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January 2006 Archives
January 31
Spider-man
, for many of us, has been a tried and true character which many of us have grown up with. For my fellow comic geeks, I'm sure many of you will agree at having enjoyed the stories for many years. However, the recent
"The Other" storyline has harped on a series of evolutions(literally, not figuratively) that our webslinger has undergone of late. Of which an upcoming
costume change is the least.
posted by Doorstop at 8:34 PM PST - 65 comments
Cindy Sheehan arrested for wearing anti-war T-shirt at State of the Union
Peace activist Cindy Sheehan was arrested Tuesday in the House gallery after refusing to cover up a T-shirt bearing an anti-war slogan before President Bush's State of the Union address.
"She was asked to cover it up. She did not," said Sgt. Kimberly Schneider, U.S. Capitol Police spokeswoman, adding that Sheehan was arrested for unlawful conduct, a misdemeanor.
Remind me not to wear my "Impeach Bush" button on my next trip to D.C.
posted by frogan at 7:30 PM PST - 522 comments
One week after publicly declaring his
lack of support for our troops, LA Times columnist & professional nerd humorist Joel Stein comes
out in favor of Grand Theft Auto's
Hot Coffee mod, which has recently been the focus of a lawsuit brought by the city of Los Angeles against Rockstar Games, the makers of GTA.
"Because if these teen computer geniuses are given the opportunity to unlock a video-game sex scene, then they'll be just one step away from breaking the code that allows them to type dirty words into Google."
posted by jonson at 7:13 PM PST - 17 comments
Last winter, Sweden was blasted by the first storm in recorded history to ever deliver hurricane force winds, devastating the country's forests. Logging crews came from all over the world. This massive collection of wood is now stored at a former air strip.
via Inhabitat
posted by stbalbach at 3:44 PM PST - 42 comments
"The Virtual Hilltribe Museum
is a project of the
Mirror Art Group of Chiang Rai, Thailand to document the rapidly changing cultures of hilltribe people in northern Thailand. While countless volumes have been compiled about the touristically popular hilltribe cultures, almost all of these works have been written by Thais or Westerners and, therefore, carry the bias and mistakes of an outsider. The Virtual Hilltribe Museum is the work of the tribal people themselves."
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:48 PM PST - 7 comments
Have you ever had
one of those times where you lose your job, then your VA benefits are cut (even though you were wounded seven times in Vietnam), then your son dies in Iraq and homophobic protesters hold up a sign at his funeral that says
“Thank God for Dead Soldiers”
then just after Christmas the candle you light for your dead child burns your house down and your family (including your grandchildren) is homeless, and your wife needs surgery for gallstones?
Yeah, that’s tough when that happens.
But sometimes
people come through for you.
posted by Smedleyman at 10:43 AM PST - 154 comments
Spiral Scouts
are the wiccan/pagan answer to Boy Scouts (and Girl Scouts, since they're not a gender specific organization). And since pagans are apparently the
new black, the scouts have been getting some
recent attention. Although the Spiral Scouts started through a wiccan church, they've made a point of including all religions and/or non-religions (as opposed to
the Boy Scouts). And while you can imagine what
the conservative response might be, the left has found enough
dirt on the Boy Scouts over the years that the Spiral alternative seems to be getting a fairly warm response so far.
posted by p3t3 at 10:01 AM PST - 47 comments
Macramé: the craft that spawned a million eyesores
As every family has its black sheep, so must the world of crafting have its irredeemable craft. Meet
macramé, the
ugly stepsister of crafting. In my recent search for a basic pattern I could use to redo a couple of old lawn chairs, every click revealed some
fresh new horror. I searched on, thinking surely there must be at least one or two examples of attractive macramé products somewhere on the world wide web, but
apparently not. There was nothing but
bad jewellery,
bad home décor items,
bad chairs and
really bloody awful owls. I tried approaching the technique with a designer’s mindset, seeing ugly things not as an end in themselves but as a design challenge. How could the patterns be improved? How could the technique and medium be used to produce something beautiful? Perhaps it was just the macramé cord and not the technique that doomed each project to aesthetic hell? But in the end, the craft defeated me. I declared it
hopeless, decided to do my two lawn chairs in a plain cream and then retreat from the field before some disaster (
possibly one involving a flaming owl) struck. However, that is just my opinion. Perhaps I just don’t appreciate that some people really need that
homemade Christmas tree, or the perfect belt to wear
while impersonating Elvis.
posted by orange swan at 7:49 AM PST - 62 comments
Gone postal
Another US postal worker shoots and kills work mates (ex workmates in this case.) As ever Wiki tells
all. USPO works to
eradicate the usage, but no
chance. Now so much part of the culture you can
game it
posted by A189Nut at 7:27 AM PST - 34 comments
Engineering Perfect Americans
Were your immigrant ancestors considered genetically predisposed to become criminals? Were your mixed-ethnic ancestors thought to be polluting the nation's 'germ-plasm'? The Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement presents a well-put-together online exhibit/walkthrough of this disturbing vein in American history.
posted by Miko at 6:12 AM PST - 7 comments
January 30
Unclaimed Baggage Center
is where lost luggage goes to die...and then live again. This huge warehouse buys the stuff we leave behind by the truckload, unpacks it, and then sells it to the public in an ongoing junk sale. Items range from the
mundane to the merely
puzzling to the somewhat
disturbing (this was found ON AN AIRPLANE, for Chrissakes.) The online store cannot compare to shopping there in person. And yes, it is located in THAT Scottsboro.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 11:45 PM PST - 33 comments
CBS' 60 Minutes
asks: "Hundreds of thousand of people could die in a nuclear attack, but hundreds of thousands of others could be saved. That’s because the Pentagon — after decades of searching — believes it has found a drug to treat radiation exposure. Why isn’t that drug available? "
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 6:34 PM PST - 41 comments
Google Images Censored in China
A picture says 1000 words, and Google.cn is censoring them all. Check out the side-by-side screens of a search for "tiananmen+square" in Google.com and Google.cn images. Looks like a nice place, with little historical significance. You can try the search
yourself. The text on the bottom left is the censorship disclaimer. Very different than our
results. A far cry from Google's
claim that they do not censor results. Nice to know that they stand up to the government here but not abroad.
A good
spoof of the whole thing.
posted by FeldBum at 5:11 PM PST - 57 comments
Nam June Paik
passed away on
Sunday. We'll read
educated commentaries in the next few days, but what I most affectionately remember about him is how his work made me laugh happily during the 70s and 80s. A precursor of video art, he was the first to use plugged tv sets as building blocks in the most
playful ways. His
TV Buddha is arguably an unsurpassed classic (a motionless moving image, an outside observation of an inner meditation, even -why not?- a premonition of a blogger) (this last one is a joke: I told you Paik made me laugh). R.I.P.
posted by bru at 3:36 PM PST - 34 comments
Army officials are investigating allegations that as many as seven members of the
82nd Airborne Division appeared
on a gay pornography web site. Authorities at Fort Bragg have begun an inquiry into whether the paratroopers' actions violated the military conduct code. Although the site in question has apparently now
been removed, the issue has once again highlighted the military's unofficial policy of "Don't ask, don't tell." Does this incident show that it is now finally time to drop this discriminatory policy, thus finally allowing
homesexual officers to serve their country without having to stay in the closet? Or is there a legitimate need for this policy to remain in use in the armed forces?
posted by Effigy2000 at 2:03 PM PST - 78 comments
Cody the Buffalo
has passed away at the age of 19. In addition to being in "Dances with Wolves" with Kevin Costner, Cody was also in the film “Radio Flyer.” He also appeared in several commercials, and even appeared with Jay Leno. Last spring, he traveled to the U.S. Mint in Washington, D.C., to participate in the unveiling of a new buffalo-head nickel.
posted by drstein at 1:31 PM PST - 11 comments
Need a patch of
skin for that burn or perhaps some new brain cells?
Print them. A team of British scientists have shown that cells could survive ink-jet printing. Ink-jet technology moves
beyond paper.
posted by Termite at 12:59 PM PST - 21 comments
Massive fraud, theft, corruption in Iraq rebuilding
...Iraqi money gambled away in the Philippines...spent on a swimming pool that was never used...US$700,000 in cash in an unlocked footlocker...millions to companies that never submitted required competitive bids or that were paid for unfinished work...paid US$14,000 on four separate occasions for the same job...US$1.3 million wasted on overpriced or duplicate construction or equipment not delivered..."needlessly disbursed more than US$1.8 million" of the estimated US$2.3 million spent for renovating the library...from new auditor reports from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.
posted by Kickstart70 at 11:32 AM PST - 48 comments
So, you're gonna talk about energy?
Wonder if the President will mention the
record profits his buddies in big oil have been earning. Exxon Mobil
who made a record $25.3bn (€19.4bn) profit in 2004, earned a company record $9.9bn (€8.2bn) in the fourth quarter of 2005. In the same quarter, Condoleeza Rice's former employer Chevron, who once named an oil tanker for their former vice president,
earned a record $4.14bn (€4.43bn).
The third-largest US oil company, ConocoPhillips, has reported a fourth quarter profit of $3.68bn (€3.05bn), a 50% leap from the same time a year ago.The
industry claims that oil companies earn 7.3 cents on a gallon, but "Exxon's profit for the year... a staggering $36.13 billion is bigger than the economies of 125 of the 184 countries ranked by the World Bank. Profit rose 42 percent from 2004."
You gonna talk about that, George?
posted by three blind mice at 10:48 AM PST - 80 comments
Media outraced by Bloggers, Kerry appeal to netroots galvanizes suprise drive against Alito
On
Google News, you'll read how US Democratic Senators Obama and Biden are against a filibuster. Old news. They've agreed to support it. Encouraged by direct appeals by Senators.
Kerry and
Kennedy to internet activists, a blizzard of calls, emails, and
faxes, organized via the
Daily Kos and other blogs - with
tactical direction from Kennedy - have helped flip the positions of several Democratic senators, and as of Saturday some claimed the push was already
within 2 votes of forcing continued Senate debate on the Alito nomination. In fact, the pro-filibuster bloc might have
started with
37 votes Meanwhile, today,
Morning Edition, which declined to run the filibuster push as a top story and failed to mention the internet effort, asked Senator Kennedy on Senator Hillary Clinton's opposition to the filibuster: actually, she joined the effort last Friday [ see main link ] : D'oh !
posted by troutfishing at 7:07 AM PST - 236 comments
January 29
It was an
instant icon, with Dan Rather calling it "the best war photograph in recent years." About 100 newspapers ran the photo, dubbing the
anonymous warrior the "Marlboro Man."
The photograph hit the world on Nov. 10, 2004: a close-cropped shot of a
U.S. Marine in Iraq, his face smeared with
blood and dirt, a cigarette dangling from his lips, smoke curling across weary eyes. He's quieter now -- easier to anger. He turns to fight at the sound of a backfire, can't look at fireworks without thinking of fire raining down on a city. He has
trouble sleeping, and when he does, his fingers twitch on
invisible triggers.
The diagnosis:
post-traumatic stress disorder.
The man in the photograph is
James Blake Miller, now 21, and he is an icon, although in ways Rather probably never imagined.
