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October 31
Ralph repents? Or something?
The man many Democrats see as just a few steps short of an evil spawn of Satan for being a 2000 election spoiler has issued statements of support for 13 non-Green candidates in tight races. These are
all Democrats, including Jean Carnahan (Mo.), Tim Johnson (S.D.) and Tom Strickland (Co.). "I certainly don't want Republicans controlling Congress," Nader said. What happened to the "things have to get worse before they get better" theory? Or has the situation in D.C. indeed grown so bad that at least
some Dems. are turning far enough left for Nader? (Note: He'd thrown support behind Wellstone, even though there's a
Green candidate for Senate in Minn.)
posted by raysmj at 10:40 PM PST - 44 comments
Listen to a true ready made Halloween horror story about a David vs Goliath type struggle.
On her October 24th show Caroline Casey creator of the VisionaryActivism Radio show interviewed Percy Schmeiser a canola farmer from Saskatchewan Canada whose organic Canola fields were genetically contaminated with Monsanto's Round-Up Ready Canola. Schmeiser a 40 year organic canola seed saver is in the fight of his life against the powerful Monsanto corporation. This powerful interview should make you cry and provoke you to clean your pantry and refrigerator and rethink food choices like I did.
posted by thedailygrowl at 10:33 PM PST - 17 comments
Friday Fun (posted early).
"Do It Yourself" virtual building blocks (similar to the virtual
Legos a while back). Addiction Rating: Mid-Range (no worries--it won't eat your life like
Bookworm did). Very simple blocks can make surprisingly beautiful, even complex creations (awfully tough to approximate a
Gothic groin vault with the available shapes, but trying's half the fun).
(Signup 'membership' is free.)
posted by Shane at 7:39 PM PST - 7 comments
This isn't about agriculture.
Today, twelve prairie farmers have surrendered themselves to RCMP, rather than pay a fine for their illegal activities. Their mutual crime was choosing to export their
wheat crop independently, rather than through the
Canadian Wheat Board. Are state-run agricultural monopolies appropriate, especially when their authority is exerted unevenly throughout the country? Do you think the action taken by these farmers is justified?
posted by vesper at 5:45 PM PST - 17 comments
Halloween isn't just for kids anymore.
Even bigtime celebrities got all dressed up this Halloween. Well that's not exactly true - photoshoppers with too much time on their hands did the work for them. Vogue Magazine, take notes.
posted by hidely at 5:20 PM PST - 5 comments
andy goldsworthy's current project
over the course of a month, artist andy goldsworthy will create works each day in the countryside surrounding his home in scotland,
photograph them, and email the photographs to a
gallery in san francisco where they will be printed out, and hung on a wall.
in a time when much conceptual art seems increasingly abstract and difficult, goldsworthy's work feels -- at least to me -- accessible, comforting, and wonderful.
what are some other artists that elicit that response in mefi readers? who's work do you like and want to share?
posted by dolface at 3:50 PM PST - 13 comments
Literary Gothic
offers up a splendid smorgasboard of literary ghosts, ghouls, goblins, and, of course, gothic. As a Victorianist, I have a particular predilection for their
ghost stories. Many more Victorian tales of the terrifying--and just plain weird--can be found
at this site, which also features an ongoing reading group. [more inside]
posted by thomas j wise at 3:02 PM PST - 8 comments
Most people think of trick-or-treating, costumes, and
jack-o-lanterns, but for me, and a lot of other Southern
Californians, Halloween was always about
Oingo Boingo's Dia de
los Muertos concerts. With t-shirts inspired by
Jose Guadalupe
Posada, huge paper-mache skeletons jerkily moving to
"Dead Man's
Party", xylophone games and at least three hours of madcap
music, you could always be guaranteed an excellent time.
Unfortunately, the band broke up in 1995, so all we have now is
tr
ibute bands,
Danny Elfman's
filmmusic career, and a heck of a lot of really cool
t-shirts
.
posted by Katemonkey at 2:08 PM PST - 12 comments
Ewww...
Even for Halloween this one's a bit creepy. I don't think I'd ever want a plasma screen above my casket providing "a lively counterpoint to the display of an open casket." And what
healthy person has time to record their life in such a fashion? They should be out living it.
posted by MediaMan at 1:16 PM PST - 7 comments
Popular Weed Killer Feminizes Native Leopard Frogs
Are feminized frogs a canary in the cage? Loss of amphibians in its own right is unacceptable. But are there problems yet unknown higher up the cornbelt food chain?
"Native male leopard frogs throughout the nation's Corn Belt are being feminized by an herbicide, atrazine, used extensively to kill weeds on the country's leading export crops, corn and soybeans, according to a survey conducted by University of California, Berkeley, biologists and reported this week in Nature."
