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January 2009 Archives
January 31
Metro Collective is an international coalition of independent photographers. This website is an ongoing compilation of
features and portfolios that represent the individual visions of Metro photographers and their commitment to particular subjects. Their
weblog features Metro news and single images, plus interesting outtake images, tearsheets, and behind the image commentary.
posted by netbros at 9:46 PM PST - 2 comments
US meddling in Kenyan elections: An exit poll, if it had been released in a timely manner, could have altered the result of Kenya's presidential election in 2007 and prevented the deaths of many people there, say people involved in the U.S. backed effort.
It is
suggested that
Michael E. Ranneberger US ambassador to Kenya was
meddling in Kenya's Elections, playing down the corruption of Mwai Kibaki's
government.
More than 1,000 people died and 304,000
displaced.
Related Metafiler threads on the 2007 Kenya election . 1, 2, 3 , 4posted by adamvasco at 1:05 PM PST - 11 comments
Desperate Man Blues Edward Gillen's documentary about Joe Bussard, renowned collector of 25,000+ blues, folk and gospel 78rpm records from the 20s and 30s. It's about the hunt and the hunter, as much as what he found. One week only on Pitchfork TV
[more inside]posted by msalt at 11:55 AM PST - 15 comments
Star Trek TNG goes horribly wrong in a series of short, surreal and very zen mashups: Episode
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13posted by loquacious at 4:54 AM PST - 102 comments
January 30
Blueful. Web-dispersed storytelling reminiscent of the some of the stuff in
We Tell Stories to promote the free interactive fiction game
Blue Lacuna from
Aaron A. Reed, the creator of the excellent interactive fiction title
Whom the Telling Changed. Caveat: the ending is only available (afaik) on a (free) postcard so if you don't feel comfortable giving up a mailing address, you won't see the ending.
posted by juv3nal at 11:06 AM PST - 8 comments
Doing research for a BBQ restaurant website, I ran across these. The names alone kinda' make me salivate... There's
Famous Dave's (my vote for best website),
Bubba Lou's,
Bodean's (BBQ in London?),
Armadillo Willy's,
BJ's,
Big Joe's,
Dallas BBQ (in NYC, go figure),
Dickey's,
McClard's (going with the pig theme...),
Stubb's,
Texas Pride... it's pretty much a never-ending, mouth-watering list. And it turns out to be torturous, because I'm in the Yucatan and there's no real BBQ for thousands of miles around.
posted by workinggringa at 10:21 AM PST - 98 comments
I asked myself: If you purchased this cheering CD for yourself or for someone else, what would I want you or your friend to feel? The answer was easy. I'd want you to feel that you were known and that you were recognized. I'd want you to feel that you were valuable and deserving and that you are worthy. Worthy! Yes, you! You are unique, an original, one-of-a-kind! And you are not overlooked, you are not ignored,and you're not forgotten! "Don't stop now! You're almost there! We believe in you!"
Another seemingly meant-to-be-taken-seriously gift from the makers of the
Because of You CD, and
"Piece of The Puzzle Affirmative Jewelry"posted by kosem at 8:40 AM PST - 40 comments
Virginity at age 22. Two approaches:
1.
Sell it. "It became apparent to me that idealized virginity is just a tool to keep women in their place. But then I realized something else: if virginity is considered that valuable, what’s to stop me from benefiting from that?"
2.
Keep it. "It is puzzling and disturbing to me that regnant feminism has never acknowledged the empowering value of virginity."
posted by Pater Aletheias at 8:05 AM PST - 114 comments
Cops regularly perjure themselves - Blue Lies. Though few officers will confess to lying -- after all, it's a crime -- work by researchers and a 1990s commission appointed to examine police corruption shows there's a tacit agreement among many officers that lying about how evidence is seized keeps criminals off the street....
Criminal-justice researchers say it's difficult to quantify how often perjury is being committed. According to a 1992 survey, prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges in Chicago said they thought that, on average, perjury by police occurs 20% of the time in which defendants claim evidence was illegally seized.
"It is an open secret long shared by prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges that perjury is widespread among law enforcement officers," though it's difficult to detect in specific cases, said Alex Kozinski, a federal appeals-court judge, in the 1990s. [more inside]posted by caddis at 1:14 AM PST - 75 comments
January 29
"To pedal the 3700 kilometres of open water from Cape Verde off the west coast of Africa to Barbados in the Caribbean should take around 50 days..." Engineer and machinist Ted Ciamillo has built a human powered
mini-submarine, designed around a larger version of his Lunocet carbon-fibre "tail" for
divers, for an
Atlantic Ocean crossing.... The "
SubHuman project".
posted by Kronos_to_Earth at 10:35 PM PST - 23 comments
Save the Words. Do lost words still have meaning? J
ust because society has neglected them doesn't make them any less of a word.
How do you get lost words back in the dictionary? With lexicogra
ph
ers scanning publications and other communication for words not curr
ently housed in the dictiona
ry, all y
ou need do is use your adopted words as often as possible.
Go,
Adop
t a Word.
Like gra
oc
rac
y.*
* - government by an old woman or women.
[more inside]posted by Tufa at 9:44 PM PST - 37 comments
The P22 Music Text Composition Generator allows any text to be converted into a musical composition. This composition is displayed in musical notation and simultaneously generated as a midi file. The P22 Music Composition Font was proposed in 1997 to the
John Cage Trust as an accompaniment to the
John Cage text font based on the handwriting of the composer. The idea was basic and simple-every letter of the alphabet was assigned to a note on a scale. This would allow for any text to be converted into musical notation.
posted by Sailormom at 7:52 PM PST - 17 comments
Most wives are
Mad at
Dad. "We're mad that having children has turned our lives upside down much more than theirs. We're mad that these guys, who can manage businesses or keep track of thousands of pieces of sports trivia, can be clueless when it comes to what our kids are eating and what supplies they need for school. And more than anything else, we're mad that they get more time to themselves than we do."
posted by Xurando at 5:45 PM PST - 199 comments
One of the
kings of nuclear proliferation has his own website. No mention of house arrest though.
posted by brookeb at 3:02 PM PST - 10 comments
Extreme pornography illegal in Britain since Monday, 26 January, thanks to the
Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. Aside from changes to custodial sentencing guidelines (and early release guidelines to ease overcrowding), the most controversial aspect of the law relates to the legal definition of extreme pornography.
An image is deemed to be extreme if it "is grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character" and "it portrays in an explicit and realistic way, any of the following
(a) an act which threatens a person’s life,
(b) an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals
(c) an act which involves sexual interference with a human corpse
(d) a person performing an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal (whether dead or alive)
BDSM groups, among others, have campaigned and protested against the law. Aside from concerns about the legality of kink,
some have pointed out that some comics and graphic novels would also fall afoul of the new law.
posted by Grrlscout at 2:37 PM PST - 87 comments
"The Department of Defense claimed in a dramatic press briefing on January 13 that “61 in all former Guantanamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight” of terrorism."
...troubling is the Defense Department’s listing of the released Uighurs, who were completely exonerated by an internal military hearing. They’ve done nothing wrong. However, one of them wrote an op-ed column for the New York Times proclaiming that “I was locked up and mistreated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time during America's war in Afghanistan.” He also said in the same editorial: “The United States [is] a country I deeply admire.”
That’s “suspected of going back into the battlefield”? Only if you are delusional. [more inside]posted by 445supermag at 12:45 PM PST - 33 comments
Every day we go on to the streets, dying at his defenders who thought about us. About us, that they were not destined to see. But we can remember!
And imagine that the horror that the people was to survive.
WWII era Photographs, I assume, of
Leningrad combined with current photographs. This era has also recently been portrayed effectively by David Benioff in his novel
City of Thieves. Found the pictures via
Warren Ellis who thinks the photographer may be Sergei Larenkov.
posted by zzazazz at 12:42 PM PST - 16 comments
Vegetable farming! Boar breeding! All the maniac thrills of 17th century agriculture --
on your tabletop! Since its
introduction two years ago,
Agricola has grown from being a German hit to a runaway success worldwide -- at least among the niche market of serious board game fans.
[more inside]posted by Shepherd at 11:18 AM PST - 34 comments
It's time to get ready for the Super Bowl... Ads! Adland has freely available archives of 37 years of commercials from the big game, over 2,800 ads - from 1969, when
Winston,
Salem,
Camel,
Tareyton,
Pall Mall, and
Silva Thins smoked up the Bowl *
cough-cough*, all the way to 2008, when the best-liked ad was
Bud's dalmation inspiration (how do we know it was best liked?
SCIENCE!). Some highlights of the collection include:
[more inside]posted by taz at 10:11 AM PST - 40 comments
Wanna test if your ISP (or company or university) is blocking or throttling BitTorrent traffic? Want some tools to diagnose network problems in your "last mile" connection? Google to the rescue:
M-Lab! Predictably, with the recent
announcement and
publicity, the servers are now getting hammered. So post this?
You can help: Host a Glasnost server (tests for BitTorrent). *Results so far. Coming soon are apps to "Determine whether an ISP is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic" and "Determine whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations". Power to the People, bay-bee!posted by spock at 7:10 AM PST - 58 comments
A
biased shadow of its
former self, a
waste of money dominated by
champagne socialists, a victim of
media fragmentation, a
political pawn or still the
trusted heart of the UK's (and, arguably, the world's) broadcasting world? As
scandal after
scandal threatens to undermine confidence in the BBC and the voices calling for the dissolution of the licence fee gain a more
cohesive platform, can the BBC survive, - is it
the solution or the problem, and can the British public really afford to let it die the
death of a thousand cuts?
On the day after the BBC announces it will put every UK
publically owned oil painting online and the Director General talks about the BBC's "special responsibility" to culture in the UK, what should the role of the BBC be and, perhaps more importantly, what should it cost?
posted by MuffinMan at 6:27 AM PST - 50 comments
The
video for Metronomy's
A Thing For Me features a psychotic karaoke ball.
