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October 2007 Archives
October 31
Here's an odd unforeseen consequence of the Columbian drug trade: fishermen along Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast have been been getting rich off of "
white lobster"—cocaine dumped overboard by Columbian drug traffickers that, through a fortuitous arrangement of sea currents, washes ashore.
[more inside]posted by Weebot at 10:32 PM PST - 17 comments
Spooky halloween sounds via
wfmu.
"Talk about a budget label classic! I was first introduced to this LP by Jack Diamond. Side 1 is pretty standard horror sounds, but Side 2 is where the magic is found! I love these remarks by a friend which pretty much sums it up:
"Side 2 of this album is unlike other Halloween sound effect records floating around in that it is all theremin! And get a load of those track titles?! It sounds as if someone let a 5 year old kid noodle around for a while. It's super scary!"
posted by vronsky at 4:06 PM PST - 9 comments
Yesterday, Ralph Nader sued the Democratic Party for conspiring to prevent him from running for president in 2004. The lawsuit alleges that defendants used “groundless and abusive litigation” to bankrupt Ralph Nader’s campaign and force him off the ballot in 18 states, and names as co-defendants the Kerry-Edwards campaign, the Service Employees International Union, private law firms, and organizations like the Ballot Project and America Coming Together that were created to promote voter turnout on behalf of the Democratic ticket. According to
attorney Carl Mayer from the team that filed the suit, interviewed this morning by Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman,
"what this lawsuit will do, and the importance of it is, is to set a precedent so that the two-party monopoly system that shuts out minor parties in a way that other Western democracies never do, that this will set a precedent to prevent this type of intimidation and harassment."posted by finite at 2:07 PM PST - 236 comments
Body fat
causes cancer according to a scary report from
the American Institute for Cancer Research and the
World Cancer Research Fund that reviewed 7000 studies. Obesity creates "a low-grade chronic inflammatory state" that promotes cancer. This report seems more foreboding than others of its ilk, e.g.: "Even small amounts of excess body fat, especially if carried at the waist, increase risk." Drinking is also carcinogenic: better limit yourself to 2 drinks a day if you're male and 1 if you're female. (Of course,
breathing is also bad, and so is
sunlight. ) Conclusion: you can live a really long time if you don't like to eat or drink, though you want to avoid taking this to
extremes.
posted by cogneuro at 11:15 AM PST - 115 comments
The 2007
Frédéric Bastiat Prize for Journalism has been awarded to Amit Varma (economics journalist for
Mint and writer of the interesting
India Uncut blog). Clive Crook (
Atlantic &
FT) was second.
The Prize was developed to encourage, recognise and reward writers whose published works elucidate the institutions of the free society, including free trade, property rights, the rule of law, freedom of contract, free speech and limited government. [more inside]posted by patricio at 11:08 AM PST - 1 comments
Looking for Halloween music, but want to avoid the cliché and overplayed
Thriller and
Monster Mash? (
YouTube Links) Three Halloween "mix tapes" have been posted over at the
AMG blog:
1,
2,
3.
(Samples included.) Or, here's
another option.
(Halloween mixtapes were also discussed recently, on AskMefi).
posted by zarq at 11:02 AM PST - 15 comments
On May 23, 2007 a multi-disciplinary team of scientists
announced (YouTube, 70mins, 7-parts, part1-1 is a summary) the finding of physical evidence strongly suggesting that, around 12,900 years ago (10,900 BC), a massive Shoemaker-Levy type comet hit the atmosphere, air burst over the Great Lakes region of North America and probably engulfed much of the continent in a fireball and subsequent firestorm with catastrophic effects for life and climate.
[more inside]posted by stbalbach at 10:54 AM PST - 23 comments
"The vast tar sands of Alberta in Canada hold oil reserves six times the size of Saudi Arabia's. But this 'black gold' is proving a mixed blessing for the frontier town of Fort McMurray, fuelling both prosperity and misery. As the social and environmental toll mounts, Aida Edemariam reports on the dark side of a boom town" -
Mud, Sweat and Tears.posted by chunking express at 7:21 AM PST - 45 comments
October 30
Trent Reznor speaks about being a member of oink, torrents and file sharing, as well as other interesting things. NIN cd cover artist, known online as
Demonbaby, also speaks about labels, file sharing and oink. It's a lonnng rant.
posted by ashbury at 10:24 PM PST - 51 comments
A list of Watson’s campaigns in the eighties reads like a catalogue of Tintin adventures. In 1981, he secretly entered Siberia to document a Soviet food-processing facility that was converting illegally harvested whale meat into feed for animals at a fur farm. He succeeded in avoiding the K.G.B. and in outmaneuvering the Soviet Navy around a pod of gray whales. (Greenpeace, which visited the facility the following year, got caught; one of the Greenpeace activists told me, “I was taken into a room with a K.G.B. guy who asked, ‘Do you know Paul Watson?’ ”) In 1982, from a chartered airplane, Watson dropped paint-filled light bulbs on a Soviet trawler in the northern Pacific. He has used spoiled pie filling, fired from water cannons, as a weapon at sea. During the Falklands War, he contacted the British Navy and offered to assist its fleet by ferrying medical supplies to the front—“so I could head off any Argentine move to kill penguins,” he told me. The British declined the offer.
Neptune's Navy [print], the life and opinions of Paul Watson, anti-whaling vigilante and founder of
Sea Shepherd.
[more inside]posted by Kattullus at 8:57 PM PST - 9 comments
We used to call it speaking in tongues, now it's music. Introducing the fantastic
Lindha Kallerdahl! A Swedish export, she's performed with Sonic Youth and won the "Jazz in Sweden" prize.
Here's her site and
here are a few samples on Myspace. I like "The Meaning of the..."
posted by borkingchikapa at 7:47 PM PST - 13 comments
Sorry PR, you're blocked. Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine calls out the 300+ PR "professionals" who cannot be bothered to look for the right person to send their announcements to. Then, he publishes their e-mail addresses online, for all to see. If you were thinking of using a PR firm this year, here are 300 that you might want to give a miss.
viaposted by parmanparman at 3:41 PM PST - 49 comments
Scary Stuff: Count Floyd's Scary Little Christmas Promo,
Dr Cube's Posse,
A Scarier Skeleton by Jack Handey [mp3],
The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra Trailer [previously],
Shining,
Plan 9 From Outer Space - Best Lines,
Re-Enactment - Pan's Labyrinth,
[previously]
Scream in 30 Seconds and Re-Enacted by Bunnies,
Season of the Witch,
The Thing in Lego,
REM & Muppets - Furry Happy Monsters.
Happy Halloween everyone!posted by McLir at 2:11 PM PST - 14 comments
Gore Lovers Click Here. When I was 12 years old, there was nothing cooler than this card series, aside from maybe Transformers The Movie. Where's the movie for this IMHO superior companion piece to the
Mars Attacks! series? I think this is the ideal property to be the first all-CGI feature with an emphasis on gore.
[more inside]posted by autodidact at 12:30 PM PST - 26 comments
Corporate Citizenship On March 24, 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez
struck Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, spilling more than 11 million gallons of crude oil. The spill was the largest in U.S. history and tested the abilities of local, national, and industrial organizations to prepare for, and respond to, a disaster of such magnitude.
Oil from the massive spill, which coated 1,200 miles of Alaskan coast,
continues to threaten the damaged ecosystem there, long after experts believed it would dissipate.
Facing a $5 billion damage award, Exxon appealed, and
won reductions to $4.5B, then $2.5B. It was still too much, the company argued.
Now, the
U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear Exxon's appeal. Justice Alito has recused himself.
[more inside]posted by Kirth Gerson at 12:19 PM PST - 56 comments
Strictly No Photography is a site where people can upload and share photos taken in places where you are not allowed to take photos. Lots of photos from art galleries, airports, museums, and even places in Glasgow (nsfw).
posted by sgt.serenity at 9:42 AM PST - 52 comments
A LIFE or DEATH STRUGGLE with MRSA recounted almost real time. Best to start with the original posting, linked at the beginning, and then
go back. Read from the bottom to get the sequence. It's a terrible story, made worse by the stupid accident that led to the struggle. I accidentally ran across this blog before the fight was over and am shocked by how things went.
posted by etaoin at 7:40 AM PST - 177 comments
Pilkipedia is the only online encyclopaedia and community based around Karl Pilkington, Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais. Includes downloads of all their
XFM radio shows from 2001-2005. [
via]
posted by patricio at 7:32 AM PST - 5 comments
BODcasts "The Bodleian Library launches its first series of BODcasts with readings by celebrated poets including Seamus Heaney, Bernard O’Donoghue and Mick Imlah." MP3s of talks and readings given on an evening in celebration of the publication of the journal
Archipelago.
[Via]posted by Abiezer at 5:49 AM PST - 4 comments
New evidence in the case of the
West Memphis 3 claims that "there was no DNA from the three defendants found at the scene, the mutilation was actually the work of animals and at least one person other than the defendants may have been present at the crime scene."
[previous thread]posted by billysumday at 5:26 AM PST - 40 comments
October 29
IN MEMORY OF
HANNAH TWYNNOY
Who died October 23rd 1703
Aged 33 Years.
In bloom of Life
She’s snatched from hence,
She had not room
To make defence;
For Tyger fierce
Took Life Away.
And here she lies
In a bed of Clay,
Until the Resurrection Day
In anticipation of Halloween, BBC History magazine announces the
winner (pdf link) of its "Mysterious Memorials" contest. (It's not the one above.) View the complete list of runners-up
here.
posted by saslett at 11:58 PM PST - 9 comments
Jail Finds is a flickr set of art found stuffed inside books by the account holder at the jail where they are a volunteer running the book cart.
posted by jonson at 11:38 PM PST - 9 comments
Project Pterosaur The goal of Project Pterosaur is to mount an expedition to locate and bring back to the United States living specimens of pterosaurs or their fertile eggs, which will be displayed in a Pterosaur Rookery that will be the center piece of the planned Fellowship Creation Science Museum and Research Institute (FCSMRI). Although, sadly, it may
not be real.
posted by geekyguy at 10:52 PM PST - 20 comments
Haven't you ever wished the US Government had an official blog? Now they do. It's called
Gov Gab.
posted by finite at 8:41 PM PST - 35 comments
Satellite News passes on the
news that Best Brains, Inc. is back in active business, with new 'Bot content appearing online.