Previously mentioned briefly here
posted by stenseng at 10:04 PM PST - 27 comments
A Case of the Crabs, and its sequel,
The Goat in the Grey Fedora, are a couple of point-and-click black-and-white Flash games that parody the old Sam Spade-type noir films. You are Nick Bounty, private detective, and it's up to you to solve the mysteries of the counterfeit crabs and the miniature goat statue, respectively. Very, very jokey; guaranteed to induce eyerolling.
Look at everything, talk to everyone, and pick up everything that's not nailed down. Hints are available, but they're crammed with jokes too.
posted by Gator at 7:12 PM PST - 5 comments
Sure, we're all aware that William Shatner is the man, but
this guy takes it to new heights (Google Video) in the mockumentary
Auto Destruct: One Man's Obsession With William Shatner. Our disturbing yet engaging subject engages in
rock and roll (Google Video, again,) shenanigans and goes into detail about a traumatic childhood experience involving a monkey.
Of course, for those who want their Shatner undiluted and pop-tastic, there's always
his version of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds (again, Google video,) now featuring cameos from across the pop-culture spectrum.
Disclaimer: I'm used for a pull quote on the first two links, and they misspelled frisson.
posted by beaucoupkevin at 1:40 PM PST - 12 comments
With the growing trend (at least among the porn stars & strippers I sleep with) of complete genital hairlessness, it's refreshing to see that the centuries old tradition of the
Merkin has been
reborn for a new generation.
posted by jonson at 9:06 AM PST - 40 comments
Poor old Abe. He had an
impressive medical history,
as previously discussed. Will we ever figure out all his ailments? As an explanation for "his especially clumsy gait," one theory claims that he had
Marfan's Syndrome (with
good company). But now researchers are leaning more toward a new theory, that a gene-linked disorder called
ataxia. But Lincoln also suffered from depression which could have been
heriditary, for which he took
"little blue pills" that gave him mercury poisoning, which could explain his insomnia, tremors and rage attacks, gait,
and more. Of course,
we also suspect that he was
in the closet.
Lincoln's DNA will continue to be a growth industry, at least until somebody can get hold of a sample of the old guy and figure him out for sure.
posted by beagle at 8:55 AM PST - 34 comments
Spies, Lies and Wiretaps
Instead of the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the warrantless spying on Americans, we've received only the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation and a couple of big, dangerous lies...
this is an editorial pointing out the lies given the American public about spying. In addtion some 15 legal scholars here conclude that the Bush "initiative" is clearly illegal
and violates the American constitution. Declaring "war powers" simply will not do!
posted by Postroad at 6:46 AM PST - 47 comments
Grief, Gratitude and Baby Lee.
She wanted to honor her son, to celebrate his life, however short. That's why she had refused an abortion, even after doctors told her that her little boy would be born without a brain.
posted by matteo at 3:14 AM PST - 73 comments
January 28
The news you knew, yet didn't really know
Project Censored has become more and more relevant in our self-censored and compliant media. These are the top ten stories that received very little airplay or no air play at all.
It makes the Baby Jesus cry. . .
posted by mk1gti at 6:10 PM PST - 28 comments
Ask a Republican.
Hello! I often get asked questions about Republican policy by greasy-haired liberal hippies. Seattle was no exception in Sept of 2005. It was teeming with them. May God bless you and America. Quicktime videos [via the monkey]
posted by srboisvert at 12:48 PM PST - 27 comments
President Jonah
--an essay/history lesson/bible lesson/etc by Gore Vidal.
...We have also come to a point in this dark age where there is not only no hero in view but no alternative road unblocked. We are trapped terribly in a now that few foresaw and even fewer can define ...
posted by amberglow at 12:25 PM PST - 33 comments
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly, specialization is for insects."
Robert A. Heinlein, "
Time Enough For Love"
posted by sourbrew at 11:55 AM PST - 89 comments
Triglav.
It's fun, it's gorgeous, it's PC and Internet Explorer only.
It's also unstable as all hell, so play career mode unless you don't mind restarting your whole game frustratingly often.
DHTML gaming at its finest.
(from the always excellent
jayisgames, which is having a fantastic week).
Triglav was
previously mentioned but was as of then unfinished. If you're already hip to it, play
meteor busters instead.
posted by klangklangston at 12:06 AM PST - 16 comments
January 27
The Flowering Nose in Slugland adventure game. As a goblin with a flower for a nose, your ultimate goal is to find the lost sprout. Defeat enemies by throwing flowers at them; power up with hearts; teleport from level to level with such esoteric trinkets as donuts and cherries. (Java.)
posted by Gator at 8:46 PM PST - 15 comments
US plans to 'fight the net' revealed
"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.
"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.
posted by Postroad at 3:29 PM PST - 25 comments
Cellfilms.
Ithica College in New York is hosting the Cellflix Film Festival, and has asked students between 13 and 20 to submit 30-second movies shot entirely with their cell phones. They have narrowed down the nearly 200 entries they received to 10 finalists that can be found
here. (My votes to the shadow puppets and the progression of life.)
posted by onlyconnect at 2:58 PM PST - 11 comments
Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win: SDS is reborn. Founded in 1959 and imploded ten tumultous years later, the Students for Democratic Society was one of the most
dynamic and controversial forces at work in organizing a mass movement against the Vietnam war, particularly among draft-age kids. The group's original manifesto, Tom Hayden's
Port Huron statement, still rings prophetic in
Bush's America.
Now SDS is relaunching and planning its first national convention since 1969, with a new crew of young radicals issuing
calls to action to their own supposedly apathetic generation: "We seek liberation from the dominant business interests that have degraded our cities, paved over our communities, drowned out small business, and commodified our culture... Cooperative self-reliance is the only moral and material salvation of our nation, and the only release from a system that demands each of us be an accomplice to its
heinous crimes."
posted by digaman at 12:42 PM PST - 45 comments
Five Reasons Torture Is Always Wrong.
From the magazine "Christianity Today", David P. Gushee, a professor of moral philosophy at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, is against torture. Period. No exceptions. Complete with Bible verses to prove it.
posted by willmize at 12:02 PM PST - 42 comments
The Great American Health Check
Cancer.org has a great online resource to figure out what your individual health risks are, to help get into better shape or to help quit smoking. Its free and kicks out a personalized list of concerns to print out and bring to your doctor.
posted by fenriq at 11:07 AM PST - 21 comments
NPR’s Live Concert Series
site offers recordings of recent live performances by
James Brown,
Sinead O’Connor,
Iron & Wine and Calexico,
Son Volt,
My Morning Jacket,
The White Stripes, M. Ward,
Sigur Ros,
Bloc Party,
The Decemberists, and live tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. ET,
Colin Meloy.
posted by ND¢ at 8:05 AM PST - 46 comments
The Great Zucchini
Eric Knaus, aka "The Great Zucchini," is a 35-year-old community college dropout who works only two days a week. But he takes home over $100,000 a year because he knows how to make preschool children laugh. His "act" is largely improvised, his "props" are old, dirty, and in desperate need of repair. So how (and maybe more importantly,
why) does he do it? As Gene Weingarten, the author of this extremely funny, moving piece, says: "
if you want to know why … it's going to take some time." He’s not kidding – the story runs almost 10,000 words. Do yourself a favor and read every one. (via
Lileks)
posted by pardonyou? at 8:00 AM PST - 45 comments
Good Dog AIBO.
Arf, Arf, he goes,
a merry sight
Our little hairy friend
Arf, Arf, upon the lampost bright
Arfing round the bend.
Nice dog! Goo boy,
Waggie tail and beg,
Clever
AIBO,
jump for joy,
Because we are putting you to sleep at three of the clock,
AIBO.
with apologies to john lennon (thanks
piratebowling )
posted by three blind mice at 4:17 AM PST - 24 comments
January 26
"Someone messed it up bad. The world went to pieces. It was dog eat dog and everyone for himself. Along came an unlikely hero. You....The future can be saved. The knowledge is inside the Four Rooms of Kharon." From the info page: "Kharon 4a is an online adventure game dealing with biotech issues. The makers of the game have worked closely with the Norwegian Biotechnology Advisory Board during the creative process - to ensure the scientific validity of the game content. So, having played Kharon 4a, you will be left with not only an interesting and entertaining online experience, but you will also be familiar with the most imporant aspects of bio technology." They also warn that it's "the hardest Flash game ever made" and that you'll probably give up after five minutes.
posted by Gator at 8:37 PM PST - 12 comments
Asteroid to graze past Earth this summer...but how close?
If you liked 2004 MN4, you're bound to enjoy 2006 BQ6. Very small but real chance it could even hit around the end of July, beginning of August this year. NASA isn't officially tracking it yet, but they are including it in their report of upcoming
close approaches, where the minimum possible distance is...zero. The
space.com discussion puts everything into perspective, including graphs and charts and such.
posted by gimonca at 8:16 PM PST - 47 comments
Fancy way to build a satellite -- spend millions of dollars hiring engineers to carefully construct your
orbital gem, then millions more on a
massive rocket to loft it into space. BORING. Easy way to build a satellite -- shove a radio into a spacesuit and toss it off a space station. Meet
SuitSat 1.
posted by eriko at 7:14 PM PST - 32 comments
Temples of democracy
A long time ago, Matt apparently
stated that state capitols look phallic in order to advertise that the Man does business there. Now you can judge for yourself. Here are all 50 capitol buildings, including artistic renderings, photos and histories. And
Alaska's is decidedly non-phallic--the same goes for the proposed Gehry-like
giant air conditioner-esque one too. And get a load of
North Dakota's Ed Wood-ish house chamber.
So . . . what makes a good capitol building (or state house or what have you) to you? (For the record, I favor the more capitol-ey capitol, the traditional; like those of California, Mississippi, Colorado, Missouri and Wisconsin, etc. Then there's the impressive simplicity of the Jefferson-designed
Virginia capitol. But I also like
Oregon's art deco capitol, from what I see in the photos.)
posted by raysmj at 6:52 PM PST - 40 comments
FTC imposes $10M fine against ChoicePoint for data breach
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has fined ChoicePoint $10 million for a data breach that allowed identity thieves posing as legitimate businesses to steal social security numbers, credit reports, and other data from nearly 140,000 people. This is the largest fine ever levied by the FTC. ChoicePoint also has to set up a 'trust fund' for people victimized by identity thieves. From the article: 'As part of its agreement with the FTC, ChoicePoint will also have to submit to comprehensive security audits every two years for the next 20 years.'"
BusinessWeek has additional info.
Perhaps there might be hope for individual privacy after all. Let's all keep our fingers crossed.
posted by mk1gti at 2:41 PM PST - 22 comments
The Works of Nino Rota
My roommate rolls his eyes. My friends are fed up. It's a mania, really, and I just had to share it: all I want to do nowadays is listen to
Nino Rota scores.
Giulietta Degli Spirit,
Il Casanova,
La Strada,
Boccacio '70...man oh manishevitz, was he good. What say you, Blue? [Favorite soundtrack music previously discussed
here and
here]
posted by ford and the prefects at 2:20 PM PST - 20 comments
We Negotiate With Terrorists.
With an abrupt move opposite of stated policy, abducted American journalist Jill Carroll's life may have been saved by the US military yielding to the demands of her captors. Have gender, politics, and media coverage become factors erroding the mantra that the US Government
formally states?
posted by trick at 12:29 PM PST - 44 comments
Bad Landlords, across the US
Recently, the tale of Gloria Trembicky, bad landlord extraordinaire
made its way around blogs. The author got enough emails of other bad landlord stories, he's now collecting them at Trembicky.com. Send in your own stories of woe, to help out future renters in your area (and entertain those of us no longer renting).
posted by davebug at 10:33 AM PST - 27 comments
BBC News: British unconvinced on evolution
"More than half the British population does not accept the theory of evolution, according to a survey.
