonder if this is another P.R. run to bolster his international credentials.
Oh, and there's a possibility it could be
blocked before it gathers enough steam -- so much for
Soft Power.
posted by gsb at 2:51 AM PST - 18 comments
Mapping couplings at a high school Sociologists graphed the romantic and sexual relationships of 80% of an entire high school (832 out of ~1000 students). The research indicates that high schoolers lack sexual alpha-persons resulting in partner maps that are mostly long lines rather than the more hub and spoke like maps common in adult maps.
posted by Mitheral at 12:14 AM PST - 47 comments
January 30
filmaffinity.com looks like another useful tool to get recommendations for your viewing pleasure-once more of us start rating! It's in English and Spanish now (with more languages yet to come).
Movielens seems promising as well.
IMDb Pro looks cool too, though I haven't gone
that far. However,
this guy says beware!!
posted by HyperBlue at 8:06 PM PST - 11 comments
Israeli Pro-Palestinian activist Tali Fahima to remain in custody. Tali Fahima grew up in a conservative desert town in Israel and voted
Likud for years. As the second intifada erupted she read about the brutality of the occupation on the Internet and eventually travelled to Jenin refugee camp where she met Zakariyeh Zbeideh, a local leader of the terrorist organization and Fatah offshoot, Al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade. She was arrested and jailed in Israel, accused of translating a document for Zbeideh into Arabic. that allowed him to warn fighters marked for Israeli assassination.
Fahima has been under arrest nearly six months.
Her case has gained prominence not just because she is an Israeli Jew supporting Palestinian resistance
but because she is a Mizrahi, a
Sephardic or "Arab" Jew. This group has historically formed a solid bloc of support for aggressive policies against the Palestinians. [MI]
posted by By The Grace of God at 7:15 PM PST - 30 comments
“If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits” Prostitution was legalized in Germany just over two years ago, and brothel owners, who must pay tax and employee health insurance, have been granted access to official government databases of jobseekers and have equal status with any other employer. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse. Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job or lose her unemployment benefit.
“There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry. The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits.”
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 4:13 PM PST - 119 comments
Bosnia's horrific war memories There were countless horrors in the wars which led to the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. A Serbian army general has now surrendered to the authorities and will go to the United Nations tribunal in The Hague to answer war crimes charges dating back to 1999. But what happens once camp guards have served their sentences?
Dragan Kolundzija (Kole) stood trial in The Hague in Holland in 1999
Dragan Kolundzija, Kole to his friends, is sitting at the bar of the Hotel Prijedor when we enter....
posted by Postroad at 9:54 AM PST - 1 comments
For 170 years, crossing the Channel from the UK to France would have brought you 11 days forward in time, and crossing back would have brought you 11 days earlier. Why? Because the Church of England wasn't about to adopt
a new Calendar instituted by
a Catholic pope. After all, if the old style was
good enough for Caesar.... In fact, it took over 300 years for the new Gregorian Calendar to
come into use throughout Europe, causing, no doubt, more than a few missed lunch dates as people forgot to
convert between them as they traveled.
There are, of course,
many other calendars in use around the world, and no shortage of people suggesting that
let's do the time warp again.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 6:47 AM PST - 16 comments
Beyond boxers or briefs: Undergarments vary much more than the current styles we find in the nearest
haberdashery department or at
Victoria's Secret. Mormons have the
temple garment.
Suffragettes invented
bloomers, the next bold step after
pantaloons. But throughout modern Western history, women tended to wear
dress-like undergarments, (with or
without accompanying drawers) though both 19th century
men and
women wore the union suit, an earlier type of long-johns.
Of course, there's always the earliest of them all, the loincloth, worn by the ancient
Egyptians and
Tarzan. Similar is the
malo worn by some Pacific Islanders, the
Japanese fundoshi (warning: excess of manflesh), and the more elaborate Indian
dhoti, the male companion to the sari.
And we mustn't forget the bra! Though not a lower-body garment, it has had a long--if
tumultuous--
history worthy of quick
mention.
posted by lychee at 3:42 AM PST - 9 comments
January 29
Those OLD states are totally 2004.
I should wait until
Thursday, but: If you're fed up with the idea of living in America OR Canada, consider moving to
The State of Jefferson, a county on the Cali/Oregon border with big dreams and a kickass
flag.
Of course, they haven't seceded
yet, but when they do, it's only going to be a matter of time before we can all live in the utopian
Republic of Cascadia, where, as Jefferson residents, we'll run on Metric Time and help
strengthen Cascadia's southern border against Californian incursions.
And hey!
Public radio!posted by dougunderscorenelso at 8:54 PM PST - 20 comments
Momblogging. The NY Times (reg. required) looks at some blogging mamas. As someone who's regularly losing friends to the new-parent netherworld of suburbia and early nights, I had previously had little interest in reading about childrearing. I checked out
Bad Mother because I'm a fan of the author's husband - the novelist Michael Chabon - and realised it was a hoot. I also like
the Pessoptimist. So what other good bringing-up-baby blogs are out there?
posted by liam at 5:15 PM PST - 23 comments
Of the few memories I still have of childhood,
Ed Emberley is tops among them. Though I am to this day a miserable artist, his
drawing books were staples of my young life. And I always thought he was my little secret. [via
BoingBoing]
posted by absalom at 12:50 PM PST - 15 comments
Jim Capaldi, legendary rock & roll drummer and Hall of Fame inductee, died Friday at the age of 60 after a brief fight with stomach cancer.
posted by geeknik at 12:12 PM PST - 8 comments
USAF playing cat and mouse game over Iran and yes: there is no hard evidence that this is taking place. But we do recall what Bush had earlier said about the axis of evil and his warnings to Iran about nuke capability. "The U.S. Air Force is playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with Iran's ayatollahs, flying American combat aircraft into Iranian airspace in an attempt to lure Tehran into turning on air defense radars, thus allowing U.S. pilots to grid the system for use in future targeting data, administration officials said.
"We have to know which targets to attack and how to attack them," said one, speaking on condition of anonymity.
posted by Postroad at 9:22 AM PST - 72 comments
ytcracker - "if this is your first time to
ytcracker.com, allow me to thank you for coming here. i am the self-proclaimed king of true computer nerd rap. i represent the dirty nerdy south and digital gangsters worldwide. after conquering chess clubs across the globe, my mission has been to provide my fellow hackers, spammers, carders, and phreaks something to get down to."
I suggest
f*ck antis about fighting the anti-spammers,
drink more, post more about message board hijinks, and the instrumental techno tune,
baby be my twisted pair.
posted by Argyle at 9:15 AM PST - 12 comments
If all men were brothers, would you let one marry your sister? Think advocates for
gay marriage and
group marriage face a lot of social prejudice? Try campaigning for legalizing
adult consensual incest. It’s an idea that seems equally distasteful to those on both
the right and the left. But what about, say, the very real situation of adoption and sperm donation resulting in meetings between adult siblings
who aren’t even aware of the relationship? (Previously discussed
here and
here.) And then there’s the earnest
cousin marriage movement, which makes a lot of people reassess their views on the laws. In fact, the adult consensual incest movement has picked up support from some
surprising quarters. Of course, most people are opposed to it, often citing the - quite
overexaggerated (PDF) - dangers of inbreeding. (But, of course, this doesn’t explain why they’d still be against adult gay incest, or incest after, say, a tubal ligation.) In the meantime, it is happening, and people are genuinely
being
arrested
for this. Should Montana be sentencing people for up to
100 years for a tryst with a pretty cousin?
posted by kyrademon at 12:11 AM PST - 91 comments
January 28
Thanks for the memories ..."I know it’s a fallacy * That grown men never cry
Baby, that’s a lie * We had our bed of roses
But forgot that roses die * And thank you so much..."
posted by growabrain at 11:56 PM PST - 10 comments
Revolution Radio is a concept that died in Minneapolis years ago. It never had a chance to take off before being assimilated by the RadioBorg -- the idea that you play good songs, regardless of whether or not they fit under some canned "format." The Suburbs. The Beatles. G-Love and Special Sauce. X. Tori Amos. Adam and the Ants. Loretta Lynn. Trip Shakespeare.
Their playlist definitely leans more toward the "alternative" side of the dial than anything else, but now, thanks to Minnesota Public Radio's
brand-new station, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the musical variety.
Submit a request online. Not fortunate enough to live in Minnesota? You can still listen along to commercial-free radio a couple of
different formats.
Viva la revolution!posted by RKB at 7:27 PM PST - 39 comments
National Lampoon appears to be less than optimistic about the election in Iraq. Nevertheless, Bush seems to
expect much of what's depicted in that satire, he manages to maintain higher hopes in the end. I'm sure
Jim Henry would love to give a pre-election pep talk.
posted by ThePrawn at 6:02 PM PST - 16 comments
Wikipes is another application of wiki. Everybody go in, put in some of your favorite recipes, and cook dinner for your sweety. Thank me later.
posted by mychai at 2:16 PM PST - 21 comments
gorgeous women getting waxed for the first time (sfw) "There's hardly a square centimeter of nudity in this video for a catchy pop tune by Markus Nikolai, but we're certain there's a bunch of gently sadistic Brazilian wax fetishists out there getting off on the facial expressions of all those cute twentysomething girls with Australian British accents experiencing the skin-wrenching thrill of the wooden spatula for the first time."
posted by tsarfan at 1:19 PM PST - 44 comments
Dick Cheney, Dressing Down I can't decide if this is interesting cultural criticism or ridiculous nitpicking about something that isn't very important. Maybe it's both. Side note: It's a nice change to read about a male politician's appearance and wardrobe for once.
posted by scratch at 12:08 PM PST - 117 comments
Hell Yes... It's time for some Friday Flash Fun! (Well sort of, since even though this video was probably created in Flash, it's delivered in crap-tacular streaming format) Anyway, everyone's favorite white-boy (or
"guero") hip-hop superstar is back in action with a new video [
rm] [
asx] for his
forthcoming album. The video was created by Flash maestro
Mumbleboy, and for those that found Beck's
last outing a little vanilla for their tastes, it signals a welcome return to the man's
Chunky Monkey roots. Enjoy!
posted by idontlikewords at 11:49 AM PST - 18 comments
Iraq - Pulitzer prize winning journalist
Seymour Hersh shares his thoughts on the path of america. (streaming video and audio, transcript included. Video is long, 20 minutes 49 seconds. Worth watching) Seymour Hersh works for the
newyorker. He is best known for breaking the My Lai massacre story from Vietnam.
posted by sourbrew at 6:57 AM PST - 24 comments
January 27
Sports Illustrated explains seven or eight professional soccer/football teams, including highly regarded Manchester United and
FC Porto, are interested in "a phenomenon, probably the best player to come out of Brazil" : Jean Carlos Chera, nine years old and 4' 6". A
video (
additional source) [wmv format, 8MB] demonstrates Jean's abilities.
posted by quam at 6:42 PM PST - 46 comments
Cartography is a skill pretty much taken for granted now, but it
wasn't always
so. Accurate maps were once prized state secrets, laborious efforts that cost a fortune and took years (or even decades) to complete.
How things have changed. (Yours now,
$110) It took almost 500 years to map North America, but it's only taken one tenth of that to map just everything else. In the last 50 years, we've been able to create acurate atlases of
two planets and
one moon (with a
second in the works). Actually,
we've done a lot more than that. We're actually running out of things to map.
Maybe Not.
posted by absalom at 5:51 PM PST - 17 comments
"Precious Lord" sung by Mahalia Jackson (mp3)
No artist brought more acclaim to gospel music than
Mahalia Jackson (October 26, 1911 – January 27, 1972). Beginning in 1950, her
divine (.wav) talents were featured weekly on
Studs Turkel's radio program, and through
her music and gentle personality she became so beloved worldwide that
her funeral rivaled that of royalty. Mahalia sang "Precious Lord" at Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s funeral -- at Mahalia's funeral, Aretha Franklin did the honors.
Mahalia was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame posthumously
in 1997. Word has it she also made a mean
okra gumbo.
posted by miss lynnster at 5:22 PM PST - 6 comments
Little-Known U.S. Document Signed by President Adams Proclaims America's Government Is Secular Some people today assert that the United States government came from Christian foundations. They argue that our political system represents a Christian ideal form of government and that Jefferson, Madison, et al, had simply expressed Christian values while framing the Constitution. If this proved true, then we should have a wealth of evidence to support it, yet just the opposite proves the case.
Although, indeed, many of America's colonial statesmen practiced Christianity, our most influential Founding Fathers broke away from traditional religious thinking. The ideas of the Great Enlightenment that began in Europe had begun to sever the chains of monarchical theocracy. These heretical European ideas spread throughout early America. Instead of relying on faith, people began to use reason and science as their guide. The humanistic philosophical writers of the Enlightenment, such as Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire, had greatly influenced our Founding Fathers and Isaac Newton's mechanical and mathematical foundations served as a grounding post for their scientific reasoning.
posted by Postroad at 5:19 PM PST - 49 comments
This is, quite possibly, the funniest TV spot for an independent videogame retailer I've ever seen. Not that there are many out there (funny ones, I mean). There's more
here and
here. (via
Joystiq, requires QT)
posted by riffraff at 3:33 PM PST - 16 comments
Malu cachu (that's Welsh, I'll leave the interpreting to you) - a comprehensive guide to swearing in 165 languages. This probably offers the most appeal to the younger crowd,
subverting classroom etiquette undetected--but it's not without its draw for the
inebriated.
It may also be a good idea to cross check your
business name before going global. A representative of
AmaCorp visiting Japan is likely to catch a few odd looks.
posted by ThePrawn at 2:16 PM PST - 14 comments
A9 yellow pages features PHOTOS!!! So A9 starts doing
yellow pages, and I'm thinking, big deal, right? But then, I think, ok I'll check out some
Italian restaurants near my work, cause it's close to lunch. And that's, well, ok, but what's the big deal?
But then, I click on one of the
little numbers in the map, AND THERE'S A PHOTO of the restaurant, right there! And little arrows, so I can WALK UP AND DOWN THE STREET!!!
And
here's how they did it! (via
kottke)
posted by jasper411 at 10:07 AM PST - 72 comments
Moan Home!
Jenna Jameson, further pushing into the mainstream and "coming" to a cellphone near you, is now going to sell her "moan tones" for $2.50 a pop.
Best bit of the article? "If you can get her to say my name then I would buy it. I need that kind of personal attention," said New Yorker Julian McCullough.
posted by fenriq at 9:30 AM PST - 3 comments
Got a Secret? (Discussed briefly previously
here)
The idea behind Frank Warren Artomatic exhibit was simple: distribute 3,000 post cards asking the public to share a secret with him anonymously by reply mail, and sit back and wait for the replies. Some of the post cards are
now on display at the Anne C. Fisher gallery, but if you can't make it to the Georgetown show don't worry, Warren has created a
"Postsecret" blog where you can see some of the most interesting replies. (via
DCist)
posted by indiebass at 7:48 AM PST - 13 comments
Ivan Noble's Tumour Diary The BBC's Ivan Noble has been keeping an online diary of his fight against a malignant brain tumour. Alas, his illness is now getting the better of him, and this will be his final column.