Beginning November 5th, BBI will be launching its very own website at MST3K.com. The site will feature brand-new animated adventures of Crow, Tom Servo and Gypsy. We're told the goal is to have one new adventure each week (though "some settling may occur with shipping," they added). The Web site will also feature work from the original series (which BBI is now calling "the legacy series"), behind-the-scenes footage and other material culled from the BBI vault. [more inside]posted by Chrysostom at 6:13 PM PST - 18 comments
It's a Big World After All. The Disneyland Small World ride is going to be closed for 10 months in 2008 due to refurbishing. The main reason for the refurbishing: the ride isn't built to accommodate today's average passengers' body weights.
posted by Bugbread at 4:26 PM PST - 64 comments
ProposalToMary.com I will send out the proposal to Mary to 50 complete strangers, people I don't know – hoping, that they will forward my proposal to as many people as possible, which in turn forward it etc. And some day, I hope, it will reach Mary, after it has travelled a very long way. Guess this guy isn't in a big rush to be with his one true love?
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 10:52 AM PST - 42 comments
Devil facial tumor disease has ravaged the population of Tasmanian Devils in the last decade. DFTD is a
transmissible cancer, i.e. the tumor cells themselves (which differ genetically from their host animal) are the agent responsible. The disease is spread by biting and other contact, and the resulting grotesque tumors interfere with feeding and lead to starvation.
Poor immune response may be partially responsible. This is actually not the only such disease: canine transmissible venereal tumor is an
analogue that has been known to be contagious since the 19th century. (CTVT, however, gets a proper immune response.)
[more inside]posted by parudox at 9:04 AM PST - 7 comments
Saul Williams releases his album with several payment options: $0.00 gets you 192k mp3s, and 5 bucks buys your choice of 192k or 300k mp3s, or
FLAC. All DRM free of course. Trent Reznor, who was recently sighted complaining about the
insane prices for his last album in new zealand,
is to blame. Need a taster? Saul and Trent have
leaked a track on pirate bay.
posted by fleetmouse at 8:58 AM PST - 17 comments
EveryScape launched this morning. It's a ground-level mapping service similar to Google's "Street View", only it offers you an "autodrive" feature that automatically moves you through a city or down a ski slope. There are links to information about stores and restaurants in the view and the ability to go inside buildings and look around. It currently features views from
Aspen,
New York,
Boston, and
Miami. And of course the obligatory view of
a colorful mime with a man-bag. [
via]
posted by cashman at 7:48 AM PST - 12 comments
October 28
The Yamanote Halloween Train vs. Japanese Netizen Rage The Yamanote Halloween Train party was planned to be held on Saturday night in Tokyo. However, sometime on Saturday morning, the Japanese megaforum 2ch.net discovered an English-language post about the event on
JapanProbe, and translated the information about it into Japanese, igniting a raging storm of anti-foreign hatred and sending over 10,000 visitors to the popular English-language blog about Japan. Scroll down for an interview with a JR employee about the event.
[more inside]posted by KokuRyu at 10:18 PM PST - 39 comments
Jack Keller's
winemaking site has not only the
basics of home winemaking in 5 parts [
12345], but also information on more
advanced topics, including
acidity,
blending, and
using a hydrometer. Equally interesting is his extensive collection of recipes for making wines out of things other than grapes, including
dandelions and other
edible flowers,
wild plants (including
nettles!),
cabbages and
beets,
tea and
coffee,
mint,
pomegranates, and
pumpkins. A complete list of recipes is
here, if you'd like to click through alphabetically, and a list of specially-requested recipes is
here (scroll down a bit).
posted by Upton O'Good at 7:26 PM PST - 11 comments
Trinity University won their football game this Saturday on a
crazy play, (somewhat reminiscent of "
The Play" minus the mayhem of the fans and band rushing the field.) This one looks more like a grade school game of keep away. What happened to the defense??
posted by tdstone at 1:46 PM PST - 135 comments
The year 1964 was a watershed period in British music. Before that year, British popular music was barely heard outside of the U.K. But when the Beatles achieved American success, a seemingly endless number of British bands and singers were suddenly able to crack the American market.
By the end of 1964, some enterprising filmmakers decided to create a cinematic year-in-review to highlight this new wave of British music talent. The result was “Pop Gear,” a strange but jolly little production that serves as a celluloid time capsule for that remarkable musical year.
The features opens with footage from a November, 1963 Beatles concert in Manchester -
She Loves You [more inside]posted by carsonb at 1:03 PM PST - 24 comments
Our notions of names and gender may be showing some 'fluidity.' A long-time trend of male names losing their popularity or even their acceptibility once the same names become popular for girls may be shifting to a new 'gender fluidity.' While it's still true that fewer and fewer boys are named Leslie, Shirley, Kim, Ashley, Shannon, Whitney, or Carol, other names have emerged as unisex monikers: Jordan, Angel, or Peyton. Logan has re-emerged as a more clearly male name. See
this article in today's N.Y. Times Magazine. The essay was penned by Sam Kean: is that Samuel or Samantha? Does it matter?
posted by Rain Man at 8:43 AM PST - 139 comments
Suddenly, a man in a vintage hat rides up, hip-hop blaring from a glowing Plexiglas container shaped like a tropical fish set above the back wheel of his bicycle, control lights flashing. Fossil Fool, a rolling rapper from San Francisco who rides the college circuit preaching the benefits of peddling, grabs his microphone, cranks up the volume and starts to rap. Paul Freedman, aka
Fossil Fool, is one of the founders of
Rock the Bike, which makes Soul Cycles -- bicycle-based, often human-powered hi-fi and
PA systems -- for "playing clean, powerful, uplifting
music at street festivals and off-grid parties." RTB recently made a
mobile DJ booth for Austin's DJ Manny;
here's how. Attention, party-throwers: In 2008, you may well be able to
rent or borrow a Soul Cycle for your own shindig.
posted by GrammarMoses at 5:10 AM PST - 9 comments
Congress at Work The U.S. House Judiciary Committee sends an email to all persons who had sent messages to its "tip line." The email described the measures the committee was taking to safeguard the tipsters' identities. All the the email recipients' addresses were in the
To: field. Oops.
[more inside]posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:02 AM PST - 36 comments
October 27
About 15% of the average American's household waste is compostable. Even apartment dwellers can turn their potato peelings and coffee grounds into gorgeous, nutrient-rich plant food with the help of
worms. You can even
buy the little dudes online!
Once you have your worm farm set up, the big question is
"Can I compost this?" You may be surprised at how often the answer is,
"Yes!"posted by freshwater_pr0n at 9:45 PM PST - 48 comments
Forgive Some Sinner.
"With age 70 bearing down hard upon him, Dad had by then written for better than 40 years, during which he had become celebrated, later disgraced, and I would like to think ultimately redeemed... Good as some of his old stories are, it always seemed to me that his own was better than any of them; I only wish he had written it himself." Mark Kram Jr. examines his late father's complicated legacy.
posted by amyms at 7:20 PM PST - 9 comments
This series of photographs,
Iconic Moments of the 20th Century, was enacted by pensioners in a home for the elderly in Glasgow. Aged volunteers pose in their everyday outfits and in the vicinity of their Home to re-create scenes from well-known historic photographs
posted by growabrain at 5:35 PM PST - 40 comments
October 26
The Band is one of the more user-friendly fan sites I have come across. What I appreciate most is the (unadvertised)
chord charts. They are not always right but they are often not wrong. Subtle, theatrical chromaticism, your name is
Mozart Robbie Robertson.
posted by St Urbain's Horseman at 7:21 PM PST - 16 comments
Cuba: The Accidental Revolution. Hasta la revolucion ? Maybe, but some revolution is dictated more by need than by politics. In this
documentary, we are shown how Cuba is converting from oil-subsidized agricolture to organic agricolture with remarkable results. The presence of a police state isn't conveniently forgotten, as much as the facts that public education, public healthcare and limited, regulated free enterprise markets are helping Cubans in the transition from the illusion of freedom in a subsidized economy to a far less comfortable and rich, but more sustainable and independant economy.
posted by elpapacito at 3:21 PM PST - 48 comments
Love American Style Season One Volume One is coming to
DVD on November 20th. The series ran on ABC-TV from 1969-1974, was nominated for an emmy for best comedy series (won for music) and often featured pilots that had been turned down by the networks. Some would later be picked up after airing on Love American Style; two such shows were
Happy Days and
Wait til Your Father Gets Home. The original theme song was performed by the Cowsills, here is their
live version years later. As a kid, I actually hoped my dating life might be fun and humorous like the show, no such luck.
posted by CameraObscura at 11:53 AM PST - 49 comments
Pennsylvania polling places regarding September 08 elections to have everything but
voters.posted by duende at 11:30 AM PST - 31 comments
Jazz on the Screen "This searchable filmography documents the work of some 1,000 major jazz and blues figures in over 14,000 cinema, television and video productions."
posted by sciurus at 10:09 AM PST - 8 comments
October 25
The Soapbox is a collection of photographs, texts of speeches, transcripts of debates and political ads from Australian election campaigns (both State and Federal) from 1901 to the present day. More materials will be added when they become available.
posted by Effigy2000 at 11:12 PM PST - 3 comments
Be a Music Faun Yourself. A sign of the popularity of this operation is that in big cities so-called Faun-Clubs are founded one after another, where entrance is only allowed with pointed ears. The reverberating success of this new look is supported by more and more celebrities with pointed ears, amongst whom we can find not only musicians, but, for example, models, as well. viaposted by squalor at 10:10 PM PST - 33 comments
In the wake of Rupert Murdoch's takeover of the Wall Street Journal, several of the paper's top reporters have left for safer ground. Among them is Tara Parker-Pope, who joined the New York Times on
October 3rd. Her blog,
Well, currently accounts for three of the paper's top ten e-mailed stories: in addition to number 1, Five Easy Ways to Go Organic, she has number 5,
Shhh...My Child Is Sleeping (in My Bed, Um, With Me), and number 8,
Drug-Resistant Staph: What You Need to Know. Touché Rupert.
posted by alms at 9:15 PM PST - 23 comments
Manufold Menus [4.4MB PDF -
mirror]: Cooking on train motors, including recipes, cooking vessels (really, plastic bags and Gladware) pictures of where to stash the food, and resulting dishes.
posted by c0nsumer at 2:06 PM PST - 12 comments
The world’s toughest animal.