Single Link Music Video.posted by minifigs at 2:58 AM PST - 20 comments
January 28
Lunatic Magazine is a bi-annual online photo magazine presenting new work of photographers from around the world. Lunatic offers the opportunity to photographers to promote original stories, images, and photojournalism. (
Issue1,
Issue2,
Issue3)
posted by netbros at 9:53 PM PST - 7 comments
"Civilization is Just a Thin Veneer. In the absence of law and order, men quickly revert to savagery. As was illustrated by the rioting and looting that accompanied disasters in the past three decades, the transition from tranquility to absolute barbarism can occur overnight. People expect tomorrow to be just like today, and they act accordingly. But then comes a unpredictable disaster that catches the vast majority unprepared. The average American family has four days worth of food on hand. When that food is gone,
we'll soon see the thin veneer stripped away."
[more inside]posted by Joe Beese at 6:21 PM PST - 179 comments
Dave Chalmers has just launched
PhilPapers, a directory of nearly 200,000 online papers in philosophy. This is a jawdropping and amazing resource for philosophical research. For evidence of the scope of this project and the care that has been given to it, see the
taxonomy of philosophy that was developed for the site.
posted by painquale at 5:19 PM PST - 28 comments
The
Vocaloids,
1 anime-like characters created for the singing synthasizer program by the Yamaha Corporation, have been capturing the imaginations of Japanese fans for more than a year. They've inspired and starred in a large body of fan-produced songs and animated videos,
2 ranging from macabre to sorrowful to dramatic to humorous. [Massive MLYTP]
[more inside]posted by anthy at 1:44 PM PST - 7 comments
Bats sleep upside down. They hang by their feet. They have little claws. They use echolocation to catch bugs. They are the only mammals that fly. They sleep during the day.
They are dying.
[more inside]posted by Mister_A at 10:50 AM PST - 86 comments
Dating A Banker Anonymous Are you or someone you love dating a banker? If so, we are here to support you through these difficult times. Dating A Banker Anonymous (DABA) is a safe place where women can come together – free from the scrutiny of feminists– and share their tearful tales of how the mortgage meltdown has affected their relationships. Viaposted by ColdChef at 9:54 AM PST - 167 comments
January 27
Colour on the Thames is a 7 minute film shot in 1935 using
Gasparcolor, one of the many early forms of tinting black and white film. Beside
Colour on the Thames, which provides a wonderful view of 1930's England, the only film made in Gasparcolor I could find online was
Colour Flight by New Zealand artist Len Lye, an abstract cartoon set to instrumental 1930's pop music.
The story of Gasparcolor is in itself interesting, for instance touching on Nazis, Hungary between the wars and early color animation.
posted by Kattullus at 9:49 PM PST - 12 comments
Portuguese carpenter
Carlos Alberto is a wizard with wood.
His modified
Vespa Daniela is a thing of beauty, and the
Mota is pretty damned cool as well.
Would love to see him panel a Rolls Royce or a Bentley.
posted by bwg at 6:15 PM PST - 15 comments
Mingei is a transcultural word which combines the Japanese words for all people (Min) and art (Gei). The site has a flash interface and features over 5,000 high resolution, zoomable objects. More information on the
Mingei Movement.
posted by tellurian at 3:54 PM PST - 13 comments
Snow day (in DC) flash fun:
Closure. is a stark, imaginative, beautiful and a creepy platformer where the only light is the one you carry in your hands...
posted by oneironaut at 7:53 AM PST - 21 comments
January 26
Art Museum for sale. Rocked by a budget crisis, Brandeis University will close its
Rose Art Museum and sell off a 6,000-object collection that includes work by such contemporary masters as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik.
The LA Times makes the
Madoff connection.
posted by R. Mutt at 7:30 PM PST - 29 comments
British Library
warns of 'black hole' in history if websites and digital files are not preserved. "Historians of the future, citizens of the future, will find a black hole in the knowledge base of the 21st century." In addition to dead file formats and lost information from government websites, Lynne Brindley also points to the habits of individuals. "I call it personal digital disorder. Think of those thousands of digital photographs that lie hidden on our computers. Few store them, so those who come after us will not be able to look at them."
posted by cashman at 10:41 AM PST - 63 comments
Obesity can be “caught” as easily as a common cold from other people’s coughs, sneezes and dirty hands.... As many as one in three obese people may have become overweight after falling victim to the highly infectious cold-like virus, known as AD-36.
posted by caddis at 4:35 AM PST - 327 comments
January 25
Robots at War: The New Battlefield. "It sounds like science fiction, but it is fact: On the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, robots are killing America’s enemies and saving American lives. But today’s PackBots, Predators, and Ravens are relatively primitive machines. The coming generation of 'war-bots' will be immensely more sophisticated, and their development raises troubling new questions about how and when we wage war."
[Via]posted by homunculus at 11:16 PM PST - 65 comments
The End of Solitude. In an age when many people are rarely alone, in near-constant contact with social networks composed of both friends and strangers, are we facing the end of solitude as we once knew it? Have we lost the ability to enjoy our own company, and learned to fear loneliness instead? William Deresiewicz seems to think so.
posted by sarabeth at 6:17 PM PST - 87 comments
Sunday Afternoon Flash Fun/Metafilter Convalescence Flash Fun:
BubbleQuod. You have lived your entire life in a bubble. Now you want out. Burst your bubble.
posted by schyler523 at 2:27 PM PST - 7 comments
'Ten years ago, while working on The South Bank Show, Melvyn Bragg and I had a heated discussion on the pros and cons of film censorship. Broadly speaking, Melvyn was against it, while I, much to his surprise, was absolutely for it. He then dared me to write a script that I thought should be banned. I accepted the challenge and a month or so later sent him a short subject entitled A Kitten for Hitler. “Ken,” he said, “if ever you make this film and it is shown, you will be lynched.'
That film has been made.
The story behind it.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:21 PM PST - 69 comments
Airlines Use Terrorism Law to Punish Unruly Passengers. Since 2003, more than 200 airline passengers have been convicted of felonies for violating terrorism laws, many for incidents only involving yelling, cursing, or behaving drunkenly. One such passenger,
Tamera Jo Freeman, was arrested and convicted for "an act of terrorism under the Patriot Act," after she spanked her children for toppling tomato juice, cursed at the flight attendant who confronted her, and tossed the juice can on the floor.
posted by terranova at 9:37 AM PST - 91 comments
The
Disasters' Emergency Committee is an umbrella organisation of 13 major British humanitarian NGOs:
ActionAid, the
British Red Cross,
CAFOD,
Care International,
Christian Aid,
Concern,
Help the Aged,
Islamic Relief,
Merlin,
Oxfam,
Save the Children,
Tear Fund and
World Vision. It was created to coordinate a rapid response to major disasters and to launch common appeals for donations to be broadcast in the British media. Since 1963, the DEC has
previously successfully run appeals for the victims of a.o. the
Asian Tsunami, the
Darfur and Chad Crisis, the
Congo Crisis, or the
Burma and
Bangladesh Cyclones. However, their
latest appeal has been
refused by the BBC.
[more inside]posted by Skeptic at 3:55 AM PST - 25 comments
January 24
January 23
Andrew Stantion, director of Wall-E, briefly
talks about a sequel, why the female robot has a gun and the separation of animated and live action films.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:34 PM PST - 62 comments
Decodeunicode.org has a useful and full-featured search for the names and glyphs for those Unicode characters that display as a plain box full of despair. It is presented by the Department of Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz. Roll the dice
⚅⚄ and try it out.
[more inside]posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 6:15 PM PST - 25 comments
Friday Flash Fun:
Scriball [
Kongregate] is a game where you want to get your ball to the goal area. Your cursor creates a line that you can use to guide the ball. Mouse button makes the ball jump. Have Fun.
posted by schyler523 at 1:32 PM PST - 10 comments
Wired: Obama Sides With Bush in Spy Case. "The Obama administration fell in line with the Bush administration Thursday when it urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants."posted by blue_beetle at 12:08 PM PST - 86 comments
"It would be naïve to identify the Internet with the Enlightenment. It has the potential to diffuse knowledge beyond anything imagined by Jefferson; but while it was being constructed, link by hyperlink, commercial interests did not sit idly on the sidelines. They want to control the game, to take it over, to own it. They compete among themselves, of course, but so ferociously that they kill each other off. Their struggle for survival is leading toward an oligopoly; and whoever may win, the victory could mean a defeat for the public good. ...We could have created a National Digital Library—the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. It is too late now. Not only have we failed to realize that possibility, but, even worse, we are allowing a question of public policy—the control of access to information—to be determined by private lawsuit."—
Robert Darnton on what the proposed
Google Book Settlement could mean for the pursuit of knowledge—
Google and the Future of Booksposted by Toekneesan at 9:48 AM PST - 44 comments
iBank? 25 billion in cash and short-term securities. No long-term debt. Why Apple should get into the banking sector, pronto.
posted by leotrotsky at 7:38 AM PST - 49 comments
The Dollar Dreadful Family Library offers gripping tales of scientific adventures in matrimony, mysterious Appalachian woodsmen, macabre travels in the ether, exotic travels in distant lands, itinerant prospectors, and cunning detectives who pose as genteel dressmakers. Assorted amusements are offered in the form of downloadable PDF booklets, perfect leisure literature for "the distinguished reader or the particularly wealthy dunder-head".
posted by sarabeth at 7:15 AM PST - 8 comments
Benjamin Gump - I was just thinking this, after watching the first half of BB..."Both movies were written by Eric Roth, a man who now owes me seventeen dollars."
[more inside]posted by mrblack at 6:38 AM PST - 87 comments
January 22
academia.edu is a project by
Richard Price, who recently completed a Ph.D at Oxford on the philosophy of perception. In collaboration with a team of people from Stanford and Cambridge, he's launched this website, which "shows academics around the world structured in a 'tree' format, displayed according to their departmental and institutional affiliations" and "enables academics to see news on the latest research in their area - the latest people, papers and talks".