Furthermore, more than 40% of those questioned believe that creationism or intelligent design should be taught in school science lessons."
Nice to know that the maxim for the UK being five years behind the US still holds true, more or less.
posted by badlydubbedboy at 10:00 AM PST - 63 comments
Can we have an intelligent non-religion-bashing discussion about this article?
". . . perhaps the most shocking implication of my inquiry into the role religion plays in our lives" : ". . . those who have an unquestioning faith in the correctness of the moral teachings of their religion are a problem: If they haven't conscientiously considered, on their own, whether their pastors or priests or rabbis or imams are worthy of such delegated authority over their lives, then they are taking a personally immoral stand. Please RTFA before commenting.
posted by spock at 7:41 AM PST - 175 comments
Web Authoring Statistics from Google.
An analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata.
posted by signal at 6:48 AM PST - 29 comments
Hamas wins majority in Palestinian elections.
In a surprise upset, Hamas has unseated Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah Party. This after
initial results indicated that Fatah would win, and both the Bush administration and Israel indicated that Abbas shouldn't form a coalition government with members of Hamas, but should keep them entirely in opposition.
Prominent Hamas leader Ismail Haneya
said, "America and Israel wanted to vote against Hamas, so the Palestinian people voted for the Hamas . . . and voted against the occupation." He reiterated that Hamas would resist Israel's occupation until all Palestinian rights were regained.
posted by insomnia_lj at 3:21 AM PST - 76 comments
They fight OUR WARS
Revenge of The Mutt People", by Joe Bageant is a striking essay about the hopelessness and pride of the impoverished decendants of Scots/Irish stock found in rural America. More
information
here.
-from rigourous intuition-
posted by thedailygrowl at 12:06 AM PST - 67 comments
January 25
"The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof...." The Seventeeth Amendement provides for the direct election of U.S. Senators. Originally,
Article I Section 3 of the United States Constition provided that each state's senators be chosen by that state's legislature.
The
Populist Party platform from 1892 on, called for direct senatorial election; and the
Progressive movment made it, along with Prohibition (18th Amendment) and Women's Suffrage (19th), a
cornerstone of reform. The 17th was ratified
8 April 1913, when the required 36th of 48 states, Connecticut, approved it. Utah, however, had rejected it 41 days earlier, on
26 February 1913. Although Utah never subsequently ratified it, the 17th Amendment, as part of the Federal Constitution, applies in Utah as in all U.S. States.
But in the
name of
re-invigorating States' Rights,
some on the
Right -- and
some less easy to
label -- have called for the repeal of the 17th Amendement. In 2003 Montana's Senate,
after passing it out of committee, indefinitely postponed by floor vote
a bill calling on Congress to repeal the 17th. Now, the President of
Utah's 29-member State Senate [pdf], with 19 co-sponsers, thinks he's figured out
a way around the Constitution's 17th Amendment. Debate on the
S.B. 156 began yesterday.
posted by orthogonality at 9:32 PM PST - 52 comments
The strange story of Henry M.
Henry was able to hold information in storage for very short periods of time. Most people can retain about seven pieces of information (a telephone number, for example) in memory for about thirty seconds, and Henry scored normally on these kinds of tasks. Thus, his working memory (or scratch-pad memory) seemed unaffected by the loss of his hippocampus. The main problem for Henry was converting short-term memories into permanent storage, a process called consolidation. Henry's case is one of the
most studied brain-damage cases [PDF] ever. A fascinating story about one man's struggle with brain surgery.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 9:20 PM PST - 17 comments
The
images on the ceramics were thought to be
mythical narratives,
imagery the
priestly class used to
underscore its coercive power. Without proper archaeological evidence, the representations were too horrific to take literally. They depicted
gruesome scenes of
torture: captives skinned alive, drained of blood (which was drunk by priests in front of them), throats slit, bodies decapitated and left to the vultures, bones meticulously defleshed and hung from ropes.
Unfortunately for the victims, these
bloody rites actually happened. They took place in an otherwise vibrant and highly advanced culture, a culture renowned for its
artists and builders. These were a people who developed advanced agricultural knowledge, extremely
sophisticated metallurgy, and built
the largest pre-Columbian adobe structure in the Americas. Because they had no written language, though, it is by
their ceramics that we know them best.
The Moche.
posted by crumbly at 11:40 AM PST - 27 comments
American Idol 5 on Popmatters.
"There are two pre-audition selection rounds before contestants are allowed to meet the judges. Clearly then, the show's army of "talent" spotters deliberately sent
Derek,
Crystal and the others crashing and burning onto national television, in the sure and certain knowledge that humiliation means ratings." Some insights into the corporate machinery behind American Idol, as well as thoughts on the current season.
posted by ludwig_van at 10:46 AM PST - 146 comments
The Clergy Letter Project
has completed acquiring 10,000 signatures from clergy around the country. Their stated goal:
For too long, the misperception that science and religion are inevitably in conflict has created unnecessary division and confusion, especially concerning the teaching of evolution. I wanted to let the public know that numerous clergy from most denominations have tremendous respect for evolutionary theory and have embraced it as a core component of human knowledge, fully harmonious with religious faith. They've declared February 12, 2006 as
Evolution Sunday, a day when "hundreds of Christian churches from all portions of the country and a host of denominations will come together to discuss the compatibility of religion and science."
posted by thanotopsis at 10:26 AM PST - 55 comments
Monogamists have bigger brains.
More precisely, female monogamy in bats makes their male partner's brains bigger and their balls smaller, while female promiscuity in another bat species caused males to have huge balls and teeny brains. Can trusting your partner not to cheat lead to greater intellectual greatness?
Via.
posted by onlyconnect at 9:35 AM PST - 57 comments
Tired of standing in line at the airport? Worried that you might share a name with a known terrorist or subversive on the TSA's mysterious no-fly lists? Relax. Get fingerprinted and/or iris scanned. And pay $79.95 a year to become a
Registered Traveler, and
fly Clear in the fast lane. (And note how quickly
conceptual art projects become indistinguishable from
reality.) Meanwhile, the Feds
settle an ACLU lawsuit over the no-fly lists... while revealing no information about them. [Lists recently discussed
here].
posted by digaman at 9:24 AM PST - 52 comments
Pork soup becomes political in France.
Small groups linked to the extreme right are ladling pork soup to France's homeless. Critics and some officials denounce the charity as discriminatory: because it contains pork, the soup is off-limits for Muslims.
posted by rxrfrx at 8:59 AM PST - 105 comments
Beefalo
is a feritle hybrid of cattle and buffalo (
bison bison). It's story cannot be told without mentioning the irascible
"Buffalo" Jones, the man who helped save the American buffalo and tried to cross-breed cattle and buffalo. He called it
cattalo.
Later successful hybridizations gave way to the
beefalo. Some cite the near-extinction and later ultimate repopulation of the buffalo to
free-market forces such as the private herds kept by Buffalo Jones for creating sustainable cattalo .
posted by ozomatli at 8:56 AM PST - 16 comments
Tips from the Blue Devils - Dunking the ball is a flashy move. In some instances, it can be the wrong move. Pot and cocaine are wrong moves. They mess up your thinking and can kill you instantly.
posted by sdrawkcab at 8:54 AM PST - 41 comments
Section 605 of the House's Patriot Act renewal bill
is entitled
THE UNIFORMED DIVISION, UNITED STATES SECRET SERVICE. The Secret Service has broad authority (included arrest powers without warrants) when it comes to protecting the President. The "uniformed division" (previously the "Executive Protective Service") handles most of the grunt work.
Talkleft has been analyzing this text and has come to the conclusion that the President can, upon passage of this bill, use his "Uniformed Divison" (aka private army) on a whim:
(11) An event designated under section 3056(e) of title 18 as a special event of national significance.Section 3056(e)(1) of title 18 reads simply:
When directed by the President, the United States Secret Service is authorized to participate, under the direction of the Secretary of the Treasury, in the planning, coordination, and implementation of security operations at special events of national significance, as determined by the President.
posted by taumeson at 7:34 AM PST - 135 comments
Sometimes movies don't finish
the way we'd like. Short, off-beat, animated re-imaginings of selected movie endings, in torrent and .wmv format. The
archives are yet young, but might be worth keeping an eye on for future chuckles.
posted by Gator at 7:32 AM PST - 11 comments
The just ordering of society and the State is a central responsibility of politics. As Augustine once said, a State which is not governed according to justice would be just a bunch of thieves: “Remota itaque iustitia quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia?”.
Eros and Agape, Justice, Charity, Marxism, and the separation of Church and State in
Pope Benedictus XVI's first encyclical letter,
Deus Caritas Est.
posted by matteo at 4:08 AM PST - 14 comments
January 24
Internet: Freedom or Privilege?
David Isenberg: "Just as Freedom of Speech means that, with very few limitations, nobody has the right to tell somebody else what to say, so should Internet freedom mean that gatekeepers should not control Internet applications or content. This is essential not just as a matter of freedom, but also as a matter of commerce, because the Internet’s success is directly due to its content-blindness. If the United States fails to understand this, U.S. Internet leadership will follow U.S. leadership in agriculture, in steel, in autos, and in consumer electronics to other countries that do."
posted by sswiller at 7:36 PM PST - 14 comments
Don't be evil.
Online search engine leader Google Inc. has agreed to censor its results in China, adhering to the country's free-speech restrictions in return for better access in the Internet's fastest growing market. Google will roll out a new version of its search engine bearing China's Web suffix ".cn," on Wednesday.
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 7:19 PM PST - 93 comments
"They're
willing to sacrifice their lives for this great country. What I'm asking all of you tonight is not to put on a uniform. Put on a bumper sticker. Is it that much to ask? Is it that much to ask to step up and serve your country?"
posted by EarBucket at 6:57 PM PST - 34 comments
Breaking the Science-Atheism Bond.
"When I was growing up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the 1960s, I came to the view that God was an infantile illusion, suitable for the elderly, the intellectually feeble, and the fraudulently religious."
posted by brownpau at 2:39 PM PST - 160 comments
Mike Jeffries, of Abercrombie and Fitch,
(Salon, Premium Pass,
Greasemonkey Script) comes across as an eccentric, vain, popularity-infatuated fashion industry genius you probably figured he was. "That's why we hire good-looking people in our stores. Because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don't market to anyone other than that." An interview with the writer on
Gawker. Think he'll stop at Midwestern frat boys? He's coming for you
NYC (Ruehl).
posted by geoff. at 1:10 PM PST - 111 comments
As a followup
to this post about Sew Fast, Sew Easy's cease and desist orders for using the phrase "Stitch and Bitch" et.al. to a variety of merchants, Yahoo groups, and knitting groups, it seems that a
boycott movement is gaining momentum. They also have a
CafePress store to support the cause. Additionally, I think SFSE may have underestimated the enormous growth in
knitting blogs and how
quickly they band together when given a cause.
posted by like_neon at 12:17 PM PST - 22 comments
Moqtada Sadr promises to help defend Iran.
The Iraqi Shi'ite leader promised to defend Iran -- presumably in Iraq -- if Iran is attacked by the US.