[...] "Atrazine has been used on crops since 1956 and currently is the most widely used herbicide in the nation".
[...] "Hayes suspects that atrazine boosts the activity of an enzyme, aromatase, that converts male sex hormones, or androgens, to female hormones, or estrogens. The lowered androgens and increased estrogens allow egg cells to grow within the testes, which is normally impossible.
Atrazine's effects on aromatase have been demonstrated in fish, reptiles and mammals, but not yet in amphibians.
posted by fred1st at 8:52 AM PST - 9 comments
How gay panic gripped 1960s Royal Navy
One sailor reportedly picked up a prostitute who he believed to be female. Realising he wasn't who she appeared to be, the sailor reportedly declared: "Blimey, you're all there!" Nevertheless, he apparently became "infatuated".
This kind of incident led admirals to argue that most of the men accused were only inadvertently homosexual, rather than dangerous "perverts".
Just-released documents from the UK
Public Records Office show some interesting attitudes among the Navy hierarchy at the time. The rationalising of the various activities uncovered is actually quite creative, and weirdly more tolerant than that in subsequent decades, when gay activity got people summarily thrown out of the forces. Even this particular 'crisis' eventually triggered a new 'education' programme on the evils of homosexuality though. In this instance, the pendulum seems not so much to have swung as to have careered wildly in all directions. A bit like the sailors.... (sorry).
posted by jonpollard at 8:41 AM PST - 11 comments
100 scariest movie moments
Retrocrush is listing their top 100 scariest movie moments, and so far, the quality is pretty high -- well-chosen scenes, and interesting writeups. And one exploding head. You've been warned. Happy Halloween!
posted by GaelFC at 8:41 AM PST - 80 comments
"You will have heard, Dr Sir I doubt not long before this can have reached you that Sir W. Howe is gone from hence. The Rebels imagine that he is gone to the Eastward. By this time however he has filled Chesapeak bay with surprize and terror." - Sir Henry ClintonSpy Letters of the American Revolution is an excellent site offering such gems as a captured letter written from Rachel Revere to husband Paul, a message from a colonial scientist written in invisible ink, and Benedict Arnold's encrypted message to the British offering to surrender West Point for £20,000. The site includes photos of the documents, back-stories on each letter, profiles of the people involved, and descriptions of methodology, as well as a timeline and route map.
posted by taz at 7:02 AM PST - 8 comments
Reply To All button considered harmful
An employee (called a manager in the headline but a millwright in the article) was fired from Eastman Kodak in Rochester, NY when he replied to an email announcing "National Coming Out Day" (hint: he wasn't in favor). But in addition to the sender, his message went to about 1000 other employees. Kodak says he was terminated when he refused to admit that sending it to all those people was wrong, not for it's content. Is this Political Correctness run amok or justifiable?
posted by tommasz at 5:00 AM PST - 53 comments
80's ROCK IS DEAD (LONG LIVE 80'S ROCK)
Holy crap, I saw an ad on the teevee for a new BOSTON album called
Corporate America.
A new Boston album! A self-described "in your face" indictment of big business and what it is doing to our world. You'll be comforted to know that the music is still way overproduced and the political content has all the impact of Mike + the Mechanics "Silent Running." In other words — don't change a thing! It turns out all the big 80's rockers have 2002 albums, even the little king himself:
Phil Collins. Testify. I'll be damned if one of his new songs doesn't sound like "Take Me Home (Redux)."
Def Leppard's "X"? Same.
Poison's "Hollyweird"? Same! Poison even does a party rock version of The Who's "Squeeze Box." Wonderful.
Bon Jovi,
Rush,
Robert Plant — what year is this again? Who cares. Let's rock. As soon as this
Family Ties is over.
posted by Dok Millennium at 1:54 AM PST - 36 comments
Googie?
Does your bowling alley have an inexplicable Tiki motif? Does your neighbor's house vaguely resemble a flying saucer? Does your coffee shop suggest, architecturally, that the secrets of the atom are being exploited within? Well now, you can call it by name. Googie. Who knew?
posted by condour75 at 12:44 AM PST - 39 comments
October 30
Light, Secret Places And Books:
Photographer
Sean Kernan's startling and beautifully literary interpretation of Jorge Luís Borges is based on his
The Secret Books album and was
reviewed on
The Garden of Forking Paths, that definitive, ever-fascinating Borges website. It's a small consolation for those, like me, who would have have liked to be in Barcelona today for the opening of the
Cosmopolis exhibition, which celebrates the stormy, but enduring identification of Borges with Buenos Aires. The relationship between writers and places is always interesting whenever they grow into each other to the point of almost
becoming each other. Joyce is Dublin; Kafka is Prague; Pessoa is Lisbon. What other, less obvious identifications are there? Is the relationship more like mutual cannibalism, mythical reinforcement, a touristy marketing scheme or the peaceful symbiosis it's generally made out to be?
posted by MiguelCardoso at 5:36 PM PST - 40 comments
Robert Flores' 22 page farewell.