[more inside]posted by jokeefe at 10:30 PM PST - 26 comments
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank gave a bank, whose capital ratio equaled only 1.88% of assets at the bank, versus a desired level of about 6%, TARP money after heavy lobbying. Frank
inserted into the bill a provision to give special consideration to banks that had less than $1 billion of assets, had been well-capitalized as of June 30, served low- and moderate-income areas, and had taken a capital hit in the federal seizure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (WSJ link) [more inside]posted by SeizeTheDay at 5:39 PM PST - 92 comments
Sam Adams, the recently elected openly gay mayor of Portland, Oregon, has come under fire for lying about a relationship he had with a teenage legislative intern in 2005 named Beau Breedlove.
When first asked about the relationship in 2007 during the election campaign, Sam (then 42) claimed he was being a mentor to the young man.
Sam recently cut short a trip to DC to return to Portland to publicly apologize and control damage over a
new article in which he admits to having a sexual relationship with Beau.
It's got the town divided over whether he should resign of if the whole thing is being blown out of proportion.
posted by strangeleftydoublethink at 2:27 PM PST - 116 comments
Russell Tice, former NSA security analyst,
just came on the Keith Olbermann show revealing that the NSA's domestic surveillance programs were not only far greater in scope than formerly thought, but also were specifically targeted at journalists.
posted by dunkadunc at 11:39 AM PST - 82 comments
After the Obama party, the Bush team
continues to spin. "Whether Barack Obama is standing on the Capitol steps to be sworn in a second time depends on whether he succeeds in replicating Bush's achievement." "If Obama weakens any of the defenses Bush put in place and terrorists strike our country again, Americans will hold Obama responsible -- and the Democratic Party could find itself unelectable for a generation."
posted by Xurando at 11:13 AM PST - 129 comments
Protests have rocked Reykjavík since Tuesday:
Envious of Obama, Icelanders hurl yogurt and stage riots for new leaders,
Global financial crisis overwhelms tiny Iceland,
Flickr set of pictures of Tuesday's protest in front of parliament (complete with
pepper spray on camera lens),
AFP photos from Tuesday's protest, video from protests
1,
2,
3 &
4,
Icelandic protesters pelt PM's car (includes short video).
New age of rebellion and riot stalks Europe,
The Icelandic "Facebook Revolution", Iceland is Burning
part 1 &
part 2 and
Reuters factbox on Iceland and its economic crisis.
posted by Kattullus at 10:43 AM PST - 45 comments
The Letter of Last Resort. At this very moment, miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there is a British nuclear submarine carrying powerful ICBMs ... there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career ... and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided.posted by veedubya at 10:30 AM PST - 65 comments
Super Useless Super Powers. A cute website with dinky cartoons and fun descriptions of those super powers which, if you were to be blessed with one, would be pretty much damn-near useless.
posted by benzo8 at 12:42 AM PST - 81 comments
January 21
Pakistan in Peril. "The relative calm in Iraq in recent months, combined with the drama of the US elections, has managed to distract attention from the catastrophe that is rapidly overwhelming Western interests in the part of the world that always should have been the focus of America's response to September 11: the al-Qaeda and Taliban heartlands on either side of the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan."
[Via]posted by homunculus at 5:30 PM PST - 30 comments
Easy access to the internet and simplified technology for recording songs and videos might do great things for the future of pop music. Or it might be like
this.
[more inside]posted by Potomac Avenue at 3:23 PM PST - 109 comments
Blandings is "a guide and companion to the books, stories, plays and musicals of P. G. Wodehouse, probably the finest craftsman of the English language in the 20th Century." It has lists of his works (and advice on collecting them), a
miscellany (old English counties, money and words, JPs, younger sons, sport, public schools and much more), a
gazetteer (with notes on real places and maps), and other amenities, but what really put a jaunty spring in my step was the detailed notes for the works. If you go, say, to the
Something Fresh page and click on the
Notes & Quotes tab, you will find, well, Notes and Quotes. The first thing your bright, expectant orb will encounter: "Arundell Street - no longer exists but it was close to Leicester Square and held both the Hotels Mathis and Previtali (also gone). See
West End for a sketch map showing its location." It's a blooming marvel! (Via
Wordorigins.org; Wodehouse
previously on MetaFilter.)
posted by languagehat at 1:59 PM PST - 32 comments
"This is the safest place these kids have," Mr. McMonigle explains. "No matter how crazy it gets here, no matter how bad the school is, it’s still better than what’s waiting for them out there when they leave. The irony is that after all the bitching and the moaning about how they don’t want to be here, at the end of the day you can’t get them to go home!" School of Hard Knocks is a heartbreaking 7-part series of articles about kids with behavioral problems in a Philadelpha high school. [
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7]
[via
mefi projects]
posted by dersins at 10:59 AM PST - 33 comments
David Goo and the
Variety Band have been gigging in London for a few years, but a recent appearance as a soundtrack to an
advert could be what propels them to the big time. Merging ska, punk, indie and
klezmer influences, read an interview with them here as they speculate on the concept of
'selling out'posted by muggsy1079 at 9:03 AM PST - 9 comments
Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Naa (You don't know, and neither do I) = A guy who's in love with a girl falls in love with someone who he thinks is right for him, but he realizes his mistake, only after the girl has decided to marry her perfect match [or so she thinks].
Taree Zameen Par (Stars On The Ground) = A boy who has difficulty with school work gets put into a Hostel for boys where he discovers a teacher who understands him and is willing to fight for him. And
Jab We Met (When we met) = A story about a guy and a girl, who meet on a train and get hitched to each other; the guy finds himself by the end of their travel but has to leave the girl because she's run away from home to marry a guy, only to find out that he doesn't want to marry her... three Hindi movies which I would suggest that everyone watch!
posted by hadjiboy at 5:07 AM PST - 12 comments
An unexpected corollary of the modern marketing-and-distribution model is that films no longer have time to find their audience; that audience has to be identified and solicited well in advance. The Cobra -
The New Yorker on the art and science of movie marketing.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:44 AM PST - 36 comments
More than 20 years ago,
Matt Pritchett, the son of a newspaper columnist,
began his daily cartoon in the
Daily Telegraph. Generally accepted as the best daily cartoonist working today on these shores, he actually wanted to become a cameraman originally but failed to find the work. Always wry, understated and pithy, Matt's cartoons typically summarise the absurd and the humdrum in modern day Britain, often at the same time.
Here's his effort for today. Some of his classics
here,
here and
here.
posted by MuffinMan at 2:04 AM PST - 19 comments
January 20
Khoda :"What if you watch a film and whenever you pause it, you face a painting? This idea inspired
Reza Dolatabadi to make Khoda. Over 6000 paintings were painstakingly produced during two years to create a five minutes film."
posted by dhruva at 5:45 PM PST - 41 comments
185. "Revolution 9"
Shortly after recording "Revolution 9", John Lennon allegedly went around telling friends that his new song was the music of the future. Well, here we are, 40 years later, and I don’t see the pop charts filled with experimental song collages featuring recording engineers, chanting football crowds, mangled orchestras, and bizarre non-sequiturs. [...]
[more inside]posted by swift at 2:59 PM PST - 116 comments
On January 20, the HHS
"Provider Conscience Rule" went into effect, allowing employees and volunteers at government-funded hospitals and clinics to deny patients access to a variety of medical services, based on moral objection.
The
Rule is one of the Bush Administration's parting
midnight regulations. Ostensibly focusing on abortion and sterilization, it is
considered by some to be written
so vaguely that it might be applied to "contraception, fertility treatments, HIV/AIDS services, gender reassignment, end-of-life care, or any other medical practice to which someone might have a personal moral (not even religious) objection.”
[more inside]posted by terranova at 2:54 PM PST - 31 comments
A clinic nurse first removed her
intrauterine birth-control device without permission, says the patient in a federal action, then told her that "having the IUD come out was a good thing," because "I personally do not like IUDs. I feel they are a type of abortion. I don't know how you feel about abortion, but
I am against them."
posted by tehloki at 12:31 PM PST - 119 comments
"The government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian Religion."
~
George Washington / "I do not find in Christianity one redeeming feature."
~
Thomas Jefferson / "The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my religion."
~
Abraham Lincoln / "A just government has no need for the clergy or the church." ~
James Madison / "I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end... where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice." ~
John F. Kennedy / "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus --
and nonbelievers." ~
Barack Obamaposted by 0bvious at 11:40 AM PST - 270 comments
January 19
Happy Birthday Dr. King. Today is Martin Luther King Day. He was born 80 years ago, on January 15th, 1929. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was just thirty-nine years old.
Tomorrow, more than four decades after Dr. King’s death, Barack Obama will take his oath of office to become the 44th president of the United States and the first African American president in US history. The Reverend Joseph Lowery, a civil rights icon who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr, King, will deliver the benediction at the inauguration ceremony. Obama accepted the Democratic party nomination on the 45th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, arguably his most famous address.
While Dr. King is primarily remembered as a civil rights leader, he also championed the cause of the poor and organized the Poor People"s Campaign to address issues of economic justice. Dr. King was also a fierce critic US foreign policy and the Vietnam War. [more inside]posted by caddis at 6:40 PM PST - 30 comments
Progressive rock was kicked off American radio circa 1985 (not so much fired as
pressured into
resigning); today, there's virtually nothing on mainstream radio in an odd meter (5/4, 7/8, etc.). At Odd Time Obsessed, though,
everything is.
[more inside]posted by kurumi at 5:27 PM PST - 73 comments
Walkie Tonky is a physics-based action game which puts you in the shoes of a giant robot invading Earth. Smash and kick your way forward using the robot's every limb to cause mayhem and clear the road ahead. (Download required, from a sort of funky filehosting site. Probably Windows only, but I'm not sure.)
[more inside]posted by Caduceus at 5:20 PM PST - 9 comments
A tempest in a Livejournal: It starts with author Elizabeth Bear's post
Writing for The Other. Or maybe it started with Jay Lake's
Thinking about the Other. It leads to a wide ranging, intense and angry debate on the portrayal of ethnicity in fiction, culture and the media. Avalon's Willow responds with an
open letter on the racial content in one of her books, and relates it to media portrayals of ethnic peoples. Deepa D follows up with a post on,
cultural appropriation. And then things get intense.