He has been, at times, an inspiration, incredibly brave and totally honest about his illness. As a former colleague, he shall also be remembered fondly.
Start from
the beginning, it's a must read.
posted by scaryduck at 2:56 AM PST - 10 comments
When is suicide selfish? Yesterday in Los Angeles a suicidal local man stabbed himself in the chest, slit his wrists, and drove his car up onto train tracks, lost his nerve and hopped out at the last minute, to watch in anguish as not one but two trains collided with his car and with each other, killing 11 people (so far) and injuring almost 200 others. [more inside]
posted by LondonYank at 2:19 AM PST - 100 comments
January 26
Etiquette Hell For those who throw good manners, common decency, and proper etiquette to the wind, here is a website collecting stories about social gaffes that are often hilarious.
posted by livingsanctuary at 8:18 PM PST - 14 comments
Blogs are a phenomenon. Technorati, a blog search engine, tracks 6,406,667 blogs. Two years ago, it tracked 100,000. About 27% of adults now read blogs, up from 2% in 2003. But really they're nothing new, says
Kevin Maney in USA Today.
posted by rushmc at 7:01 PM PST - 35 comments
While Abu Musab al-Zarqawi declares a
"bitter war" against democracy,
Josh Muravchik suggests that Realists—"those who are skeptical of injecting issues of freedom, democracy and human rights into the conduct of foreign policy"—have historically been less in-step than pro-democracy Idealists. Responding to Bush's Inauguration Day comments about confronting tyranny in the coming years,
many Iranians cheered.
posted by jenleigh at 5:11 PM PST - 56 comments
climateprediction.net is the largest experiment ever to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century. it's a collaborative project a la
seti@home, and they have come up with some
interesting results.
we've
heard about climate change before, but this study indicates that things might be significantly worse than initially thought (double the temperature increase as previously predicted).
maybe this is all okay though, even
good for you. if you'd like to see that idea nicely debunked, i suggest you check out
trust us, we're experts. a lovely little book about how much we can trust all of these studies.
makes you wonder if we should have signed
this.
posted by christy at 4:33 PM PST - 21 comments
Long ago, in 1998, the EU looked at the future "... The implications of vertical and horizontal proliferation of this technology and the need for an adequate political response by the EU, to ensure it neither threatens civil liberties in Europe, nor reaches the hands of tyrants."
posted by hank at 3:41 PM PST - 8 comments
"To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about..." -
John WatersGotta give him credit... he never loses the ability to
shake people up, this time on NPR.
Listen for yourself to the "offending" piece
here.
(Safe bet he's giggling about it all...)posted by miss lynnster at 2:25 PM PST - 21 comments
Man dances his way around the world [wmv - 36MB] getting jiggy on a mountaintop, busting moves in an impenetrable forest, dodging Hanoi motorcyclists with his finely tuned moves, and, well, I wouldn't want to give anymore away. It's the feel good movie of the season.
posted by donovan at 2:23 PM PST - 32 comments
Who thinks this stuff up? Further to concerns discussed
here regarding the torture of Guantanamo detainees, some interesting stories are emerging from those released about the creativity of gonzo military interrogation. Eww.
posted by cosmonik at 1:34 PM PST - 38 comments
Budweiser is pulling their "wardrobe malfunction" ad from the Super Bowl because they think someone might be offended by it. But, you can see the ad
here: -- after going through their tough "age filter" and then clicking to the commercial. When you can't even make fun of stuff begging to made fun of anymore, that will be a sad day.
posted by narebuc at 1:23 PM PST - 40 comments
How do you donate to charity, play videogames and prove just how freakin' money you are in one fell swoop? If you're Jay Mohr,
this is how.
posted by riffraff at 1:11 PM PST - 17 comments
Lithium Picnic is one of the multitude of fetish/goth photography sites, but with a low key, only slightly snobbish attitude and many great photos.
Apnea,
Anyssa,
Domiana. (Main link is possibly NSFW, all the photos I linked to are SFW, but others on-site probably are not.)
posted by Captaintripps at 12:38 PM PST - 10 comments
Is
it gone now? The Suck archive seems to have disappeared. For me Suck.com was and still is best of the web, nothing else comes close. Co-founder Carl
Steadman’s site, with depressed, cryptic, brilliant and
Plastic-hating notes, seems to be fading away as well (Google
cache). Well, at least we’ve still got his
suicide note.
posted by Termite at 12:02 PM PST - 30 comments
Dream Job. "It's Linklater's faithful adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly, which is being brought to full paranoid life via Bob Sabiston's gloriously surreal software abilities, which, as in the team's previous Waking Life, utilizes hi-def filmmaking overlayed with a rich, rotoscope-inspired animation. Thirty-plus animators, and, here's the catch, so pay attention: They need more." [
via]
posted by gsb at 7:11 AM PST - 43 comments
Boozer vs. monk: the epic. Graphic Forums'
Battle Grid is a showcase of "Photoshop tennis"-style showdowns wherein the first player presents an image, and the second player posts a response that incorporates at least some portion of the previous image... and so on. This particular battle began began July 26, 2003 and the
latest entry was mid-December, 2004; presumably the battle will continue.
This post from September shows a thumbnail synopsis of the action after 26 rounds. A nice (though time-consuming!) thread to follow if you are a fan of collaborative improvisation.
posted by taz at 4:50 AM PST - 7 comments
January 25
Bring it trombONe! After watching this I am now wondering how fine a line there is between confidence and just being crazy.
quicktime movie, some laughter may be requiredposted by Hands of Manos at 9:30 PM PST - 41 comments
After School A documentary is being made about the rise of sexual molestation in schools by teachers. As someone who is trained as a teacher, I find this extremely shocking and disturbing.
posted by livingsanctuary at 7:43 PM PST - 27 comments
The end of the endless September. "America Online on Tuesday confirmed that it will stop supporting access to newsgroups." Thus ends what many labeled the greatest plague upon the Internet, the (triple posting)
barbarian horde that descended upon Usenet when AOL added Usenet access for its members.
This is when Usenet returns to utility, readability and civility. Right?
posted by NortonDC at 5:19 PM PST - 53 comments
The Dictators. Even in this age of crate-digger archaeology, especially when it comes to the roots of punk rock, this band of Bronx miscreants is little known except to cognoscenti. The stream of punk most identified with The Ramones (unapologetically crude three-minute pop singles, pop culture obsessed, based around fun, what Tom Carson called "deadly serious kidding")
began with these guys first three albums and lives on in the work of The Muffs, Nashville Pussy, The Supersuckers and countless others. A rock and roll treasure often overlooked.
posted by jonmc at 5:04 PM PST - 31 comments
Post Secret is a group confessional, where the site admin solicits deep, dark secrets from anyone that sends theirs in via postcard, then scans them in, and hijinks/hilarity/psychosis ensues. Kinda like
grouphug, but more visual and has a bit of a barrier to entry.
posted by mathowie at 4:44 PM PST - 25 comments
The Fall of Fannie Mae This is not your ordinary accounting fraud. Yes, there's the matter of $9 billion in overstated earnings. But the fight over Fannie is a nasty political showdown where everyone has his own agenda. And it's not over yet.posted by trharlan at 2:11 PM PST - 9 comments
Are you in the market for fine art? Have you considered
looking at Costco [Philly Enquirer link]? Last week, an original, authenticated Pablo Picasso sketch sold from their website for about $35,000. Currently you can purchase Mourlot edition lithographs by
Modigliani and
Chagall, as well as
prints from the Picasso Estate Collection with a click of your mouse. Would you trust Costco for your fine art purchases?
posted by ScottUltra at 2:04 PM PST - 10 comments
A fantastic example of old meets new, a man spends weeks crafting the perfect Christmas gift for his wife, with spectacular results. I give you the
typewriter-keyboard conversion: a true labor of love.
Makes me want to dig up my grandpa's old Underwood and give it a go.
posted by Igor XA at 9:06 AM PST - 27 comments
Surrational Images - A More Perfect World - The hallmark of Mutter's remarkable imagery is the distinct sense that the elements of each picture belong together, even though the combination may violate the laws of physics. Click pictures for descriptions.
posted by hypersloth at 8:38 AM PST - 16 comments
January 24
“Ain’t the Lord good?” You can finally watch Part 3, “The Son of the Robert Tilton” in all his glory. And usually, like third generation rendering, the director relies on larger explosions, bigger special effects and more dead bodies…
“God, I don’t have a thousand dollars! But you do!” (Interestingly, according to the website, the original VHS/DVD of “
Pastor Gas” is only 4 minutes long…) “In other words, you’ll be ahead instead of behind! Hello?” Send your donations to or call 214-620-6200, PO Box 819000, Dallas, TX 75381.
Stinking heathens!
posted by growabrain at 10:40 PM PST - 1 comments
The Aztecs at the Guggenheim. The hypercivilized, unimaginably savage Aztecs perceived the stability and very survival of the world in the view of their religion. The key belief was that certain gods, having sacrificed themselves to make human existence possible, demanded incessant repayment in kind. It seems that one of the reasons they could not resist Cortes was that they could not think outside the terms of a faith that they believed to account for all eventualities.
posted by semmi at 3:31 PM PST - 24 comments
Auntie re-launches her Internet Radio Player, which should be fully operational tomorrow. It looks as though it will feature some truly user-friendly facilities. The numbers: it will feature 500 extra hours of programming and over 80 more programmes,and they've read over 30,000 e-mails to find out what people want.
posted by Holly at 2:19 PM PST - 25 comments
Global warming approaching point of no return...Climate change: report warns point of no return may be reached in 10 years, leading to droughts, agricultural failure and water shortages. The possibilities include reaching climatic tipping points leading, for example, to the loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (which, between them, could raise sea level more than 10 metres over the space of a few centuries), the shutdown of the thermohaline ocean circulation (and, with it, the Gulf Stream), and the transformation of the planet's forests and soils from a net sink of carbon to a net source of carbon.
Countdown to global catastropheposted by y2karl at 1:36 PM PST - 80 comments
Glass and Light Very cool gallery of glass and plasma sculptures by Ed Kirshner, of Aurora Sculpture. Found via
Mona – the Museum of Neon Art, in LA. The Mona site includes an eclectic gallery section, too. I especially enjoyed Eric Ehlenberger’s floating jellyfish (more of his work
here), Brian Ferrin’s “Blind Faith,” Vince Koloski’s neon crop circle, and David Wilson’s amazing hand-blown neon lifeforms.
posted by Man O' Straw at 1:04 PM PST - 7 comments
"Rose . . . is as close to us as family". Rose Mary Woods, who died Saturday at 87, was
Richard Nixon's private
secretary. In 1973 Woods was transcribing
secretly recorded
audiotapes of
Oval Office conversations , working on a
June 20, 1972, tape of a conversation between
President Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, that might have shed light on whether Nixon knew about the
Watergate break-in three days earlier. While she was
performing her duties (.rtf file), she said, the phone rang. As she reached for it, she said she inadvertently struck
the erase key on the tape recorder and kept her foot on the machine's pedal, forwarding the tape. More inside.
posted by matteo at 12:46 PM PST - 16 comments
It's not the other white meat, but it seems cows have yet another
use.
"That's some good
shit, man
(in my very best Tommy Chong!)."
posted by LouReedsSon at 11:32 AM PST - 14 comments
Come out, experts from the woodworks! Neu5Ac and Neu5Gc are sugars found on cells present in nearly every mammal, from chimps to pigs. When scientists altered the genes of mice so that they couldn't produce them, the mice died. However, unlike our closest relatives, humans lack a gene that makes Neu5Gc. The gene is not gone, but rendered silent by a fatal mutation, one that occured approximately 500,000 ago. Now, note that it is illegal to produce any new embryonic stem cell lines. Any scientist will tell you that extant and legal human stem cell lines have been existing in calf serum and often on layers of mouse "feeder" cells for growth. As such, they are immersed in a bath of antigen and if re-introdcued would elicit a strong immune response. I.e. although of human origin, they would be treated as foreign cells if injected. It is likely they would be rejected if injected with today's techniques anyway, but this may represent another significant hurdle for research, one that could be sidestepped with more progressive policy. (Via
The Regular)
posted by willns at 10:33 AM PST - 32 comments
Old Wood Working Machines. Covering only North American manufactures, the OWWM website (referred to as the mothership) has 1160 scans of manuals, flyers, catalogs, and sales literature dating back over 100 years. The
FAQ is extensive and has exploded spinning off many pertinent
articles. OWWM also has almost 2200 user submitted,
machinery profiles showing machines as found and/or restored. One of the highlights is a write up on what appears to be the very
first (PDF) Delta Unisaw which was built before WWII and aside from mostly cosmetic changes is still built today.
posted by Mitheral at 8:44 AM PST - 10 comments
Advance Warning The 26th Annual Mooning of Amtrak will take place all day Saturday, July 9, 2005, Laguna Niguel, Orange County, California, U.S.A. "Attending this event may be hazardous due to the large concentration of silly people." Front page includes non-explicit pictures of people mooning, and pictures of trains.
posted by carter at 8:38 AM PST - 11 comments
The Chopper Show commercials are awesome! They're 30 minute (or longer) commercials for a dealership in Las Vegas. They're obnoxious, over the top, and mesmerizingly amusing. It boggles my mind that there are people who purchase cars based on these commercials, but I can understand why The Chopper is so popular in Las Vegas. If you can't speak spanish, I recommend El Chopper en Espanol - it's even funnier if you can't understand the sales pitch.
posted by Fantt at 7:41 AM PST - 26 comments
January 23
Serial Killer Art Review Tired of the Gustav Klimpt posters you bought when you were a freshman? Grown tired of the faux antique absinthe poster you bought at Ikea? How about spicing up your decor with a splash of bona fide serial killer art?
This site showcases the best of the worst.... reviews and grades of serial killer artwork. Enjoy!