Moqtada Sadr is the commander of the
Mahdi Army, which fought US troops for weeks in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf, threatening to unite poor, discontented Iraqi Shi'ites in common cause with Sunni insurgents. Sadr and his followers are known to have close ideological and logistical links to clerics inside Iran. In the event of a conflict with Iraq, their assistance to the Iranians could greatly increase instability within Iraq, possibly assisting elements of Iran's Revolutionary Guards'
Qods Force in infiltrating Iraq, and orchestrating attacks upon American interests.
posted by insomnia_lj at 9:27 AM PST - 72 comments
Opera Mini
is now available worldwide, for free. A quality web browser for your Java enabled cellphone.
posted by mr.marx at 8:23 AM PST - 35 comments
Bush has put the production of
coal above the safety of coal miners. As is sadly demonstrated in the two recent
mining disasters. They even went so far as to
remove Clinton era safety regulations and then had the
audacity to claim that resource production and "
other priorities" took precedence. These
budget cuts come at a time when coal prices have gone up 30% and led to huge profits for the coal industry. Sound like any other resource industry you know. /*hint
OIL! hint*/ Once again the government has favored the big corporation over the little guy to disastrous results. Is the death of miners and the death of soldiers worth our reliance on fossil fuels?
posted by stilgar at 7:48 AM PST - 89 comments
Whale puke
may not sound like the sort of thing that could make you money, but a 15kg lump of it found on a beach has made Australian Leon Wright and his wife more than a quarter of a million dollars overnight. Perviously discussed
here, ambergris is essentially the vomit of a sperm whale. It has a scent like nothing else on earth and is used in
perfume or as an aphrodisiac.
posted by The Ultimate Olympian at 7:04 AM PST - 54 comments
Because He Fight To Live… And He Fights Dirty As Hell!
Bob developed his unique style of "dirty fighting" during his
40 years of formal training, bar brawls and street fights, bounty hunting and busting up narcotics gangs. He served his country well as a "hot-zone" combat soldier in Vietnam, worked as a private eye, a personal armed bodyguard to superstar rock groups (like
Aerosmith, the
Who and
Led Zepplin), and a canine handler for 11 separate jurisdictions. He's also a recognized
"Chi Master" - at an infamous
Soldier of Fortune convention, he
drove a steel rod through his forearm, tied it to a new Ford Mustang, and dragged the car 287 feet... without blood, without pain, without scarring. (Don't try this at home.)
posted by Sticherbeast at 3:30 AM PST - 57 comments
January 23
E-voting systems hacker sees ‘particularly bad’ security issues
...On Tuesday, Dec. 13, we conducted a hack of the Diebold AccuVote optical scan device. I wrote a five-line script in Visual Basic that would allow you to go into the central tabulator and change any vote total you wanted, leaving no logs.... More from the
Washington Post here, where
... Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques. ..."Can the votes of this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card?" Two people marked yes on their ballots, and six no. The optical scan machine read the ballots, and the data were transmitted to a final tabulator. The result? Seven yes, one no. ... Verified Voting and
Black Box Voting have much much more on all of this.
posted by amberglow at 11:14 PM PST - 58 comments
"Culture of life" vs. Culture of Profit ?
Today, by phone, George W. Bush addressed the anti -
Roe v. Wade protestors gathered at the Washington D.C. mall : in support of the crowd gathered in expectation that Samuel Alito - if nominated - would vote to overturn
Roe.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bush's administration is proposing EPA rules that would allow testing of pesticides on pregnant women and children. How very curious.
posted by troutfishing at 8:18 PM PST - 49 comments
Where can a company that owns nothing but legal documents force another company that actually does make products to pay them?
In the USA! You too can be a patent troll. Just patent any dumb idea you have -- you'll certainly be awarded the patent -- then sue anyone who makes a product that looks remotely like it could be based on your idea. Congratulations! You made money by
punishing people who actually make things! Hooray!
posted by raaka at 4:56 PM PST - 22 comments
The Futurliners are imposing vehicles, 33 feet long, 8 feet wide and standing 11 feet 7 inches tall at the top of the driver's canopy. The driver's eyes are about 10 feet off the ground and in front of the steering wheels.
This site updates a 2002
post on the restoration of one of these magnificent vehicles.
via Boing Boing
posted by 327.ca at 2:56 PM PST - 35 comments
On Sunday, June 25, 1961, New York's famous
Village Vanguard witnessed one of the
greatest live jazz performances ever recorded: the afternoon and evening sets by the Bill Evans Trio (
review).
Evans was one of the great jazz pianists and
Paul Motian has been playing superb drums for half a century now, but it was bassist
Scott LaFaro who made the group something new; where other bassists kept time, he played the bass "as though he were playing a large guitar," and inspired a kind of "simultaneous composition" that left everyone who heard it awed when he joined up with Evans (after working with Stan Getz, Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman).
On June of 1961 the Evans trio had a memorable week at New York’s Village Vanguard; the final day of the engagement, June 25th, was taped in its entirety. On July 3, he played Newport with Stan Getz; it would be the final performance of Scott LaFaro. On July 5 he visited his mother in Geneva [NY], and stayed until it was very late. He was invited to spend the night, but said no; he had to get back to New York. In the early hours of July 6, Frank Ottley and Scott LaFaro died when Scott’s car left the road, hit a tree, and caught fire. Bill Evans was so distraught he did not perform publicly for nearly a year...
[More inside.]
posted by languagehat at 11:59 AM PST - 56 comments
c64s
is a pretty amazing site. Much of the popularity of the old c64 was in its wide array of games and this site offers a way to play most of the popular ones all in your browser (in java). Waste time today by reliving those old early 80s memories.
posted by mathowie at 10:02 AM PST - 44 comments
BillMonk
is a new way of tracking informal debts with your friends. Web 2.0 nonsense or a viable solution to those awkward 13-way restaurant bills? Not to be confused with
Zopa, another social money project...
posted by runkelfinker at 9:25 AM PST - 24 comments
Sympathy for a Lawyer ?
His father sustains he should sell screwdrivers, he takes attention deficit disorder drugs, his ex probably keyed his Toyota Corolla and he takes pleasure in tormenting prosecutors while wondering if they like him. Not a reality tv show [Via Fark]
posted by elpapacito at 8:58 AM PST - 48 comments
Online
election results will be available after the polls close in British Columbia at 7pm PST.
Bloggers have been
warned not to post early results from the east before the polls close in British Columbia. CBC
explains.
It appears that US-hosted websites
ProAlberta and
Captain's Quarters will be wilfully violating the Canada Elections Act and posting early results.
Andew Coyne has suggested that posters to his website
"[pretend] to report the results from some election in a foreign or imaginary land."
Paul Bryan was fined $1000 for posting early results from the 2000 election and is currently appealing to the Supreme Court. Previously discussed
here and
here.
posted by angrybeaver at 7:25 AM PST - 126 comments
January 22
Can you score your way out of disgrace?
Kobe Bryant's 81 points tonight were the second most points ever scored by a single player in the 59 year history of the NBA, and the most scored since Wilt Chamberlain's 100 point night
44 years ago (when the league was much whiter than it is today). With
a new campaign from one time sponsor Nike and sports writers increasingly touting Bryant as a leading MVP candidate, two of the three elements of modern sports superstardom (sponsorship, good press) have returned to Kobe since the rape allegations that threatened to end his career. Will the final piece of the puzzle (public sympathy) be next?
posted by jonson at 9:38 PM PST - 119 comments
"History is filled with legends of Demons: evil creatures with dark powers and horrifying strength. There is Astaroth, who turns invisible; Beelzebub, master of flies and all Earthly diseases; Mephistopheles, Prince of Deceit; Asmodeus, Lord of Corruption; and Leviathan, great monster of the Deep. You are Bill." It's a Flash game.
posted by Gator at 4:14 PM PST - 17 comments
When George Met Jack
As details poured out about the illegal and unseemly activities of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, White House officials sought to portray the scandal as a Capitol Hill affair with little relevance to them..."The President does not know him, nor does the President recall ever meeting him," McClellan said....The President's memory may soon be unhappily refreshed. TIME has seen five photographs of Abramoff and the President that suggest a level of contact between them that Bush's aides have downplayed.
posted by Postroad at 12:42 PM PST - 42 comments
The Subway Challenge!
Can one man get off the Glasgow underground at one stop, race the train to the next and get back on
the same train? Mebbes aye, mebbes naw.
(What? Want more underground?
Here are some great photographs from before and after its 1970s restoration)
posted by bonaldi at 12:06 PM PST - 61 comments
Universal Studios
is making a movie of Flight 93 (the 9/11 plane that crashed in Pennsylvania). The funny thing is, this movie is not the one by
Oliver Stone (which is going to be about police officers).
Also, from what I can tell, this venture is going to be a
commercial one although it has "full support" of the families of that Flight.
It seems like we'll have to brace for a decent amount of
9/11 related TV shows and movies only a couple years after the attacks.
posted by narebuc at 9:43 AM PST - 75 comments
(Knock, knock) "Candygram!"
We don't know if ZDF has shown early SNL
skits (nostalgic photo
here), but German Greenpeace made a dramatic delivery to the Japanese Embassy in Berlin: a 55-foot-long fin whale that had been stranded in the Baltic. The dramatic gesture underscored the organization's contention that Japan's whaling, long defended as research, is in fact unnecessary: sufficient numbers of beached whales are available for research. The leviathan — 20 tonnes of blubber — was craned onto a truck and driven 150 miles from Rostock-Warnemünde to Berlin, and was due to be returned to the coast for study. (German-language stories on Greenpeace.de website
here,
here, and
here, including logistical details for those curious about arranging their own special deliveries.)
posted by rob511 at 1:10 AM PST - 12 comments
Maude Maggart--
Fiona Apple's sister-- does cabaret. She doesn't sound anything like her though, her voice is more soprano than alto.
posted by brujita at 12:20 AM PST - 13 comments
January 21
If you liked those
Yeti vs.
penguin games, you might enjoy the
C4 Hamster Challenge.
You are Death Jr. (of PlayStation fame). You have a hamster. The hamster is strapped with C4. If you release the hamster with just the proper strength and speed, and detonate the hamster at just the right spot, you can really send that demon's head flying. (Flash.)
posted by Gator at 12:39 PM PST - 28 comments
It's not the war in Iraq that's revolutionizing the Middle East -- it's the media.
"Surprisingly, it may be this new public sphere, rather than the war in Iraq or the Bush's administration's democracy rhetoric, that does the most to promote liberalization and reform in the Arab world. " Marc Lynch, an associate professor of political science at Williams College and the (until recently) anonymous writer behind the popular blog
Abu Aardvark, talked to Mother Jones about how the new Arab public is transforming the Middle East.
posted by storybored at 11:19 AM PST - 12 comments
Find out what's in it before it's in you
... using
free software provided by the US Department of Agriculture's database. The information, which can be kept on a PC (Windows) or PDA (Palm OS), provides a detailed listing of nutrients (calories, protein, fat, carbs, sugars, vitamins, minerals) on almost 7,000 foods, including processed and fast foods.
posted by crunchland at 10:32 AM PST - 19 comments
Mighty Morphin' Spider Ranger.