[more inside]posted by happyroach at 3:53 PM PST - 82 comments
Ensuring that at least
someone gets his legacy right, Ex-President Bush has on his final day in office commissioned
a series of Official Legacy Booklets with such unlikely titles as
100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record. These weighty tomes inform us, for example, that "the Afghan economy has doubled since 2001"-- an accomplishment perhaps assisted by the arrival of American forces spending some $3 billion per month there.
[more inside]posted by shii at 2:28 PM PST - 64 comments
"Then I started stripping and cleaning. I told myself it would help sell the flat. How could anyone think of buying it? But I also imagined that if I cleaned long enough and hard enough, the dull patina of dried blood that seemed to cling to every surface would finally go. I hoped that if I emptied the flat of its objects, and pared back its contents to nothing, I would uncover the place that I grew up in, before Ivor was the old man, before he was a legend. I couldn’t find that place, and I didn’t think I would find it in the boxes and among the papers either."
David Goldblatt traces his murdered father's life through unpaid bills and unopened letters.posted by marmaduke_yaverland at 4:40 AM PST - 19 comments
January 18
Introducing the
Gamelatron, "the world's first and only fully robotic gamelan". Brought to you by the Brooklyn-based League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, affectionately known as
LEMUR.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 3:07 PM PST - 29 comments
Astronomer Tycho Brahe was one of the more colorful characters of the scientific Renaissance. He
lost his nose in a duel; flouted the rules of Danish nobility and married a commoner; built, on the island of Hven,
Uraniborg, the best astronomical observatory of his day; kept a
beer-drinking pet moose; and amassed the data that would ultimately allow Johannes Kepler to derive the
three laws of planetary motion.
His chief sponsor had been Danish king Frederick II, but Frederick's heir, Christian IV, quarreled with Tycho and kicked him out of Hven. Insulted, Brahe left Denmark for Prague and the sponsorship of Rudolph II. New evidence has emerged suggesting that the offended king
may have had Tycho assassinated.
[more inside]posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 2:31 PM PST - 30 comments
The
New Yorker has reprinted their articles about the Obamas over the years.
From a 1996 profile as part of a series about couples in America:
MICHELLE OBAMA: There is a strong possibility that Barack will pursue a political career, although it’s unclear. There is a little tension with that. I’m very wary of politics. I think he’s too much of a good guy for the kind of brutality, the skepticism.
From a story about his Senate campaign:
He was affable with everyone, smiling warmly, but in exchanges that lasted more than a few seconds it was possible to see him slipping subtly into the idiom of his interlocutor—the blushing, polysyllabic grad student, the hefty black church-pillar lady, the hip-hop autoshop guy. Black activists sometimes say that African-American kids need to become “bi-dialectic”—to speak both black English and standard English—to succeed. Obama, the biracial kid from Hawaii, speaks a full range of American vernaculars.
There are others. Read in sequence, it's an interesting series of snapshots, with the guy slowly coming into focus.posted by cogneuro at 10:20 AM PST - 35 comments
blog to the oldskool, collecting obscure & long forgotten 91-95 oldschool hardcore/jungle gems, live sets, and
more oldies from the golden era of jungle .
posted by geos at 9:00 AM PST - 43 comments
Who Doesn't Like Soil Science? Well, OK, a lot of people. But there is a cool collection of 3-D models of significant compound in the field at the
Virtual Museum of Minerals and Molecules. Hosted at the University of Wisconsin, it currenly has 26 exhibits ranging from simple (I like
graphite) to complex (
plastocyanin should please everyone with its useful copper-holding functions).You can rotate the models in all directions and emphasize particular substructures to get a better look at them. Fun for anyone who like soil, chemistry, or playing with 3-D molecule models.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:07 AM PST - 11 comments
January 17
Nebraska-born musician
Christiaan Virant was in Beijing performing drone-like ambient music with his Chinese collaborator Zhang Jian, under the name
FM3 (mostly in Chinese); as pioneers of the electronic movement in China, most of their money came from sound installations at art galleries, which entailed wiring up rooms with sound equipment. Mulling a simpler and cheaper way of doing this, Virant was wandering around a Buddhist temple in southwest China when he spotted a
little plastic box on the altar (one such possible example), piping out loops of the tinny, digitized chants played endlessly at such places. Intrigued, he found two of the devices in the temple gift shop and bought both. The idea of an instant sound installation was born.
That was almost four years ago.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 5:25 PM PST - 26 comments
Peanut butter recall - hundreds sick. Federal health authorities on Saturday urged consumers to avoid eating cookies, cakes, ice cream and other foods that contain peanut butter until authorities can learn more about a deadly outbreak of salmonella contamination. It appears that retail peanut butter in jars is safe. So far, more than 470 people have gotten sick in 43 states, and at least 90 had to be hospitalized. At least six deaths are being blamed on the outbreak which is believed to have started at a Blakely, Ga., facility owned by
Peanut Corp. of America that ships peanut products to
85 food companies.
posted by dejah420 at 4:51 PM PST - 73 comments
"Money" is a completely AWESOME music video of a track by
N.A.S.A. (
North America South America), a DJ collective featuring
Squeak E. Clean and
DJ Zegon plus many famous guest artists, including, on this track alone, David Byrne, Chuck D, Ras Congo, Seu Jorge, & Z-Trip. (Other tracks by N.A.S.A. feature the likes of Tom Waits, M.I.A., Gift of Gab and Kool Keith.) The video features the artwork of
Shepard Fairey, who has
been discussed previously here. The video was directed by Paul Griswold and
Syd Garon (who also did
this great video for DJ Qbert and
this one for Dan the Automator, which features some nice Gilliamesque touches.)
posted by slappy_pinchbottom at 2:08 PM PST - 15 comments
With George W. Bush's presidency coming to a close David Letterman on last night's
The Late Show bid farewell to his recurring segment "Great Moments in Presidential Speeches" with a video
montage [4:00] of clips. Another
compilation of clips [4:49].
posted by ericb at 1:53 PM PST - 39 comments
Billionaires have more grandchildren through their sons than through their daughters, because the status advantage is more reproductively valuable to the sons. Therefore, it would be adaptive for the mothers of their children to bear more sons than daughters. But surely that can't be; mothers can't control the sex of their children.
Oh but so it is: billionaires have 60% male children.
[more inside]posted by grobstein at 1:21 PM PST - 69 comments
On November 20th, the CTRC made
a landmark ruling that defeated the CAIP's plea to stop Bell's conjuration of the
Deep Packet Throttle Monster. However all was
not lost, as consumers of Bell's copper pipes can take solace in
three recent developments that aim to reclaim the pipes for We, the little guy.
hooray! [more inside]posted by tybeet at 11:01 AM PST - 28 comments
Known as
Black Box in the UK,
Survival in the Sky was a four-episode 1996 series about commercial aviation accidents and the investigation of their causes. (Two additional episodes were filmed in 1998.) Not currently available on DVD, five of the six episodes are available in their entirety on YouTube (links within).
[more inside]posted by maxwelton at 1:16 AM PST - 12 comments
January 16
"Well behaved women rarely make history," said Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
Scandalous Women brings you the lives, loves, and sexual adventures of some of the most fascinating women who rocked the world. Like
Olimpia Maidalchini who managed to achieve something that no woman ever has, for the 11 years of her brother-in-law Innocent X's reign as pope, Olimpia was the real power at the Vatican; or
Elizabeth Armistead, wife of a cabinet minister, courtesan to many. Read the bios and follow the tales of nearly a hundred women of scandalous pursuit from
Mata Hari to
Typhoid Mary.
posted by netbros at 10:04 PM PST - 14 comments
People of the Screen : "Digital literacy’s advocates increasingly speak of replacing, rather than supplementing, print literacy. What is “reading” anyway, they ask, in a multimedia world like ours? We are increasingly distractible, impatient, and convenience-obsessed—and the paper book just can’t keep up. Shouldn’t we simply acknowledge that we are becoming
people of the screen, not people of the book?"
posted by dhruva at 9:22 PM PST - 31 comments
"The Mass Observation movement was founded by a group of 1930s' British intellectuals who believed the most revealing way to document an event was to document the peripheral activities surrounding it. The Mass Observers carried out their greatest project on May 12th, 1937, when they dispatched more than 200 observers throughout London to monitor the coronation of
King George VI." This coming Tuesday, the folks at
Januarythe20th.com are attempting to create a day of Mass Observation in the United States.
posted by TheWash at 8:02 PM PST - 18 comments
Frozen in 1955 This awesome 50's bungalow, located on a quiet, cul-de-sac street on the Hill neighborhood in St. Louis Missouri, has seriously never been lived in... at least on the main level. This ONE-OWNER home was resided only in the lower level during their stay here, so the main level has been frozen in time and perfectly preserved.
posted by robbyrobs at 6:45 PM PST - 64 comments
The Bioscope is dedicated to the subject of early and silent cinema. It is designed to be a news and information resource on all aspects of the motion picture before sound. It covers news, publications, events, discoveries, documents, critical theory, filmmakers, performers, audiences and technology, and aims to encompass film production, distribution and exhibition in the silent era, as well as ‘pre-cinema’, chronophotography, optical toys, and related media, across the world.
[more inside]posted by jokeefe at 6:21 PM PST - 4 comments
Willy Pete - Now It’s a Chemical Weapon, Now It’s Not; was
used by US forces in the siege of Fallujah. Now
Haaretz has questioned if White Phosphoros is being used against Gaza.