This is my first (and probably creepiest) post.
posted by mannythedog at 5:55 PM PST - 30 comments
The Death of Yesterday Twenty years ago, an everyday virus destroyed Clive Wearing's brain. Now, all he can remember is music -- and his wife. Here, Deborah Wearing tells how their enduring love has become the one constant in a marriage without memory.
posted by matteo at 12:10 PM PST - 29 comments
Would You Like Fries With That? Fourteen
McDonalds in Oregon and southeastern Washington have been linked to the call center operated by
SEI-CCS Inc.,(link works in IE only...) a Fargo, N.D.-based company that works closely with McDonald's. The call taker in Grand Forks enters your order into a computer and relays it back to the home restaurant, where it pops up on a screen in the kitchen. Meanwhile, a digital camera photographs your car as you drive through. The photo pops up on a separate screen next to the order at the drive-through cashier's window to match the order with the car. A total of 50 McDonald's are expected to be on line within a few months, including seven more of Adams' restaurants and five in the Portland area, he said.
posted by pwb503 at 11:52 AM PST - 59 comments
Anti-Porn Law Is Unconstitutional A federal court in
U.S. v. Extreme Associates has struck down the federal anti-obscenity law. In this case, the government argued that "entertaining lewd and lustful thoughts stimulated by viewing material that appeals to one's purient interests . . . . is immoral conduct even when done by consenting adults in private." The court, however, wanted no part of this moralizing, as it declared "upholding the public sense of morality is not even a legitimate state interest."
posted by expriest at 11:07 AM PST - 36 comments
Dogblog - Jon Sung takes us on a magical journey through San Francisco, and its many fluffy dogs.
posted by Simon! at 7:59 AM PST - 14 comments
Windows users: are you on the lookout for good free software? Worried about spyware, adware, malware, hijackers, or just plain lousy code that likes to play havoc with your system? Look no further. It's
pricelessware to the rescue!
posted by MotorNeuron at 6:52 AM PST - 39 comments
It's Carnival Time! In 2002,
Silflay Hraka launched the internet's first carnival:
The Carnival of the Vanities. Carnivals are showcases of the best that blogs have to offer; bloggers send in posts they have made that they are especially pleased with, and a rotating editor collates them into a weekly edition with editorial comments. Think of carnivals as best-of-the-blogosphere magazines. The Carnival of the Vanities (current edition
here) doesn't have any particular focus, but a number of offshoots dedicated to specific fields have popped up. Stay up to date on blog postings about
philosophy,
science,
history,
the early modern period,
sex,
Canada, and (if desperately bored)
cats. A new carnival about atheism,
The Carnival of the Godless, will be coming out at the end of the month.
posted by painquale at 5:25 AM PST - 5 comments
January 22
A house of cards. Trapped by the blizzard, our elaborate system of creature comforts seems like nothing more than a house of cards that Mother Nature so easily knocks down.
Bryan Berg knows how to make a real
house of cards.
posted by caddis at 8:21 PM PST - 10 comments
Did the Interim Iraqi Defense Minister have these two Americans murdered for $300 million? In the middle of a election that will decide who controls Iraq, Interim Iraqi Defense Minister Hazim Shaalan has announced that Ahmad Chalabi -- a rival candidate --
will be arrested on
13-year-old charges. But why now? Shaalan says Chalabi "wanted to malign the reputation of the defense ministry". How?
1> Shaalan claims Chalabi
released documents accusing Shaalan of being
a former member of the Mokhaberat, Saddam's intelligence service. (Shaalan claims political fraud, with the intent of silencing
his claims against the Iranians.)
2> Chalabi claims that Shaalan
flew $300 million in U.S. currency to a shady businessman in Lebanon, bypassing financial controls, the public bidding process, and Iraqi government oversight.
So, how does this tie in with Stoffel and Wemple? Stoffel
recently alerted senior U.S. officials that the Iraqi Defense Ministry was involved in a kickback scheme involving a shady businessman in Lebanon and
a multimillion-dollar arms deal. Late last year,
Stoffel, a
prominent Republican donor and arms dealer,
met with aides to Sen. Santorum, R-Pa. Santorum wrote Donald Rumsfeld on Stoffel's behalf, asking him to raise the issue with Shaalan. Stoffel was later invited by the Coalition to arbitrate a solution with the Lebanese businessman. After several days, the arbitrator told the businessman to pay Stoffel -- a debt which is still unpaid. Upon leaving the base, Stoffel and Wemple were attacked and killed nearby.
A video from a previously unknown terrorist group claimed responsibility, but one expert suggests that the video may be
"manufactured". A reporter recently granted an interview with an Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman was
forbidden to ask "dangerous" questions about the contract. Stoffel and Wemple are survived by their wives and five children.
posted by insomnia_lj at 1:21 PM PST - 26 comments
Squashed Philosophers is Glyn Hughes' gift to mankind. "Unfortunately, life is rather short, the little storeroom of the brain doesn't have extensible walls and the greatest of thinkers seem to also be among the worst, and the lengthiest, of writers." Try Plato's
The Apology in 22 minutes, or Descartes'
Meditations on First Philosophy in 26 minutes. Really pressed for time but need a lift? Maybe you'd prefer Schopenhauer's
The World as Will and Idea in 12 minutes or, if it does it for you, Nietzsche's
Beyond Good and Evil condensed to only 14%. (just add water)
Suit your fancy, take your pick:
"Can machines think?",
"...we men... find reality generally quite unsatisfactory.",
"If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.",
"Cruelty is a virtue, not a vice.",
"Therefore, the earth is not flat.",
"Gott wüfelt nicht (God does not play dice).",
"Once freedom has exploded in the soul of man, the gods no longer have any power over him.
"posted by reflection at 12:51 PM PST - 41 comments
AH, IS THIS NOT HAPPINESS "Chin Shengt’an was a 17th century playwright who once found himself stranded with a friend in a temple for ten days because of a rainstorm. While thus secluded, the pair compiled a list of the truly happy moments in life. The wonderful thing about Chin’s Happy Moments is their lack of piety. Material pleasures are not rejected in favour of loftier ones." Lovely elegant idea. If you need an antidote be sure to also look at
Crap Jobs and
Crap Holidays.posted by milkwood at 12:02 PM PST - 14 comments
North Korea is the most secretive country in the world today, with its main railway lined with walls so high that its foreign passengers can't see the countryside.
posted by semmi at 10:52 AM PST - 19 comments
USA Today and others are reporting that
Doubleday will be publishing "[t]he original thoughts of Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders" in a book to be sold in the U.S. (and presumably abroad). From the
CNN article, Doubleday plans on donating proceeds from the sale to charity, and openly describes plans to flaunt U.S. law by NOT paying royalties for the use of source materials.
What are the ramifications for a publishing company (which relies on royalty payments and preservation of copyright for self-survival) to ignore their own rules (and U.S. law) when it suits them? Should we expect anyone in the U.S. to care about the royalty payments to these two individuals? Furthermore, could Doubleday's stance affect any of the other
copyright infringement actions currently being taken by U.S. organizations?
posted by aberrant at 10:22 AM PST - 32 comments
Why haven't you settled down yet? (
impermanent no-login link) Time has discovered that people are no longer graduated, married, and parenting by 22.
Twixters
are using their 20s to jump between jobs, apartments and cities instead of becoming adults. The reasons? Colleges
seriously out of step with the real world,
the ubiquity of choice, declining wages and plenty more. Personally, I blame the Toys-R-Us ad song for conditioning a generation to not
wanna grow up.
posted by revgeorge at 8:09 AM PST - 104 comments
January 21
Mold A Rama! Remember those plastic
lions,
tigers and
gorillas? How about an
Abraham Lincoln bust or locomotive? You remember those
machines where you stuck a quarter in and watched as 250 degree plastic was pumped into a mold and then automotive antifreeze was hosed in to supposedly cool the mold before the animal was pushed into the compartment below for your waiting
hands. Remember the burnt plastic smell? Those really hot to-the-touch animals that you wore down your parents until they gave you a quarter animals are not just simply things from your
fading memory. Uh uh,
new molds are being made even today. Not good enough you say? Then
buy your very own vintage Mold A Rama for a mere $9,500!
posted by Juicylicious at 2:27 PM PST - 43 comments
Flashback This has got to be one of the strangest and most beautiful things I've ever seen. (Flash, requires audio, has lots of pretty colors and runs almost 10 minutes.) I have no idea who the artist is but he obviously spent a lot of time putting this thing together.
Does this give anyone else the feeling that they are trippin?
posted by daHIFI at 12:32 PM PST - 13 comments
Instead of liquid water,
Titan has liquid methane. Instead of silicate rocks, Titan has frozen water ice. Instead of dirt, Titan has hydrocarbon particles settling out of the atmosphere, and instead of lava, Titanian volcanoes spew very cold ice.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 12:18 PM PST - 28 comments
While culling my clippings file for the big move, I came across
Ragtime: No Longer a Novelty in Sepia, which led me to the
The Rag-Time Ephemeralist, a labor of love by one
Chris Ware , whose
'The Acme Novelty Library' and
Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Boy In The World I had long admired. The Ragtime Ephemeralist's mention of
Out of Sight - The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895---here's a
review from
Musical Traditions--and, its very own
links page, as a consequence, led to this post about Ragtime, Cakewalks, Coon Songs and Vaudeville, with a slight nod to Barbershop Quartets. There's more, of course...
posted by y2karl at 11:41 AM PST - 27 comments
A candid exchange on Fox New about yesterday's inauguration's pomp and splendor between Judy Bachrach from Vanity Fair and Brigitte Quinn from Fox. (apologies for the link, it was the only one I could find)
posted by threehundredandsixty at 10:25 AM PST - 89 comments
Pop Lockin is a great way to waste some time today. And maybe learn a new step or two to show the little Mrs. this weekend [Flash required]...
posted by Miyagi at 8:30 AM PST - 11 comments
She may not have the grey matter, but what's that matter anymore, anyway?
A recent study shows that men have more
gray matter, women have more
white matter and in the end these differences seem to be no matter. Apparently men have more raw computing power, while women have a more efficient infrastructure -- resulting in similar general intelligence.
posted by ThePrawn at 3:38 AM PST - 27 comments
January 20
Inaugural protest pics (series begins at that photo):
Kevin Smith attended the inaugural protests and took some (IMHO) really good photographs that you weren't likely to see on any of the mainstream media outlets. Outside of the subject matter itself, I enjoy his photos and wanted to share these given this sets timeliness. In particular, I like
this one and love
this one. Non protest pics can be find by using the first link and then navigating back through his archives.
posted by jperkins at 11:24 PM PST - 82 comments
The City [Parts I & II, each a
15:00+ minute realPlayer video].
An urban planning film from 1939 that takes a nostalgic look at country life, compares it to the hustle and bustle of 1930s big city life, and presents a utopian alternative.
Reviews of The City, Parts I & II, can be found at
the Prelinger Archives if you want to read about them before you commit to watching the 30 minute movie. I tripped across this while surfing around on the
forums at
Cyburbia: The urban planning portal. Also notable: Music by
Aaron Copland.
posted by Doohickie at 9:28 PM PST - 14 comments
Ta-Da List is 37 Signals' latest offering is free sharable to-do lists. You can keep them to yourself, share them with only specific people, or share them with the world. So now you have
no excuse for forgetting to buy milk on the way home.
posted by riffola at 8:49 PM PST - 29 comments
Terrorist Video Bloopers Chicago comedy troupe Teatro Bastardo spoofs the hostage video: Three warnings:
1. Windows Media Player required
2. Funny AND offensive
3. Might be low-bandwidth
posted by lilboo at 8:12 PM PST - 28 comments
Protest Warriors Clash • Gil Kobrin of the
Protest Warriors went down "under a hail of black boots" belonging to anti-Bush peace activists. "It wasn't much of a contest. ProtestWarrior's contingent numbered 13, the other side in the hundreds. If they won any hearts and minds, no one said so." Meanwhile, DC activist group
Anarchist Resistance issued their call to action: "There's nothing left to salvage in this empire that is the U.S. government. It's time to bring it down." AR is listed as a resouce by the Internet Liberation Front who
Kos reported "hacked and defaced six Republican websites" yesterday. Some commentary on civil disobedience by
Thoreau &
ActUp.
posted by dhoyt at 7:12 PM PST - 88 comments
Idiotarod. The
Iditarod is the famous long-distance race in which yelping dogs tow a sled across Alaska. Our Idiotarod is pretty much the same thing, except that instead of dogs, it's people, instead of sleds, it's shopping carts, and instead of Alaska it's New York City.posted by thanatogenous at 6:46 PM PST - 12 comments
Avatar High - you are back in school. Better study for that test. Hey, what are you doing Friday night? Flash fun for Friday. (best for those younger than you, but still interesting)
posted by caddis at 6:33 PM PST - 10 comments
Do you speak American? The companion website to a PBS series, full of interactive language and dialect tools. You can
map your attitudes about regional correctness,
guess the speaker's home, learn about
American varieties, track the
history of certain words, hear
samples of regional dialects, and more.
Further reading:
Dialect Map of American English [
image],
Slanguage's local terms, and this collection of
local phrases.
Previously on MetaFilter: The Dialect Survey (and results), The Speech Accent Archive, Pop vs. Soda.posted by stopgap at 6:03 PM PST - 13 comments
TLE, possibly one of the most common diseases, believed to affect 600,000 to a million Americans, remains obscure. It is what afflicted Julius Ceasar, Alexander the Great, and
Dostoyevsky. Known through the work of
Bear and
Geshwind, it is virtually impossible to diagnose except in a severe cases where a seizure can be witnessed by an MRI or EEG, also because of the controversial
theories on personality. While a neurological disorder, it is treated by psychiatrists, and when medicated,
artists have often felt that the muse has left them.
posted by scazza at 1:15 PM PST - 38 comments
With all the talk about the emergence of Europe as an economic rival to the US,
is there a more likely rival emerging? A real strategic partnership between
Russia and
China could be exactly the combination of nuclear power, boots on the ground, and economic momentum to truly create a new bipolarity. Apparently, there has been
serious collaboration in military philosophy between the two powers at least since the USSR broke up, and
flash gamers have known about it for at least a couple years, but now it is
becoming very real. Conventional wisdom says that there are longstanding disputes over trade and territory, but things generally seem to be
warming up. You want to know what the world will look like in 20 years? Look to Siberia.
posted by milkman at 1:04 PM PST - 9 comments
The One Man Star Wars Trilogy is a one-hour, high energy, nonstop blast through the first three Star Wars films. The catch is, there's only one cast member.
Charles Ross, the writer and solo performer, spent too much of his childhood in a galaxy far, far away- adulthood has been similar. Ross plays all the characters, recreates the effects, sings the music, flies the ships, and fights both sides of the battles.