In 1978, Japanese company Toei produced a TV show for a live-action version of Spider-Man. It's
like the American version, with just a few small differences, such as Spider-Man gaining his powers from a bracelet given to him by an old man in a cave. Also, he has a giant robot and fights aliens. The entire first episode is viewable online, which has been accentuated with deliberately incorrect subtitles.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 7:08 AM PST - 16 comments
Autopsy: Life & Death.
Following on from Anatomy for Beginners which concentrated on the anatomy of life, anatomist Dr Gunther von Hagens and pathologist Professor John Lee now turn to the process of understanding death. Full video clips.
posted by srboisvert at 6:54 AM PST - 11 comments
January 20
Protrude, Flow
uses
magnetic fluid, sound, and moving images. Affected by the sounds and spectators' voices in the
exhibition place, the three-dimensional patterns of magnetic fluid transform in various ways, and are simultaneously projected on the wide screen. (note: Japanese site with WMV files) Related MeFi
post. [
via]
posted by dhruva at 5:08 PM PST - 21 comments
NSA,FISA, and Privacy
It is of course the president who finally approves of actions that may or may not be deemed legal but before 9/11, this is what he had been advised to consider "The largest U.S. spy agency warned the incoming Bush administration in its "Transition 2001" report that the Information Age required rethinking the policies and authorities that kept the National Security Agency in compliance with the Constitution's 4th Amendment prohibition on "unreasonable searches and seizures" without warrant and "probable cause," according to an updated briefing book of declassified NSA documents posted today on the World Wide Web.
If this is the sort of reading you enjoy, then by all means dig about here:
But then Windows allowed NSA to have a sure access to your machine .
And by now we all know that
Google will fight the government on making its search data base available in order to protect your privacy.(Reality: to protect Google stuff). And if you worry about search engines tracking you and making data available,
then here is a workaround
posted by Postroad at 3:31 PM PST - 16 comments
Wikipedia wrangling once more: the entire German edition
was shut down this week over the contents of a
single entry. The parents of the article's subject, a German hacker who died in 1998 under
mysterious circumstances, are displeased with his real name being disclosed in the encyclopedia. It is now back online; however, the future of the family's efforts is currently unclear, not only due to the German order's debatable validity in the US - but also because the order was, initially at least,
mistakenly addressed to St. Petersburg, Russia, instead of St. Petersburg, Florida.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 1:35 PM PST - 18 comments
Genocide in Slow Motion.
"[For every Genocide this century], we have wrung our hands afterward and offered the lame excuse that it all happened too fast, or that we didn't fully comprehend the carnage when it was still under way. And now the same tragedy is unfolding in Darfur, but this time we don't even have any sort of excuse. In Darfur genocide is taking place in slow motion, and there is vast documentary proof of the atrocities."
posted by dgaicun at 1:15 PM PST - 25 comments
"You awaken from an uneasy dream.You are in a small, bare apartment. You are alone. You have no idea how you got there. You don’t even know who you are." Fans of Franz Kafka may appreciate
Kafkamesto, a bleak and bizarre point-and-click Flash game.
posted by Gator at 12:24 PM PST - 27 comments
OK, so some professional sports players have less-than-usual
first names. Certainly not ones that are likely to appear on the
top ten list. But if you really want weirdness in names (and, quite possibly, other things) you need to head over to
Utah. (Frameset page; click on 'The Cream of The Crop'.)
Personal favorite: VulvaMae
posted by littleme at 9:29 AM PST - 144 comments
Hamas pays consultant for "image makeover."
Hamas has paid an image consultant £100,000 to help "project the right image" of the organization. Actual tips the consultant gave Hamas included "talk about Palestinian suffering" and "don't talk about destroying Israel."
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 6:19 AM PST - 38 comments
Hollywood fights back: is this the year Hollywood finally nails its political colours to the mast, or are we seeing just the latest salvo in
a battle for the political heart of the industry? [NYT registration required.]
In the red corner,
"uninformed, misleading, money-hungry, two-faced, elitists" making films about
gays, feminists and commies. In the blue corner,
"towering intellectuals, hard-core conservatives, supermen and superwomen, and just good common people" making films about
god, democracy and family values.
And if you wonder what difference it makes anyway, just ask eBay founder
Jeff Skoll. He thinks films have the power to shape public opinion, and has launched a
website to galvanise support for social change.
posted by londonmark at 5:32 AM PST - 41 comments
January 19
Disney eats crow.
Disney, whose former CEO Michael Eisner rejected the idea of Disney being hired to market Pixar's movies, who insisted on owning their sequel rights, and who apparently
hoped Finding Nemo would flop so that he could get better negotiating terms with Pixar, is now in talks for buying Pixar outright for approximately $6.7 billion in stock.
Steve Jobs gets his revenge... again. How much revenge?
50.1% of $6.7 billion dollars, apparently.
posted by insomnia_lj at 9:24 PM PST - 51 comments
Wilson Picket passes on.
Pickett, one of
greatest stars in the
Stax stable, the singer of such classics as "In The Midnight Hour," and "Mustang Sally," (the latter a standard for just about every R&B singer and garage band in the world) has died of a heart attack. he was 64.
posted by jonmc at 3:57 PM PST - 62 comments
Defense of Bill Cosby
[...]My crimes that afternoon were two. I committed the transgression of wearing a tweed jacket, black sweater, black slacks and glasses, a no-no for the “ thug barbers" there because to be an appropriate African American by their standards was to wear saggy pants, sport jerseys and doo-rag caps. My second transgression was to bring a book, James Baldwin’s Notes of A Native Son.
posted by Postroad at 12:20 PM PST - 88 comments
"Oh, Detroit! Detroit, how hast thou fallen!
No power in noonday to defend the helpless women and children from outlaws, till they have fully glutted their hellish appetites on the weak and defenseless." This full-text version of
A Thrilling Narrative From the Lips of the Sufferers of the Late Detroit Riot, March 6, 1863, with the Hair Breadth Escapes of Men, Women and Children, and Destruction of Colored Men's Property, Not Less Than $15,000 contains firsthand testimonies from African American victims of this forgotten race/draft riot, which was overshadowed by a much larger one in
New York City. [more inside]
posted by goatdog at 11:47 AM PST - 8 comments
The Atlantic Ideas Tour
It's been almost 150 years since a group of writers that included a group of writers that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and James Russell Lowell founded
The Atlantic Monthly. The magazine is klcking off a year–long celebration of its
upcoming 150th anniversary by having each issue this year based around articles from their archives.
[more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 11:26 AM PST - 15 comments
Cubeoban -- Arrange the colored blocks so that they cover the colored dots. (Flash.)
posted by Gator at 11:22 AM PST - 37 comments
On January 19, 1986, the first PC virus —
Brain — was detected. It was virtually harmless, and the Pakistani creators
claim that it was only intended to protect their copyrights. (They did, after all, include their own address and phone number in the machine code.) In the past 20 years, though, both
creating viruses and
destroying them have become billion-dollar industries.
posted by Plutor at 11:03 AM PST - 48 comments
Choose your own adventure! You are the manufacturer of a premium product. Wal*Mart wants it. They want it cheap. Do you buckle to their demands and out-source, reduce the build quality, and make money on volume? Turn to page 67. Or do you keep your American employees, increase quality, and make money by targeting the higher-end market? Turn to page 28.
The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:59 AM PST - 55 comments
January 18
What Would Tyler Durden Do
is the latest home for Brendon, the one time head writer over at celebrity gossip sites thesuperficial.com & idontlikeyouinthatway.com (while his writing remains sharp & inventive, the domain names of the sites he writes for are getting longer & less original with each move). The usual content (updated several times daily) involves photographic embarassing invasions of celebrity privacy and
absurdist writing.
Oh, I almost forgot - for the undoubtedly small percentage of the reading audience interested in watching Colin Farrel have sex with a playboy playmate, a digital copy of the illegal tape stolen from Farrel's house is the lead post on wwtdd.com currently.
posted by jonson at 9:44 PM PST - 36 comments
The
conference at
Wannsee occurred on January 20, 1942.
The Holocaust had been going on for at least one year; the camp at Dachau had been in operation for several years. The
Final Solution was already underway. At issue at Wannsee, in the relaxed and distinctively
upper middle-class atmosphere of that SS guest-house for the fifteen highly placed Nazis was the
best strategy for genocide.
Less than one year after the conference a little girl who had been hiding in Holland is sent to the Bergen camp in northern Germany. She spends more than six years looking for
four perfect pebbles
posted by Smedleyman at 5:13 PM PST - 16 comments
The 100 Best Companies to Work For.
The Top Ten starting with #1: Genentech, Wegmans, Valero Energy, Griffin Hospital, W.L. Gore, Container Store, Vision Service Plan, J.M. Smucker, REI, S.C. Johnson & Son. But
The Complete List has some surprises. It puts Microsoft at #42 behind Starbucks at #29. (Starbucks pays $500 towards tuition to part-timers who work there for more than a year). By clicking on the company links on the List you get stats on employee salaries, turnover, minority hiring etc, learning for instance, that the most common job at Microsoft pays $107,000/year.
posted by storybored at 3:36 PM PST - 53 comments
THE ORIGINAL GAY REPUBLICANS
A homosexual prostitution ring was under investigation by federal and district authorities that included among its clients Key officials of the reagan and Bush (senior) officials. The story received some newspaper coverage but there was a TV News Media blackout on the subject. For this reason, most Americans have never heard of it. Former republican Senator John Decamp was involved in the production a documentary about called "Conspiracy of Silence".
posted by sundaymag at 2:55 PM PST - 51 comments
The Anti-Cute
"Oh it is mother fucking on. Round up the troops. Arm yourselves. It's time to show your loyalty to
JALG and fight for once in your puny little life goddamnit. Some very popular blogs which shall remain nameless(boingboing and metafilter) have recently posted to some bullshit cute "animal" blog. I'm not going to embarass anybody here by telling you what this bullshit blog is. It's cuteoverload [
previously], more like overload of bull." Compare and contrast with the ultimate in
cute.
posted by ereshkigal45 at 1:50 PM PST - 45 comments
We don't not make deals with terrorists.
Yesterday,
the Guardian reported: "Kidnappers threatened to kill the abducted US journalist Jill Carroll unless the Bush administration ordered the release of Iraqi women prisoners within 72 hours, according to a report on al-Jazeera television yesterday." Today,
the BBC reports "Iraq's ministry of justice has told the BBC that six of the eight women being held by coalition forces in Iraq have been released early. The six were freed because there was insufficient evidence to charge them, a justice ministry spokesman said." Cause, meet effect. Effect, this is cause.
posted by insomnia_lj at 12:33 PM PST - 48 comments
The Niagara Fortissimo.
“Mahler was to conduct in Buffalo, New York, and we took advantage of the trip to visit Niagara Falls. We spent hours near and even under the roaring falls... and then with that roar still in his ears Mahler went to conduct Beethoven’s ‘Pastorale’. I was waiting for him as he stepped off the podium. ‘
Endlich ein fortissimo!,’ he said, ‘At last a fortissimo!’” The fortissimo in question is Beethoven's, not Niagara's. The point,
as Alma elaborates it in her memoirs, is that music can offer experiences more overpowering than Nature itself — a kind of extreme aestheticism that Oscar Wilde also propounded in "
The Decay of Lying" when he said that most sunsets are attempts at second-rate Turners. More inside.
posted by matteo at 12:15 PM PST - 8 comments
The Supreme Court
decided Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood today, vacating the lower court's ruling that the parental notification statute was unconstitional. Instead, the Court instructed the lower court to consider narrower relief. The Court, in an
opinion [pdf] written by Justice O'Connor, held that if enforcing a statute that regulates access to abortion would be unconstitutional in medical emergencies, invalidating the statute entirely is not always necessary or justified, for lower courts may be able to render narrower declaratory and injunctive relief.