Tardigrades, are sometimes called
water bears [embedded video] or moss piglets. They are the coolest things on 6 to 8 legs and are able to survive in extreme environments that would kill almost any other animal. Freeze them, boil them, dry them, expose them to
open space & radiation - after 200 years they'll still be alive! And some have just come back from a
a rocket trip.
[more inside]posted by nickyskye at 11:21 AM PST - 37 comments
'There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If
it be now, 't is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if
it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man has
aught of what he leaves, what is 't to leave betimes?'
Chris Chester, author of
Providence of a Sparrow:
Lessons from a Life Gone to the Birds, a meditation on his life
with B, an English Sparrow which he raised from a hatchling fallen from
the nest, died suddenly early this past Spring. His nephew Marc Mowery
has created
Chris Chester - born May 14, 1952
died April 17, 2007 to his memory and has posted 6 of 8 short videos
of Chris and Rebecca Chester and the sparrow named B on YouTube.
And
here is
The Sorrow and the Sparrow: The
Life and Death of Chris ChesterExcerpt and video
links within [more inside]posted by y2karl at 10:52 AM PST - 9 comments
Nudism, in the modern, Western, sense
seems to have started in Germany (NSFW) back around the turn of the century, and
despite the efforts of the Nazis to eradicate the practice Free Body Culture (FKK), as the Germans call it, enjoyed great popularity in East Germany, the Communists thought it expressed solidarity, and everyone else thought it reflected West German freedoms they were being denied. After the reunification it turns out the
West Germans aren't so hot
on FKK after all...
In Germany opponents say nudism is disorderly, in the USA they say its
child porn in disguise (SFW) Laws in the USA vary widely. In
Arkansas its not only
illegal to be nude, but its also illegal to talk about nudism, while in
New York its legal for women to be topless, as long as they aren't being paid for it. As usual the
gods send mixed messages.posted by sotonohito at 4:32 AM PST - 37 comments
This post isn't about the great Belgian guitarist
Philip Catherine - too many guitar posts recently - it isn't about the Belgian singer
Katerine (nothing to say). It is about the French singer Philippe Katerine, who has been changing the way lyrics are written, as well as giving a whole range of new topics to French song. With
Je vous emmerde (F*** you) he explains what's on a loser's mind.
Excuse-moi is about the things a man focuses on during sexual intercourse in order to avoid early ejaculation. The individual struggling with an meaningless society is always present :
Borderline (
warcraft version with English subtitles). His lists and his humor clearly link his work with the texts of Poets like Raymond Queneau, Boris Vian (and Serge Gainsbourg), or the prose of Georges Perec. He can be
Elegiac,
Paradoxical,
Funky,
prosaic, he's always twofold.
posted by nicolin at 2:20 AM PST - 13 comments
October 24
Catherine Roraback was the only woman in her class at Yale Law School. She was a founder of the Connecticut ACLU, and a president of the
National Lawyers Guild. During her long career she defended labor organizers, immigrants, civil rights organizers, Black Panthers, and maybe most famously, Estelle Griswold before the United States Supreme Court in the case that legalized the distribution of birth control.
She died this week at age 87. [more inside]posted by serazin at 9:43 PM PST - 19 comments
"This will be
a woman’s world, and men will have to learn to fit in." The Wilson Quarterly examines the historical, cultural, and sexual implications of matriarchy.
Via. posted by amyms at 9:16 PM PST - 34 comments
"Proposition. We are all archaeologists, even if we don't realize it. An archaeological sensibility - working on what is left of the past, heritage, museums, collecting culture, antiques, retro styling, family genealogy, local history, tourists visiting the past - is a vital part of the contemporary zeitgeist.
Archaeography and
Archaeographer are photoblogs that explore the connections between photography and archaeology." Mining a similar vein is
The Nonist's Archeography Project.
posted by Kattullus at 7:58 PM PST - 6 comments
TubeDuel The CTFL was created out of a desperate need to better train and arm citizens with cardboard tubes. The goal of the CTFL is to provide organized cardboard tube based events that help spread cardboard awareness.
posted by otherwordlyglow at 3:35 PM PST - 24 comments
During its run, Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffed on over 50 short films. Almost all of them are now on YouTube or Google Video. See the list (shamelessly cribbed from
here) inside for links.
[more inside]posted by cog_nate at 12:38 PM PST - 148 comments
Director
Henry Bean has written and directed a new
movie,
Noise. It's about the bad kind of noise: car alarms that won't stop going off, garbage trucks that wake you up, endless horns honking. You know the pain.
[more inside]posted by bassjump at 9:21 AM PST - 48 comments
Liz Phair has gone from indie rock's princess to indie rock's bête noire over the last few years. But way, way before she was any of those, she was a just another post-collegiate twentysomething who had moved back into her parent's house and who
recorded odes to
Speed Racer and parodies of "Wild Thing" into her 4 track tape recorder to pass the time.
[more inside]posted by Weebot at 1:49 AM PST - 56 comments
Each of the following
MySpace Music pages features bios and/or photos and/or videos and/or miscellaneous related materials and/or up to four songs by each of the following Old Time, Traditional, Appalachian folk (and related) artists:
Lowe Stokes,
Clarence Ashley,
Charlie Poole,
Gid Tanner and the
Skillet Lickers,
Roanoke Jug Band,
Roscoe Holcomb,
Hobart Smith,
The Weems String Band,
Burnet & Rutherford,
Bascom Lamar Lunsford,
John Masters,
Dock Boggs,
Tampa Joe & Macon Ed,
William Stepp,
Buddy Thomas,
Buell Kazee,
Isidore Soucy,
John Salyer,
Cousin Emmy,
Luther Strong,
Elizabeth Cotten,
Fred Cockerham,
G.B. Grayson,
Melvin Wine,
Lewis Brothers,
Uncle Dave Macon,
George Lee Hawkins and
Wilmer Watts. And here's some general Old Time (etc.) pages, featuring various artists:
Dust To Digital,
Traditional Music of Beech Mountain and
North Carolina Folklife Institute.
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 1:04 AM PST - 17 comments
October 23
The Western States Trail Ride, more commonly known as the
Tevis Cup, is an equestrian competition held annually in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. It begins near Squaw Valley, and ends in Auburn - a distance of 100 miles, to be covered in under 24 hours.
[more inside]posted by po at 11:14 PM PST - 10 comments
Raisin Hell, a tale of fourth-grade Halloween woe by
Eric Feezell.
"I was deep in thought, mulling over ideas for a Halloween costume, a fresh, heart-stopping one. Something that had never been done before... Suddenly I witnessed something stupendous. Instantly, any ounce of reason contained in my young mind evaporated. I saw a California Raisins commercial." For reference: a
list of California Raisins commercials on YouTube.
posted by amyms at 9:05 PM PST - 30 comments
"In the summer of 1954, twenty-two fifth-grade boys were taken out to a campground at Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. [...] Ostensibly it was an unremarkable summer camp. [...] what they had really done for two and a half weeks was unwittingly take part in an elaborate and fascinating
psychological experiment."
[more inside]posted by desjardins at 2:53 PM PST - 44 comments
He once stopped a school bus on a busy interstate because he “needed a hug” from the kids inside. He’s been known to strap weapons to his chest and leg that he has no authority to carry or conceal, then wear them in public. He once bulldozed an elderly woman’s house, promising to build her a better one. He then forgot to build it. He recruited a team of kids to torch a row of dilapidated shotgun houses, without clearance or first turning off the utilities.
Meet The Worst Mayor In America.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 11:57 AM PST - 81 comments
Happy 6010th birthday, world! Technically,
God created the world (or possibly the entire universe?) the night
before Sunday, October 23rd, 4004 BCE, but the 23rd is the day that some
Young Earth Creationists still hold to be the Earth's birthday. Anglican Archbishop
James Ussher arrived at this date in his 1650 magnum opus,
Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti, and while
many other dates have been interpolated from the Pentateuch, Ussher's has become the best known, probably because (starting in 1701, at the behest of Anglican Bishop
William Lloyd) his chronology was included in copies of the King James Bible (and, centuries later, in editions of the
Scofield Reference Bible).
[more inside]posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 9:14 AM PST - 81 comments
Warming Climate Fuels Mega-Fires (11-minute video)
60-Minutes reports. "Recently there has been an enormous change in Western fires. In truth, we've never seen anything like them in recorded history. It appears we're living in a new age of mega-fires -- forest infernos ten times bigger than the fires we're used to seeing."
posted by stbalbach at 6:07 AM PST - 51 comments
October 22
The San Diego area is in grave danger right now from two major fires being fanned by Santa Ana winds. The SD Union Tribune is maintaining
a special Google Map in real time showing what's burned, and what's in danger, who's supposed to evacuate, and where they're supposed to go.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 4:55 PM PST - 204 comments
The US may be the economic superpower, and China the new manufacturing powerhouse, but there is one industry in which Africa still leads the world: the manufacture of red tape. The World Bank releases its 2008
Doing Business report (
overview, pdf) on the ease of, well, doing business. The USA is pushed into third by plucky New Zealand and Singapore but overall Eastern Europe has overtaken East Asia as the most business-friendly environment behind high-income OECD countries.
[more inside]posted by patricio at 6:53 AM PST - 34 comments
"
The world is at the beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This
change will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence almost
all aspects of our daily life."