I'm not so sure I want to see him playing Carrie Fisher, especially in E6posted by Hands of Manos at 10:23 AM PST - 21 comments
Blackout Some sites have gone black today in protest of black box voting and/or four more years of Bush. But, actually, I haven't seen many. Are people tired of fighting or is this just a poorly-organized effort no one knows about?
posted by sparky at 7:56 AM PST - 64 comments
CIA Predicts European Union Will Break Up Within 15 Years. With all the attention focused on Iraq, this new CIA report seems to have slipped under the radar. Europe's dismal economic prospects and the continent's unfavorable demographics could have dire consequences for the EU, result in the dissolution of NATO and generally @#$?! up every post World War II/Cold War alliance that has been formed over the last half-century. Not that the CIA has ever been wrong...
posted by Heminator at 7:28 AM PST - 67 comments
Internal Amazon.com Conference - Liveblogged Interesting approach to sharing the wealth - Amazon.com has rounded up an interesting roster of tech speakers for a private conference - and decided to allow an internal blogging team to liveblog the speeches. Links to their talks (from yesterday and today) are
here. (Speakers include Rick Dalzell, Joel Spolsky, George Dyson, James Gosling, Eric Neustadter, Rael Dornfest, Gregor Kiczales, Craig McClanahan, Brian Aker, Gavin King, Bela Ban, Michael Tiemann, Margo Seltzer and Arlene Capismalis, Chris Hofmann, Bjorn Freeman-Benson and Guido van Rossum)
posted by kokogiak at 7:08 AM PST - 6 comments
Oh, the Humanity! "I'm a professional musician & I would like to share with you a song that I have just completed, I consider to be one of my most important and controversial pieces of work to date..." [
via]
I'm looking forward to the next versions of, "Sirhan Sirhan, who are you?" and "Oswald was a patsy."
posted by gsb at 6:06 AM PST - 10 comments
January 19
kontraband.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their noses, or why.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 9:48 PM PST - 21 comments
A Nation of Faith and Religious Illiterates The sociologist Peter Berger once remarked that if India is the most religious country in the world and Sweden the least, then the United States is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. Not anymore. With a Jesus lover in the Oval Office and a faith-based party in control of both houses of Congress, the United States is undeniably a nation of believers ruled by the same.
posted by Postroad at 5:35 PM PST - 30 comments
book. For thirty-six weeks, a sketchbook was sent in random order between four artists: two in Brooklyn, two in Belfast... [Flash]
posted by Armitage Shanks at 4:13 PM PST - 9 comments
A year ago, NYT reporter Nicholas Kristof purchased two Cambodian prostitutes (discussed
here).
Today, he's published an
update, along with a multimedia presentation about the girls' lives.
posted by mudpuppie at 3:17 PM PST - 19 comments
The shift from Colin Powell to Condoleeza Rice at the State Department could have important implications for the future of American foreign policy. Some of the commonalities and differences between them are revealed in
Powell's essay, and
Rice's essay. (via Foreign Affairs)
posted by semmi at 11:40 AM PST - 14 comments
For the neighbor kid who keyed your car, for the paperboy who rode his bike through your daisies, for the pack of urchins who were throwing snowballs at your car last week, you now have a wide selection of
ideal gifts.
Roll to taste.
posted by Gooney at 11:37 AM PST - 7 comments
Get rid of all those Gmail invites "Welcome to isnoop.net's gmail invite spooler. This page offers a place for people with Gmail invites and those who want them to come together with minimal effort and fuss."
posted by dhoyt at 10:39 AM PST - 36 comments
filetype:doc For those of you who don't know, Google allows you to limit your searches to files of a certain type. It reminds me of the world wide web of '93 in a lot of ways, before the web become so commercialized and vapid. Little bits of randomness.
posted by delmoi at 10:11 AM PST - 13 comments
Hitman.us is certainly a parody, offering, for a reasonable $20,000 fee, to remove the unwanted from your life. One of the rotating ads on the site, however, points to
bustoutdealer.com (registered under the
same name), which, with a fee
under $4,000, looks like it may be serious.
posted by nobody at 7:42 AM PST - 17 comments
TellBush.org Call 1.800.734.1463 To Leave A Voice Message For Bush. Your Voice Message Will Appear On TellBush.org And Get Itself Emailed To Bush At The Whitehouse. As messages are recorded, a flag gradually builds on the website.
posted by Hands of Manos at 7:27 AM PST - 41 comments
There aren't very many there yet, and the signs are illegible for all but the 3rd set of photos, but I still really like the idea behind
These are the People in my Neighborhood. You walk around your neighborhood and take pictures of people holding signs with the lyrics from Sesame Street. Very interesting and probably a good way to actually meet your neighbors.
viaposted by willnot at 6:50 AM PST - 9 comments
Athens chief fumes at US lewdness claims because, out of 3.9 billion people (and about 56 million of them in the United States alone),
9 people in the United States complained of nudity in the opening ceremonies. It's one thing to have our very moral, rather infintesimal minority running what we all see, but what happens when that morality clashes cross-country? (The complaints are old news; the Grecian response is not.)
posted by FormlessOne at 6:02 AM PST - 61 comments
Today's Music Tomorrow. "For the Finest "Cutting Edge" of Sound Transcendence Technology with Deluxe Dynamic Psychedelic Engineering for full phase Alpha States of Ultra Conscious Realization Imagery, in practical down to earth realistic simplistic easy to percptualize [sic] musical terms." And of course: "...born with a genius level I.Q., Vegetarian Vegan..., Astrologer, Artist, Writer, Health Expert, Hetero..." In particular check out the mp3s of
the drum tracks. (Though maybe that U2 song does sound a little better.)posted by TiredStarling at 12:42 AM PST - 8 comments
January 18
From MathNet to that silly song about the number nine,
Square One was one of my all-time favourite programs as a kid. It hasn't been released on video or DVD, but luckily there are
plenty of fansites with video clips, pics, and other media to take you on a trip down mathematical memory lane.
posted by sanitycheck at 4:11 PM PST - 25 comments
"Thunder Warrior." In the 1980s, the Italian movie industry -- better-known for "spaghetti" reimaginings of Westerns,
crime movies , and "After the Bomb"
flicks -- also gave us the Rambo rip-offs "Thunder Warrior" and "Thunder Warrior 2." Only instead of a Vietnam veteran, the hero was a Navajo warrior battling anti-Indian prejudice. (Windows Media File; possibly NSFW)
Via.
posted by inksyndicate at 3:19 PM PST - 7 comments
Americanism—and Its Enemies Puritanism did not drop out of history. It transformed itself into Americanism.
David Gelernter is a contributing editor of The Weekly Standard and professor of computer science at Yale. This essay helps to explain American religiosity..to the rest of us.
posted by dash_slot- at 2:40 PM PST - 49 comments
MYSTERY TWISTER 2005 is an international crypto competition. During the year 2005, different tasks will be set, altogether 13 CryptoChallenges, CC1 to CC13, of increasing difficulty, such as, for example, decrypting an encrypted message or forging a digital signature.
The variety of topics, which will be covered by the collection of
challenges, is intended to provide a survey of modern cryptology. Powered by the Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany), registration required.posted by tcp at 11:34 AM PST - 2 comments
Picasa 2 Google's entry into the world of photo sharing and management has been released to the world... and it's totally free.
Back when Google acquired Picasa, I heard a lot of "it's a total ripoff of iPhoto" well, folks, this version can do things that Photoshop can't even do, to say nothing of how it outshines iPhoto.
posted by coldon at 9:16 AM PST - 61 comments
Everyone is talking about Clint Eastwood's new movie,
Million Dollar Baby (
trailer). What you may not know however is that the movie was based on a short story in a book by the name of
Rope Burns: Stories From The Corner by the late F.X. Toole (aka Jerry Boyd). The book by the way was called, "...the best boxing short fiction ever written," by
James Ellroy of L.A. Confidential fame. Back in 2000 Toole gave an amazing
interview on Fresh Air about spending the last 20 years of his life as a cut man and the last 40 years of writing while trying to overcome his fear of rejection before getting his first book published at age 70.
posted by pwb503 at 12:06 AM PST - 19 comments
January 17
Learn Disco! They say it drives the chicks wild... maybe you'll finally get a date!
(The end of the video is the grooviest part. Courtesy NewToday.)
posted by miss lynnster at 11:13 PM PST - 40 comments
Following up on our
discussion of a classic Salinger short story, I find myself surprised - nay, shocked - that nobody has posted a link to the classic short story
"Guts" by Chuck Palahniuk.
posted by GriffX at 10:45 PM PST - 27 comments
If you have heard of the bands
Lightning Bolt,
Arab on Radar or
Forcefield,
chances are you've heard of the legendary space known as
Fort
Thunder - an
artists collective in
an otherwise neglected part of Providence known as
Olneyville
-where roughly 100 artists and musicians lived, worked, and held
underground music shows. After the
demolition
of Fort Thunder in
2001,
a number of those artists began again in a different space known simply as Oak
& Troy. One year ago this month, on one of the coldest days on record, the residents
of that fertile
creative
space were also
evicted,
this time with just two weeks' notice. But where there is
innovative music there
are dedicated audiophiles, and last week one of the former residents of Oak
& Troy released a
10-CD compilation
of some of the best music to happen in those amazing spaces. See if you can
pick out the extracurricular projects of members (or former members) of AoR,
ff,
Dropdead,
thee
Hydrogen Terrors and
Olneyville
Sound Station.
posted by antimagnet at 9:51 PM PST - 15 comments
Fat Truckers Union is just one of 35 sites hosted by
Alkem foundation. While at F.T.U. don't miss The Golden Age by scrolling right and set aside 8 hours to play the flash game.
Bridgeport seems to be a band that plays in livingrooms.
I'm not sure what
GPI is other than it has a lot of small print.
(contains flash, shockwave, sound and a few other things i don't know what they are.)posted by mss at 9:19 PM PST - 6 comments
The Cactus Project is a "transgenic artwork involving the fusion of human genetic material into the cactus genome resulting in the cactus expressing human hair." See also the
Artist links link for more transgenic art.
posted by dhruva at 7:59 PM PST - 25 comments
Before they were nobodies. There are a few bands who never quite made it huge but influenced everyone who ever saw or heard them (the Velvet Underground, Capt Beefheart, Sonic Youth).
The best were
The Replacements. And recently from their defunct website comes a complete early show of theirs, broken up in bite sized chunks, via quicktime. (more inside)
posted by tsarfan at 7:13 PM PST - 70 comments
Ten Reasons --from going to McDonald's (Did you know that Happy Meals are a loss leader?) to becoming a miser (It's a weightloss plan that really works) and more. From
AK13, a great little brit web mag.
posted by amberglow at 6:12 PM PST - 23 comments
Weatherman fired for on-air MLK day racial slur. I hope someone has video because I wouldn't mind seeing this dood go out like a sucka.
posted by wbm$tr at 5:58 PM PST - 106 comments
The Digested Read at The Guardian reduces popular books to 400 words and a conclusion. Recent notables include
Belle du Jour ("Sometimes I lie about my age to clients. Sometimes I even lie to my friends. I guess you must be wondering whether I'm lying now.") Crichton's
State of Fear ("Author's note: I'm very, very clever and have read a lot and you're all stupid wishy-washy liberals.") and Tom Wolfe's
I am Charlotte Simmons ("At least it covered her breasts, whatever they were. Charlotte knew men might want to touch them, but she didn't know why as she had never read Cosmopolitan.") Possibly NSFW if you have an employer with no sense of humor. On preview: Individual Digested Reads have been linked in previous discussions on
Henry James and
Camille Paglia. posted by KirkJobSluder at 3:56 PM PST - 9 comments
What the World May Come To. "THE school books tell us that the earth is a round globe, or, to be more exact, an oblate spheroid - a ball with the ends slightly flattened, as in an orange. This is, of course, true of the general appearance of the earth as it might be viewed from the moon or from Mars, and we may see it proved more or less by watching the earth's shadow on the lunar surface during an eclipse of the moon. But the earth is slowly but surely changing its shape, and already it is in process of becoming a tetraedron, or a pyramid." (Via
Incoming Signals, which quite properly calls the author "sort of the
Time Cube guy of the World War One era.")
posted by languagehat at 2:22 PM PST - 20 comments
NASA has released some pictures from another moon The article has some pictures - almost actual and computer-enhanced of Titan. There are also links to the radar signals Huygens received in its descent to Titan and Cassini sent back to NASA. (They sound a bit like a Vespa buzzing past a window.)
posted by Cranberry at 11:24 AM PST - 28 comments
Ultimate Recycling Rug hooking must be one of the simplest and cost-effective of crafts (
basically, cut old clothes into strips, use burlap, insert hook, pull up loop of fabric), and so it’s all the more amazing that it can be used to achieve such
cool,
painterly and
stunning results. If you click on just one link in this FPP, make it
this one, made by a Japanese woman out of her grandmother’s old silk kimonos. I’ve selected just one excellent,
comprehensive rug hooking web site,
but there’s a lot of resources and information available on the web for this craft if you’re interested.
posted by orange swan at 7:25 AM PST - 12 comments
January 16
3 Hive This is a great source for free, legal and cool mp3's. The folks at
3hive have put together a great collection of links to bands and the free mp3's they have available, including a short description/bio of each artist. New posts appear almost every day making this an excellent source for new music. Radio who needs it!
posted by mule at 11:50 PM PST - 8 comments
The next step? And so on...
Seymour Hersh, the fellow that broke the
Abu Ghraib story
(more) is now saying in the New Yorker that the US has been operating covertly in Iran (and possibly as many as 9 other mid-east and S. Asian countries).
As
this BBC article says
"Mr Hersh could be wrong. But he has a series of scoops to his name, including the details of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal last year. His track record suggests that he should be taken seriously."posted by edgeways at 10:13 PM PST - 120 comments
With all of the talk and posts about itunes, the RIAA, P2P, etc. I thought that I would take this opportunity to point out that there are hundreds of great, free music files online that are legal to download. Sites like
Soundloads which posts links to new music every day,
Garageband which features up and coming bands, and
CNet's music site that lets anyone and everyone upload their files to share with the masses, all feature some great music. And the creators of the music are asking you to download the files for free and add them to your playlists.
I've also downloaded some good music from
epitonic.com,
purevolume.com,
audiostreet, even blogs can be a good source of new, free, legal music downloads.
While you're not gonna find the latest big media pop diva or boy band, you can find good music if you take the time to look a little.
posted by copacetix at 8:27 PM PST - 17 comments
Naïve in Thailand: The misadventures of an unprepared 43-year-old Brit who drops everything to try and help with tsunami rebuilding. Pet peeve? "The only real irritation has been the American Christian volunteers."
posted by NortonDC at 8:24 PM PST - 88 comments
Empty your pockets before attending the Presidential Inauguration. Among items forbidden are
pocket tools,
explosives, animals -- and in case they forgot to mention something, "
any other items at the discretion of the security screeners that may pose a potential safety hazard"
posted by ThePrawn at 5:39 PM PST - 50 comments
Chika Honda, falsely imprisoned for ten years by Australian authorities for heroin smuggling, and never pardoned,
tells her story in her own words [Real Audio] in this
Walkley Award-nominated documentary. This is a wrenching story of incompetence by the federal police, legal aid services, media-influenced juries and the problem of translation in legal investigations. Listen to her story and decide on her innocence for yourself.
posted by DirtyCreature at 4:19 PM PST - 6 comments
Blogs contribute to political reform in Iran (New York Times): Former vice-president of Iran,
Mohammad Ali Abtahi, said that he learned through the Internet about the huge gap between government officials and the younger generation.