[more inside]
posted by monju_bosatsu at 10:06 AM PST - 33 comments
Near Ovulation, Your Cheatin' Heart Will Tell on You
"New research from UCLA and the University of New Mexico suggests that members of "the gentler sex" may have evolved to cheat on their mates during the most fertile part of their cycle — but only when those mates are less sexually attractive than other men."
posted by anyokerin at 2:56 AM PST - 57 comments
January 17
Body, volume, style and shine with long-lasting power.
Clonycavan Styling Gel, along with mummification in Irish peat, works together with your freshly disemboweled corpse to protect hair from the disruptive power of 2000 years of rigor-mortis.
posted by 0bvious at 9:06 PM PST - 14 comments
"
Epigenetics : the lives of your grandparents – the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they saw – can directly affect you, decades later, despite your never experiencing these things yourself.
This work is at the forefront of a paradigm shift in scientific thinking, in which the environment can impact our health for generations to come."
posted by stbalbach at 3:22 PM PST - 40 comments
Gloria Trembicky is a bad landlord.
Ever wish you knew more about your new landlord
before signing the lease? Hopefully Gloria Trembicky won't have any more unsuspecting tenants. This well-documented story of disrepair, deceit and disorder should keep any landlord-Googler away (especially with the growing contributions emailed from former tenants). Also, it provides some great Schadenfreude for those of us not renting in NYC.
posted by davebug at 1:54 PM PST - 66 comments
Its not a tumor.
Russian man has tumor removed from his back….but it’s really a 35-year-old embryo that should have been his twin brother.
posted by goldism at 10:42 AM PST - 82 comments
Having a filthy mind, I'm able to come up with several non-medical uses for the
Digital Rectal Examination Simulator. However, when I noticed that the company selling the device was Japanese, I realized that the intended use is most likely as a way to hone your skills away from the arcade for the video game
Boon-Ga Boon-Ga.
posted by jonson at 10:11 AM PST - 24 comments
Supreme Court upholds Oregon's assisted suicide law.
Justice Kenedy wrote the opinion for the majority, concluding that Ashcroft did not have the authority to sanction doctors under the Controlled Substances Act. Justice Scalia dissented, joined by Justice Thomas and Chief Justice Roberts. Thomas also wrote a separate dissent. The Washington Post has the
opinions, and you can get the
pdf from the Supreme Court's website.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 9:51 AM PST - 44 comments
World Correspondence:
I have always wanted to properly pull off a project by which I would correspond with each of the 200+ world leaders. I would compliment them on a fine job well done and request a autographed photo of themselves. I'm happy to report that I have finally embarked on this long-awaited project.Current status: 23 down and counting...
posted by Ljubljana at 8:39 AM PST - 38 comments
January 16
"Yousry is not a practicing Muslim. He is not a fundamentalist,"
prosecutor Anthony Barkow acknowledged in his closing arguments to a jury in federal district court in Manhattan earlier this year
. "Mohammed Yousry is not someone who supports or believes in the use of violence." So why is Yousry now awaiting sentencing in March, when he could face 20 years in prison for translating a letter from imprisoned Muslim cleric Omar Abdel Rahman to Rahman's lawyer in Egypt?
posted by dash_slot- at 1:50 PM PST - 63 comments
Jack Bauer is back... in Japan, and he wants some Calorie Mate. Watch Kiefer Sutherland maintain character in a series of Japanese snack food commercials (with hour by hour backstory). Parts
one,
two, and
three.
posted by bobo123 at 1:02 PM PST - 50 comments
Treasures from the kingdom of fungi
Taylor F Lockwood's artsy, well lit photos of fungi in their natural habitats have gotten very little attention outside of mycologists, but his eye for detail and composition shows a skilled photographer performing in a very specific niche.
Some favorites
posted by klik99 at 12:51 PM PST - 22 comments
Sharkey's wife/friend
may not be able to do her job anymore. You remember
Jonathon "The Impaler" Sharkey, the undead, bloodsucking candidate for Minnesota governor, don't you? Julie Carpenter's association with her husband/friend and Wicca affiliation makes her unsuited to drive the school bus, according to the Princeton Schools Superintendent. [
by]
posted by Captaintripps at 10:42 AM PST - 92 comments
The New York Times
reports that community forum sites like
Digital Point Solutions' have created a system whereby forum participants share in the Google AdSense revenue (
Revenue sharing FAQ). Digital Point claims that no gaming of the system has occurred so far. A google search turns up at least a
handful of
other sites that are doing the same (but no major sites, it seems), and the latest
drupal adsense module apparently makes it easy to set up. Curious.
[Full disclosure: I know nothing about any of this. I mean, I barely know what a 'blog is (and I'm sticking to that leading apostrophe -- it's the only thing standing between us and Babelian anarchy and we're not even sure 'Babelian' is a legitimate word so now we're really mired in the hypocrisy, huh?).]
posted by nobody at 9:26 AM PST - 9 comments
The Root of All Evil? is
Richard Dawkins' new programme on Channel 4 in the UK, where the noted scholar says we must abandon
all religion to advance human kind. RD notes that he is technically an agnostic, but his bold show suggests that declared atheism is the correct political stand. Reminds me of the
recent NPR piece on what Penn believes. Are popular-media pieces of this sort a bellweather for a new anti-theism?
posted by re6smith at 8:06 AM PST - 191 comments
Your papers please, komrade.
Australian Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock is now determined to introduce a national ID card. He has gone on the record saying that it's not a matter of if it will be introduced but what information it will carry and how much it will cost the government. Given that recent "anti-terror" laws were recently
rammed through parliament minus any debate one can only speculate when this will be rammed through and whether there will be any debate.
posted by Talez at 2:58 AM PST - 58 comments
Ndiyo systems
consist of a central PC running Linux, serving a bunch of ultra-cheap, ultra-thin VNC-ish clients over 100Mbit Ethernet connections. The developers hope that mass production will soon make the clients cost as little as a typical video cable.
posted by flabdablet at 2:53 AM PST - 32 comments
Remember Segregation -
Founded in the core belief that segregation is, was and has always been wrong, this campaign is intended to make people stop, think and perhaps get a little uncomfortable in the process of realizing the modern day importance of Dr. King's life.
posted by bluedaniel at 12:37 AM PST - 28 comments
January 15
Dead Man Eating:
THOMAS GRASSO, OKLAHOMA, 1995-- a dozen steamed mussels, a Burger King double cheeseburger with mustard, mayonnaise, lettuce and tomato, a can of Franco-American spaghetti with meatballs, a mango, half of a pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and a strawberry milkshake. But, there was a problem. Mr. Grasso had been served spaghetti and meatballs, but had actually requested Spaghetti-O's. He did not take this slight lightly, his last words included this complaint, "I did not get my Spaghetti-O's. I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this!"
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 9:49 AM PST - 71 comments
Two completely dissimilar yet nifty artists: The twisted ink drawings of
Jon Kuta (big enough to make desktops; Flash interface), and the fabulously lifelike driftwood and bronze sculptures of
Heather Jansch (she really likes horses. Warning: you'll have to side-scroll).
posted by Gator at 9:36 AM PST - 11 comments
January 14
Shelley Winters Dead and Trolls Appear
It was pretty sad today to see that Shelley Winters died. She was a better actress than most of her movies and a bit of a
hottie before she outlived her
peers and lost her physical appeal. Nice to see that the trolls used the occasion to
bash her pretty mercilessly, mostly focusing on her weight and overwhelming a condolence board. Is there any topic people can be
civil on? How long before someone loses their
shirt and unmoderated forums/comments become a thing of the past?
posted by jbielby at 2:57 PM PST - 71 comments
The Internet Is For Porn
is a song from the Broadway comedy
Avenue Q (an adult version of Sesame Street) that I found myself humming for quite a while after watching this homemade machinima video using World of Warcraft characters. (warning first link goes to a Google Video with audio).
posted by jonson at 1:16 PM PST - 39 comments
How will we be prepped for war with Iran?
Winter/Spring - The clone army of foreign policy "experts" from conservative foreign policy outfits nobody ever heard of before suddenly appear on all the cable news programs all the time, frowning furiously and expressing concerns about the "grave threat" that Iran poses. Never before heard of Iranian exile group members start appearing regularly, talking about their role in the nuclear program and talking up Iran's human rights violations....
posted by kgasmart at 12:30 PM PST - 271 comments
Henry Rollins Blogs
- Henry Rollins, lead singer of Black Flag & The Rollins Band, Spoken Word performer, and one of the USO's most frequent travelers, is now blogging daily.
posted by Argyle at 9:15 AM PST - 74 comments
The Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks.
For "Stupid in America," a special report ABC will air Friday, we gave identical tests to high school students in New Jersey and in Belgium. [...] The Belgian kids called the American students "stupid." Interesting insights into the different school systems employed in both countries.
posted by slater at 7:03 AM PST - 124 comments
January 13
Alibaba regularly ranks as one of the
top destination web sites in the world, currently higher than Wikipedia or CNN, it is a mind boggling Bazaar of bulk items available for import and export, mainly from China. A popular site rarely heard about, it is for those who buy by the shipping container or become lost in the bewildering variety and possibilities of generic bulk commodities.
posted by stbalbach at 10:26 PM PST - 28 comments
NSFW: Not sure if this is an extension of
crush, but if you dig seeing women in fancy shoes destroying real automobiles with sledge hammers and such, the
Crash Car Girls are here!
posted by bonefish at 5:15 PM PST - 20 comments
Bush authorized domestic spying before 9/11.
What had long been understood to be protocol in the event that the NSA spied on average Americans was that the agency would black out the identities of those individuals or immediately destroy the information.
But according to people who worked at the NSA as encryption specialists during this time, that's not what happened. On orders from Defense Department officials and President Bush, the agency kept a running list of the names of Americans in its system and made it readily available to a number of senior officials in the Bush administration, these sources said, which in essence meant the NSA was conducting a covert domestic surveillance operation in violation of the law.
posted by rxrfrx at 10:17 AM PST - 118 comments
Graphs, Maps, Trees.
The Valve is hosting a literary event for professor Franco Moretti's new book,
Graphs, Maps, Trees. Moretti aims to reinvigorate literary studies by constructing abstract models based upon quantitative history, geography, and evolutionary theory. PDFs of the original articles:
Graphs,
Maps,
Trees. A review at n+1 is
here.
posted by painquale at 9:54 AM PST - 10 comments
The (Broken) Triangle: Progressive Bloggers in the Wilderness.