Here is apparent video proof. Willy Pete has a strange
legality; but whether legal or not is certainly one of the nastiest
chemicals used in warfare.
posted by adamvasco at 4:32 PM PST - 62 comments
The New Creation was born in 1970 when Chris Towers, an unknown guitarist from Vancouver, decided to form a Christian rock group with his mother Lorna as lead singer and their neighbor Janet Tiessen on drums. Scared by reports of the hippie excesses of the Manson/Altamont era, Lorna Towers wrote doom-laden, apocalyptic lyrics for the New Creation's aptly titled album,
Troubled. The band was unpolished, yet somehow captured a unique lo-fi sound comparable to a hybrid of the Velvet Underground and
the Shaggs. The group might be totally forgotten today, if an aging hippie record dealer named
Ty Scammel hadn't rescued a copy from a $1 bargain bin, leading to the
album's rediscovery by collectors of Christian rock and
outsider music.
[more inside]posted by jonp72 at 12:46 PM PST - 23 comments
44 Presidents Coming is either the perfect antidote or the perfect complement to all the Inaugural excitement. Though not complete yet, it will continue to be updated until all 44 presidents are....there. I'm particularly partial to
Teddy.
posted by sleevener at 9:30 AM PST - 35 comments
Kamal Chunchie charts the history of the black and Asian community in Canning Town, east London, in the 1920s and 1930s. It tells the story of the Coloured Men's Institute and its founder, Kamal Chunchie, a man who can rightly be called east London's first black and Asian community leader. One of the many excellent East London
history projects at Hidden Histories.
posted by Abiezer at 4:16 AM PST - 2 comments
January 15
Hongkiat.com is a treasure trove from a Malaysian designer, developer that features
Photoshop tutorials,
icons,
Wordpress tips and tricks,
tools for everything from
sound to
Flickr,
inspirations,
graphics and templates,
stunning wallpapers including for
Windows 7,
Leopard, and
iPhone, and finally a
library of how-to's to make your everyday internet simpler.
posted by netbros at 9:07 PM PST - 2 comments
President-Elect Obama has shown he can make the hard decisions when it comes to appointments, but one job remains to be filled: Drug Czar. A tough job requires a tough man, and one such man is asking for the chance.
Ted Nugent for Drug Czar. [more inside]posted by theroadahead at 5:35 PM PST - 89 comments
US Airways Flight 1549 has
crashed into the Hudson. Fortunately, it appears that everyone has survived. The culprit appears to be a
bird strike from a flock of geese (as opposed to a single bird, which airplane engines are built to withstand).
[more inside]posted by kdar at 1:56 PM PST - 169 comments
"Authored by the U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM), the Joint Operating Environment (
JOE 2008,
pdf) outlines a strategic framework and forecasts possible threats and opportunities that will challenge the future joint force." One portion picked out by the media: Mexico and Pakistan are the two countries most likely to undergo "
sudden collapse".
[more inside]posted by 445supermag at 1:39 PM PST - 7 comments
What can be done with worn, outgrown or single socks? Well, if you want to wear those favourite socks awhile longer, you can
darn them. If your baby’s feet are no longer so tiny, make a
baby sock purse or
sachet,
baby sock reindeer, or
baby sock corsage or
bouquet decorations for a friend’s baby shower. You can
make a hat out of your child’s outgrown socks, or your kids can make
Barbie clothes. You can use single socks to make a
foot massager,
potholders,
slippers, a
dog rug, a
snowman,
sock puppets or
cute critters. Or
sock art installations.
See these articles for more pedestrian ways to use socks.posted by orange swan at 10:51 AM PST - 18 comments
GSA and NARA hope that
this online directory will introduce you to the operation of the Federal government and the resources available to help you begin your service in the new Administration. Are you a nominee? Your survival guide can be found
here. Just an appointee? Your orientation begins
here. And be sure to make sure you have a good understanding of the
Org Chart.
posted by dchase at 10:17 AM PST - 1 comments
As you may know,
acoustic treatment of your listening room is very important. But many people want to use their space for both music listening and entertaining guests. Quite often large and effective bass traps can rob your space of its grace and majesty and make your guests feel weird and uncomfortable.
posted by Brocktoon at 10:01 AM PST - 37 comments
About those tunnels The media here had led me to believe that those tunnels were crude things that were used to smuggle rockets and explosives, but this photo essay from Foreign Policy, gives another take on what its been about
posted by donfactor at 5:39 AM PST - 111 comments
January 14
Obama's People [full-screen slideshow]: one photographer; one background; fifty-two members of the incoming US administration. Oh, and one "significant item" per person. The kind of thing -- not just a political piece, but a photographic project -- that reminds you what the institutional clout of the
New York Times can make possible.
posted by holgate at 9:36 PM PST - 93 comments
Smiles, everyone. Ricardo Montalban
dies at 88. The actor may be best remembered for his roles as
Mr. Roarke in
Fantasy Island and as the malevolent
Khan in
Star Trek (and, to a younger generation, as the grandfather in
Spy Kids, and, to teevee fans, as the
hawker of the fine Corinthian leather of the Cordoba), but, after early years of playing
Asians (!), the actor might be most important for gaving been one of the few Hispanic actors to get
lead roles during the 1950s and 60s. Also, the actor introduced the song "
Baby It's Cold Outside," which he never gets credit for.
posted by Astro Zombie at 1:41 PM PST - 131 comments
The meat is almost ready to be boiled, except for one thing: Although its head, innards and three paws have been removed, it still has one. That’s the law.
"They leave the paw on to prove
it's not a cat or a dog,"
posted by 445supermag at 11:20 AM PST - 105 comments
"Yes, We Tortured," says
Susan Crawford, Convening Authority of The Guantanamo Military Commission. "I sympathize with the intelligence gatherers in those days after 9/11, not knowing what was coming next and trying to gain information to keep us safe," said Crawford, a lifelong Republican. "But there still has to be a line that we should not cross. And unfortunately what this has done, I think, has tainted everything going forward."
posted by Xurando at 7:48 AM PST - 131 comments
January 13
Lovecraft is Missing. If you like reading Lovecraft, you might enjoy this comic about his unexplained absence, as well. Make sure to check out the Lovecraft related links on the left.
posted by Caduceus at 10:28 PM PST - 25 comments
Fire destroyed the office of the War Department and all its files in 1800, and for decades historians believed that the collection, and the window it provided into the workings of the early federal government, was lost forever. Thanks to a decade-long effort to retrieve copies of the files scattered in archives across the country, the collection has been reconstituted and is offered here as a
fully-searchable digital database.
posted by Knappster at 9:41 PM PST - 10 comments
At nightfall youth gangs transform the streets of Kinshasa's townships into arenas of the fight. Although many of these boys and young men are trained in foreign fighting styles such as judo, jujitsu and karate, in the public clashes between the fighting groups, these boys and young men perform
mukumbusu.
This fighting style, inspired and based on the gorilla, was invented during the last decade of colonialism, and is an original mixture of a traditional Mongo wrestling practice,
libanda, and Asian and Western fighting practices.
An essay from
Edinburgh University's Center of African Studies (PDF - or
accessmylibrary link)
[more inside]posted by Smedleyman at 9:35 PM PST - 15 comments
Most video games are easy to learn, but hard to master. For those focused on single player, there are always
speed runs. However, multiplayer competition can often be much more interesting to perfect.
Of course, there are those who make gaming a
career with games like Halo and other FPSes.
There's
Street Fighter II (as well as other editions and variations), which can lead to some incredible
matches. There are some very intense
StarCraft tournaments, as well as similar tournaments for a variety of other RTSes.
Often, games can last so long beyond their shelf lives simply because of the fan base and multiplayer aspect.
posted by cardern at 7:11 PM PST - 41 comments
In a breathless, passionate, yet level-headed 15 part series, YouTube user, paleontologist, ex-Christian, and potential
Space Coyote impersonator
AronRa presents an uncommonly well-written and presented argument against what he identifies as the 14 "Fundamental Falsehoods of Creationism."
[more inside]posted by Mr. Anthropomorphism at 6:24 PM PST - 57 comments
Atmospheric Optics.
Rainbows,
in spray,
of moonlight,
in reflective paint,
without sky,
with spokes,
twinned,
reflected,
in clouds,
in the fog, more.
Halos,
horizon distortion,
green flashes,
pillars,
near-contrails.
Surface and volume shadows.
Waves atop the atmosphere.
Mysteries.
Picture of the Day.
Via.
Previously. Still no unicorns.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 2:07 PM PST - 18 comments
Prominent blogger
Andrew Sullivan develops an unhealthy obsession over the (lack of) details surrounding the birth of Sarah Palin's youngest child.
Sullivan really, really won't let it go. Persistent rumors lead the editor of the Alaska Daily News to, "finally decide, after watching this go on unabated for months, to let a reporter try to do a story about the 'conspiracy theory that would not die' and, possibly, report the facts of Trig's birth thoroughly enough to kill the nonsense once and for all." Palin releases
press release slamming the paper. Editor of paper
publishes email from Palin's office along with his response.
Palin complains about "bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers who lie," says episode is, "more indication of continued problems in the world of journalism." She also
thinks Katie Couric is bad at journalism, not the center of everybody's universe, and is exploiting Palin. Mike Huckabee disagrees, says Couric was
"extraordinarily gentle" with Palin. Political pundits and journalists are left scratching their heads - is she crazy?
Or a crazy genius? 2012 is just
around the corner.posted by billysumday at 12:49 PM PST - 188 comments
“It would be completely unethical to give the
drug to someone else,” he said, “but if you’re in a marriage and want to maintain that relationship, you might take a little booster shot yourself every now and then. Even now it’s not such a far-out possibility that you could use drugs in conjunction with marital therapy.”
posted by badego at 11:59 AM PST - 42 comments
Youngest Briton to climb Everest dies in Alps Last year, two British kids skied, sailed, and biked through North, Central, and South America, en route from the
north pole to the south pole. They
made it the whole 180 degrees, but as you can read in the articles, they almost died several times. You may enjoy reading an
interview about that trip.
They had already climbed to the top of Everest at 19 years of age.
They were named
Adventurers of the Year for 2008 by National Geographic.