"We do not understand each other and cannot have a dialogue," he said. "As government officials, we receive a lot of confidential reports about what goes on in society. But I have felt that I learned a lot more about people and the younger generation by reading their Web logs and receiving about 40 to 50 e-mails every day. This is so different than reading about society in those bulletins from behind our desks."
posted by hoder at 2:52 PM PST - 7 comments
A fun time waster for anyone stuck in a Mexican hotel room, like me, or bored sitting at home. A joining of del.icio.us and flickr. Related to this
askmeposted by mss at 1:06 PM PST - 7 comments
Carnivore, the gold standard for conspiracy theory, has apparently been mothballed. An interesting element of this is that Carnivore has been removed from service not because it is invasive of civil liberties, but rather because it has failed to perform against commercially-available monitoring technologies. Of course, since we do not know what those technologies *are*, it may be that they have built into them considerations of individual rights to privacy that Carnivore could not be altered to respect. However, given the drift of the US on matters of data privacy, this seems unlikely...
So, what are the programmes that do it better than Carnivore? What do they have to offer that Carniviore doesn't, or is it just the ISPs are now offering information straight to the government? And does this mean that it is no longer fashionable to append long strings of exciting-sounding nouns to emails?
(Apologies if this is old news to the more plugged-in - this report has only just been released under FOI)
posted by tannhauser at 11:08 AM PST - 27 comments
January 15
Metahistory. A system of demystification of histories, historians, journalism, and journalists who claim to present things "as they are", while providing some brilliant methods for determining in what ways a given account lacks "complete objectivity" and how it can be seen as ultimately ideological.
posted by stbalbach at 9:21 PM PST - 57 comments
Journalism's vacation from the truth One day after Tucker Carlson, the co-host of CNN's "Crossfire," made his farewell appearance and two days after the network's new president made the admirable announcement that he would soon kill the program altogether, a television news miracle occurred: even as it staggered through its last steps to the network guillotine, "Crossfire" came up with the worst show in its 23-year history
posted by Postroad at 4:23 PM PST - 44 comments
The Brampton Bugle News, Culture, Health, Fashion, Jobs and much, much more. The charming English village of Brampton in Derbyshire goes on-line. Brampton’s Website offers a “behind the scenes” view of British village life written by the people themselves (and most of them seem to contribute). Click also on the banner/display adverts which provide deeper insights. Some pages have sound….when you least expect it! Other than that, SFW.
posted by JtJ at 7:09 AM PST - 10 comments
The damage wrought by the construction of an American military base in the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon must rank as one of the most reckless acts of cultural vandalism in recent memory. And all the more so because it was unnecessary and avoidable... but given that it was, the US authorities were very aware of the warnings of archaeologists of the historic importance of the site. Yet, as a report by Dr John Curtis of the British Museum makes clear, they seem to have ignored the warnings. Dr Curtis claimed that in the early days after the war a military presence served a valuable purpose in preventing the site from being looted. But that, he said, did not stop "substantial" damage being done to the site afterwards not just to individual buildings such as the Ishtar Gate, "one of the most famous monuments from antiquity", but also on an estimated 300,000 square metres which had been flattened and covered in gravel, mostly imported from elsewhere. This was done to provide helicopter landing places and parking lots for heavy vehicles that should not have been allowed there in the first place...Cultural vandalism.
Months of war that ruined centuries of history.
American graffiti.
posted by y2karl at 12:45 AM PST - 62 comments
January 14
the stanford prison experiment ,first posted in Feb 2001, can now be compared to the actions of soldiers who have served in Abu Ghraib. It's an illustration of how one can get carried away with a role and not act as one would normally. No, not an excuse. Thank you Plep!
posted by snsranch at 8:00 PM PST - 32 comments
The Salvador Option --sending Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, in imitation of our actions in El Salvador.
It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. More
here, including this:
In Iraq, in fact, as in many other places where the United States has tried to train ethical armies to fight dirty wars, the Iraqi troops are tacitly expected to do what American troops won’t. A fundamental purpose of the upcoming elections on January 30 is to create democratic legitimacy for whatever extreme measures the newly organized military decides to take.posted by amberglow at 7:25 PM PST - 18 comments
Global dimming. It's official. Particulate pollution in the air has decreased the amount of sunlight reaching the earth. How much? A fraction of a percent? Try 10% globally over the past 50 years. Worse yet, global dimming is thought to be counteracting CO2 and its greenhouse effect, lessening the worldwide temperature increase called global warming. Why's that bad? Because, in the coming decades, particulate pollution is expected to level off, while CO2 emissions are expected to rise strongly, multiplying the effects of global warming as we know it. "
That means a temperature rise of 10 degrees Celsius by 2100 could be on the cards, giving the UK a climate like that of North Africa, and rendering many parts of the world uninhabitable." Holy fucking shit! [via kottke]
posted by scarabic at 7:18 PM PST - 74 comments
Rent-a-Midget. "Think about the best party you've ever been to, wouldn't it have been better if there was a midget there? Another boring day at the office, why not have one of our little people go down and bring some life in there!"
posted by cedar at 6:19 PM PST - 16 comments
Concentration Test NSFW! Nekkidness Inside!
Friday fun, not work safe in any way and contains nudity mostly directed at the male population or anyone who likes boobs.
A new take on the old "Follow the Ball" game. Also in
German and
Danish.
posted by fenriq at 3:23 PM PST - 37 comments
Whatever happened to Jordan? This is perhaps the most thought-out dissent regarding Michael Jordan as sports god I've ever read. I have to say I agree, even though I was a Bulls fan growing up. What did he ever really stand for?
posted by Leege at 2:04 PM PST - 52 comments
Do you consider yourself a latter-day "beatnik"? Even
young fans of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg proudly
christen themselves with the tag
beatnik these days, apparently unaware that word was originally coined as a
term of ridicule by San Francisco columnist Herb Caen. "Beat" was indeed used by Kerouac to denote both "beaten down" and
"beatitude" -- a state of revelation. He
first heard the word spoken by a Times Square hustler and writer named Herbert Huncke; then another writer, John Clellon Holmes, popularized the term "Beat" in a
New York Times article headlined "This is the Beat Generation." But the original Beats did not approve of the term "beatnik" -- combining "beat" with the Russian
"Sputnik," as if to suggest that the Beat writers were both "out there" and vaguely Communist -- as this
hilarious dialogue [note: MP3 link] between a very young Ginsberg, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and an excruciatingly square talk-radio host makes plain.
posted by digaman at 11:05 AM PST - 45 comments
Yet another dead microbiologist. Why was Joeng Im of the University of Missouri, a 72 year old protein chemist, stabbed to death, stuffed in the trunk of his car, and burned? Was it a random act of violence? Was it a former student bent on revenge? Or is this biologist merely following in the footsteps of 40 other microbiologists and other scientists who have mysteriously died in the past 4 years? Scientists like
David Kelly,
Steven Mostow,
Ian Langford,
, Don C. Wiley,
David Wynn-Williams,
Michael Perich,
Gene Mallove, and dozens of other scientists?
Is it too
presumptuous, too "
tinfoil hat" to suppose that someone is killing off the microbiologists of the world, for some nefarious purpose?
posted by Sir Mildred Pierce at 10:07 AM PST - 46 comments
Ship shape? Welcome aboard the
SS United States. Her maiden voyage was July 7, 1952, where she set a trans-Atlantic
record which still stands.
Her
passenger list included such luminaries as Marlon Brando, Salvador Dali and Harry Truman. Several
sites document the effort to save her from being sold for scrap or sunk.
Far from her former glory, she
now lies at anchor in the Delaware River in Philadelphia, a
sad counterpart to her
former self.
posted by fixedgear at 9:53 AM PST - 25 comments
Into the realm of Henry Darger When
Henry Darger died in Chicago on April 13, 1973, he was a destitute man whose final days were spent at a home for the elderly. Now, 30 years later, Darger ranks among the
greatest outsider artists America
has ever seen.
Found in the astounding clutter of Darger's one-room apartment was a 15,000-page fantasy epic, bound by hand in 15 volumes, titled "
The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by
the Child Slave Rebellion." Along with this were three separate volumes filled with
300 drawings, including 87 multi-sheet horizontal panels, some 12 feet long with
drawings on both sides.
The discovery of
Darger's NSFW work spawned numerous books, a play, a British rock band (the
Vivian Girls), and an
excellent y2karl MetaFilter post. And now there's also
Jessica Yu's documentary "
In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger," a
portrait of the reclusive artist that has been
shortlisted for the upcoming Academy Award nominations. Again, Darger's art can be disturbing and must be considered not safe for work
(more inside)posted by matteo at 9:36 AM PST - 30 comments
January 13
Creative Commons and
Wired have launched
CC Mixter; a commons pool for music samples and remixes. Mix artists can now browse, download, remix, other artist's samples and tracks, then upload their own work for the same purpose. To celebrate, a bunch artists have donated music, and a
couple of
competitions have sprung up. Listen
here.
posted by armoured-ant at 7:57 PM PST - 3 comments
Blinked is Malcom Gladwell's latest short, concept driven book about how instant judgements are often correct, but equally often dangerous. Two reviews on
S****.com and
S****.com [ad thingie to watch] make for great reading themselves. Gladwell's long been a
favorite of mine, and I
don't think I'm alone here. Previously cited works include one of the best essays I've ever read, about the ultimate
pitchman.
posted by allan at 6:55 PM PST - 33 comments
Dr. Jay's Street Style is a site where the hip-hop fashion-minded critique each other's outfits. It's supremely entertaining because these guys
pose tough — and then "holla" catty comments about mismatched colors and outdated brands. Be sure to check out the
Hall of Style for the best and worst of the site. [
via]
posted by arielmeadow at 3:20 PM PST - 79 comments
The folks at
Threadless have launched a new collaborative contest type way to make shirts at
OMG Clothing. You sign up, submit a slogan, and
everyone votes on them, with the best scores getting made into shirts. Threadless has always done graphical submissions, but I suspect more people can come up with a funny phrase than a crazy cool vector art graphic.
posted by mathowie at 2:08 PM PST - 12 comments
"Researchers have
discovered the hidden laboratory used by Leonardo da Vinci for studies of flight and other pioneering scientific work in previously sealed rooms at a monastery next to the Basilica of the Santissima Annunziata, in the heart of Florence."
posted by ScottUltra at 12:56 PM PST - 28 comments
"Do you like this, the greedy scrabbling in greasy boxes, the whole herd determinedly chomping and chewing and slurping . . . don't you feel even a little bit as if you're in the pig barn, at exactly the moment the big trough full of ground intestines slops over for all to rush towards and snuffle in?"
Why movie going sucks by Russell Smith of the
Globe and Mail.
posted by Quartermass at 11:11 AM PST - 85 comments
A World of Invisibilia. "The pictures are simple enough: the people in the photos have been digitally removed and replaced with drawings. Yeah, I know... anyone can trace a drawing. But so what? I am doing it, and you're not. You're sitting at home doing nothing."
I like the effect, and I'm sure it's been done before but I can't place it.
posted by gsb at 10:42 AM PST - 34 comments
Tip and Shout: 2'' Tape: "But last Friday, [Jeff] Tweedy hit a snag as he prepared for a session in
Wilco's Chicago studio space: Nobody could find any of the professional-grade audio tape the band is accustomed to using."
posted by pfafflin at 10:31 AM PST - 37 comments
The journal of an American soldier. Although it's typically my policy not to reveal the identity of people I know in Iraq, I am making an exception in this case. The journal above belongs to Michael Smith, a LiveJournal friend of mine who
died in Iraq on Tuesday when an RPG hit his Humvee.
Mike was 24 years old and leaves behind family, friends, and a newlywed wife, who he married in Korea shortly before he deployed to Iraq. As is tradition on LiveJournal,
his last journal entry has become a memorial of sorts.
posted by insomnia_lj at 9:36 AM PST - 75 comments
Iraqi Rebels Taunt Departing from fiery Islamic slogans, Iraqi guerrillas have launched a propaganda campaign with an English-language video urging U.S. troops to lay down their weapons and seek refuge in mosques and homes.
The video, narrated in fluent English by what sounded like an Iraqi educated in the United States or Britain, also mocked the U.S. president's challenge to rebels in the early days of the insurgency to 'bring it on'.
"George W. Bush; you have asked us to 'bring it on'. And so help me, (we will) like you never expected. Do you have another challenge?," asked the narrator before the video showed explosions around a U.S. military Humvee vehicle.I do wish I could find a link to the video and "bring it on."
posted by nofundy at 6:44 AM PST - 39 comments
January 12
Scary recipes from the past! Included: Jello molds with meat inside, weird dinners made with hot dogs (including Circle Dogs, which would be the name of my band if I had one), and tuna spaghetti. Actually, I'd like to try some of the desserts...
posted by braun_richard at 10:25 PM PST - 27 comments
Big Crash! An iceberg the size of Long Island is about to impact a land-bound ice mass in Anarctica. Stand back!
posted by erebora at 9:04 PM PST - 10 comments
Mappr demonstrates the potential of open web APIs by plotting recently uploaded
Flickr photos onto their locations using an interactive map of the US.
Map24 mixes Mapquest and
Keyhole (previously discussed
here) by doing realtime zooming on your driving directions; good for not losing context on those tricky merges.
The National Map lets you see overlaid info from the US government's geologic surveys. What are some of the best designed interactive map sites?
posted by acid freaking on the kitty at 4:06 PM PST - 19 comments
Bob Marley goes home? Looks like Bob Marley will get what he wished for
here and return to Africa. Well, his bones will anyway. I always thought exhumed was an interesting word, see also disinter.
posted by fixedgear at 3:01 PM PST - 23 comments
The DNA of Literature. The Paris Review, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, makes available free .pdfs of fifty years of interviews with leading writers.
posted by rushmc at 2:37 PM PST - 7 comments
"I don't see how you can be president at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a relationship with the Lord," said George W. Bush yesterday. (Really?
I do.) While
giant crosses are banned from next Thursday's inauguration, Jesus
likely won't be, despite Michael Newdow's protestations. By the way, the benediction
is scheduled to be delivered by
The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, who also got the honor in 2001. Back then, he
said to millions of bowed heads gathered to mark the beginning of the Bush presidency: "We respectfully submit this humble prayer in the name that's above all other names, Jesus, the Christ. Let all who agree say, 'Amen.'" After gay rights, is discrimination against atheists
the next great civil rights battle of our time? Or should we just
shut up and move to France?posted by Saucy Intruder at 1:10 PM PST - 90 comments
Roots Manuva's "Ventriloshiznit Machine" Recombine rhymes as you please and hear them spit back via Mr. Manuva with this flash toy/promotional item for his new single "Colossal Insight." Helpful for the flow-impaired or those who would like those magnetic poetry things more if they were recited to them by a bobble-head MC. [Flash + Audio]
posted by Swampjazz! at 12:58 PM PST - 6 comments
Linguists Gone Wild Linguists from The American Dialect Society and the Linguistic Society of America recently met to vote for the Words of the Year, in various categories—Most Useful, Creative, Unnecessary, Outrageous, and Euphemistic; Most and Least Likely To Succeed; and an overall Word of the Year... no one really cares unless we pretend that These Are Important Words That Define Us as Americans. Still, that's marginally better than the alternate interpretation: This Is How Scholars Waste Their Time When They Could Be Doing Real Work.
posted by weepingsore at 11:42 AM PST - 23 comments
MGM animator Irv Spence's cartoon diary for 1944. A cartoon of the day's happenings for every day in 1944 -- reprinted daily thoughout 2005.