The
Huffington Post's Peter Daou, whose
dour forecast of how Bush and lazy media would spin away the
NSA scandal proved prescient, on why "netroots activists" can't get traction: "It's slow-motion-car-wreck painful, and most certainly NOT where the left's triangle should be a half decade into the new millennium, as the Bush-propping machine hums and whirrs, poll numbers rise and fall, Iraq bleeds, scandal dissolves into scandal, terror speech blends into terror speech. The landscape is there for everyone to see, to analyze. Enough time has elapsed to make the system transparent. It is dismaying for netroots activists to see the same mistakes repeated..."
posted by digaman at 8:53 AM PST - 19 comments
For interrupting an NFL game,
weathercaster
George Flickinger was fired last week by Clear Channel owned KOKI Fox 23 of Tulsa. The reason? Breaking into the Seahawks-Giants game to warn the public during the
wildfires [PDF] of November 27. The fires engulfed 50 homes and prompted the governor to declare an
emergency the next day. Flickinger's termination was confirmed in the
Tulsa World newspaper,
unfortunately they want $7 for the article.
posted by rolypolyman at 7:06 AM PST - 37 comments
January 12
National Information Exchange Model (NIEM)
Sometimes, its the unheralded steps, that take you most quickly to your destination.
On October 7, 2005, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and their associated domains announced the first release of the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) Version 0.1. NIEM "establishes a single standard XML foundation for exchanging information between DHS, DOJ, and supporting domains, such as Justice, Emergency Management, and Intelligence."
The release of this specification, and the development of the systems that utilize it may actually be the cataylst for more 'progress' in information mining on the individual than most other, well publicized efforts.
NIEM Mission: "To assist in developing a unified strategy, partnerships, and technical implementations for national information sharing — laying the foundation for local, state, tribal, and federal interoperability by joining together communities of interest."
When you say it like that, it sounds sort of cool!
posted by sfts2 at 7:10 PM PST - 19 comments
Everybody knows that gangsta rap promotes sexism, homophobia... and fascism. Take
Bushido, for instance - the Berlin rapper of Tunisian descent that all the neo-Nazis love.
Confused?
(nyt) Well,
so are the Germans. And then we're not even talking about
Fler, whose
"This is black-red-gold, hard and proud!" nationalist lyrics never fail to piss off the
German papers (in German), and who likes to pose in his videos with a nice symbolic eagle. (Then again,
Helmut Kohl didn't mind.)
Still, Fler's flag-waving, eagle-loving rhymes are no match for Bushido's
"Salute, stand to attention, I am the leader like 'A'". The A stands for Adolf, you know.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 5:15 PM PST - 28 comments
Dogs trained to sniff out cancer.
In this study which will be published in the March 2006 issue of the journal Integrative Cancer Therapies published by SAGE Publications, researchers reveal scientific evidence that a dog's extraordinary scenting ability can distinguish people with both early and late stage lung and breast cancers from healthy controls. A BBC Four documentary will be aired soon in the US, an article and a clip from the documentary can be found
here.
posted by Meredith at 3:55 PM PST - 20 comments
Diego Garcia, a heavenly spot you can not go to.
Take your time and go through a large batch of links at this site: drinking, hot babes, great beaches.(see, too, Other links on this page) Just what is this place?
Well,
this is how we got it and
this is a brief sketch of the place and
this is the official Navy page at which you will find some odd stuff if you put your mind to it. Note, for example, employment opportunities. Ok. Now you know it is strategically located place for Amrican planes. For further information, read (see index) James Bamford,
Body of Secrets.
posted by Postroad at 1:57 PM PST - 24 comments
Home heating prices getting you down? Turn off your oven and cook with
lava instead.
Sure, try this at home, what the hell.
posted by Saucy Intruder at 1:30 PM PST - 12 comments
The
"Battle of Los Angeles" occurred on February 24/25, 1942, when a large object was picked up on radar approximately 120 miles off the southern California coastline. Fearing
another Japanese attack, a general blackout was called and fighter planes were dispatched to combat the unknown assailant.
Three hours later, the planes were recalled. Witnesses reported furious fighting but no sightings of downed planes were noted. The Navy claimed there were no enemy planes;
the Army put out the story (embedded sound) that Japanese spy planes were indeed present. Subsequent investigations revealed that the invasion was most likely a weather balloon.
Other opinions were also expressed.
posted by DeepFriedTwinkies at 11:44 AM PST - 25 comments
Mark Spoon
, best known as half of German trance duo
Jam & Spoon, was
found dead today, apparently of a heart attack at age 41. Jam and Spoon aren't well known in the mainstream, but they almost single handedly invented the dance music genre today known as "Progressive Trance" with their early 90s singles
"Stella" and
"Age of Love" (Short MP3 samples).
posted by empath at 10:07 AM PST - 38 comments
Mozart's musical diary
- kept between 1784 and 1791 - goes online today courtesy of the British Library. There is a helpful audio commentary if you can't decipher his handwriting, plus excerpts from some of his music.
The same site also has works by artists and authors such as Jane Austen, Leonardo da Vinci and Lewis Carroll.
posted by greycap at 1:36 AM PST - 5 comments
My awesomeness
is at an all time high, as this chart will clearly demonstrate. And thanks to the magical people at
Bellygraph.com, I can create & update charts to illustrate all the trends that matter to me, from my own personal awesomeness to total number of pugs owned or whatever other metric I choose.
posted by jonson at 1:05 AM PST - 29 comments
January 11
Iraq is full of fabled
ancient ruins, many in
bad shape, but which still fire the imagination. Some highlights:
Ur,
birthplace of Abraham, still contained
many beautiful artifacts when it was last excavated in the 1920s. Then there is vanished
Cunaxa, near Baghdad's airport, where the Ten Thousand, a group of Greek mercenaries, fought their way back to Greece in a 1,000 mile, two-year-long retreat described by
Xenophon in the
Anabasis (and which served as the inspiration for
cult films/games and
bad science fiction alike). The ruins of the city of
Nineveh were discovered in the 19th century just across the river from Mosul,
containing art confirming elements of the Biblical account of the conquests of King Sennacherib. Most famously, the ruins of Babylon (
not much to look at, the
best bit being in Berlin) have seen much abuse, from
Saddam's awful rebuilding of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar to reports of
recent damage by coalition troops.
posted by blahblahblah at 11:22 PM PST - 15 comments
So with global warming being linked to all sorts of
bad things lately, and our illustrious leaders
doing nothing about the problem because they don't want to slow down the economy, its good to see someone
doing something about the problem, Whole Foods is the first fortune 500 company to go 100% green. And I for one am happy as a clam. This just goes to show you that you can have a wonderful, profitable business, without raping the earth, your customers, or your employees.
posted by stilgar at 8:39 PM PST - 54 comments
Country Boys
is Donald Sutherland's latest film documentary being hosted by PBS. Like his
previous film on PBS, this one too is a tough but real story of American life. It focuses on the coming of age of two boys in rural Kentucky. You can watch the
full program online (the third part will be released tomorrow).
posted by allkindsoftime at 7:48 PM PST - 53 comments
"On the day
Memoirs of a Geisha premiers in London, a flashback to January 1974 when
Donald Rumsfeld, then President Gerald Ford's Chief of Staff, entertained a geisha during an official visit to Kyoto." More
candid shots of the occasion courtesy of Pulitzer Prize winning photographer
David Hume Kennerly.
posted by milquetoast at 6:35 PM PST - 26 comments
Writing in the
most recent Military Review, British Army Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster very politely points out some observed cultural difficulties inherent in the US Army, such as rigid heirarchies, "institutional racism" and destructive aggression.
posted by wilful at 5:51 PM PST - 46 comments
"Open Source Radio"
was what I found at 1550 AM when I was tuning around on the radio.
It didn't sound at all like AM radio, and it wasn't a pirate.
It's Infinity Broadcasting/CBS Radio/VIACOM, but it's also
klezmer weddings, motivational spam, Rhino Records, current
Japanese music, self promotion, unsigned bands, and things
that I can't identify.
posted by the Real Dan at 3:38 PM PST - 23 comments
Newsfilter: Remember how Pat Robertson said god struck down Ariel Sharon because he divided Israel? Remember how Pat Robertson was going to build a $50 million dollar theme park in Israel with a Christian theme? Yeah.
Not so much anymore.
posted by delmoi at 11:35 AM PST - 58 comments
The Almighty Gaylords
"...To our first time visitors or people with little understanding of street gangs in general, the web site probably appears a little weird or creepy at first glance..." Gang violence - Chicago Gaylord style...
posted by longbaugh at 10:23 AM PST - 42 comments
Song Tapper
lets you to use your space bar as an instrument. Tap in a song rhythm and Song Tapper will identify it for you with its internety black magic.
posted by Zosia Blue at 9:05 AM PST - 47 comments
Uncle Neptune's Song Factory is a treasure trove of old time music preformed by Mr. Neptune himself with his ukulele. The blog also sometimes features mp3s of the original 78s. From the Uncle's introduction
"I have only to offer to you the songs that help make my world more sweet, and it is my hope that it may do so for you."
posted by wheelieman at 7:54 AM PST - 8 comments
January 10
Watch what you say.
Russell Tice, the NSA whistleblower who was the source for the NYT, has alleged that the
the technology exists to track and sort through every domestic and international phone call as they are switched through centers, such as one in New York, and to search for key words or phrases that a terrorist might use. "If you picked the word 'jihad' out of a conversation," Tice said, "the technology exists that you focus in on that conversation, and you pull it out of the system for processing." What else are they listening for?
posted by bukharin at 5:06 PM PST - 87 comments
INTERNET AS HYPER-LIBERALISM:
By the limitations of common sense and consensus. Sometime wacky ideas can help us look at things much clearer than a technical manual description of them by rational and well argued people. Paul Treanor is a one-of-a-kind writer. don't try to argue with him about being wrong. he does not believe in communication and therefore there is no CONTACT link anywhere on his site. He writes and lives in Amsterdam, Holland.
posted by sundaymag at 4:50 PM PST - 52 comments
A new
study indicates that giving homeless alcoholics controlled access to one drink and hour may reduce their alcohol consumption and cut down on emergency hospital visits. This harm reduction approach, and the related
housing-first model, although
controversial and
in need of further study, appears to be one of the more
hopeful developments in homelessness policy of the past few years.
posted by footnote at 3:08 PM PST - 35 comments
Yet another Flash puzzle game:
Shift. Very beautiful, with low-key music.
posted by Gator at 1:43 PM PST - 28 comments
It's the demography, stupid:
"The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birth rate to sustain it. ... Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there’s an excellent chance they can drag things out until western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default."
posted by shivohum at 9:49 AM PST - 72 comments
woot.com
One item per day, until midnight, or until they run out of stock. Innovative ecommerce at its best.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:00 AM PST - 64 comments
Meet the Bloggers
is a group of Ohio citizen journalists who have been interviewing state political candidates, podcasting the interviews and taking questions from anyone who is interested in the candidate's policies. [more inside]
posted by sciurus at 6:18 AM PST - 3 comments
January 9
Kintaro Walks Japan
A Google Video featuring an American who walks from Kyushu to Hokkaido in the hopes of learning about Japanese Culture and finding his father's birthplace.
(Running time ~ 1hr)
posted by matkline at 8:58 PM PST - 15 comments
Were you a
minger, sporting a
mullet, looking a bit
naff when you were getting
mullered while out
on the pull, anytime before 1988? Or were you
posh and
minted, looking
snazzy after spending your
dosh to get a
nip and tuck before 1980? If so, the Oxford English Dictionary and the
BBC need you for their
Wordhunt – a call to help find the earliest verifiable usages of a
list of words from the past decades whose origin is still uncertain.
posted by funambulist at 3:13 PM PST - 28 comments
Hyperdrive and a possible Unified Theory.