The new Oil Report from Energy Watch Group makes a strong case that we have now passed peak oil.
[more inside]posted by roofus at 5:58 AM PST - 87 comments
The Open Content Alliance poses a threat to Google and Microsoft's competing library digitization projects. OCA was founded by the
Internet Archive, whose main claim to fame is the Wayback Machine, designed to archive the internet's web history. OCA's mission is to open the nation's library collections to universal web search by digitizing books and making them as widely accessible as possible.
[more inside]posted by richards1052 at 12:05 AM PST - 9 comments
October 21
Tokyo-Ga: this excerpt from a Wim Wenders film offers an interesting little glimpse into the world of
pachinko, a gambling obsession for so many in Japan. But while most are gazing hypnotically into the noisy little machines in order to win prizes or money, others are
circuit bending them to make them even
noisier.
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:15 PM PST - 31 comments
Find He-man! SEPTEMBER 14 - SARAH saw He-Man slicking his hair back, using the fountain water at Madison Square Park. The once dull, dirty, water is now a sparkling lush blue, and is filled with rare tropical fish.
posted by Stynxno at 5:22 PM PST - 26 comments
Journalist Accepts $1 Million Challenge: Do $7250 Cables Sound Better or Not? (Or they could use
these $43,000 cables instead). At least, it
sounded like acceptance, even to James Randi. But then...
maybe not.
So while you're waiting to find out if you should spend that much for cables, maybe you can buy something from
this collection of fine audiophile products.
$400 for a pair tweeters may not be too bad. You can use them with your
$350,000 amplifier, and
your awesome-looking $100,000 turntable. Make sure you set aside
$13,416 for a decent power cable, though, or you're just wasting your money.
posted by The Deej at 9:43 AM PST - 147 comments
Max McGee was not expected to play in Superbowl I. He ended up catching 7 catches for 138 yard and two touchdowns including the first ever in Superbowl history.
After retiring he became one of the most
popular broadcasters the team ever had.
He also was one of the founders of
Chi-chi's restaurant.
He
died from a fall on Saturday. He was 75.
posted by Bonzai at 12:52 AM PST - 14 comments
October 20
What do you know? Just when I thought ships were the way to go, I learned that
global emissions of carbon dioxide from shipping are twice the level of aviation, one of the maritime industry's key bodies has said It came out on the
BBC News this week.
posted by lamarguerite at 3:11 PM PST - 48 comments
Oh, deer. "The catching was slow and they looked back to check their lines. They saw what appeared to be a seal with its snout out of the water, but they didn't think any seals were around their fishing grounds and they kept watching."posted by mr_crash_davis at 1:29 PM PST - 73 comments
List of Ads Offensive to Women. Topping the list:
Dolce & Gabbana: This ad is beyond offensive, with a scene evoking a gang rape and reeking of violence against women. In an interview,
NOW Foundation President
Kim Gandy said, "It's in
Esquire, so they probably don't think a stylized gang rape will sell clothes to women, but what is more likely is that they think it will get them publicity. It's a provocative ad but it is provoking things that really are not what we want to have provoked. We don't need any more violence.
[more inside]posted by Tommy Gnosis at 1:05 PM PST - 215 comments
Hooker raped & robbed by justice system. Apparently, if you're a prostitute and you're gang-raped at gunpoint, that's not actually rape, but "theft of services". In Philadelphia, judge Teresa Carr Deni ruled exactly that in a case where a woman posted a Craigslist ad offering sex for money -- but when she met with her John, instead of the agreed upon exhange, he pulled a gun on her, raped her, then invited four other men to rape her as well. As if this weren't sad enough, a near-identical case --
with the same defendant -- came up four days later, and the prosecutor decided not to even try it as to not put the woman through the misery of being so resoundly denied justice. Devolution is real, spuds.
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 7:28 AM PST - 61 comments
Piggybacking the opening of the
Rome Film Fest, a group of self-styled
cultural "terrorists"
struck Rome yesterday,
dyeing the Trevi
fountain red. In an elaborate manifesto, the previously unknown group Azione Futurista is claiming to represent "precarious workers, the unemployed, the elderly, the ill, the student body and workers alike", and have announced that "we are coming with our vermilion to colour the grey of your everyday" - "a blob of colour will bury you all."
[more inside]posted by progosk at 5:45 AM PST - 37 comments
Amusing Ourselves to Depth: Is The Onion our most intelligent newspaper?:
"While other newspapers desperately add gardening sections, ask readers to share their favorite bratwurst recipes, or throw their staffers to ravenous packs of bloggers for online question-and-answer sessions, The Onion has focused on reporting the news. The fake news, sure, but still the news. It doesn’t ask readers to post their comments at the end of stories, allow them to rate stories on a scale of one to five, or encourage citizen-satire. It makes no effort to convince readers that it really does understand their needs and exists only to serve them. The Onion’s journalists concentrate on writing stories and then getting them out there in a variety of formats, and this relatively old-fashioned approach to newspapering has been tremendously successful." The article is based on the premises of the late media critic
Neil Postman, especially from his book
"Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In The Age Of Show Business."posted by amyms at 12:58 AM PST - 47 comments
October 19
You’ve heard of
train-spotters and maybe even
plane-spotters. Now comes a new innovation in the world of voyeurism:
yacht-spotters. Yacht-spotters are boat-obsessed individuals around the world who hang around docks, marinas, shipyards and ports snapping photos of megayachts and charting their migratory patterns. Some are in the yacht business; others live by the water or own boats themselves. But all share what they call a “passion” for rich people’s boats.
(via) [more inside]posted by stbalbach at 7:33 PM PST - 23 comments
Two executives of the alternative newspaper chain
Village Voice Media were arrested last night after running a story about
grand jury subpoenas [PDF] they received seeking reporters' notes and information on who visits their
Phoenix New Times Web site. The article, titled "
Breathtaking Abuse of the Constitution," claims that the grand jury investigation stems from a long-running feud with controversial county sheriff
Joe Arpaio (who calls himself "America's toughest sheriff"). The subpoenas demand New Times turn over all notes, tapes and records of the reporters who have ever written about Arpaio. The subpoenas also seek online profiles of anyone who read four specific articles about Arpaio and profiles of anyone who visited the paper's Web site since Jan. 1, 2004. Also sought is information on what Web users did while on the site.
[more inside]posted by ericb at 2:12 PM PST - 58 comments
Chat Noir A little Friday Flash fun to polish off the week - couldn't be easier: the cat will try to escape off the board. Block it by clicking on circles -it can't cross the dark ones. (via del.icio.us)
posted by nanojath at 2:11 PM PST - 67 comments
Pink Floyd fans may not need no education but
Gilmourish, an exhaustive review of the guitars and audio effects of Pink Floyd's David Gilmour (with help from an insider), will leave most comfortably numb.
posted by punkfloyd at 10:34 AM PST - 35 comments
On ham, with a fascinating (well, unless you're kosher) history of colonial curing methods.
posted by digaman at 9:48 AM PST - 46 comments
Just lately I was thinking of the Dutch Invasion. No, not
this one. Not
this one either. I mean
this one. There was, of course,
Shocking Blue, with their
classic hit,
Venus, and their lesser-known
Never Marry a Railroad Man and
Mighty Joe. Then there was the
George Baker Selection, with
Little Green Bag and
Una Paloma Blanca. Then you've got the very, er...
unique Ma Belle Amie, by
Peter Tetteroo and the
Tee Set. And how 'bout that
Golden Earring, eh?
Radar Love? Amirite? And of course, the inimitable
Focus, with their mega-hit instrumental,
Hocus Pocus. By now you're probably asking yourself "Why didn't they ever put a bunch of these Dutch bands out on little platforms sticking out of the ocean, and throw in some go-go girls, and film the whole thing from helicopters?" Well,
THEY DID! Those crazy Dutch!
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:35 AM PST - 52 comments
The stalled documentary
American Scary may never see a DVD player, but that doesn't stop you from celebrating the lost art of the late night horror host.
Vampira,
Zacherley,
Ghoulardi,
Morgus,
Sinister Seymour,
Svengoolie,
Doctor Madblood,
Elvira,
Joe Bob, and
many more are all on the tubes. Who was your favorite?
posted by Roman Graves at 5:01 AM PST - 28 comments
October 18
So you're at your favorite night spot , and your looking to impress the ladies
(or the men for that matter) why not have a few
Zippo tricks up your sleeve? What better way to enjoy a coffin nail than with a
flourish? More inside? Yes.
[more inside]posted by nola at 8:57 PM PST - 18 comments
Deadlicious is an English language blog from France focusing on weird and kitschy art of all kinds. Online since May, the last few weeks alone have featured vintage monster model
kits, Nazi sex paperback
covers,
lots of crazy
comics (including
King Kong) and
bizarre action magazines,
Hammer vampire posters, old motorbike
helmets, Japanese plastic
toys,
UFO zines from the 1950s and 60s, French art from 1910 depicting the year
2000, as well as some pictures of famed Mexican masked wrestler
Santo I'd never seen before. Plus there's over 300 more features in the archives.
posted by stinkycheese at 8:55 PM PST - 9 comments
This man kept me awake at night as a child, As I stared, bleary-eyed, at my flip-card style analog alarm clock, willingly watching the hours go by, thinking, "How am I going to be able to wake up for school tomorrow?" And laughing, laughing. I place the blame for my night-owl-ness squarely in his lap.