They
died this weekend, January 10, 2009, climbing in the French Alps.
posted by peter_meta_kbd at 11:22 AM PST - 31 comments
Autumn 1944, and London was under attack from space. Hitler's 'vengeance' rocket, the V-2, was the world's first ballistic missile, and the first man-made object to make a sub-orbital spaceflight. Over 1400 were launched at Britain, with more than 500 striking London.
Each hit caused devastation. The 13 tonne rocket impacted at over 3000 miles per hour. There was no warning; the missile descended faster than the speed of sound and survivors would only hear the approach and sonic booms after the blast.
via Londonist.posted by swift at 9:15 AM PST - 84 comments
C. Brian Smith
gets invited to dinner at a college friend's house. The father drinks "non beer" and scolds the dog for farting. Smith remembers that he has a joint in the cigarette box in his pocket. One of the sisters "severs the tension by asking her father how many words he screwed up" during a recent speech he gave. Just another family dinner at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
posted by tractorfeed at 4:39 AM PST - 107 comments
Charlie Corcoran, Bagman of the Morris Ring, believes that Morris dancing
(previously) may be on the "
brink of extinction". This is what
the world would miss. Not everyone is that troubled by the news, however - as assistant librarian at the English Folk Dance and Song Society Elaine Bradtke argues, there are
more obscure types of English folk dancing, including (but probably not limited to)
Long Sword dancing (a serious-looking dance),
Molly dancing (not a very serious dance at all),
Rapper dancing (the Welsh miner kind, not the hip-hop kind),
Step clog (which needs no introduction), and the English ceilidh (aka
barn dancing).
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 2:16 AM PST - 46 comments
January 12
Global Museum is sort of a daily paper for the museum world. The site, which marked its tenth year in 2008, aggregates museum news, job listings, and links from around the world, helping readers stay up-to-date on issues and events like artifact repatriation, art theft and trade, archaeological discoveries, innovative programs,
unusual museums, threats to collections from war and natural disasters, and plenty of stuff just for fun.
[more inside]posted by Miko at 10:24 AM PST - 4 comments
The Best Job in the World. Would you like to be paid AUD$150,0000 to live for free in a three-bedroom villa on an island in the Great Barrier Reef for six months, simply in exchange for blogging about your experience? Yeah, so would I. Submit your application before February 22nd, and see if you make it through the other millions of people who are sure to apply. And no--it's not a joke.
posted by schroedinger at 6:33 AM PST - 70 comments
The State of the Web 2008 is a report from
Web Directions that includes details and analysis of all the responses to over 50 questions covering technologies, techniques, philosophies and practices that today’s web professionals employ. The survey was open for just under 3 weeks, from December 1st to 20th 2008. In total, over 1200 designers and developers from around the world responded to the survey. Respondents were likely to be self-educating, “early adopters” who keep abreast of developments in their field. Here are the
tabular results.
[more inside]posted by netbros at 4:25 AM PST - 7 comments
January 11
International House of Logorrhea, at
The Phrontistry, a free online dictionary of weird and unusual words to help enhance your vocabulary. Generous language resources,
2 and 3 letter Scrabble words l
The Compass DeRose Guide to Emotion Words l all kinds of glossaries for
color terms,
wisdom,
love and attraction,
scientific instruments,
manias and obsessions,
feeding and eating,
carriages and chariots,
dance styles and all kinds of fun word stuff.
[more inside]posted by nickyskye at 9:33 PM PST - 12 comments
General Laurent Nkunda is a Tutsi warlord in
Katanga who was recently
interviewed by the Huffington Post. The
BBC believe he is nothing more than your standard African rebel with a long list of atrocities to his name. An opinion supported by the UN and some human rights groups.
The War Nerd has come to his
defense, however, suggesting that he's just angered the UN by refusing to disarm and allow the Hutu "refugees" from the Rwandan Genocide to terrorize the lands under his control.
[more inside]posted by Pseudology at 5:35 PM PST - 8 comments
January 10
SFXR by Tomas Pettersson - Ever needed a skilled Foley artist and an audio lab for making sound effects? No, probably not, but even the most amateur game designer needs sound effects for his game. Now, thanks to Tomas Pettersson the long tradition of stealing sound effects from other games is finally over. It doesn't do much more than little 8-bit bleeps and bloops, but it sure feels nice to have original, royalty-free sound effects for your game, or just for fun.
[previously]posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 10:04 PM PST - 15 comments
Top Events USA lists their top 20 events across the USA, the top 10 events and festivals for each of the United States, and lists of the best annual events and festivals by category or theme.
[more inside]posted by netbros at 4:49 PM PST - 7 comments
Everybody has one -- that album that first made you a music-lover for life. It could be the first album you ever heard or bought with your own money. It could be one you didn't hear until later in life. But everybody has one, and
we want to know about yours.
posted by davebush at 11:37 AM PST - 212 comments
"The more we understand why we demonise certain scientific advances, the better we will be able to decide whether some areas of research are so sensitive they should always remain off limits to science." Is Science Out of Control?posted by tybeet at 8:37 AM PST - 60 comments
When the modern oil industry began
150 years ago, many speculators moved into Northwestern Pennsylvania. Among them was John Wilkes Booth, who walked off the stage and onto the oil fields in an attempt to increase his fortunes with the
Dramatic Oil Company.
[more inside]posted by hoppytoad at 6:48 AM PST - 4 comments
Neale Donald Walsch, author of the best-selling series “Conversations With God,” recently posted a personal Christmas essay on the spiritual Web site Beliefnet about his son’s kindergarten winter pageant.
During a dress rehearsal, he wrote, a group of children spelled out the title of a song, “Christmas Love,” with each child holding up a letter. One girl held the “m” upside down, so that it appeared as a “w,” and it looked as if the group was spelling “Christ Was Love.” It was a heartwarming Christmas story from a writer known for his spiritual teachings.
Except it never happened — to him. [more inside]posted by tatnasty at 1:58 AM PST - 95 comments
January 9
Having a hard time taking over the Earth? Inefficient right hand men making a mockery of your efforts to wreak havoc? Could you use a tool that will help your evil team monitor the crises you create whilst you cackle out callous laughter? Well then the
Henchman's Helper is just what you've been breaking into run-down laboratories for. [via
mefi projects]
posted by cashman at 8:43 PM PST - 18 comments
In December 2003, Brent Cambron gave himself his first injection of morphine. Save for the fact that he was sticking the needle into his own skin, the motion was familiar--almost rote. Over the course of the previous 17 months, as an anesthesia resident at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Cambron had given hundreds of injections.
-
Going Under by Jason Zengerle of The New Republic [
print version] is heartbreaking article about the high rates of drug addiction among anesthesiologists. It tells the story of Brent Cambron and his spiral into addiction. His live was also sensitively chronicled in The Boston Globe by Keith O'Brien in
Something, anything to stop the pain [
print version].
[more inside]posted by Kattullus at 1:10 PM PST - 96 comments
Friday Flash Fun:
Evacuation is a puzzle game about explosive decompression. Save the crew! Eject the aliens into space by opening the spaceship's doors! The catch: doors of the same color all open together.
[more inside]posted by Rinku at 1:01 PM PST - 17 comments
Blagojevich impeached by State House. With only one dissenter Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was impeached by the Illinois House of Representatives while
out jogging (video). This is the first step for removing the governor from power. Next the state senate puts Blaggo on trail, and that is scheduled to happen shortly after Obama's inauguration in a couple of weeks.
Capital Fax Blog is reporting that Blaggo is not going to resign, and the governer has scheduled a press conference this afternoon with an official response to the vote. Previously on
Mefi [more inside]posted by zenon at 10:38 AM PST - 78 comments
Worried about antibiotics in your beef?
Organic vegetables (and pirated
honey) may be no better. 90% of animal antibiotics are excreted as dung which is then used as fertilizer. The amounts are smaller but cumulative, particularly in potatoes, lettuce.
posted by stbalbach at 8:37 AM PST - 31 comments
January 8
Once every 27 years or so, the mysterious binary star system of
Epsilon Aurigae undergoes an eclipse, lasting nearly two years. This gives this system the distinction of having both the longest eclipse and the longest period of any known binary system. However, it is not clear why the eclipses last so long, or even what the structure of the system actually looks like--
the main star is a supergiant, with a radius as big as the distance from the earth to the sun, and yet its light is dimmed for two years by something yet bigger. The next eclipse is due to begin in August of 2009, and as part of the
International Year of Astronomy in 2009, amateur astronomers are being called on to make their own observations of the changing brightness of Epsilon Aurigae. If you want to try it yourself, you can read the
training guide to find out how to do your own observations and report them. In addition, the two scientists who organized observations of the previous eclipse both have webpages [
1,
2] which are coordinating the organization for the upcoming observation. If you want to learn more about the science behind ε Aurigae, a good rundown with links to papers is available
here.
posted by Upton O'Good at 10:49 PM PST - 32 comments
Eartheasy is about sustainable living. It offers information, activities and ideas which help us live more simply, efficiently and with less impact on the environment.
[more inside]posted by netbros at 10:20 PM PST - 9 comments
Here's to
Ray Dennis Steckler, the independent filmmaker who
wrote, starred (as Cash Flagg) and directed influential films including
The Thrill Killers,
Rat Pfink a Boo Boo, and his masterpice
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. A visionary artist whose influnce is clearly seen in contemporary cinema, Steckler was prolific (producing movies from 1963 until last year), economical (his films were self-produced, shot on 16mm film and later Hi-8 video), and brilliant (as clearly evidenced in this
dance sequence from Creatures, "The First Monster Musical"). It hasn't been widely reported yet, but fans are mourning his passing. He died in his sleep yesterday, January 7th, aged 70.