The man who shot and killed three people at the College of Nursing. Makes for interesting reading and should inspire some discussion as to the stereotyping of whites among whites. Please do read the whole thing, although I doubt you would be able to put down after having started.
posted by ( .)(. ) at 5:18 PM PST - 110 comments
More guerilla corporate advertising.
So another
major technology company vandalizes a city (a la the peace-love-penguin thing) and gets a slap on the hand. Obviously, this company can afford any punishment that could come their way for mere vandalism, and the publicity about the punishment process itself just leads to even more free advertising for them. (Not to mention, the free advertising they're getting from people like me commenting on the publicity ;) ) Can anything be done to keep the judicial system from becoming a new advertising medium?
posted by badstone at 3:06 PM PST - 16 comments
Apocalypse Cow!
In the most bizarre collaboration between the American Christian Right and ultraorthodox Jewish Zionists in Israel, Pentecostal minister and Georgia cattle farmer
Clyde Lott has collaborated with the
Temple Mount Institute of Jerusalem to breed a
red heifer suitable for purifying the foundation of
a rebuilt version of Solomon's Temple, which ultraorthodox Jews hope will lead to the coming of the Messiah. The problem is that the proposed site for the rebuilt temple is on the same site as the
al-Aqsa mosque, the holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina. Some Zionist extremists in Israel have attempted to
"solve" this problem by plotting to blow up the mosque, which doesn't exactly promote peace in the Middle East. And to think all of this could have been started by a cow that looks like it should have belonged in "the Horse of a Different Color" sequence in the Wizard of Oz!
posted by jonp72 at 2:35 PM PST - 45 comments
This
story has been feature in the media a bit lately, but something on the
second page caught my attention, it was mention of a '4G' wireless technology that was also a weapon of mass-desctruction. The article mentions a
press release which revels the company is called
Gaiacomm and a quick
search reveals quite a few more 'press releases' (
1,
2,
3,
4).
So, is this for real or what? Can my 802.11b card be used as a weapon?
posted by sycophant at 2:31 PM PST - 9 comments
Are you "e-fluential"?
It's possible you are without even knowing it--you never know who might be
listening in. While I don't find all gadget/soft drink/product discussions insidious, it does seem like they pop up pretty regularly. Has anyone here been
contacted? Or are these companies (and others like them) just targeting product-oriented boards?
posted by _sirmissalot_ at 2:08 PM PST - 35 comments
CIA funds "alternative" media through nonprofit foundations?
"The multi-billion dollar Ford Foundation's historic relationship to the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] is rarely mentioned on Pacifica's DEMOCRACY NOW / Deep Dish TV show, on FAIR's COUNTERSPIN show, on the WORKING ASSETS RADIO show, on The Nation Institute's RADIO NATION show, on David Barsamian's ALTERNATIVE RADIO show or in the pages of PROGRESSIVE, MOTHER JONES and Z magazine. One reason may be because the Ford Foundation and other Establishment foundations subsidize the Establishment Left's alternative media gatekeepers / censors" -- heavy claims. A several part report, in considerable detail. My note - the Mexican PRI, when it ran Mexico, used to fund a whole constellation of Mexican Leftist groups - the threat of withdrawing funding $ proved a very effective way of keeping dissent within "safe" limits.
posted by troutfishing at 12:48 PM PST - 27 comments
Oregon Measure 23
Oregon's single-payer-health-care referendum:
Sanity in the face of returning double-digit annual cost increases (after an HMO-induced respite), or a tax-and-spend, job-destroying
nightmare which even the public-employee unions (not well-known supporters of any for-profit system)
oppose?
posted by MattD at 12:32 PM PST - 38 comments
"
Kmart Forever is a community gathering place for employees, retirees, friends, family and supporters of Kmart. Kmart started this site after receiving
thousands of emails, calls and letters from people like you asking how they can help support the company. We all want to do what we can to make sure Kmart is with us well into the future."
Of course, such blatant PR cheerleading is bound to be parodied by those of the opposing view -- witness
Kmartsucks.net's innovative design.
posted by me3dia at 12:24 PM PST - 10 comments
Obsolecence and adolescence
I came of musical age during the beginning of the tectonic shift between cassette/vinyl/CD (vinyl on the way out, cassette taking precedence and CD waiting in the wings).