[more inside]posted by not_on_display at 8:26 PM PST - 17 comments
Portland, ME school board approves distribution of birth control at King Middle School, where students are as young as 10. Students must have a signed parental permission slip to use the student health center, unless a student requests confidentiality, in which case birth control pills could be prescribed without a parent's knowledge.
posted by Nathanial Hörnblowér at 3:35 PM PST - 177 comments
Kerouac's On The Road: The 50th Anniversary Of A Book I Had Not Read I can't be the only one whose impression of the book, from hearing about it but not actually reading it, was that it was about young, potent men, lost in a growing commercial society, two coiled springs ready to pop, looking for adventure-- America style. And this Road Trip that launched a thousand, other boring, useless road trips, was about young men looking to experience the world, really see, really live, really feel, free of the constraints of an artificial post war soulless society . . . That impression is wrong. You know what the book is really about? It's a primer on how to be a narcissist.posted by jason's_planet at 7:46 AM PST - 136 comments
Each of the following
MySpace Music pages features bios and/or photos and/or videos and/or miscellaneous related materials and/or up to four songs by each of the following Delta Blues (and related) artists:
Ishmon Bracey,
Mance Lipscomb,
Son House,
Blind Willie Johnson,
Charley Patton,
Blind Boy Fuller,
Skip James,
Bukka White,
Blind Willie McTell,
Mississippi Fred McDowell,
Robert Johnson,
Babe Turner,
Blind Lemon Jefferson,
Howling Wolf,
Jessie Mae Hemphill,
Tommy Johnson,
Reverend Gary Davis,
Big Joe Williams,
Mississippi John Hurt,
Ramblin' Willard Thomas,
John Lee Hooker and
Oscar Buddy Woods. And here's some general Blues pages, featuring various artists:
Delta Blues,
Pre-War Blues and
Blind Blues. You see, Delta Blues lovers, I comb MySpace so
you don't have to!
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:59 AM PST - 22 comments
Adopt a Vortex! Because nothing says "I love you" more than naming a European weather system after your special someone. Interestingly, lows are cheaper than highs. [
via]
posted by patricio at 4:56 AM PST - 14 comments
StupidFilter is a work in progress which aims to
recognize online stupidity programmatically.
Keep in mind we grade stupidity on a scale of 1 to 5. Someone might get a 1 or 2 for a comment that used no punctuation, whereas a comment consisting of nothing but text message abbreviations with a dash of LOLLLLL thrown in for good measure would probably rate a solid 4 or 5. There is a certain amount of subjectivity, and our software is aware of that; scoring will be normalized to eliminate excessively generous or harsh estimations of stupidity. Read some examples of "the tyranny of idiocy" in their collection of
Random Stupidity .
posted by amyms at 12:17 AM PST - 69 comments
October 17
John Lennon’s lighthouse. He said, ‘Well, actually, I invited you because I wanted to know if you can build the lighthouse in my garden,’ and I said: ‘Oh, dear, no, no. It’s just a conceptual idea. I don’t know how to build anything.’
Yoko makes a dream of John's come true in Iceland. It’s
geothermal.
Amy Goodman's take on the subject. And, of course,
video.
posted by LeLiLo at 10:46 AM PST - 14 comments
Something of a wild man -
James Watson, the Nobel-Prize-winning DNA researcher, has made some (
more) provocative remarks.
Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really". He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true". [more inside]posted by Kirth Gerson at 10:26 AM PST - 130 comments
"“If the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story, that’s how closely, God Forbid, some of those stories are to my sense of regaining my health and mental well-being.”
The New York Times
reported today that Raymond Carver's widow, Tess Gallagher, is pushing to republish the stories in Carver's acclaimed 1981 breakout collection, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," in their original, unedited form.
[more inside]posted by sock it to me monkey at 8:51 AM PST - 25 comments
31 hours, 4 minutes. Blowing the doors off the previous record of
32 hours, 7 minutes,
Alex Roy of Team Polizei and co-pilot Dave Maher set a new transcontinental driving record in a modified
BMW M5. Of course, to pull off such a feat today required a modest collection of equipment: thermal night-vision camera, binoculars, radar detector, radar jammer, CB and police scanners, oh, and a
spotter airplane. As you might expect,
not everyone is celebrating. Some photos.posted by knave at 12:29 AM PST - 70 comments
October 16
Two recent reports on immigration in the UK, a published
study on its economic effects, and an expert panel
report on its and public service consequences, paint very different pictures. Not that the press need logic or evidence: they
made their minds up about those
Poles a long time ago, like people did about the
West Indians,
Bangladeshis and
Jews . Is a rational debate on immigration even possible?
posted by athenian at 11:45 PM PST - 18 comments
Way too much thought about tentacle porn on this page, which details the history, current usage, and
'media' coverage of what to many seems the extreme of internet porn weirdness. Also covered are
Lovecraftian stories,
trinkets,
movies,
bestiality-inspired poetry and
modern pictorial porn (this is weird porn, NSFW, I'm warning you). Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to bleach my mind.
posted by Kickstart70 at 8:43 PM PST - 41 comments
Stephen Barnwell makes meticulous bills for fictional worlds, such as the
Dream Dollars of a
lost Antarctic colony, complete with symbolism and backstories. He has introduced several new, more politically controversial fictional currencies for less ideal worlds: the
United States of Islam, the
State of War, and the
Empire of America. He is not the only artist who imagines currency, there are the
beautiful notes of
Kamberra and the strange work of
JSG Boggs [prev] who hand-draws almost real bills that
subvert the lines between money and art, occasionally running into issues with the
Secret Service on the way. On the borders between reality and fantasy is the new currency developed by foreign exchange specialists Travelex, the
Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination, introduced to solve some of the problems in money in space, and which
may actually be used by space tourists.
[prev.]posted by blahblahblah at 8:07 PM PST - 18 comments
At a time when fed-up American citizens are
petitioning Congress to end the imprudent financial practices that caused the
housing bubble sub-prime mortgage crisis liquidity crisis impending recession -- including the banning of
SIV's and
refusing any bailouts for Wall Street, banks, or mortgage companies -- the United States Treasury Department
has just announced the creation of a giant-mega-ultra SIV called "M-LEC" made up of assets from several of the largest American banks. Already unofficially nicknamed "Sivie Mae" (or worse,
"the Frankenstein Fund"), it would be an off-balance-sheet way for these banks to pool and price the
ABCP's that they've lately been having trouble pricing and thus selling -- i.e. the liquidity crisis.
[more inside]posted by Asparagirl at 4:24 PM PST - 82 comments
The Moby Quotient [I]n the late 1990s, the techno artist Moby, as hip as they come, openly boasted of having sold every track of his breakthrough album "Play" to an advertiser, or to a film or TV soundtrack. The album should perhaps have been called "Pay." In homage Bill Wyman of
Hitsville has dubbed his formula for determining the offensiveness of a rock-based advertisement. (
accompanying article)
posted by caddis at 9:14 AM PST - 138 comments
John Fahey - Fare Forward Voyagers
John Fahey - Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Palace Of King Phillip XIVClips from a 2 hour performance at
the Euphoria Tavern in Portland, Oregon from 1976. Among the cognoscenti at
FaheyGuitarPlayers, the consensus is that these clips display Fahey in rare form on a very good night.
Apart from Fahey,
Bohemia Visual Music aka Mike Nastra, the contributor of these clips, provides an interesting assortment of way too hip YouTubery offerings including, among others, Spike Jones, Dimandas Galas, Gene Krupa, Tuxedo Moon, Sun Ra, Pere Ubu and the Holy Modal Rounders.
posted by y2karl at 5:36 AM PST - 9 comments
The greybeards of the U.S. foreign policy establishment have spoken out to the Bush Administration telling it what it needs to do to have a successful Mideast peace summit: advocate a return to '67 borders, Jerusalem as capital of two states, solution of refugee problem with financial compensation to Palestinians, security guarantees for Israel.
Signatories of the statement include Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, Nancy Kassebaum, Carla Hills, Thomas Pickering, Ted Sorensen and Paul Volcker. A pretty formidable bunch.
[more inside]posted by richards1052 at 1:35 AM PST - 87 comments
October 15
Rush Rush is a
Canadian rock band comprising bassist, keyboardist, and lead vocalist
Gary Lee Weinrib, guitarist
Alexander Zivojinovich, and drummer and lyricist
Neil Ellwood Peart.
Bewitched by
Ayn Rand, obsessed by nuclear war and enraptured by
cheap science fiction, Rush were role models to
geeks everywhere,
yearning to be cool, but
failing. Still,
they rocked, in their own way.
[more inside]posted by psmealey at 9:34 PM PST - 135 comments
The challenge, take the usb drive to new levels, you may have seen the
mimobot usb drives, pretty hip but perhaps only Japanese-influenced since manufacturer Mimico is Boston based. The true Japanese usb style is undeniably unbalanced, por ejemplo: The USB Chameleon
(video), the Self-destruction USB hub
(video), the USB motorcycle engine hub
(video), and no movie here but you will be happy to know that the Kore
Janai robot USB drive is the "perfect cool toy" with the uncool appearance.
Full context found here posted by jeremias at 8:20 PM PST - 5 comments
The SY Empire: A rare and fascinating look inside the secretive
Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn, which has drawn a bright line against assimilation called the Edict that casts out for life any "SY" who marries a gentile, even if they convert. (
Crazy Eddie --
who knew? Seinfeld's mom --
who knew? Isaac Misrahi --
who knew? "J-Dubs" --
who knew?)posted by digaman at 8:14 PM PST - 84 comments
The Yogurt Encyclopaedia (254kb pdf). With information such as how to make your own yogurt, the origins of yogurt and many recipes using yogurt, the Yogurt Encyclopaedia certainly... contains a lot of information on yogurt.