"These images are scanned from xeroxes an incalculable number of generations removed from the originals. Apparently, no amount of shoddy reproduction can suck the life out of these drawings..."posted by Robot Johnny at 11:23 AM PST - 6 comments
Woman Blows Up Home, Roaches Survive ... A 20-something woman in Jersey City, NJ, had a roach infestation, so she bought a few roach foggers and set them off in her kitchen. She then walked out of the house just before the pilot light on her stove ignited the fog. The resulting blast blew out a window, messed up the kitchen, and -- in a lucky break that saved her from injury -- slammed the door shut behind her. The truly sad part is that the roaches survived both the fogging and the explosion, according to firefighters who put out the blaze.
posted by nathanrudy at 9:38 AM PST - 39 comments
Charles Eames (1907-78) and Ray Eames (1912-88) gave shape to America's twentieth century. Their lives and work represented the nation's defining social movements: the West Coast's coming-of-age, the economy's shift from making goods to the producing information, and the global expansion of American culture. This Library of Congress exhibit outlines major themes of the Eames' life and voluminous works, including
architecture,
furniture, and the film
Powers of Ten. It is wonderfully illustrated with
artifacts,
photos of their life and work, and
examples from the Eames' collection of 350,000
slides.
posted by carter at 9:22 AM PST - 14 comments
Life in the future. In the year 2,000 "everything will be so easy that people will probably die from sheer boredom." Workweeks will be 24 hours and the home computer will be the new status symbol.
posted by caddis at 9:19 AM PST - 46 comments
Knight's American Mechanical Dictionary Containing over 3000 pages the Knight's American Mechanical Dictionary was billed as
A description of tools, instruments, machines, processes and engineering; history of inventions; general technological vocabulary. Published in 1876 it is a great resource for those trying to figure out how things were done in the time of our great (great?) grand parents. Ilustrations,
upwards of 5000 engravings, include a ride inside
monocycle,
trestle bridges,
compound microscope,
clod crushers,
washing machines,
spoke driver,
hydraulic wagon-tipper, and a
farmers tool-house. Warning: the book has been scanned in and all the item links are to 100-150K images.
posted by Mitheral at 8:12 AM PST - 10 comments
Ann Telneas is an editorial cartoonist. She started out working for Disney Imagineering as a designer. She has also been an animator for various studios in London, Los Angeles, New York and Taiwan. She now holds many awards for her cartoons and is in several prestige publications. Her works are an impressive array of
political caricatures,
feminism, and
cultural issuesposted by Hands of Manos at 8:04 AM PST - 12 comments
sacred science The scientific method is a tool for determining objective truth about the world around us, right? But not everybody thinks so. From being a proof of God's existance to a mere socio-pilotical construct, scientific humanism is under attack.
posted by MadOwl at 3:31 AM PST - 50 comments
Another
working blogger bites the dust - "This was moaning about not getting your birthday off or not getting on with your boss. I wasn't libelling anyone or giving away trade secrets."
The company he worked for,
Waterstones, saw differently. More on the subject
here.
posted by triv at 1:31 AM PST - 56 comments
January 11
Red, White and Blue Dogs of War Just found this story in
The Nation about a decision by the Bush administration to hire
Aegis Defense Services to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq. The trouble is, its boss, ex-British Lt. Col. Tim Spicer, who is responsible for actually starting a coup in Papua New Guinea in 1996, among other things. Perhaps Bush, the free market disciple, is beginning to think that he needs to hire some mercs to make up for all the reserve and Guard guys quitting. If the Army needs more help and advice, they could hire
this or
that homegrown "consulting firm."
posted by Leege at 9:05 PM PST - 22 comments
ResumeWiki is a community edited resume centre. You post your profile (goals, etc) and assume the community of peers will give you comments and possible edits. Their
ResumeWriting section has some interesting links, and could be the place to stay up caught up on HR snobbery.
posted by McGuillicuddy at 7:45 PM PST - 2 comments
Yet another del.icio.us ? "One of the main purposes of social bookmarking systems is allowing people to see what other people are bookmarking. I frequently find things that people are linking to very interesting, and thought it would be nice to slap together a system that could tell me, automatically, what lots of other people have just bookmarked. Thus, oishii was born".posted by azul at 6:42 PM PST - 10 comments
Dear Dan,
I am writing this memo to explain
what happened to the case our NeXTCube Computer, Serial Number AA001032....
posted by casarkos at 6:07 PM PST - 20 comments
Some stories are longer than others.
In the early 1900s,
Burro Schmidt spent 32 years (or 38, depending on your source) digging a
1/2-mile tunnel through a Mojave mountain. Why? Because it was easier than hauling his gold and his burros down the back road.
"Solely, he labored long days.... The tunnel was solid granite, which needed no shoring, except at the entrance to the tunnel. Being at 4200 foot elevation there was a shortage of oxygen, making his labor even more difficult. He was trapped many times by falling rock and injured as many times."
(But the story doesn't end with him.
More >> )
posted by mudpuppie at 5:37 PM PST - 11 comments
Feral Cities. Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power. It would possess at least a modicum of commercial linkages, and some of its inhabitants would have access to the world's most modern communication and computing technologies. It would, in effect, be a feral city.
posted by stbalbach at 3:32 PM PST - 36 comments
Cut-Rate Diplomas Laura L. Callahan was very proud of her Ph.D... and she never let her employees at the Labor Department, where she served as deputy chief information officer, forget it.
To get her Ph.D., Callahan merely had to thumb through a workbook and take an open-book exam. The whole correspondence course-which includes instruction on business ethics-takes about five hours to complete. A 2,000-word paper (shorter than this article) counts as a dissertation.posted by trharlan at 12:41 PM PST - 73 comments
Schnappi! Contrary to popular belief in the rest of the world, the German pop charts are not dominated by
over-the-hill American TV stars. In fact, the current #1 single, outselling even the
usual imported subjects is a silly little ditty about a baby crocodile. (Think of it as the German version of SpongeBob Squarepants, kindasorta.)
I'm passing on the earworm to all of you via the four versions listed
here. You're quite welcome.
posted by chicobangs at 12:29 PM PST - 30 comments
Artocracy is aiming to use the net to democratize yet another expensive thing in the world: the sale and distribution of art works. While the first works offered aren't that impressive and having to use your own inkjet is a limiting factor, I like the direction this is going in. From
their Gallery, you can purchase prints from a dozen or so artists, in the range of $20-50, and then print as many as you wish at home.
The Seattle PI has a full story. Perhaps this will spark a "
long tail" of small change art sales from folks used to getting several thousand per canvas sold, while at the same time allowing any Tom, Dick, or Harry to have some nice looking apartment walls at home.
posted by mathowie at 9:54 AM PST - 16 comments
Once, i had a secret lovelife.... The urge to act out an entirely different persona is widely shared across cultures as well, social scientists say, and may be motivated by curiosity, mischief or earnest soul-searching. Certainly, it is a familiar tug in the breast of almost anyone who has stepped out of his or her daily life for a time, whether for vacation, for business or to live in another country. On secret lives, for good and bad. We're in this too:
"I think what people are doing on the Internet now," she said, "has deep psychological meaning in terms of how they're using identities to express problems and potentially solve them in what is a relatively consequence-free zone."
Yet out in the world, a consequence-rich zone, studies find that most people find it mentally exhausting to hold onto inflammatory secrets - much less lives - for long. (NYT, reg.req.)
posted by amberglow at 4:25 AM PST - 36 comments
CoasterSims.com. Just because nature is full of icy death outside doesn't mean you can't sit in your computer chair and scream like a damn fool on a roller coaster.
posted by qDot at 1:46 AM PST - 3 comments
January 10
Poker player plays for 24 hours in a row?
Yawn. Online poker player plays eight tables simultaneously for 24 hours in a row?
Interesting.posted by bdk3clash at 10:03 PM PST - 20 comments
PSST! Wanna get rich? Make a cardboard chair and sell it!
No, I'm
serious. Based on a design by architect Frank Gehry that is now in the
Guggenheim, these chairs apparently sell for some good cash. Engineers and
design students have been doing the cardboard chair project for years, but I think it's time for the common folk to get in on the
action. Need inspiration?
Check out some more stuff . . .
posted by ashbury at 9:19 PM PST - 17 comments
RIP commercial jingles. Looks like the era of "I'd like to teach the world to sing" and "Oh I wish I were an Oscar Mayer weiner" is going away, thanks to the use of pop and rock songs.
posted by braun_richard at 8:19 PM PST - 62 comments
This Highway Adopted By The Ku Klux Klan The US Supreme Court has declined an appeal by the state of Missouri seeking to reverse an 8th Circuit opinion which allows the Ku Klux Klan to adopt a highway. Under the controlling ruling of the 8th Circuit, "desire to exclude controversial organizations in order to prevent 'road rage' or public backlash on the highways against the adopters' unpopular beliefs is simply not a legitimate governmental interest that would support the enactment of speech-abridging regulations."
posted by expriest at 3:42 PM PST - 114 comments
St. Andrew's Face Morpher lets you upload a photo, and then morphs that photo so the person looks more caucasian, or afro-caribean, or older, or younger. Or drunk. Or like the person is 1/2 monkey. (Many more options available.)
posted by 23skidoo at 3:32 PM PST - 23 comments
Library Musical. "Sometimes, you are moved by such a strong emotion that you can only express it through song. As we learn from musical theatre that emotion can swell up anytime: in a corner deli, on a playground, in an open field--and even at the library."
posted by adrober at 2:16 PM PST - 15 comments
Back in Decemeber of 2002
Christa Worthington was murdered in the small Cape Cod tourist (and home of the 'livliest'
nude beach on the Cape) of
Truro, MA. Despite an active investigation and a $25,000
reward there has little progress in the search for the killer. This has led to a police request for
voluntary DNA samples from 790 men.
Civil libertarians (ACLU press release in .doc format) are concerned that, though voluntary, police have stated that, "
that those who refuse could face some scrutiny." The Dept. of Justice, on the other hand, feels that DNA is a means to
prevent crime.
Though more common in the
UK and
Europe, mass DNA testing has been used several times in the United States, most notably in Lousiana where more than
1,000 men were tested in the search for a serial killer.
posted by cedar at 10:10 AM PST - 58 comments
Imagining the Internet. What will become of the internet? And how far off have prognosticators been about it thus far? Submit your own predictions, if you dare.
posted by rushmc at 9:11 AM PST - 27 comments
Do you want to be a writer?
"Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon?... Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble; it is why no one can ever write this book. Complex stories, essays and poems have this problem, too -- the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he had never noticed. He writes it in spite of that." Luminous and wise writing advice from
Annie Dillard, author of
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, one of the most beautiful books written in the last hundred years (published when Dillard was 29). As a writer myself, I am often asked by younger folk how to become one. Dillard says best what I would tell them.
posted by digaman at 6:35 AM PST - 67 comments
Happy Happy (both pdf) The burgeoning field of happiness studies is unearthing all sorts of interesting findings, many of them summarized in these two articles by University of British Columbia economist & "Professor of Happiness" John Helliwell. Rich countries are not happier than poor countries; people tend to revert to the mean after a happy event; money has only a modest effect on happiness; and, hey, good news! you get happier as you get older.
posted by mono blanco at 1:39 AM PST - 11 comments
January 9
The Torture Tape Experiment Create for combat purposes a tape so wretched and foul that anyone who listens to it for 24 hours will never be able to think straight again. Warning: dangerous MP3 files contained within.
posted by boost ventilator at 11:20 PM PST - 62 comments
The mystery of Stefan Mart and the 'Tales of the Nations'. "The Tales of Nations" was not an ordinary book that you could buy in a book store, and it's mysterious narrator/illustrator disappeared into the darkness of Hitler's Germany, seemingly without a trace. Learn the background, read the stories, and view all 150 fabulous colour illustrations — "small in size, but strong in expression, each a microcosm packed with action, each a feast for the eyes like a beautifully set jewel".
posted by taz at 2:54 AM PST - 20 comments
The Salvador Option. As a retired four star general conducts an open ended
review (to be fair the DoD paints this as"
just not accurate") of the military's entire Iraq policy, serious consideration is being given to this
legacy of the Reagan administration (see
John Negropante, ambassador to Iraq) in an effort to put the insurgents on the offensive. Involving cross border "snatch and grab" operations and possibly assassination teams it's a policy that was and is to this day
controversial. The controversial part? The
70,000 or more left dead in the wake of a campaign of terror led by death squads. This gross human rights violation eventually led to the formation of an international
truth commission.
posted by rocket_skates at 2:38 AM PST - 64 comments
January 8
Swarming is a guerilla tactic that goes back to the days of Alexander the Great fighting the Scythians (more
here and
here). It was used by the anti-WTO protestors in the late 90s and is being used against US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. New
equipment being developed by the military will attempt to use swarming behaviours.
posted by rks404 at 10:10 PM PST - 20 comments
Administration Paid Commentator (WashPost membership rqd) The Education Department paid commentator Armstrong Williams $241,000 to help promote President Bush's No Child Left Behind law on the air, an arrangement that Williams acknowledged yesterday involved "bad judgment" on his part.
I'm sure y'all check the Washington Post regularly, but isn't this simply bribing a journalist?
posted by punkbitch at 7:50 PM PST - 44 comments
GovTrack.US ... Using the Technorati API these folks track not only the votes and speeches of members of the US Congress, but also what's being said about them in the blogosphere. You can track them both with e-mail alerts and RSS feeds. There's even a way to embed info from GovTrack on your site if you are focusing on particular legislation.
posted by nathanrudy at 7:28 PM PST - 11 comments
The Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, with Margeaux Mundeyn, Pavel Törd, Ida Nevasayneva, Vladimir Legupski, Sveltlana Lofatkina, Olga Supphozova, Lariska Dumbchenko, Fifi Barkova is reviewed by Joan Acocella, "they pass through the joke and come out the other side, where the subject, having been laughed at, is once again embraced, enthroned."
pic 1, and 2 .
posted by semmi at 6:59 PM PST - 5 comments
NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory
recently detected [reg required] the largest explosion ever detected in the universe: an eruption releasing the energy of hundreds of millions of
gamma ray bursts. Just to put it in perspective, a single
GRB releases enough radiation to
wipe out just about everything human beings would require for survival in a 1000 light year radius. (The Milky Way spans ~100,000 light years, while the
United Federation of Planets spans about 8,000). Arthur C. Clarke has gone so far as suggesting that GRBs might be one of the reasons for Extra-Terrestrial silence:
Gamma Ray Bursts are so large and inescapable, a single one would wipe out even an enormous galactic empire. Makes
killer asteroids seem downright
quaint.
posted by absalom at 5:10 PM PST - 24 comments
A student asked the Master, "What is the nature of the
Unofficial Daria Movie Rumor Page?"