[more inside]posted by Chinese Jet Pilot at 7:53 PM PST - 26 comments
Remember Palm? In the 1990s they created an industry and ate Apple's lunch when their smaller, nimbler
Palm Pilot 1000 did the PDA right and blew the MessagePad away. Today they unveiled the
Pre, a phone running their new
"WebOS" and aimed straight at the iPhone's weaknesses. With one of the guys behind the iMac and iPod
running the show, can they pull it off again?
posted by bonaldi at 6:23 PM PST - 108 comments
Today Boeing completed the
first test flight of a commercial jet-liner using a mix of conventional jet-fuel and a fuel created from algae and the african weed
jatropha. Boeing hopes that biofueled flights will be common in
just three years.
posted by Artw at 10:21 AM PST - 28 comments
2009 marks not only the 150
th anniversary of the publication of
Charles Darwin's
On The Origin of Species* but the 200
th anniversary of his birth as well. To celebrate,
BBC Radio 4 presents a special series of Melvyn Bragg's
In Our Time exploring Darwin's life and work:
Episode 1 explores Darwin's unhappy childhood, his time at Cambridge University and his failure to become a priest,
episode 2 focuses on Darwin's round the world voyage on the Beagle and the objects and the ideas he bought back,
episode 3 looks at the publication of Darwin's masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, and the controversy it stirred, and
episode 4 is set in Down House where Darwin lived out the final years of his life and which became both family home and experiment lab.
[more inside]posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:39 AM PST - 14 comments
"The
National Counterterrorism Center is pleased to present the 2009 edition of the
Counterterrorism (CT) Calendar. This edition... contains useful information across a wide range of terrorism-related topics: terrorist groups, wanted terrorists, and technical pages on various threat-related issues" such as recognizing the effects of an anthrax infection. "The Calendar marks dates according to the Gregorian and Islamic calendars, and contains significant dates in terrorism history, as well as dates that terrorists may believe are important when planning 'commemoration-style' attacks." Conveniently available in both online multimedia format (deep link to the
timeline itself), as well as a
printable version (63 MB PDF).
[more inside]posted by grouse at 7:34 AM PST - 11 comments
Pink is
still the colour where little girls are concerned, no matter where they grow up - some think propensity for pink is
hardwired into girls. For a stark depiction of how many pink things a five-year-old could possibly own, a Korean photographer
photographed boys and girls with their possessions arranged according to colour.
posted by mippy at 7:28 AM PST - 116 comments
Congress must back sex! According to Larry, "Americans can do without cars and such", but it can't do without sex...and for an extra $5 billion US, he will help Americans do who ever, I mean what ever it takes to get people using porn. However, maybe, just maybe that the decline in sales is due to the free porn access on the net.
Another article about it hereposted by Prunedish at 2:35 AM PST - 46 comments
As we anxiously/eagerly/fearfully await the premiere of the long-in-coming
(previously) remake
(previously) of that TV Cult Classic
(previously) "The Prisoner" (previously), I am delighted that AMC has put
all 17 full episodes of the original Patrick McGoohan series online for you to see, unedited, uninterrupted, also not pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed or debriefed but, yes, numbered.
posted by wendell at 12:34 AM PST - 34 comments
January 7
A recent series of posts on the web site of First Things magazine looks at what could be described as a reactionary moment on the part of some folk and roots musicians in Québec and around the world... and we're not talking
The Goldwaters (
Wikipedia).
[more inside]posted by Jahaza at 9:52 PM PST - 10 comments
"
So I found out yesterday that the soundstage for "The Wire" still existed. I wasted no time in visiting it and was there almost less than 24 hours [sic].
It's one of my favorite TV shows ever and I had to see this before everyone ruined it. The building is also scheduled for demolition and they are going to build a super market on it." NOTE: LINK CONTAINS SPOILERS
[more inside]posted by dersins at 4:19 PM PST - 79 comments
Flickr stream. "...[T]he 5′X10′ diorama is comprised of 60,000 Lego bricks. It cost creator Mark Borlase about $3,000 and four years of construction time to complete." Take note of his
custom LEGO pieces.
[via]posted by deborah at 12:31 PM PST - 46 comments
I know how Mefi loves bacon.
Here's a tasty-looking appetizer for all you crafty types who want to combine your love of pork with your weaving skills.
posted by vytae at 9:01 AM PST - 68 comments
A perfect space storm, which happens about every century, like the one that occurred in
1859, could cause "catastrophic social and economic disruptions", according to
a new study by the National Academy of Sciences on behalf of NASA. "Potable water distribution affected within several hours; perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours; immediate or eventual loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, transportation, fuel resupply and so on," the report states. Outages could take months to fix, the researchers say. Banks might close, and trade with other countries might halt. The next peak in solar activity is expected around 2012.
posted by stbalbach at 8:31 AM PST - 61 comments
“You can’t roll a joint on an iPod” or how the iPod killed the music industry. First the music biz overlooked the computer CD rom when they put copy control on cd burners. Then they eliminated the single. Shortly after that "mp3" replaced "sex" as the most popular search term. Apple has become the largest music seller largely against the wishes of the music biz, but 99 cents beats free. Yesterday
Apple announced they were eliminating DRM. The questions remains, who needs Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group, and EMI, does Apple? When is Apple just going to replace them? There were rumors a year ago that they would
launch a record label with Jay-Z but that does not appear to have come to fruition.
posted by caddis at 8:18 AM PST - 105 comments
In these difficult economic times, what's a museum to do? Is an art collection a financial asset or a trust to be held in perpetuity? These questions are being raised by
The National Academy in New York's recent sale (or "deaccessioning" in museum lingo) of two important paintings for $15 million to shore up its finances, first reported by Lee Rosenbaum's
ArtsJournal blog. The museum's director told
The New York Times that it was the only way for the 183-year-old academy, which runs a chronic operating deficit, to survive. The Association of Art Museum Directors
censured the Academy and called on its members to suspend any loans of art to the institution. New York lawyer Donn Zaretzky's
ArtLaw Blog has become ground zero for a fascinating debate involving art critics, museum directors, financial bloggers and others.
posted by up in the old hotel at 7:00 AM PST - 40 comments
Every year the Strategy Team at
Saxo Bank, a Danish
virtual bank, publishes a list of ten black swan class market events. Some of the more dramatic possibilities Saxo advance for 2009: crude trading down to $25 a barrel causing severe social unrest in Iran, the S&P 500 falling to 500, Chinese GDP approaching zero and several member states dropping the Euro. The complete
2009 list is here and for completeness their
2008 [ .pdf ] ,
2007 [ .pdf ] and
2006 lists [ .pdf ] are also available.
[more inside]posted by Mutant at 2:13 AM PST - 32 comments
January 6
Virtually all the predictions about the death of old media have assumed a comfortingly long time frame for the end of print—the moment when, amid a panoply of flashing lights, press conferences, and elegiac reminiscences, the newspaper presses stop rolling and news goes entirely digital. Most of these scenarios assume a gradual crossing-over, almost like the migration of dunes, as behaviors change, paradigms shift, and the digital future heaves fully into view. But what if the old media dies much more quickly? What if a hurricane comes along and obliterates the dunes entirely? Specifically,
what if The New York Times goes out of business—like, this May?
[more inside]posted by netbros at 9:11 PM PST - 62 comments
You know the trouble with Historically-Based Movies? Unless you're an uneducated, ignorant moran, you know how they're gonna end. At least that's the argument of this
Premiere article on
10 Movie Endings Spoiled By History. Of course there are ways to avoid that problem, as Cracked.com's (yeah, them)
11 Movies Saved by Historical Inaccuracy declares. Books have been written about
Historical Movies' accuracy or inaccuracy, and
everybody has an opinion on what
the Best Historical Movies are, but if you want your History purely entertaining, there's only one
mandog you can count on: here are Mr. Peabody, Sherman and the
original Wayback Machine dropping in on
Cristopher Columbus,
Pancho Villa and
Francisco Pizarro and the Incas (sorry, no USA History episodes on YouTube).
[more inside]posted by wendell at 7:44 PM PST - 36 comments
A lot of people have nightmares about showing up to school or work naked. But hey, how about
this one?
Brrrrrrrrr. (nsfw)posted by miss lynnster at 6:30 PM PST - 77 comments
Who would have known that that the death of DRM would come in the form of a
press release? While
MP3 stores are nothing new, with iTunes moving to a 100% DRM free catalog by the 31st of March this now cements a de facto standard of DRM free music in the marketplace. As a side effect it's now a near certainty that
AAC will become the successor of
MP3.
posted by Talez at 4:15 PM PST - 135 comments
On December 4, 2008, at NYC's
Symphony Space,
NPR's
Intelligence Squared program conducted an
Oxford-
style debate. As their future debate schedules in
Australia,
England, and
America show, the propositions of such debates are routinely phrased strongly to provoke debate, and this was no exception. The motion that was put forward was: "
Resolved, that Bush 43 is the worst President of the last 50 years."
[mp3, 23 MB, 50 min.] What lifts this above the
reams of media and multimedia already spent on this issue is that, moderated by ABC's
John Donvan, this premise was debated — under formal debate guidelines — by
Jacob Weisberg,
Sir Simon Jenkins,
Bill Kristol, and ...
Karl Rove.
[more inside]posted by WCityMike at 9:34 AM PST - 28 comments
A nice photogallery, with descriptions, illustrating
the progress of Moore's Law from a 1958 single-transistor Texas Instruments integrated circuit to the anticipated 2009 AMD Phenom II, with 758,000,000 transistors.
posted by beagle at 9:15 AM PST - 14 comments
January 5
Bought a video game second hand and found it doesn’t have a manual? Or have you been thinking about that great manual that came with that copy of
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past you owned years ago and wouldn't mind taking a look through it again? Well, help is at hand!