Crushes, science and lots of bad music I still love (yeah, too much
Anglophilian pop) was spooled on those tapes. This
story about the demise of the cassette has it all! And it's a great bit of writing, too...
posted by chandy72 at 11:20 AM PST - 26 comments
Dave Winer's not happy
about the fact that people are
tweaking the orange XML icon used to link RSS/RDF feeds. You've seen that orange button saying XML at various sites, including MeFi.
Milo just put up one saying RSS instead of XML, which was based on a point brought up by
xiffix, "In hindsight, appropriating the global acronym XML for this narrow use was a mistake. The button should say RSS. Hopefully, people will take Daves suggestion to do something completely different to heart and abandon the Userland attempt at a standard icon"
posted by riffola at 10:10 AM PST - 28 comments
Russian gas clues point to cocktail.
Events show that the Russians were organized to respond to various terrorist eventualities, but not prepared well enough to take into consideration the lateral side effects. I wonder how this scenerio would have played in the US?
posted by semmi at 9:35 AM PST - 23 comments
Got Milk? High?
Do we really need a town called Got Milk?, Calif.? One town is thinking about changing its name to get money. Is this a cool idea, or are marketing people going nuts?
posted by scudder at 9:18 AM PST - 21 comments
President To Author: Your Book Is Unpatriotic
" "The letter began by thanking me for sending the book," Hudson said. 'Also, I'm from Austin, Texas, and the president touched on the fact that I was a fellow Texan, congratulating me on my book. But he was setting me up for the one-two punch. Because he called the book unpatriotic and ridiculous and just plain bad writing. Beyond that, I've been instructed not to talk about the contents of the letter for the time being.'"
posted by owillis at 8:43 AM PST - 31 comments
Between
Wellstone and
Veblen, I got to thinking about my
alma mater.
There are a
few others, off the top of my head, that this tiny,
out-of-the way school can lay claim to. How many other prodigal children come from small colleges?
Kofi is one, from another small Minnesota college. Who else? Schools with more than 2,500 students need not apply.
posted by RKB at 8:23 AM PST - 18 comments
Criminal profilers are racist
for not thinking a black man could fire a rifle well enough to be the sniper.
They didn't think a black person could be smart enough" to pull off three weeks of terror, driving into very public places, hitting his mark, then eluding all the local, state and federal officers. Wow.
posted by BirdD0g at 8:19 AM PST - 26 comments
"The Blog Twinning Project
asks people to tell it which blogs they consider to be similar, and tallies results. Pairs of blogs with lots of mutual votes are declared 'twinned'."
Not a bad way to discover new reading material.
posted by Scottk at 7:39 AM PST - 5 comments
Boy Scouts
tell Atheist Eagle Scout he has one week to declare his belief or get out.
On membership applications,
Boy Scouts and adult leaders must say they recognize some higher power, not necessarily religious. "Mother Nature would be acceptable," said Brad Farmer, the Scout executive of the Chief Seattle Council of the Boy Scouts. Hmmmm...
posted by quirked at 7:32 AM PST - 45 comments
Cigarettes are good for you, say "scientists."
Yes, that's right. According to the Times of India the
National Institute on Drug Abuse did a study in Bethesda, MD that reports that nicotine aids in concentration. The "Times" also says that this means new things for sufferers of
ADD. Unfortunately, NIDA doesn't seem to want to say much about this new study on their own website.
I wonder why the "Times of India" is all in English. Well, if you need a new reason to justify smoking, you can take this at face value, but something tells me there's more to this story than is instantly obvious.
posted by magikeye at 7:29 AM PST - 26 comments
City of London Churches
'The Square Mile that constitutes The City of London is a world financial centre where 300,000 people work and nearly 500 foreign banks have an office. Less well known is that amongst the largely uninspired office blocks are hidden around 50 current or former churches and other places of worship, either complete, converted into offices, or in ruins. Once there were nearly 100 parish churches within the City boundaries but the Great Fire of London, the migration of residents to the suburbs, and Hitlers bombs have done most to reduce that figure. Many of the surviving churches are, famously, Wren churches. After the Great Fire he had the unique opportunity of designing over 50 churches, and he gave full rein to his imagination ... '
A guide to 55 churches in London's financial district; best seen on a weekend, when the City is virtually deserted. Whilst the majority are Wren churches, there are some exceptions -
St Bartholomew the Great, which dates back to Norman times;
the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the oldest surviving synagogue in Great Britain; and
the Dutch Church, which was drawn by
van Gogh and important to the Huguenot community. Particularly worth a visit is
St. Bride's, the journalists' church; the design of the wedding cake is based on the shape of its spire.
posted by plep at 4:49 AM PST - 28 comments
The Iraq Research and Documentation Project (IRDP)
website is a collection of resources documenting the government, politics, and society of modern Iraq. IRDP is engaged in the gathering of information of diverse content and format (official government documents, maps, citizen testimonies, reference sources, chronologies, bibliographies, notable articles, human rights reports, photographic and other images, audio and video materials). This online collection is made available to the public to provide a window into the inner workings of the repressive state system evolved under the aegis of the Iraqi Ba'th Socialist Party in Iraq since 1968.