The Master repiled, "The Page is
a long, confusing story told backwards. It is
lies and half-truths, yet it is the greater truth. It is a mirror,
a puppet show, a morality tale, a fiction which is real life, an homage yet the
reverse of an homage. It is the future, set in the present,
retelling the past. It is the present, set in the present, retelling the present."
The student said, "
Huh?"
The Master continued, "If
all else fails, look at the very bottom of the Page, past the links and the Web rings."
The student, not understanding, did as the Master told him. It was then that he was
enlightened.
posted by pieoverdone at 3:02 PM PST - 17 comments
Is this a library or a Borders? A Denver Post writer laments the availability of CDs, DVDs, and not so intellectually stimulating reading material at the Schlessman Family Branch Library (part of the Denver Public Library system), and calls into the question the library's purpose. Should libraries give the people what they want, if what they want is an Ashlee Simpson CD?
posted by schoolgirl report at 9:15 AM PST - 121 comments
January 7
It used to be that there were four basic tastes- Sour, Sweet, Salty, and Bitter. Now there are five.
Umami is the fifth. More commonly thought of as
"Savory", the taste is connected to
receptors that sense Glutamic acid. In fact, the first taste receptor ever
discovered was one that interacts with glutamate.
While
Monosodium Glutamate has gotten a bad
reputation, most sources agree that it's relatively
harmless, and in fact, does add the "more-ish" type of flavor that is ascribed to umami foods. Foods like
mushrooms are high in glutamate, and therefore taste more "umami". Pass the Parmesan cheese, please.
posted by exlotuseater at 10:54 PM PST - 42 comments
Looking for
ohibitutic and
purspermal words, but need something a little more
rhymmeal?
Cromulac might just be the
tingulen you're
spranning for.
posted by Robot Johnny at 8:40 PM PST - 17 comments
how to use your urine Every day, we urinate nutrients that can fertilize plants that could be used for beautiful landscapes, food, fuel, and fiber. Instead, these nutrients are flushed away, either to be treated at high cost or discharged to waters where they overfertilize and choke off aquatic life.
Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants tells you how urine—which contains most of the nutrients in domestic wastewater and usually carries no disease risk—can be utilized as a resource.
posted by halekon at 6:26 PM PST - 61 comments
Friday Flash Fun -- This is one of those
Sisyphussian games where the point is to push a certain object towards a goal, but once you reach the goal (and advance to the next level), you find you have to do it all over again.
As Camus says,
The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
You be the judge.
posted by pmbuko at 12:38 PM PST - 9 comments
Adventure - based on the classic text game of the
same name - was the first game ever to contain an easter egg.
It seems laughably primitive these days, but when it first hit shelves, Adventure was a programming masterpiece. The
text version of Adventure (by Willie Crowther and Don Woods) required hundreds of KB and a mainframe computer to operate, so much that Atari brass told
Warren Robinett not to even bother with a 2600 version.
He did anyway, and the results are near legendary. The 2600 version of Adventure went on to sell over a million copies at $25 a pop. For his effort Robinett recieved absolutely nothing beyond his $22,000/year salary.
Play the 2600 Adventure. (Flash) If you're one of those who requires some eye candy, why not download the
Quake 3 Adventure Map, instead?
posted by absalom at 9:42 AM PST - 41 comments
Hybrid cars. Car owners in the north Virginia area are apparently stocking up on hybrid cars - so much so that they are clogging up the carpool lanes they're allowed to use under state law. I can't believe they're doing it just to get a better lane, considering the purchase price on the vehicles.
posted by Leege at 8:56 AM PST - 65 comments
Twilight of the Superheroes. After the success of 1987's
Watchmen series,
Alan Moore approached DC Comics with an idea of epic proportions. Inspired by grand scope of
Crisis on Infinite Earths and the dark promise of
The Dark Knight Returns,
Twilight was pitched as a way to elevate the DC Comics roster from heroes to legends.
"What I'd like to do creatively with the series, above and beyond the creative satisfaction to me ... is to create a storyline that lent the whole superhero phenomenon, the whole cosmos and concept a context that [is] intensely mythic ... aiming at coming up with something that cements the link between superheroes and the Gods of legend by attempting something as direct and resonant as the original legends themselves."
The story? Oh, just a little scenario involving the dissolution of society as we know it, a massive conflict resulting in several superhero casualties, a splitting of the surviving superheroes into eight distinct houses, a bubble of lost time called "the fluke" and the unfortunate fate of a BDSM-loving midget in a locked room. Oh, and the hero of the whole thing is
John Constantine.
The series was never published. The proposal itself
might even be a hoax. But real or not, it is worth
finding and
reading ...
even if DC Comics would prefer you didn't.
posted by grabbingsand at 7:17 AM PST - 63 comments
Hi, I'm Brad Pitt and I'm a carbon-neutral movie star. "Pitt has just given $10,000 to have a forest planted in his name in the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Its trees will absorb carbon dioxide, compensating for the tonnes that the star has been responsible for releasing into the atmosphere: burning aviation fuel as he jets around the world, using up petrol in his limousines and running air-conditioning in hotel rooms."posted by Hands of Manos at 6:19 AM PST - 48 comments
When a developer asks 'don't use TYPO3 for NewAge publications, anti-christian messages, sexually explicit material, extreme political propaganda' , would you use the software? Would you respect his wishes?
posted by dprs75 at 3:36 AM PST - 86 comments
The Mitchell and Kenyon collection consists of 800 rolls of nitrate film documenting scenes of everyday life in England between 1900 and 1913. This extraordinary archive,
now painstakingly restored by the British Film Institute, includes footage of trams, soup kitchens, factory gates, football matches, seaside holidays and much else besides. Here are some
sample images and a short clip of
workers at a Lancashire colliery, all astonishingly evocative and reminiscent (to me) of Philip Larkin's poem
MCMXIV: 'The crowns of hats, the sun / On moustachioed archaic faces / Grinning as if it were all / An August Bank Holiday lark .. Never such innocence, / Never before or since .. Never such innocence again.'
posted by verstegan at 3:17 AM PST - 7 comments
Need the antidote to the
current administration? 133 years ago,
Mikhail Bakunin laid the groundwork for anarchism as a rational political system in his seminal work
God and the State.
Strongly critical of the dehumanizing effects of religion, Bakunin famously paraphrased Voltaire when he proclaimed, "if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him."
If you can't make hide nor hair of the President's words, perhaps Bakunin's rationalism is what you're looking for.
posted by Netzapper at 12:37 AM PST - 43 comments
January 6
The Reality of Red-State Fascism, by Lew Rockwell. We consistently say
"Man, we're on the road to fascism" yet people fall all over themselves to say
"We're nowhere near it.". Well, when do we say "Holy shit...we're there"? Everybody's favorite libertarian gives us a timeline of the descent, and lets us know how we are now not just on the brink, but in the midst of Americanized Fascism:
"If you follow hate-filled sites such as Free Republic, you know that the populist right in this country has been advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now. The militarism and nationalism dwarfs anything I saw at any point during the Cold War. It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state...In 1994, the central state was seen by the bourgeoisie as the main threat to the family; in 2004 it is seen as the main tool for keeping the family together and ensuring its ascendancy. In 1994, the state was seen as the enemy of education; today, the same people view the state as the means of raising standards and purging education of its left-wing influences....it sees the state as the central organizing principle of society, views public institutions as the most essential means by which all these institutions are protected and advanced, and adores the head of state as a godlike figure who knows better than anyone else what the country and world's needs"
posted by taumeson at 4:52 PM PST - 92 comments
As I'm
sure you all know, today would've been the 74th birthday of actor
Vic Tayback, best known as
everybody's favorite hairy, sweaty, ill-tempered (yet almost cuddly) diner chef on that wacky piece of 70's tv Americana
Alice (Remember when Mel called Vera "dingy"? Sitcom gold!). Kept busy for years as a character actor with constant tv guest spots on everything from "I Dream of Jeannie" to "Gunsmoke," Vic embraced job security when given an opportunity to expand one character in particular, Mel Sharples from Martin Scorcese's drama
"Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" (starring Ellen Burstyn [she won an Oscar], Kris Kristofferson, Diane Ladd, Harvey Keitel and Jodie Foster). Thanks to Vic, the character of Mel smoothly adapted from his dramatic origins into his new home of sit-com hi-larity... one of the rare attempts of that kind to succeed.
RIP Vic. Oh, and kiss my grits.
posted by miss lynnster at 3:09 PM PST - 22 comments
U.S. Plans Tidal Wave of Nuclear Proliferation They want to tell all the non-nuclear states: “Y’all must stay non-nuclear, but we’ll have as many nukes as we want. We’ll make new nukes but keep the old. And if you don’t like it, just take a good look at Iraq, because you could be next.”
The message coming from the Bush administration and the U.S. media is clear. It’s not about the danger of weapons of mass destruction. It’s about using the fear of that danger, along with our own growing nuclear arsenal, as a club to rule the schoolyard roost.
posted by Niahmas at 12:31 PM PST - 40 comments
Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, but they will stop and take a picture if you ask nicely.
Cameramail shows that the USPS has a sense of humour and are good sports.
posted by riffola at 11:03 AM PST - 14 comments
+Plus - An internet magazine published five times a year which aims to introduce readers to the beauty and the practical applications of mathematics.
posted by Gyan at 10:47 AM PST - 7 comments
Ever dreamed of building a boat and sailing away? Two clearly mad Canadians decide to built a yacht. Clearly mad because they actually do it! It's a bit of a saga but well worth the read for the vicarious pleasure. I'm green with envy!
N.B. the site navigation can be a bit dicky so you may have to change the url to get to the next day sometimes. It goes up to day 222.
posted by milkwood at 10:30 AM PST - 14 comments
MC Chris is the pseudonym of Chris Ward, comedian, writer, and aspiring rap star. Most popular as the voice of Hesh on
Sealab 2021, his site is a great little archive of silly (but good) songs, and improv comedy bits- some from his UCB Theater days with now-
Daily Show reporter Ed Helms.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 8:56 AM PST - 29 comments
Tom DeLay's
thoughts on the tsunami, to the 109th Congressional Prayer Service. Quite unbelievable. No, on second thoughts, all too believable.
posted by rhymer at 7:11 AM PST - 97 comments
January 5
Party like it's 1892! "Executive power and patronage have been used to corrupt our legislatures and defeat the will of the people, and plutocracy has thereby been enthroned upon the ruins of democracy."* In the late 1800s, the
Populist Party, or People's Party, formed to merge the Farmers Alliance message of economic empowerment for growers with the Knights of Labor's movement to check the growing power and corrupt practices of big business
(along with the Greenbacks Party critiques of monetary policy). With a strong base in the midwest and south, the party earned 9% of the 1892 popular vote,
won the presidential electoral votes of four states (not to mention electing 10 congressmen, 5 senators, 3 governors, and 1,500 state legislators). However the party's power quickly faded as the Democratic Party co-opted much of the
Populist platform while
internal disputes culminated in the Populists placing the Dems' 1896 nominee at the head of their own ticket. Nevertheless, the populist movement's influence continued to be felt through various 20th century reforms including
direct election of senators,
presidential term limits, and
abandonment of the gold standard.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 5:14 PM PST - 7 comments
Teddyport "Its discreet, its funky and now none of your friends will ever know you have a problem."
Well, as long as they aren't observant enough to notice that you're ripping the head off of a stuffed bear and trying to drink from its neck...posted by miss lynnster at 2:05 PM PST - 22 comments
ComicsFilter (but bear with me): Frank Miller & Jim Lee will be the writer and artist, respectively, of
All-Star Batman and Robin, a new miniseries intended to make the characters simple, interesting, and easy to follow after decades of backstory. Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely were announced to be doing the same thing on
All-Star Superman, and any comics fan will tell you that these four guys are some of the best in the entire field. Between these two projects,
DC Comics most likely has the top-selling books in the tiny comics industry sewn up for most of 2005, which is reason enough to publish them.
But there's also a question for non-comics readers here at MeFi: DC are really doing this for you. They want new readers (best-selling comics are lucky to top 150,000 copies these days), and they think publishing accessible comic books linked to the release of large movies (The Christopher Nolan film
Batman Begins, based in part on Frank Miller's
Batman: Year One, will be released roughly alongside
All-Star Batman & Robin) is the way to do it. But is there a snowball's chance in hell you'd read something like this? Would your kids, if you have them, be interested, do you think? (Frank Miller, it bears noting, is also the creator and co-director of
Sin City, a film you might've seen a preview for recently -- truly insane cast.)
posted by logovisual at 1:55 PM PST - 69 comments
Same song, different lyrics. Mikey Smith put out an MP3 of two Nickelback hits, one in each channel, showing them to be basically the same song (
original thread). This All Things Considered story shows he's been on the project since then, and the problem is more widespread than it seems.
posted by abcde at 10:18 AM PST - 115 comments
On the Great Atlantic Divide Published on Sunday, October 26, 2003 by TomDispatch.com. By Susan Sontag.
I came across this piece at
dailyKos
"Two weeks ago during the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade) to Susan Sontag. She was cited for standing up for "the dignity of free thinking" and for her role as an "intellectual ambassador" between the United States and Europe. The association's director Dieter Schormann commented, "In a world of false images and distorted truths, she defends the honor of free thought." In its over half-century of existence, the Friedenspreis Prize has been awarded to Chinua Achebe, Max Frisch, Jurgen Habermas, Yehudi Menuhin, and Vaclav Havel among many others.
An excerpt from Susan Sontag's acceptance speech was published today in the Los Angeles Times Book Review section, but I thought the whole speech, which focuses on the increasingly embattled relationship between Europe and the United States, or rather between much of Europe, especially the various peoples of Europe, and the Bush administration, was well worth reproducing as a whole. Near its end is a rare moment in which Sontag considers an aspect of her early life in public. Her most recent book, by the way, is Regarding the Pain of Others. What follows then, with her kind permission, is her full acceptance speech. (The title and subheads are, however, mine.) Tom "
posted by Postroad at 10:11 AM PST - 9 comments
Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell was in charge of making sure the election in his state was free and fair. With his recount was still progressing, he
revealed his true colours.