Vimm offers you heaps of free pdf manuals from retro systems as old as the Atari 2600 and as recent as the N64! Meanwhile
Meekeo does much the same, although it mostly looks after current generation systems (including the PC) only. Finally, if you own a Nintendo Wii, DS, Gamecube or Gameboy Advance, Nintendo is
offering up full colour pdfs of games they publish(ed) for these systems, as well as manuals for some of their older games.
posted by Effigy2000 at 9:24 PM PST - 15 comments
Do you have something to say, but never had the chance to? Founded in late 1997 and originally published August 15th, 1998,
So There has stood as a testament to your daily lives for over five years.
posted by cjorgensen at 8:03 PM PST - 26 comments
A year and a half ago, a professor of underwater archeology at Northwestern Michigan University
discovered a pattern of stones 40 feet below the waters of Lake Michigan. The story has been surprisingly under-reported, given that the Stonehenge-like structure is potentially estimated to be 10,000 years old. One of the stones even appears to have a
mastodon carved on it.
posted by jon_hansen at 1:42 PM PST - 42 comments
"Church was not part of my family life, and I don't think I ever expected to find myself being a Christian or, as I used to think of it, a 'religious nut.'"
Sara Miles grew up an atheist. One day she went into a
church, took communion and had a moment with God. She's now a Christian that has made it her mission in life to
feed the homeless. She's started a
food pantry in the slums of San Francisco that feeds over 450 hungry families every week.
She's also a
lesbian who is
outspoken for gay marriage and considers herself a liberal but doesn't really care for
liberal guilt.
posted by Hands of Manos at 11:11 AM PST - 63 comments
The Great British Sandwich is a 'collaborative web project' to build the world's tallest sandwich, one ingredient at a time. It began picking up inedible layers early (20th from the bottom is Cat Hair, 38th is an iPhone 3G) and is now
almostover 400 layers including the Higgs Boson, Child's Tears and All the Turtles. via
the Ridiculantposted by wendell at 10:56 AM PST - 19 comments
New Yorker fiction 2008. Annotated list of short fiction from the past year. "As perhaps the most high-profile venue for short fiction in the world, taking stock of the
New Yorker's year in fiction is a worthwhile exercise for writers and readers alike."
posted by stbalbach at 7:38 AM PST - 24 comments
What was so shameful and embarrassing to me, an American journalist whose own Moscow-based newspaper, The eXile, had just been driven out of existence [previously] by these same Kremlin bastards, is that Sasha was rightly frustrated. A Kremlin minder right and the Western journalists wrong? What has this world come to when the Kremlin has a better grasp of the truth than the free Western media?
How to screw up a war story: The New York Times at workposted by Anything at 12:04 AM PST - 32 comments
January 4
Have we ever been more emotionally volatile, more in thrall to our sensations than now? We had become used to viewing all our neuroses as crises; now a genuine crisis was upon us, it was a cataclysm. Atheist or believer, we have in the last decade been primed for an end-time of sorts, with a stock of latent fears ready and waiting.
Suddenly, all of those fears had an outlet.
Tim Adams
contemplates the new Age of Anxiety.
posted by Sonny Jim at 3:07 PM PST - 28 comments
It's easy to take for granted in today's data-drenched world.
But time was, if you wanted to see Doctor Who and you had the misfortune of being an American. You have very few options, you could hope to connect to someone across the world via a BBS once the 80's rolled around and
FidoNet mail someone who may be able and/or willing to send you NTSC VHS copies from their own collection, taking the generational hit in quality as penance for your copyright crime. Or you could
phone your local PBS station and beg them to show the
Tom Baker era episodes that proved popular with the more imaginative kids (or poor kids, depending on whether or not you had
CATV) .
[more inside]posted by mediocre at 5:14 AM PST - 64 comments
So you've spent the holidays playing games, but now you have to be back at work. How to get your gaming fix during commutes and lunch-hours, whilst keeping up with that resolution to Learn Something New this year? Well, you could make a
Sack-Boy. You can keep your portable games device warm with a
Zelda cosy. You can knit up a
Pacman scarf or a Space Invaders
bag or
socks if you're feeling retro. Or you can make a
pocket ninja, an
invincibility star to get you through the afternoon, a
maqgnetic Katamari ball to spring-clean that desk, or a friendly
companion cube. (and if you're too cack-handed to knit, you can sew a friendly cube with the pattern
here and tutorial
here!)
posted by mippy at 2:59 AM PST - 13 comments
January 3
Exit Mundi's thoughts on the latest anticipated apocalypse: the
coming apocalypse in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 A.D.. (No kidding.)
[more inside]posted by WCityMike at 10:38 PM PST - 79 comments
The Internet Bird Collection has over 28000 videos of birds from all over the world. The brain-child of
Josep del Hoyo (who also started the
Handbook of the Birds of the World) it contains footage of more than half of all the bird species in the world, which number around 10000. Just browsing randomly I found such charming clips as
a pair of gang gang cockatoos,
a pair of preening and feeding Siberian cranes,
a hoatzin displaying,
Temnick's tragopan displaying,
Kerguelen petrel swooping between waves,
green hermit feeding on heliconia flowers, in flight,
a pair of hamerkops mating display and
American avocets mating. Or you can just go look up your favorite bird species and see if they have videos of it. Happily they had plenty of videos of my favorite bird, sterna paradisaea, the arctic tern, and
I like this one best. Each bird has taxonomic and distribution information.
posted by Kattullus at 8:01 PM PST - 25 comments
Some videos: In 1985, Tipper Gore's
PMRC released a list they called the "Filthy Fifteen," detailing what they believed to be the fifteen most objectionable songs of the time, and the reason they felt each song should be censored...
[more inside]posted by the_bone at 4:51 PM PST - 120 comments
Love Thy Neighbor: Why Have We Become So Suspicious Of Kindness? Most people, as they grow up now, secretly believe that kindness is a virtue of losers. But agreeing to talk about winners and losers is part and parcel of the phobic avoidance, the contemporary terror, of kindness. Because one of the things the enemies of kindness never ask themselves - and this is now an enemy within all of us - is why we feel it at all. Why are we ever, in any way, moved to be kind to other people, not to mention to ourselves? Why does kindness matter to us?posted by jason's_planet at 12:54 PM PST - 71 comments
J. Tithonus Pednaud herein presents for your edification and enlightenment a
curious collection of human marvels. You may call them oddities, freaks or monstrosities—whatever you will—but I call them incredible, persevering, resourceful and marvelous human beings. I chronicle their inspirational stories of triumph over nature, fate and the judgment of man.
[Previously seen here. See also.]posted by parudox at 9:52 AM PST - 9 comments
January 2
Kurt Kuenne is a filmmaker and composer. His light hearted, modern fairy tales have a strange continuity to them.
Validation is the story of how free parking can change your life.
Rent-A-Person is a musical about restroom attendants and
Slow is about the power of travel. But Kurt's work isn't just fairy tales.
[more inside]posted by Lord_Pall at 11:21 PM PST - 7 comments
My Day Yesterday. A Flickr set of short (under 90 seconds) videos which describe... a person's day. The instructions, as outlined by Garrett Murray, who started the group with
this video: "Shoot video throughout a day in your life, then put it together and upload it the next day. Don't add any music or sound effects, just use what the camera recorded." Some favourites:
Delphine Gilbert in Cordoba,
Dean Allen in France, and
Piotr/presentday in Florence.
posted by jokeefe at 6:41 PM PST - 25 comments
"When Harold Carr's nephews and nieces inherited a dusty old lock-up garage from their eccentric uncle their expectations were low. But when they opened the doors of the car collector's Tyneside [England] garage they discovered what may prove to be a life-changing inheritance."
* Inside they found a rare 1937
Bugatti Type 57S Atalante. Having sat hidden, gathering dust for over 50 years, the classic car -- of which only 17 were built -- goes up for
auction by
Bonhams at the
Retromobile auto show in Paris on February 7, 2009.
[more inside]posted by ericb at 2:54 PM PST - 44 comments
Offbeat Guides create personalized, up-to-date travel guides that cover over 30,000 travel destinations, using a combination of search technology and curation by both amateur and professional travel experts.
[more inside]posted by gman at 2:30 PM PST - 30 comments
Peace and War in the 20th Century is an ambitious, in progress, massive assemblage of posters, photographs, propaganda, ephemera, letters, diaries, paintings, sketches, stories, letters, music and related items, from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. The collection is international in scope. Some of the nodes lack content, and the navigation is a little confusing, so the jump I list some of my favourite case studies from their site.
[more inside]posted by Rumple at 12:03 PM PST - 4 comments
At 18 lanes and 110 metres wide, Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is not only a beautiful example of urban design but is also apparently the
widest major road on the planet.
[more inside]posted by Cobalt at 9:25 AM PST - 60 comments
January 1
Walter Monheit -- The Oldest Club Kid A retiree who lives in Bensonhurst with his cat, Precious, he is known for nocturnal antics like dancing with sexy young women in clubs, and getting their phone numbers. In a world marked by status-consciousness tied to youth, physical beauty, and wealth, this elderly man of modest means is popular and respected, and some club owners admit him for free—the mark of a VIP.posted by jason's_planet at 9:56 PM PST - 28 comments
So one of your resolutions was about your lifelong dream of getting into Playboy? Here's an
article that has all the details you don't normally hear about.
"Hef is like any normal hot-blooded American who likes pretty ladies: He took a wife or two, has four kids, and lives in a Tudor-style mansion with luscious lawns and a personal zoo. Sounds like any old family man, right?"
There's a How-To included:
[more inside]posted by P.o.B. at 4:53 PM PST - 59 comments
The
Academy of Achievement brings students face-to-face with the extraordinary leaders, thinkers and pioneers who have shaped our world. Through profiles, biographies, and interviews Achievers in
The Arts,
Business,
Public Service,
Science, and
Sports teach us how the Academy's core values of
passion,
vision,
preparation,
courage,
perseverance, and
integrity can, and will, lead to success.
[more inside]posted by netbros at 7:59 AM PST - 6 comments
The End of the World Cult is a 2007 documentary about the Lord Our Righteousness Church, aka the Strong City Cult, as they count down the days before the end of the world on October 31st 2007. The film features unusually good access and especially focuses on the creepy sexual relationship cult leader Wayne Bent has with his mostly female followers. If you watch the film and are hankering after justice, you'll be pleased to know that yesterday Bent was
sentenced to eighteen years prison for sexual relations with minors. Oh, he also has a
blog.posted by dydecker at 3:42 AM PST - 38 comments