[More Inside]
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 2:53 AM PST - 23 comments
October 29
Thorstein Veblen
, Economist and Social Commentator, who contributed to the common tongue the phrase
conspicuous consumption.
Who was Thorstein Veblen--and why should anyone care?
I should like him for his writing style alone:
The appreciation of those evidences of honorific crudeness to which hand-wrought goods owe their superior worth and charm in the eyes of well-bred people is a matter of nice discrimination. It requires training and the formation of right habits of thought with respect to what may be called the physiognomy of goods. Machine-made goods of daily use are often admired and preferred precisely on account of their excessive perfection by the vulgar and the underbred who have not given due thought to the punctilios of elegant consumption. The ceremonial inferiority of machine products goes to show that the perfection of skill and workmanship embodied in any costly innovations in the finish of goods is not sufficient of itself to secure them acceptance and permanent favor. The innovation must have the support of the canon of conspicuous waste. Any feature in the physiognomy of goods, however pleasing in itself, and however well it may approve itself to the taste for effective work, will not be tolerated if it proves obnoxious to this norm of pecuniary reputability.
From
Chapter Six - Pecuniary Canons of Taste of the work entire,
The Theory of The Leisure Class. Feel free to consume conspicuously.
posted by y2karl at 11:27 PM PST - 7 comments
Stop making excuses for Muslim Extremists
Still licking my mefi wounds that I received last week when I posted a NY Times article discussing the recent rise of crime in France, in which the author states that a recent immigrant was murdered solely for his North African heritage, and also reports that the mayor of Paris was also attacked in the same week - yet the author does not bother to mention that the attacker was a Muslim who 'didn't like homosexuals'. Has anyone else noticed how the media is downplaying the role of Muslim extremism since 911 ?
posted by Kaslo at 10:52 PM PST - 68 comments
The Vatican vs. the laity
- NPR's
All Things Considered had a report today about Catholic laity groups
pushing for more say in how the Church is run, especially in light of the scandals of the past year. The Vatican claims that giving too much power to laypersons, which make up 99% of the body of the Church, is in violation of Canon law. Laity groups claim that when there are laypersons serving in administrative bodies, they are mere rubberstamps appointed by the bishops. Can the church be more responsive to the its membership without unmaking its fundamentally hierarchical character?
(The audio stream may not be available yet, but when it is you'll need RealAudio, Windows Media, or Quicktime to hear it.)
posted by RylandDotNet at 5:02 PM PST - 17 comments
Recently, the armed forces
announced that it would seek the approval of congress to begin recruiting non-citizens, specifically arabs, into the special forces. Seems reasonable enough, we all know the army is lacking native Arab speakers. Meanwhile, the Federal government is
firing every non-citizen from their job as airport bag checkers (
1200 in San Francisco alone - mostly Filipino). An interesting paradox in our war against terrorism? An unfortunate cost to enure security? A cruel injustice to working men and women? Who could do more damage, a Delta Force member, armed to the teeth and trained to kill acting as forward observer for air and artillery strikes? Or the guy checking your shaving kit?
posted by pejamo at 2:29 PM PST - 20 comments
The scariest costumes this year represent those that crushed the dreams of many, bilked millions from strangers, and got away. Psycho Killers? Crazed Snipers? No, Forbes gives you:
CEO Halloween masks. I know the kids will love going as
Martha. It's a good thing.
posted by mathowie at 2:07 PM PST - 14 comments
ATTENTION: brothers and sisters.
Does the thought of your siblings naked send a shiver up your spine? Well, according to psychologists and people who study adoption, siblings and other close kin who reunite after being separated at birth often experience 'Genetic Sexual Attraction', a potent and embarrassing lust for the estranged relative. You may have heard that 'opposites attract', but scientists have long known that people are, as a basic rule, attracted to physically similar people. Now let the chorus of 'ewww' commence...
posted by dgaicun at 2:03 PM PST - 42 comments
Each year in the US, nearly two and a half million high school seniors enroll in college. Nearly one million do not. They are overwhelmingly poor, rural, and white. The Washington Post
has profiled one such young man.
posted by ewagoner at 1:37 PM PST - 28 comments
The Quest for the Three Year Sandwich
"This bad boy will last a minimum of three years at 80 degrees, six months at 100 degrees. They will travel to the swampiest swamp, the highest mountain, the most arid desert." Great. So glad my tax dollars are getting put to good use. If they want prepackaged food that's been around for ages, there's a corner store near my house that can fix them right up. Is this sort of thing really needed?
posted by slackdog at 1:11 PM PST - 22 comments
Religion! What Is It Good For?