New Scientist article about a paper and proposal to NASA outlining development parameters and possiblities for a faster-than-light anti-gravity propulsion system, based on some rather interesting physics theories originated by a guy named Heim. You mean you've never heard of the Millenium Falcon? (
via)
posted by zoogleplex at 3:07 PM PST - 70 comments
Osama bin Laden
is dead?
And, according to Iranians I trust, Osama bin Laden finally departed this world in mid-December. The al Qaeda leader died of kidney failure and was buried in Iran, where he had spent most of his time since the destruction of al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 1:22 PM PST - 102 comments
What’s "Sacred" about Violence in Early America?
Susan Juster discusses the "oversized colonial martyr complex" with its attendant paradox: "colonial martyrs were everywhere, religious violence... in short supply." She begins:
One of the most chilling images in early American history is the deliberate firing of Fort Mystic during the Pequot War of 1637. Five hundred Indian men, women, and children died that day, burned alive along with their homes and possessions by a vengeful Puritan militia intent on doing God’s will. "We must burn them!" the militia captain famously insisted to his troops on the eve of the massacre, in words that echo the classic early modern response to heretics. Just five months before, the Puritan minister at Salem had exhorted his congregation in strikingly similar terms to destroy a more familiar enemy, Satan; "We must burne him," John Wheelwright told his parishioners. Indians and devils may have been scarcely distinguishable to many a Puritan, but their rhetorical conflation in these two calls to arms raises a question: Was the burning of Fort Mystic a racial or a religious killing?
She avoids easy answers and makes some interesting connections. If you want to find out more about the Pequot War, there's good material in the History section of
this site. (Main link via
wood s lot.)
posted by languagehat at 12:30 PM PST - 35 comments
US troops seize award-winning Iraqi journalist
li Fadhil, who two months ago won the Foreign Press Association young journalist of the year award, was hooded and taken for questioning. He was released hours later.
Dr Fadhil is working with Guardian Films on an investigation for Channel 4's Dispatches programme into claims that tens of millions of dollars worth of Iraqi funds held by the Americans and British have been misused or misappropriated.
Question: Coincidence or Coercion?
posted by Mr Bluesky at 12:28 PM PST - 21 comments
This weekend, NASA
will order the
Stardust spacecraft to jettison its 100-pound capsule that contains comet dust. The capsule will hurdle through earth’s atmosphere and make a soft landing in the Utah desert. Not directly connected to last summer’s
Deep Impact, Stardust’s mission is to bring comet debris back to earth for study. Here’s hoping we don’t need the
Wildfire lab.
posted by mania at 12:07 PM PST - 17 comments
Sodaconstructor.
"Looking at the fluid, lifelike way these creatures walk and roll and slink across the screen you might think that there must be some very complicated stuff going on behind the scenes. well fear not, it's actually very simple. it only looks complicated because lots of simple bits are working together." Be sure to stop at the
sodazoo to see others' creations.
posted by AstroGuy at 11:42 AM PST - 27 comments
How is life
for
accused war criminals (see e.g. drag-down list at top) awaiting trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia? Stimulating if they enjoy chess or model ships, according to this brief Slate dispatch. How well do such alleged monsters need to be accommodated?
posted by grobstein at 8:55 AM PST - 39 comments
A revolution is the solution
We talked about how
Ebaum's World sucks before in the Blue, but it's looks like things have been taken a step futher with Eric Bauman's latest theft of an animated GIF of Lindsey Lohan. While script kiddies have already been concentrating on wiping Ebaum's World off the net completely, the latest swipe from
ytmnd.com (NSFW?) has caused a 'massive' DoS war against Bauman as this wonderful writeup from
Vitalsecurity.org explains.
posted by daHIFI at 7:40 AM PST - 59 comments
Angry and Furious at the Collaborationist Democrats
I [Martin Garbus] don't understand. An hour after I saw the Times "scoop" on the Bush illegal wiretapping plan, I wrote that it was clearly illegal and unconstitutional.
But as it now turns out, dozens of politicians, as well as the New York Times knew about the surveillance plan and did nothing.
Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, and Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, a man known for some sensitivity to civil liberties infringements, and a substantial number of congressmen, plus the New York Times, all knew of Bush's illegal spying.
posted by Postroad at 7:05 AM PST - 56 comments
January 8
"The Hand That Time Forgot"
- Richard Brandt interviews two men who worked on the now-classic train wreck of a film,
Manos: The Hands of Fate. Find out what drives someone to gather $19,000 and make what is by many accounts the worst film ever made! Also available is the followup,
"Growing Up Manos," in which we gain another perspective ("It was so obviously bad that even a seven-year-old could see it") from Jackey Jones, who played the little girl.
posted by Monster_Zero at 10:37 PM PST - 111 comments
What makes a prank great
? The Economist (of all places) is looking for the finest prank in history. I'd be happy just to hear
your finest.
"For the most impressively elaborate pranks, however, go to a university campus. Take thousands of bright young things with too much time on their hands, itching to achieve, amuse and misbehave, and splendid acts of delinquency will follow." See also:
Shenanigans
posted by spock at 9:45 PM PST - 53 comments
Teju Cole
is a Nigerian who is returning home after years in the US. His writing is some of the best online prose I have ever read. Good photographs too.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 6:13 PM PST - 12 comments
Will the real JT Leroy please stand up? (ny times link)
The public face of JT Leroy is confirmed as Savannah Knoop, the half-sister of the man who claimed to be JT Leroy's caretaker. The authenticity of JT Leroy was previously discussed on Metafilter
here, in which a New York magazine article
portrayed Ms. Albert, 40, and Mr. Knoop, 39, as unfulfilled rock musicians who concocted the character of JT Leroy to gain access first to literary circles and, later, to celebrities. Have JT Leroy fans now officially been punk'd?
posted by billysumday at 2:21 PM PST - 47 comments
Similar in implementation to the
Fensler films, but not connected to him in anyway,
Johnny Whoop Ass is a funny overdub of the former Saturday morning cartoon (or half-hour long toy commercial)
He-Man.
Start at
Episode 1 (Embedded QT). Audio is most definitely NSFW.
posted by toftflin at 12:47 PM PST - 10 comments
"Why is it that students can graduate from MIT and Harvard, yet not know how to solve a simple third-grade problem in science: lighting a light bulb with a battery and wire?" "
Minds of Our Own shows that many of the things we assume about how children learn are simply not true." Three one hour streaming video programs on teaching science.
(low hassle reg. required, or try login:metafilter@mailinator.com, password:metafilter)
posted by Chuckles at 10:25 AM PST - 39 comments
January 7
The Cute Factor:
"Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say..." (NY Times registration req'd)
posted by shivohum at 9:03 PM PST - 28 comments
cool, but slow loading
particle physics trick using interaction between your mouse & the Google logo. Software is in Java, page isn't related to Google in any specific way other than that the logo was chosen for its recognizability.
posted by jonson at 7:14 PM PST - 37 comments
Lifeboat ethics.
"
Terror had assumed the throne of reason, and passion had become judgment." After the ship
William Brown sank on a voyage from England to America in 1841, its longboat with 41 passengers and crew aboard leaked badly and began sinking. To stay afloat, the first mate ordered sailors to throw men and women overboard: those remaining were saved and eventually rescued. One sailor who followed orders, Alexander Holmes, was convicted of manslaughter after he returned to Philadelphia in 1842. This true story inspired a famous
fictional case, many
legal opinions,
two movies, and a recent
book. What would you have done in the same life-or-death situation?
posted by cenoxo at 5:09 PM PST - 57 comments
The Celestron SkyScout
(Flash page) is an amazingly cool portable device combining an celestial object database with GPS abilities. It's not quite the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, but it's definitely one of the most compelling applications I've yet to see of GPS - it takes note of your viewing location, and uses text and audio to guide you around the night sky. Announced at the CES show, there's no pricing info yet, but dang, I want this
badly.
posted by dbiedny at 12:44 PM PST - 17 comments
The Year in Culture:
a different kind of 2005 roundup—influentials are asked to mention significant cultural points of the year. Hitchens on intelligent design ruling: "Just for once…one can hear the lucid tones of reason, detachment, culture, and irony"; Gladwell on the Streets: "the British take an African-American musical form and wonderfully reinvent it" (again); others muse about rare high points in South Park, or of Brokeback Mountain and the future of movies, or the Rove-esqueness of Cindy Sheehan, et cetera.
posted by Firas at 10:05 AM PST - 17 comments
Cooking Behind Bars.
In 1986, upon my arrival at the county jail, my cooking lessons began. There, I witnessed men using empty toothpaste tubes as spoons, and burning toilet paper to heat up coffee or reheat the food served. Complete with
recipes.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:04 AM PST - 34 comments
Psst... I know you called your girlfriend last night. No, not the one you live with. The naughty hottie that she doesn't know about. I know this because I paid
a website $110 to buy your cell-phone records, which they delivered in two hours. Did you know that
your private phone records are for sale?
posted by digaman at 9:58 AM PST - 49 comments
Prone to Violence
FROM THE French Revolution to contemporary Iraq, the beginning phase of democratization in unsettled circumstances has often spurred a rise in militant nationalism. Democracy means rule by the people, but when territorial control and popular loyalties are in flux, a prior question has to be settled: Which people will form the nation? Nationalist politicians vie for popular support to answer that question in a way that suits their purposes. When groups are at loggerheads and the rules guiding domestic politics are unclear, the answer is more often based on a test of force and political manipulation than on democratic procedures.
posted by Postroad at 4:38 AM PST - 17 comments
January 6
A blog for everyone in Davos.
"Every participant of the Annual Meeting – ranging from business leaders to political leaders, heads of NGOs, religious leaders academics and journalists – will be asked to join the Forum blog...All of the more than 2,000 participants, including presidents and prime ministers, will be asked to provide at least one posting for the
blog."
posted by nyterrant at 11:21 PM PST - 13 comments
Lou Rawls dies
You'll never find... A "velvety baritone" like Lou Rawls, who died Friday of lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai in LA. He moved with his mother from Chicago in the 1950s, was a friend of Sam Cooke, and sang the National Anthem at Game 2 of the 2005 World Series
in Chicago. Rawls sang with
Sam Cooke, was awarded three Grammys, sold one platinum and five gold albums. He said: There are no limits to music, so why should I
limit myself?"
posted by SeeAych4 at 11:00 PM PST - 31 comments
The Passivator.
A passive verb and adverb flagger for Mozilla-derived browsers, Safari, and Opera 7.5, with caveats.
posted by semmi at 9:12 PM PST - 54 comments
Private Mail--Not.
...Goodman, an 81-year-old retired University of Kansas history professor, received a letter from his friend in the Philippines that had been opened and resealed with a strip of dark green tape bearing the words “by Border Protection” and carrying the official Homeland Security seal. ...the agency can, will and does open mail coming to U.S. citizens that originates from a foreign country whenever it’s deemed necessary. ...
posted by amberglow at 6:48 PM PST - 54 comments
The Beast is coming.
Director Brian Flemming prepares to bring to the silver screen what might be the most controversial film of the year (if not all time). The cast and crew are all sworn to secrecy regarding the film's actual content, and the central premise easily explains why:
What if there was a massive conspiracy in the Christian Church to conceal the fact that Jesus Christ never existed?
posted by deusdiabolus at 6:05 PM PST - 74 comments