[more inside]posted by Effigy2000 at 5:10 PM PST - 20 comments
9000 miles by ferry, train, bus, bicycle, horse, foot and car. In a bid to
reduce his carbon footprint, Joseph Tame swapped 11 hours in a plane from Japan to England for a month-long adventure across Eurasia. Along the way he has a
Chinese Imperial Guard hold a penguin, stays in a
Mongolian Yurt, experiences a
"road" trip or
two,
misses some
trains, and
befriends a chipmunk.
posted by Freaky at 3:55 PM PST - 25 comments
The Iron City Houserockers were Pittsburgh's entry in the Heartland Rock Sweepstakes that occured after the success of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger. They had literate lyrics, tough rock and roll backing, and clear-eyed vision. Led by
Joe Grushecky, a special ed teacher by day, produced by Miami Steve Van Zandt of the E Street Band, and possessed of tunes like
"Junior's Bar" (youtube), they seemed poised to hit the big time, but it never quite happened, which is the music audience's loss. He is, however the subject of a loving tribute in the form of
"A Good Life: The Joe Grushecky Story" (trailer).
posted by jonmc at 2:07 PM PST - 27 comments
Antique Maps of China A database of 230 maps, charts, pictures, books and atlases from the Special Collections of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Library. You can browse thumbnails of maps dating back to the 15th century, then download a splendid colour PDF, for example, the 1923 map
Carte des environs de Peking. There are also some
world maps and ones of a few other
places.
posted by Abiezer at 12:20 PM PST - 13 comments
Margaret Talbot's wonderful profile of David Simon, the creator of "The Wire." Simon said, he and his colleagues had “ripped off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. Not funny boy—not Aristophanes. We’ve basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern city-state.” He went on, “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.”posted by geoff. at 10:50 AM PST - 34 comments
"I called [Stephen] Colbert with a dare: if he thought it was so easy to be a Times Op-Ed pundit, he should try it. He came right over. In a moment of weakness, I had staged a coup d’moi. I just hope he leaves at some point. He’s typing and drinking and threatening to 'shave Paul Krugman with a broken bottle.'”posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 9:37 AM PST - 56 comments
American Lawbreaking. "This series explores the black spots in American law: areas in which our laws are routinely and regularly broken and where the law enforcement response is … nothing. These are the areas where, for one reason or another, we've decided to tolerate lawbreaking and let a law—duly enacted and still on the books—lay fallow or near dead." The first two entries are
prescription drug abuse and
internet pornography.
posted by ND¢ at 7:19 AM PST - 84 comments
If Bruce Schneier, the
expert voice of
security moderation, is "worried" than so am I. Since the beginning of the year Storm, an advanced, distributed worm network has been growing quietly as its authors tweak its social engineering attack. Now it seems that it is in place and waiting. Schneier's
article. Digital Intelligence and Strategic Operations Group has been
monitoring Storm for a year.
OWL.
posted by shothotbot at 6:43 AM PST - 89 comments
Edith Macefield is stubborn. Man, is she stubborn. That's what her mother told her when she was a little girl back in the 1920s. It's a characteristic that has followed her all her life. Now that unrelenting stubbornness has won the 86-year-old woman admirers throughout Ballard. Macefield refused to sell her little old house where she has lived since 1966 to developers, forcing them to build an entire five-story project, which includes a grocery store, fitness club and parking garage, around her. She was offered $1 million to leave. She turned it down flat.
Old Ballard's new heroNewsfilter, local interest filter, too, but, oh, man, it lifts the spirits. Her's is the last house on the block, the one in which she grew up, the one her mother died in. She is going to be surrounded by five storys of shopping mall but she isn't moving. It's like
The Little House come to life. And bonus points:
Mike's Chili Parlor, the other hold out on the same block, is the bomb. So you get two Old Lost Seattle treasures in one post.
posted by y2karl at 5:29 AM PST - 81 comments
"Not much chance for survival, if the
Neon Bible is right." Presented by
Arcade Fire which is a
band that hails out of Montreal. Okay. So I'm easily
entertained, but you will believe a turkey can roast marshmallows. Requires flash.
posted by ZachsMind at 1:35 AM PST - 45 comments
October 14
Like a windshield cowboy ... never ridden on a house says the guy from Mexico ... Vincente Fox also says Bush is "quite simply the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life".
Interestingly though, around the world this story is reported differently. In India he is "
petrified of horses", while Germany just says he's
scared. It seems most American news just covers it as "doesn't like horses". As the real cowboys I grew up with would say "all hat, no horse".
posted by Kickstart70 at 9:30 PM PST - 39 comments
Blackburn makes manifest a propensity for turgid language. Not content with foisting “cockalorum” (meaning, boastful talk), “froward” (willfully disobedient) and “mordaciously” (bitingly) on the reader, he may be the first judge to use both “contumelious” (scornful) and “contumacious” (pigheaded) in the same opinion. Judge Robert E. Blackburn's
ruling [pdf] granting a motion for a new trial based on attorney misconduct is an interesting read for those who enjoy the use of uncommon, flowery and "big" words.
[more inside]posted by amyms at 8:46 PM PST - 14 comments
A day by day account of the progress of the manufacturing of 12 Glass Windscreen panels by artist Mario Muller. The pieces are a commission by the MTA Arts in Transit program for Kingsbridge Road station in the Bronx. The work is being done at Franz Mayer of Munich in Germany.
More on the artist
here
and
here.
posted by pt68 at 7:21 PM PST - 6 comments
October 13
About two weeks ago, 41 Democratic senators signed a letter which was sent to Clear Channel Communications, complaining about something Rush Limbaugh said over the air. Clear Channel turned the letter over to Limbaugh, and Limbaugh is
auctioning it off via eBay, with proceeds going to charity.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 10:45 PM PST - 141 comments
Georgia's going dry -- and we're not talking liquor stores. Record temperatures in Georgia and a long drought have left many Georgia cities wondering when the taps will run dry.
Some towns have only a few weeks of water left, while
rivers near Athens have nearly dried up. A
broken water main hasn't helped the problem, and some fear that the University of Georgia campus there may
shut down for lack of water. What's more,
Atlanta itself is already feeling the pressure, as Lake Lanier, a water source for 3 million residents,
falls by 1.5 feet per week and has only a three month supply remaining. While there have been
more severe (pdf) droughts in Georgia's history, rising population numbers have increased demand to now unsustainable levels.
posted by InnocentBystander at 10:37 PM PST - 75 comments
And we're off! Prime Minister John Howard has set the date for the Australian Federal election as November 24th, meaning we're up for a long six-week campaign. With Kevin Rudd leading the PM by
between 16 to 18 points (depending on who you read) in recent opinion polls, this election seems the most likely to provide a change of Government since Howard was first elected 11 years ago. Antony Green's usual excellent election guide is
up and running here, along with an
excellent calculator which shows which seats are up for grabs dependent on a
2 party preferred swing. You might also want to check out the
Vote-O-Matic, a fun but entirely disposable quiz which aims to help you decide who you'll vote for.
[more inside]posted by Effigy2000 at 7:48 PM PST - 603 comments
Asemic is a magazine of asemic writing, which is writing without semantic content. The editor is Australian Tim Gaze, who's made the asemic books
Aussie Runes and The Oxygen of Truth, volumes
1 and
2. "Only words lie; asemic texts cannot lie."
[more inside]posted by Kattullus at 7:07 PM PST - 74 comments
How depressing is your job? The Office of Applied Studies, a division of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, released a report ranking various occupations in order of the number of depressive episodes experienced by workers. "Personal Care & Service" occupations (defined by the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics
here) top the list. One wonders if these are the occupations contributing to the growth of the so-called "service economy," and if so, are we heading for a deepening national malaise?
posted by univac at 5:30 PM PST - 51 comments
The man who knew too much. "He was the CIA's expert on Pakistan's nuclear secrets, but Rich Barlow was thrown out and disgraced when he blew the whistle on a US cover-up. Now he's to have his day in court."
posted by homunculus at 3:00 PM PST - 21 comments
to gather information about Americans' phone records --
... the NSA had approached the company (Qwest) about participating in a warrantless surveillance program to gather information about Americans' phone records.
...Nacchio's account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts. ... -- The Administration's crimes and illegal spying on all of us and Quest's punishment for not going along with their plans.
posted by amberglow at 12:04 PM PST - 76 comments
The
Global Incident Map is an interactive map displaying "terrorism events and other suspicious activities" happening at this very moment (updated every 5 minutes) all around the world. Click on the various icons for "event details" or scroll down for "announcements, alerts and breaking news."
Via.posted by amyms at 9:54 AM PST - 28 comments
Attention Scum! You can now catch Simon Munnery's occasionally brilliant comedy series on YouTube. If you only have three minutes to spare then make do with this fuzzy three minute clip of
The Security Guard. If video is not your thing then you can enjoy Munnery's superb articles
here (you could start with this
one).
Finally, you could treat yourself to his book
How To Live which contains large chunks of all the above.
posted by dodgygeezer at 4:38 AM PST - 10 comments
Advocate or Adumbrate? Martin Amis writes an open letter to Yasmin Alibhai Brown for her
suggestion that after reading everyone's favourite last living Marxist
Terry Eagleton's comments on
this (posted previously), Amis is 'with the beasts' on Muslim-hating. He may have been adumbrating not advocating, but is there another way to describe patronising and smug?
posted by jennydiski at 3:30 AM PST - 47 comments
October 12
Hannu's Boatyard is a site by a Finnish guy who offers free plans for two dozen simple plywood boats you can build, along with photos illustrating the build process of each. He also describes basic woodbending technique and some of the design process, in a pleasing writing style that makes me want to get off the internet and make things. My favorites:
Portuguese style dinghy; tiny stubby
halfpea; round, Welsh-style
coracle -- if you click on no other link today, click on the coracle link and scroll down at least to the black and white photo.
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:19 PM PST - 31 comments
I Am Emily X is "the true-life diary of a frontline
Planned Parenthood worker and activist", created in response to the
40 Days for Life Campaign. "*For their safety and protection, Emily X represents a small handful of Planned Parenthood workers and activists, who may or may not be named Emily."
posted by mewithoutyou at 7:27 PM PST - 13 comments
NewsFilter: "A Montgomery minister found in his home this summer died with his hands and feet bound behind his back and dressed in two rubberized suits, an offical autopsy showed. ... The Rev. Gary Michael Aldridge was found dead June 24. Police ruled the 51-year-old pastor of Thorington Road Baptist Church was alone at the time of his death and that there was no foul play involved."
He's a
Liberty University graduate and former Liberty dean.
[more inside]posted by ibmcginty at 2:55 PM PST - 133 comments
Gunnerkrigg Court is a lovely and strange webcomic by
Tom Siddell. While its scenario bears a passing resemblance to Harry Potter (magic school, main character with a strange destiny, etc.), there's something quite different going on here.