Absolutely nothing? Perhaps not.
Michael Prowse, a lifelong atheist (and Financial Times columnist even!) had this to say in an article for
Prospect:
"Having accepted that meanings are always contestable, I have found myself more able to focus on what religious people do, and less on what they say. Are they "better" people than the irreligious? Of course not. Are they better people than they would be were they not religious? Probably, and this is what counts for me.".
Meanwhile, another atheist,
Jared Diamond, writing (brilliantly, as the author of
Guns, Germs and Steel always does) in the current
New York Review of Books, addresses religion in a (let us say) more
scientific way and, though more sceptical, leaves a similar question mark hanging. So, in a nutshell: can there be something in (or about) religion for atheists too?
posted by MiguelCardoso at 12:32 PM PST - 142 comments
RealNetworks opens up.
RealNetworks today launched
the Helix Community which provides the source code to its RealPlayer client (the server and encoding components are coming later). This will present the first end-to-end open source media delivery system- Apple has open sourced its
streaming server, but not its clients or codecs; Microsoft's
Windows Media platform is totally closed. Marketing ploy or real step forward for the software industry?
posted by mkultra at 10:36 AM PST - 22 comments
With all due respect to the Classic Scary Movies discussed
below, nothing says "Halloween" like
Cheese! From the
marketing schtick of William Castle to the liberal use of gore by
George Romero, horror movie directors have done their best to give us their worst. As a child I was scarred for life so that to this day I cannot look at mist-covered snow-capped mountains without thinking of
The Crawling Eye. Anybody else want to confess to having the poop scared out of them by movie crap?
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 8:08 AM PST - 84 comments
What is Bagotronics?
"At Bagotronics we are IN business FOR business. Our scientists, engineers and designers work to develop the innovations that fuel the e-business engine that drives America's economy."
Entertained by an (unfortunately not reproduced on the website) full page ad in the SJ Mercury News, promising a time machine and including an apology to
old H.G., I wondered what was up. The ads, the website, all say to stay tuned until Thursday for details, but I'm not really that patient. But quick searches of MeFi, /., and Google turned up nothing, so I swerved over to my favorite lookup service and found that this is
simply an advertising comeon, with the site owned by humongous advertising agency Ogilvy & Mathers.
posted by billsaysthis at 8:06 AM PST - 9 comments
War of the Worlds
(this is not about Bush) Don't own a television? Want an alternative? Live performance, live orchestra, no net. October 30, 2002 8-9 PM Eastern. Glenn Beck recreates Orson Welles chilling performance that captivated a nation along with full orchestrations and foley effects.
this is a radio broadcast
posted by RunsWithBandageScissors at 7:39 AM PST - 6 comments
Are Ernie and Bert gay? What is Gonzo? Find out the answers (question 19 and 10, respectively) and more at the
Muppet FAQ.
Read the profiles of your favorite Muppets like
Zoot or
Animal.
Or maybe you'd be interested in one of the Henson
feature creatures and its
background.
Read about it. Explore the fascinating world of Jim Henson and muppets in general.
posted by ashbury at 7:28 AM PST - 14 comments
Rumplestiltskin gets torn in half, Cinderella's stepsisters get their eyes pecked out, and Snow White's stepmother dances in red hot iron shoes until she dies from exhaustion. These are the original endings to the non-sweetened, and sometimes unsavory,
fairy tales collected or written by
by reclusive librarians Jacob and Wilhelm, better know as
The Brothers Grimm. Their first book,
Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Childrens' and Household Tales) was published in 1812. Several more books, mostly of folk tales collected from willing relatives and friends, followed, some containing
bizarre and
disturbing stories with less than
happy endings. As the
National Geographic Grimm site puts it, "
Looking for a sweet, soothing tale to waft you toward dreamland? Look somewhere else. The stories collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early 1800s serve up life as generations of central Europeans knew itcapricious and often cruel." Check out the strange 1960
Mp3s and
RealAudio files of some Grimm tales.
posted by iconomy at 6:42 AM PST - 26 comments
"Sometimes I question the wisdom of continuing on in a profession that is under siege and under valued. I am aging, I am tired and some days I dont know how I can continue to teach the newest and brightest of our profession." Part of an
essay written last year by
Cheryl McGaffic, one of the nursing professors
killed by a disgruntled student at the University of Arizona yesterday.