You remember towards the beginning of Fahrenheit 9/11, where the objectors to the electoral result needed just one senator to come out and support them? Well, it's that time again.posted by Pretty_Generic at 7:31 AM PST - 35 comments
Can your employer require you to wear makeup and follow the dictates of an image consultant? Yes, according to a panel from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In
Have They Ever Shared a Bathroom with a Woman? Workplace Fairness discusses the recent ruling and the historical background of bartender Darlene Jesperson's challenge to Harrah's "personal best" policy on the basis that it is discriminatory to female employees.
posted by madamjujujive at 7:25 AM PST - 48 comments
If you have a cat, you'll recognize many of these immediately. Although some of them are availiable in a
book, many of these have only appeared in the
comic so far. Luckily, someone with far more spare time than I have has collected them for our enjoyment.
posted by ChrisR at 5:38 AM PST - 41 comments
Ellen Macarthur is trying to break the solo round-the-world sailing record. From
her website you can see stills and videos while she’s enroute, and track her progress. Meanwhile, the
Vendee Globe is underway, with 20 sailors racing a similar course – also nonstop, and with no outside assistance allowed. The first solo nonstop circumnavigation was only 35 years ago, and the record has gone from
313 days to 72. It’s the slow way around, to be sure, and that’s probably why only
a few dozen people have done it.
posted by Framer at 4:10 AM PST - 5 comments
Shut Up! "The EU has requested that member states come to a standstill at noon today to observe a three-minute silence for victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Is this just a shallow, belated gesture - or the best way to show our solidarity?" Blake Morrison of the Guardian asks. There's also an interesting "History of Silences" at the end of the article.
posted by The Ultimate Olympian at 3:27 AM PST - 39 comments
January 4
Alert Retreival Cache Is a system of collecting, sorting and routing SMS messages for the purposes of alerts and relay communication. I heard about it on NPR today and of it's importance in the wake of the recent Tsunami. I thought it was a pretty neat idea and was especially pleased to hear how fellow geeks are working together to solve real world problems. More
here (World Changing) and
here (Audio).
posted by yossarian1 at 8:24 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
The Mormons Got Game! "Mortality!" Finally, a truly fun, uplifting gospel game!Mortality is built around gospel principles as taught by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. However, no LDS background is necessary in order to play, enjoy, or win the game, which makes it a wonderful missionary activity. It's great for parties and mixers. Get a game going with your friends, and you'll find yourselves laughing over the troubles each player meets: Your children come home from school with lice; a hailstorm wipes out your tomato plants; you break your arm on the kids' jungle gym; mice invade your teenage son's stash of Twinkies. If you have enough inner strength, you'll grow from each of these challenges. Otherwise, they may do you in!posted by miss lynnster at 1:48 PM PST - 33 comments
Kid Rock To Play Bush Inauguration ... The Bush Twins have invited
Kid Rock to play their inauguration bash after their father is sworn in to a second term. Rock also played the Republican National Convention. This is a guy who stuck his head through an American flag at the Superbowl and has lyrics that say all women are whores and extol drug and alcohol abuse. (The link has actual lyrics from Rock, so if you are offended by cursing don't follow it.)
posted by nathanrudy at 11:02 AM PST - 173 comments
Robbery, Rape and Kidnapping: Tsunami Aftermath (Sun.UK link) and
Criminals target tsunami victims (BBC link). After surviving the tsunami, the loss of their homes, their families and pretty much everything they own, now the human predators are getting in on the action.
"In Thailand thieves disguised as police and rescuers looted suitcases and hotel safes around the resort of Khao Lak, where up to 3,000 died."
"One of the most disturbing allegations is that criminal gangs are befriending children orphaned by the tsunami, and selling them to sex traffickers."
""I don't think you could have a more vulnerable child on Earth than a child in this situation," Mr Budd told the BBC News website."
posted by fenriq at 10:33 AM PST - 51 comments
A Theory of Power is the weblog of Jeff Vail, where he posts regular, insightful articles on world events with the same worldview found in
his book by the same title.
"An exploration of the development and structure of hierarchy and empire through political anthropology, economic theory, evolutionary ontogeny and developmental psychology." Strong influences include Noam Chomsky and John Zerzan.
posted by jefgodesky at 8:56 AM PST - 3 comments
Glen Barr draws robots, creatures and vixens that live in a seedy yet swinging 1960's universe, drenched in the haze of a post industrial hangover.
Flash enabled and ever-so-slightly NSFWposted by Hands of Manos at 8:24 AM PST - 7 comments
Will Eisner Dies at age 86 The father of the modern Graphic Novel and hugely influential comics figure has died today from heart surgery complications. His concept of
Sequential Art helped move comics out of the idea of being solely "kid's stuff" and was seen as a cannon in the comic art world.
He was working on a book called "The Plot" due out later this year. He will be missed. More info and Eisner Bio at
Newsaramaposted by Jeffy at 7:23 AM PST - 54 comments
Beyond Life [Java]. Mirek's Cellebration is an beautiful applet for exploring all sorts of cellular automata. Source code and standalone version also available.
posted by Wolfdog at 6:53 AM PST - 7 comments
January 3
Trio close to being cancelled. They are one of the few good cable nets. They showed
Pink Lady and Jeff fer goodness sakes. Link to how to complain
here. As the poster sez: "Isn't the point of paying for hundreds of different channels to not have them be all the same?"
Caveat: I killed my tv in March and have never been happier.
posted by alfredogarcia at 7:55 PM PST - 39 comments
The surprising legacy of Y2K. In the runup to the new millennium, my uncle stocked a bunker full of supplies and ammunition and drove around with more in the trunk of his car. Crazy? Maybe, but this piece by American Public Media might get him off the hook and at the same time give the geeks who staved off armageddon a little credit. [Audio version at NPR's
Marketplace]
posted by schoolgirl report at 5:13 PM PST - 17 comments
The Ethics of Deep Self-Modification. What will happen when machines gain the ability to modify their own psychology? Do we have a responsibility to step in? What happens when we have the ability to modify
ourselves? Philosopher
Peter Suber has dedicated himself to issues of self-modification... not just in psychology, but also in
constitutional law. Small wonder that this is the guy who invented
Nomic. His site is littered with great stuff; he now is primarily involved with the open access movement. Check out his
open access primer and
blog.
posted by painquale at 4:45 PM PST - 14 comments
Metacritic Books. Metacritic has been covering reviews for movies, music, and games for years, but now has started aggregating books reviews, with about 150 books so far.
posted by driveler at 12:23 PM PST - 13 comments
Gaming in Iraq by US troops. Soon after the battle for Fallujah ended in November, U.S. Marines brought their Xbox consoles, Gameboys and laptops forward and started fighting the Covenant hordes in "Halo," Mario and Luigi's worst enemies and those irksome roommates from "The Sims."
Of course such actives during war are
nothing new. Iraqies have also gotten in on the
action too.
posted by Bag Man at 11:14 AM PST - 14 comments
must drive fast faster faster The use of cocaine is widespread among Formula One drivers, a former Ferrari team doctor has claimed.
Although random FIA tests have never returned a positive result, Benigno Bartoletti said in Rome that 'as many as one third' of the current field take the drug as a stimulant prior to grands prix.
posted by halekon at 10:47 AM PST - 29 comments
Ballad is the story of a nervous and confused little homunculus. It's an unsettling webcomic with moody artwork and fantastic pacing that creeps along slowly, like a severed hand across the floor.
posted by picea at 10:16 AM PST - 14 comments
"A growing body of evidence suggests that the
meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age, around the 1880s. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace: would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap. The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society."
posted by Krrrlson at 9:23 AM PST - 90 comments
A high IQ is a hindrance for women wanting to get married while it is an asset for men, according to a study by four British universities.
The study found the likelihood of marriage increased by 35 per cent for boys for each 16 point increase in IQ. But for girls, there is a 40 per cent drop for each 16-point rise, according to the survey by the universities of Aberdeen, Bristol, Edinburgh and Glasgow. The study is based on the IQs of 900 men and women between their 10th and 40th birthdays. (
via)
posted by airguitar at 3:09 AM PST - 205 comments
January 2
Weenie Juke Radio: "...and that was Sleepy John Estes singing
Drop Down (I Don't Feel Welcome Here) and Bo Carter, North Canton Quartet are coming up."
Automated yet they take requests. For your favorite Yazoo, Document, Biograph or Arhoolie country blues and string band recording artists, here's your
Juke.
posted by y2karl at 9:03 PM PST - 9 comments
“Not only is it illegal, but it's becoming increasingly dangerous,” Leggio said of underage drinking. How dangerous? Well apparently dangerous enough that one affluent Kansas City community has decided that it is best to have police spy on teens during high school basketball games. Oh it gets better, apparently a carload of teens is enough for a Lenexa cop to follow you! So the parents should be up in arms right? Nope, they encourage the police, even calling them ("she told dispatchers that when she called home to check on her son, it sounded like a party was going on"). Yet surprisingly, despite this almost police-state like mentality against drinking,
attitudes are slow to change.
posted by geoff. at 7:36 PM PST - 35 comments
The death of Frank Olson on November 28, 1953 was a murder, not a suicide. 2. This is not an
LSD drug-experiment story, as it was represented in
1975. This is a
biological warfare story.
Frank Olson did not die because he was an experimental guinea pig who experienced a “
bad trip.” He died because of concern that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation program called “ARTICHOKE” in the early 1950’s, and concerning the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War.
3. The truth concerning the death of Frank Olson was concealed from the
Olson family as well as from the public in 1953. In 1975 a cover story regarding Frank Olson’s death was disseminated. At the same time a renewed coverup of the truth concerning this story was being carried out at the highest levels of government, including the White House. The new coverup involved the participation of persons serving in the
current Administration.
This is his son Eric's search for his father.
posted by hortense at 5:48 PM PST - 23 comments
"You can be happy. You can live the life you want to live. You can become the person you want to be.
This is what I've figured out so far."
posted by iffley at 1:55 PM PST - 57 comments
Unproduced Screenplays "The Writers Guild of America registers approximately 30,000 screenplays every year, most of which never make it anywhere near the silver screen. Some of these are by "big name" writers like James Cameron and The Wachowski Brothers." Presented here for your reading pleasure are:
"Edward Ford" by Lem Dobbs,
"One Saliva Bubble" by David Lynch & Mark Frost,
"Red, White, Black, and Blue" by Andrew Kevin Walker,
"Carnivore" by The Wachowski Brothers,
"Alien 3" by David Twohy,
"A Crowded Room" by James Cameron, and
"I Am Legend" by Mark Protosevic.
posted by miss lynnster at 1:49 PM PST - 27 comments
"In a text with only six favorable outcomes amid some thirty-eight possible conclusions, indeed the reader seems intensely vulnerable – even doomed perhaps – if he were to travel only a single path. The odds, quite simply, are against him."
Click here to investigate the unforgiving plot of
The Third Planet from Altair, by Edward Packard.
Click here for the definitive database of information about
Choose Your Own Adventure-style stories
Click here to write your own
CYOA story.
posted by Hildago at 12:48 PM PST - 34 comments
Congressman dies of rare disease Congressman Bob Matsui, who was recently elected to a 14th term in Congress, has died due to a rare stem cell disease. Matsui, who was one of the leading opponents of President Bush's plan to eliminate Social Security, was the ranking Democrat on the Congressional subcommittee on Social Security.
posted by expriest at 12:13 PM PST - 26 comments
The State of Virginia (nyt) has provided judges with a checklist to determine whether or not nonviolent offenders should go to jail. 40 year old woman with a job and husband = no jail. 21 YO man without job or wife = see you in 3-5. Here are the
official guidelines (pdf) for sex offenders with a detailed explanation of the process.
posted by jmgorman at 10:15 AM PST - 38 comments
January 1
Well, now what do we do with them? "The Bush administration is preparing plans for possible lifetime detention of suspected terrorists, including hundreds whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts, The Washington Post reported Sunday.... As part of a solution, the Defense Department, which holds 500 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, plans to ask the U.S. Congress for $25 million to build a 200-bed prison to hold detainees who are unlikely to ever go through a military tribunal for lack of evidence, defense officials told the newspaper."
posted by ilsa at 9:59 PM PST - 185 comments
Cool video of ballpoint pen spinning tricks; warning - horrendous heavy metal soundtrack, video is embedded wmv. This is undoubtedly the most useless skill I've ever been jealous of. For more pen trick threads, see
here&
here.
posted by jonson at 8:37 PM PST - 26 comments
What is he up to
this time?
Richard D. James, aka
Aphex Twin has been the impetus and central figure of the electronic music scene from the 90s onwards. You might remember his deranged
music videos, his habit of bullshitting the press,
his outrageous stunts (such as the DJ set where he dropped the stylus onto a sandpaper disc before "seguing" it into a food blender, driving around in a tank, owning a submarine, and recording in a bank vault) or his utterly inconsistent discography, that ranges from
genius to
tripe. After much rumor and speculation, his record label,
Rephlex, announced Richard will be releasing "Analord 10",
a 2 track 12" vinyl-only EP, 13 mins duration in elaborate packaging and selling for an absurd £39.99 (~$77USD). Mike Paradinas (aka
µ-Ziq) heard it and
claims (see soundmurderer's post) that it is "some of the best music" he's ever heard, "the aphex everyone's been waiting for", but he might be in on what may well be another costly
practical joke. Analord pre-orders have shipped and
everyone is eager to find out.
posted by ori at 3:16 PM PST - 66 comments
American Photographs: The Road "In 1935, the collaborative satirical writers Ilya Ilf (1897-1937) and Evgeny Petrov (1903-1942) traveled to the United States from the Soviet Union on assignment as special correspondents for the newspaper Pravda. Shortly after their arrival in New York aboard the French luxury liner Normandie, they purchased a Ford automobile and embarked upon a ten-week road trip to California and back."
posted by todd at 1:20 PM PST - 25 comments
Is this really the best idea the military can think of? Today's NY Times provides details on some methods used to extract the truth from Iraqi prisoners, including (I'm not making this up) audio tapes played loudly with
"songs by Lil' Kim and Rage Against the Machine and rap performances by Eminem played loudly," and
"a mix of babies crying and the television commercial for Meow Mix in which the jingle consists of repetition of the word 'meow'." Wouldn't sodium pentathol or some other chemical persuasion be more effective, while providing less fodder for Leno and Letterman?
posted by centerpunch at 11:25 AM PST - 49 comments
Marine Refuses to Use Guns ... Marine Cpl. Joel D. Klimkewicz converted to the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day saints while in the Marines, and now believes that killing is against Jesus' teachings. As such, he refused to train with a gun though he says he would be willing to clear mines and work the front lines. The result is that the military has jailed him for his religious beliefs, convicting him of disobeying a direct order. Anyone think that Bill O'Reilly is going to say the military is trying to destroy Christianity?
posted by nathanrudy at 7:39 AM PST - 71 comments
72 page comic in 72 hours. Ryan Estrada has decided that for New Year's he is going to spend 72 hours creating a 72 page comic book. His site is complete with hourly updates of page count and his sanity level. And I thought the
24 Hour Comic was tough.
posted by fizz-ed at 1:59 AM PST - 5 comments