Chapter One, for instance, deals with how to get an anthropomorphic shadow back to its forest home, using only a box of discarded robot parts and a young girl's initiative. And that's just the beginning. Need a more trustworthy endorsement than mine?
Neil Gaiman likes it.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 7:38 AM PST - 19 comments
Jason Lewis has become the first man to
circumnavigate the Earth using human power alone. It only took him 13 years: he set off from London in July, 1994 and ended his expedition in October, 2007, having travelled 46,505 miles (on foot and by pedal boat, roller blades, kayak, and bicycle). [via
QI]
[more inside]posted by chuckdarwin at 5:49 AM PST - 31 comments
October 11
You've never heard a box of Stoned Wheat Thins, a big tub of Necco, a little wooden frog, a Tupperware bucket, an empty jar and a theremin sound this good. It's
Crazy. No, really, it's
Crazy.
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:26 PM PST - 19 comments
Delirious Moscow: a survey on stellar and interstellar Soviet constructivist architecture, or, buildings in the time before Stalin (with pictures).
posted by Falconetti at 7:18 PM PST - 6 comments
"Since 1862, many have heard the
tale of a
wandering vagrant who traveled in an endless 365-mile circle between the Connecticut and Hudson rivers. The strange man only spoke with grunts or gestures and dressed in crudely stitched leather from his hat to his shoes."
[more inside]posted by horsemuth at 12:08 PM PST - 20 comments
First she was a dancer but after an injury she had to sing to make a living. She still dances a little during her songs (a rare feat among flamenco cantaoras). I first heard about her when she made a whole record (cd) of Edith Piaf's songs in spanish. You can get a taste
here. She talks about it
here (spanish + french, excerpts). She sang
les feuilles mortes too. But nothing equals seeing her, I think : so here she is with two covers from a recent documentary : a song by
Edith Piaf, a song by
Lola Flores. Btw, If you get into french songs in the flamenco idiom, try
this.
posted by nicolin at 11:50 AM PST - 4 comments
“Iraq War Memorial: Death of Prince Harry" features the
in fact hale and hearty royal scion "laid out before the Union Jack with pennies placed over his eyes and head rested on the Bible...Prone with his unfired gun still holstered, Prince Harry is represented clutching a bloodied flag of Wales, and holding to his heart a cameo locket of his late mother, Princess Diana, while a desert vulture perches on his boot...a bronze casting of Prince Harry’s 'severed ears' also set for display at the Trafalgar Hotel will be offered on eBay."
Via.
posted by Abiezer at 4:23 AM PST - 50 comments
Brazilian Ethnomapping: Inside a thatched-roof schoolhouse in a village deep in Brazil's Amazon rain forest, Surui Indians and former military cartographers huddle over the newest weapons in the tribe's fight for survival: laptop computers,
satellite maps and hand-held global positioning systems.
Some of the
resulting maps.
posted by dhruva at 1:10 AM PST - 6 comments
October 10
Design Patterns,
Reuse, recycle, but don’t reinvent the wheel unless necessary. This collection captures findings of consistent, unique or interesting interfaces and design flows from across the web. One of the many tools, tutorials etc. from Smashing Magazine's list,
Best of September 2007.
[more inside]posted by nickyskye at 5:25 PM PST - 9 comments
The "Nuclear Nav." On March 11, 1958, Captain Bruce Kulka was the navigator on an Air Force B-47 Stratojet carrying nuclear bombs to an airfield in North Africa. Somewhere over the southeastern US, the captain sent him to back the bomb bay to check on a cockpit warning light. As he climbed through the narrow space around the
Mark 6 nuclear bomb, Kulka grabbed the emergency release pin by mistake.
[more inside]posted by gottabefunky at 4:00 PM PST - 21 comments
A month ago Randall Munroe of XKCD drew a
comic lamenting the internet's lack of pictures of women playing electric guitar in the shower. He registered
wetriffs.com and soon the submissions started pouring in. The
gallery is now up.
[nsfw]posted by Kattullus at 3:56 PM PST - 85 comments
"
This blog is intended to document our experience in creating a “green” home in the city of Chicago. We hope to share our experience, good and bad, in creating a place to live ecologically, happily and with minimal impact upon our world."
[more inside]posted by Terminal Verbosity at 1:50 PM PST - 12 comments
Why is anonymous group suicide so popular in Japan? From 2003 through 2005, 180 people died in 61 reported cases of Internet-assisted group suicide in Japan . . . All but two of these cases have proceeded according to a common blueprint: The victims meet online, using anonymous screen names, and then take sleeping pills and use briquettes, charcoal burners, and tape to turn a car or van into a mobile gas chamber. posted by jason's_planet at 8:52 AM PST - 33 comments
The quicker you succeed the better. Declassified documents show Secretary of State Kissenger
gave a green light to the Argentine Junta, whilest Rev. Christián González
aka Christián von Wernich, also leant a hand, showing that The Catholic Church's involvement with fascism and the Dirty War was far from dead. The Vatican was instrumental in
witholding detail. The
Desaparecidos probably exceeded
12,000.
posted by adamvasco at 6:25 AM PST - 8 comments
Revolution in Jesusland: a new blog, written for secular progressives about the currently building movement within conservative evangelical christianity of people who are passionate about and working towards many of the same goals: "eliminating poverty, saving the environment, promoting justice and equality along racial, gender and class lines and for immigrants—and even separation of church and state." If you want a place to start,
the about page is here.
[more inside]posted by Arturus at 6:00 AM PST - 28 comments
The full-on, amped-up
sanza sounds of
Konono No. 1 have been celebrated here at MeFi not
once but
twice, and they are indeed wonderful.
Björk's been working with them a bit lately, too. But let's go back a few decades, and take a listen to the unplugged version of this type of music: mesdames et messiurs,
Papa Kourand, the grand old man of the sanza!
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 12:33 AM PST - 11 comments
October 9
Is the net good for writers? "Now the web — and its democratizing impact — has spread for over a decade. Over a billion people can deliver their text to a very broad public. But what does it mean for writers and writing? What does it mean for those who specialize in writing well?"
posted by dhruva at 9:10 PM PST - 39 comments
And I thought us UC Santa Cruz students and alums only had to deal with the defensive ticks we developed by being the stepchild to that
other University of California in the Bay Area. But no! We apparently attended the
Worst School in America!
The always endearing David Horowitz, in addition to posting an
article showing the university's crimes-against-academia/cool-classes, was on Fox News decrying the University's policy of turning patriotic Midwestern kids into Molotov-throwing Marxists. After watching that clip, I do have to wonder what career paths are available to someone with a skillset that includes "Can organize anti-capitalist revolutions."
posted by Weebot at 8:59 PM PST - 43 comments
Earth, 2100 AD. Atmospheric CO
2 has doubled to 1000 ppm.
From shore to the horizon, there is but an unending purple color -- a vast, flat, oily purple. No fish break its surface, no birds. We are under a pale green sky, and it has the smell of death and poison. Paleontologist Peter Ward's
new book links past mass extinctions to global warming
and shows, absent major changes,
"Our world is hurtling toward carbon dioxide levels not seen since 60 million years ago, right after a greenhouse extinction." Maybe it's time for a
heresy: nuclear energy's green, and renewables aren't.
posted by Bletch at 5:15 PM PST - 168 comments
A Virtual Cartography of European Migration Policies MigMap conveys a picture of how and where the production of knowledge is currently taking place in the field of migration – and of who is participating in and has access to it. It investigates precisely how the new forms of supranational governance that can be observed in the European migration regime function. It looks, for example, at how European standards in politics and civil society are implemented, and at the authorities, persons and institutions taking part in this process. It examines how the various key players in the public and private spheres are interrelated and funded, as well as at the ways in which these spheres overlap or differ in terms of focus, location or personnel. Finally, it analyzes how responsibilities are allocated and legitimized – and explores the theories, data and discourses upon which current paradigms in migration are based.
[more inside]posted by psmealey at 2:07 PM PST - 12 comments
There is time, and there is
"African time". The Ivory Coast is
fighting chronic lateness with a contest that offered a $60,000 villa as its grand prize. The winner, legal adviser Narcisse Aka, is known by his colleagues as "Mr. White Man's Time" and
said that his punctuality makes him feel like "an extra-terrestrial."
posted by stbalbach at 8:37 AM PST - 54 comments
Launchball : Think a stylised, fluoro version of The Incredible Machine. And when you finish the level, it reveals a science fact -- which you can pretend to read and claim it's educational...
posted by robcorr at 3:35 AM PST - 36 comments
October 8
It's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your cats are? They might be off helping to translate the
Old and
New Testaments of
Teh Holiez Bibul.
[more inside]posted by fuse theorem at 11:40 PM PST - 45 comments
While other children their age spend their days in school, forming friendships and worrying over their grades, these two young ragamuffins spend long nights camped out in front of hot night spots they won't be able to legally enter themselves for at least half a decade. Please open your hearts, ladies and gentlemen, to
the littlest paparazzi.
[more inside]posted by maryh at 9:34 PM PST - 29 comments
Breakfast looks different to different people. That alone made me wanna post this cuz that's just hella cool, but after I saw that, I started wondering what does breakfast
sound like?
Why should we even bother with breakfast? Here's
some more thoughts on breakfast. Hungry yet? This was a
great movie by the way. I guess
that one was okay too.
So what did you have for breakfast? [previously] posted by ZachsMind at 8:18 PM PST - 71 comments
A new generation of bike rental is here, where you pick up the bike where you start your ride and drop it off at the destination.
Vélib' and
Vélo'V are the high-profile, wildly successful products of the JCDecaux ad firm in the cities of Paris and Grand Lyon. Velib' provides
10,000 bikes for
cheap hourly rental beginning this past summer. In exchange for fully underwriting the €90 million of expenses, JCDecaux wins exclusive rights to all the city's billboards.
JCDecaux' rival Clear Channel beat them out of the gate by a couple months, opening
Bicing in Barcelona to similar success, although at a smaller scale.