posted by rcade at 6:02 AM PST - 13 comments
"Cops of the World": remembering Phil Ochs
--------------------------------------------
Ochs lyrics: We're hairy and horny and ready to shack. We don't care if you're yellow or black. Just take off your clothes and lie down on your back.'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys. We're the Cops of the World.------------
LISTEN to his songs (realplayer/quicktime)
Amidst the
unilateralist talk of invading Iraq, and the (mostly media ignored)
biggest anti-war protests since the Vietnam War [quote-Wash.Post,Oct. 27] last saturday, I thought of
Phil Ochs......some of his songs [see Ochs
lyrics index] haven't
aged well, but some are still as
searingly acidic as the day he wrote them, as above or in
Love me, Im a liberal:Once I was young and impulsive, I wore every conceivable pin...But I've grown older and wiser, and that's why I'm turning you in. So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal. ------- Phil Ochs ------- (born 1940, suicide 1976)
posted by troutfishing at 5:42 AM PST - 22 comments
The Owl House.
The Owl House and the Camel Yard were home to the reclusive South African artist Helen Martins.
A place of archetypal, almost mythic outsider art,
Miss Helen transformed her home with the help
of her collaborator
Koos Malgas.
'
That simple decision, to embellish her environment, was to grow into an obsessive urge to express her
deepest feelings, her dreams and her desires. '
Here are some
pictures.
posted by plep at 1:10 AM PST - 5 comments
October 28
"I was driving a Lexus through a rustling wind."
Did anyone recognize the opening sentence of Don DeLillo's
Underworld? First lines often set the tone for a whole novel but they're fun on their own too. So, after reading
this article by John Mullan, I found this interesting quiz to test my identification skills. Well! The warm-up exercises are recommended for giving you a false sense of security, btw... And here's a
bonus quiz for Faulkner fans. Just one example: "
The jury said "Guilty" and the Judge said "Life" but he didn't hear them." They don't get much better than that, do they?
posted by Carlos Quevedo at 10:40 PM PST - 36 comments
U.S. Vows to Disarm Iraq with or Without U.N.
We lead. You follow. Or get out of the way. How this will play out in terms of the very existence of the UN in the near future, the EU, and our attempt to maintain good relationship with Arab countries is anyone's guess. What is yours?
posted by Postroad at 6:09 PM PST - 84 comments
Buy Bush a Playstation 2.
If the fundraising goal is met, the President will be given a PS2 with a copy of
SOCOM and
Conflict: Desert Storm, hopefully distracting him long enough to forget about the real war. Send your donation and you'll save a lot more people than just Karyn.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 4:29 PM PST - 11 comments
The man who wrote 10,000 Grooks
(
grooks,
grooks,
grooks), Piet Hein, was also the inventor of
Hex and the creator of the
Soma Cube. In the design world, he is most famous for the
SuperEllipse, a figure that rivals Buckminster Fuller's geodesics in ingenuity, an aesthetic balance between a circle and a square, and a
mathematical figure which has been used to design a
square in Stockholm. From the SuperEllipse, you can get the SuperEgg, a strange solid which will unexpectedly balance on one end and has been
mistaken for an alien artifact.
posted by Winterfell at 2:16 PM PST - 11 comments
Here is an excellent article on
Rationality versus Values. Personally though, I'd rather be free of more mundane risks such as traffic accidents than say, extraordinary risks such as being held hostage in a theatre... but that's just my opinion.
posted by titboy at 12:40 PM PST - 10 comments
Does this seem incongruous to anyone else? (-cnn)
Two professors were shot and killed Monday at the University of Arizona's College of Nursing
A student was "disgruntled" at the professors and shot at them. I am (sadly) not too surprised that something like this would happen on a college campus, but it does seem strange that it would happen at the College of Nursing.
posted by valval22 at 10:50 AM PST - 48 comments
Formula One tweaked!
The Formula One Commission met earlier today at what was touted as the
most important meeting (PDF) in the last 20 years to discuss ways to rescue Formula One. The biggest outcome was to have single qualifying laps on Fridays and Saturdays, the historic Spa circuit was dropped from the calendar due to tobacco advertising restrictions. [More inside]
posted by riffola at 10:10 AM PST - 17 comments
America Still Unprepared - America Still in Danger,
a new report sponsored by the
Council on Foreign Relations, claims that "a year after September 11, 2001, America remains dangerously unprepared to prevent and respond to a catastrophic terrorist attack on U.S. soil. In all likelihood, the next attack will result in even greater casualties and widespread disruption to American lives and the economy. The need for immediate action is made more urgent by the prospect of the United States going to war with Iraq and the possibility that Saddam Hussein might threaten the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in America." While of al Qaeda,
George Tenet says that "the threat environment we face is as bad as it was before Sept. 11. It is seriousthey have reconstituted, they are coming after us." This is not comforting (more inside.)
posted by homunculus at 10:03 AM PST - 4 comments
Your special day. Afterwards, you curl up in a corner with your new better half, gorging yourselves on leftover wedding cake and laughing over the pictures. You sift through the thoughtful presents your guests have selected, piles of dishware and linens, decorations and photo albums that will fill your home for years to come. Soon, you come to the most special present of all ... a coffee table book entitled
Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America??!!
scroll down to #389
posted by grrarrgh00 at 9:26 AM PST - 19 comments
Lingerie Barbies.
From FAO Schwarz. This is not a spoof.
(Personally, I'll pick black over white any day of the week, but that's another story)
posted by magullo at 7:18 AM PST - 33 comments
If sex is a pain in the a$$ (so goes the joke) then you are doing it wrong. But what if it's a
pain in the head? 1 in 100 people will suffer from
Orgasmic Cephalgia, causing blinding headaches when approaching orgasm. It's nothing more than a blood vessel dilating and causing pain that can only be stopped by coitus interruptus. Then again, it could always be a sexually induced
brain hemorrhage...
posted by twine42 at 6:40 AM PST - 9 comments
The Guardian isn't so good
at letting you link to their articles anymore. But if you use this link then click on "printable version" you might get to the site I want you to link to. My title being: If you're Jewish and American its hard to know whose side your on these days.
posted by donfactor at 4:52 AM PST - 20 comments
Sky Witness - New Site from Sky News
Yet another another example of "big media" embracing audience involvement. Sky is asking people to "tell us in no more than 300 words how a particular news event touched your life," including eye witness accounts, and photos. The "most compelling" entries will be published on a special site at the end of the year. Anyone who has read the
9/11 Metafilter thread will know how extraordinary such commentary can be. Anyhow for the wordsmiths here, this could be a great opportunity to show just how clever you are ;-) My question to MF - how far can this go - should, or will big/national/local media open up far more to audience involvement?
posted by RobertLoch at 4:24 AM PST - 5 comments
The Postage Stamps of Donald Evans
(scroll down a paragraph or two) A rich and complex internal world expressed through postage stamp art.
'When Donald Evans (born Morristown, New Jersey USA in 1945) was a boy, he drifted from his hobby of collecting postage stamps to creating his own postage stamps of countries he made up in his imagination ... He left behind an astonishing planet seen through its nations' postage stamps, thousands of them, all drawn to postage-stamp size, with all the familiar periphery of postage stamps hand-done ... '
posted by plep at 1:04 AM PST - 18 comments
October 27
American brands
PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble and Western Union are advertising on Hezbollah television. The Iranian-backed and funded group has been implicated in the attacks against the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Americans in 1982.
posted by semmi at 8:13 PM PST - 29 comments
Motorbikes the new craze for Iranian Women.
More taboos crumble in Iran, as women sign-up in their thousands for motorbike riding classes. Women have been allowed to drive cars, but not ride bicycles or motorbikes since the Islamic Revoluion. The problem now is to find women motorcyclists able to train those who have shown interest.
posted by Jimbob at 8:10 PM PST - 4 comments
It's the eve of the election, and control of the Senate is up for grabs... but Senator Wellstone dies tragically in a plane crash.
Who you gonna call?!
MONDALE!!!
He's an alright guy and everything, but I just can't hear his name without thinking of "Names for Bands" from Jello Biafra's
"No More Cocoons"...
posted by insomnia_lj at 2:30 PM PST - 28 comments
Afghanistan leads in poppy production
Now that we have rid the country of the nasty controlling party, it is good to return to normal business so that exports can help make this a better world. Is this a part of our re-construction plan?
posted by Postroad at 2:11 PM PST - 19 comments
Feet first? You're sick!
What's this all about? Fetishism on its own is impotence. It should surely be an apéritif, an accompaniment, a starter - not the main dish. Men seem to use it as an excuse not to engage. For women it's just an item on the menu of love; not the make-or-break thing men seem to make it. What was that Adam Sandler film where he gets foot-whacked by brilliant, dreamy John Turturro? [
Via very manly, ever-so-sensitive Bifurcated Rivets - I hate the way men post things and then cover themselves by saying "may offend"!]
posted by Schweppes Girl at 2:09 PM PST - 25 comments
Banning hip-hop.
Police in San Francisco control the kinds of music clubs may play and promote. In key parts of the city, rap music has basically been outlawed.
posted by xowie at 10:49 AM PST - 58 comments