[more inside]posted by ardgedee at 8:01 PM PST - 17 comments
At San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving 1976, The Band served turkey dinners to an audience of 5,000 and played
Don't Do It,
Theme from The Last Waltz,
Up on Cripple Creek,
The Shape I'm In,
Who Do You Love,
It Makes No Difference,
Such a Night,
Helpless,
Stage Fright,
The Weight,
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,
Dry Your Eyes,
Coyote,
Mystery Train,
Mannish Boy,
Further on up the Road,
Evangeline,
Ophelia,
Caravan,
Forever Young,
Baby Let Me Follow You Down, and
I Shall Be Released with
a ton of guests (listed in link titles).
[more inside]posted by kirkaracha at 4:49 PM PST - 46 comments
“Blue Monday” Owners’ Club Photos of actual original “Blue Monday” sleeves (Peter Saville die-cut design) as brandished by their owners. Also
You Are There! photos of searching for “Blue Monday” in the wild and finding it.
(Creaky old frame-based site)posted by joeclark at 2:51 PM PST - 37 comments
modulation is visiting warsaw. not a city which has ever appeared in my top ten tourist destinations, but i am much more inclined to visit it after reading his thoughtful reflections on its
architecture and history not to mention obscure (and in classic polish style,
rarely open to the public or about to be shut down/demolished because they are too popular, attractions.)
posted by toycamera at 2:39 PM PST - 1 comments
Martin (no last name given) has done some fascinating and unusual things to his penis.
In this interview, you can read about Martin's genital evolution, see pictures of the results, and find out the motivations behind Martin's actions. Despite what you might think, this is totally not safe for work.
Via.
posted by jonson at 1:02 PM PST - 99 comments
Morbid Anatomy - an excellent blog with a focus on art, medicine, death, and culture. Great viewing anytime, but it might also be a good reference source for any macabre seasonal celebrations!
posted by madamjujujive at 9:56 AM PST - 5 comments
In 1897, pioneering Swedish balloonist Salomon August Andrée and two companions took off for the north pole in a hot air balloon. In 1930 their bodies were found, along with records of their expedition.
This archive of newspaper articles tells their story.
(So does Wikipedia, of course.) Many of the photos they took are
here, along with a lot of text in Polish that I can't read any more than most of you can, so don't come complaining to me.
posted by dersins at 8:42 AM PST - 12 comments
The ability of Postsecret to reach out and touch everyday lives has not waned with its increased popularity and reknown.
"I feel the same way. I often wonder why I even have a phone because I rarely receive calls."
Then he offered a metaphorical ear.
"If there was a way we could contact each other, that would be cool. My phone number is 605-212-7787." [more inside]posted by Phire at 1:52 AM PST - 58 comments
October 7
Growing drugs in space. If the rainforest runs out of undiscovered medicines, just grow new drugs in space:
Wired reports that "a swaggering Texas investor" wants to turn the
International Space Station into a kind of orbiting drug lab: "If people knew what I already know," he says, "the International Space Station would be considered one of the most valuable resources our world possesses." Think of it as
New Jack City in zero-G – full of weird, crystallized proteins (and billion dollar cures).
posted by BLDGBLOG at 11:38 PM PST - 19 comments
Swamp Ghosts.
Of all the wrecks on Papua New Guinea (PNG), none is as fabled as the "Swamp Ghost," a B-17E Flying Fortress that ran out of fuel on an ill-fated bombing mission in early 1942 and was ditched in the Agaiambo Swamp about eight miles inland on the northern coast. There the plane rested, intact and more or less unmolested, in soggy splendor for 64 years—that is, until May 2006, when an American salvager took it apart and removed it. This caused such a controversy that the plane was stopped from leaving the country. The story of the Swamp Ghost illustrates the international debate over ownership of salvaged wrecks and war surplus, told from a personal perspective by a journalist whose war-correspondent father died in PNG during WWII.
posted by amyms at 9:40 PM PST - 13 comments
In one fell swoop, some 16,000
hyphens have been eliminated from the sixth edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, published last month.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:52 PM PST - 62 comments
The number of handicap tags has
been increasing in recent years and so has abuse, for example nearly one-third of temporary placards found on cars parked in downtown Boston were being used by people who were not disabled.
Handicap Fraud is a website for anonymously reporting seemingly able-bodied people who park in handicap spots. Free post-it-notes "You've been reported" available.
[more inside]posted by stbalbach at 5:34 PM PST - 67 comments
Reporter whacks man with shovel [video]. d30 (dee-three-oh) is a specially engineered material made with intelligent molecules. They flow with you as you move but on shock lock together to absorb the impact energy.
posted by nickyskye at 5:17 PM PST - 47 comments
"
A Ghostbike is a junker bike that has been painted stark white and afixed to the site where a cyclist has been hit or killed by a car driver."
[more inside]posted by ardgedee at 5:12 PM PST - 74 comments
WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier This blog is made up of transcripts of Harry Lamin's letters from the first World War. The letters will be posted exactly 90 years after they were written. "Dear Kate, Just a line to let you know I’m going on alright. We had an exciting time and this time up the line. We had only been in about six hours when fritz’s came over to us. We had an hour and a half of it but we beat them back and they lost a good many men too not many got back I can tell you. We lost #### (pencilled out –censored?) which I’m sorry to say and about #### wounded. I think the mug will be all right for Willie which Jack is getting for him. If you send me anything it will come in very nice the chocolate is very good I should like a bit of cake, if you could afford it really gets crushed so if it is not packed careful. With best love from Harry"
posted by feelinglistless at 3:42 PM PST - 6 comments
"My first day on the job was the Amish school shooting at Nickel Mines in Lancaster County, Pa. in October of 2006.
Here is some video of what I saw that day." Raw footage from that terrible day, recently posted to YouTube.
1,
2,
3,
4,
5 [more inside]posted by Toekneesan at 7:33 AM PST - 28 comments
Flamenco guitar is such a subtle and delicate mean of expression that it looks like arranging flamenco music for a number of musicians isn't practical or efficient. Nevertheless, many attempts have been made to use flamenco phrasing or colors within large ensembles : in a classical piece like
The Aranjuez Concierto, in jazz when Gil Evans teamed with Miles Davis to greate several pieces entitled
Sketches of Spain, or more recently, with the beautiful work of
Maria Schneider, or the small units of
Louis Winsberg. One of the most convincing score has been recently produced by
Juan Carmona, a gipsy guitarist from Marseille, a
work performed by many philarmonic orchestras.
posted by nicolin at 3:14 AM PST - 11 comments
October 6
Triumph of the Will - the Director's Cut This rare director's cut of Triumph of the Will (German: Triumph des Neger) is a propaganda film by the German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. It chronicles the Nazi getting fonky at Nuremberg. The film contains excerpts from rhymes kicked by various Nazi leaders at the Congress, including dat Brooklyn flava by Adolf Hitler, interspersed with footage of splifted party members.posted by empath at 3:35 PM PST - 39 comments
A record number of floods, droughts and storms around the world has been characterized as a climate change
"mega disaster" by a senior UN official, a measure based on
13 emergency "flash" appeals (PDF, map) issued so far
this year (pic gallery) - three more than in 2005 which held the previous record. Sir John has expressed frustration at how little media attention in the west is being devoted to what he terms a global "creeping climatic catastrophe".
posted by stbalbach at 7:34 AM PST - 39 comments
The Mahikari Hoax The Harvard Asia Quarterly tells
the story of Fujimura Shinichi, a once-renowned amateur Japanese archaeologist nicknamed 'God's Hands' (神の手） for his seemingly preternatural talent for finding artifacts, who was caught planting planting stone tools, some of which he had fabricated himself, others he had taken from other sites, at an archaeological dig in
Miyagi, northern Japan.
[more inside]posted by KokuRyu at 5:59 AM PST - 25 comments
October 5
Too Hot To Hear.
Fifty years ago today, a San Francisco Municipal Court judge ruled that Allen Ginsberg's Beat-era poem "Howl" was not obscene. Yet today, a New York public broadcasting station decided not to air the poem, fearing that the Federal Communications Commission will find it indecent and crush the network with crippling fines. More on Allen Ginsberg
here.
Via.posted by amyms at 11:39 PM PST - 69 comments
Are Zebras black with white stripes, or white with black stripes? Find the answer to this, plus many other fun zebra facts and many great zebra pictures and photos for your desktop at the appropriately titled
Fun Zebra Pictures & Facts website.
[more inside]posted by Effigy2000 at 4:53 PM PST - 40 comments
Mad About the Boys "Until he fled the country in January, accused of embezzling more than $300 million, Lou Pearlman was famous as the impresario behind the Backstreet Boys and 'NSync. Turns out his investors weren't the only victims, colleagues reveal: Pearlman's passion for boy bands was also a passion for boys."posted by empath at 1:49 PM PST - 60 comments
Up for consideration is the
Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which has been written to provide a comprehensive Federal prohibition of employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Last week, Barney Frank
released a Statement saying that it is a mistake to continue seeking inclusion of "gender identity" as part of the Act. Or to put it in other words, there'd be protections for only the "GLB" part of the larger "
GLBT community".
[more inside]posted by AccidentalHedonist at 12:04 PM PST - 149 comments
Ellsworth Kelley, Bill Blass, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and a host of lesser known but equally talented
painters, designers,
sound engineers and actors served together during World War II in the
Ghost Army – the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, a unit whose existence remained an
official secret until 1996.
German soldiers referred to them as the "Phantom Army," because one moment they were in one place, and the next, they were attacking their flanks or from the rear. Together, they made rubber tanks and fake Jeeps; their
changing unit insignia were designed to fool spies and allied units alike. They recorded the sounds of Allied units building bridges or moving troops and broadcast them from special
sound trucks, leading the Germans to conclude that the U.S. Army had more troops in more places than it did. "
Guys drew, or painted, all the time," documenting their lives, the lives of their fellow soldiers, and that of the local populations in wartime Europe.
posted by rtha at 11:35 AM PST - 23 comments
October 4
Decentralized social network: "...build your social network in one place and have other NoseRub clients connect to it instead of you having to build multiple networks on multiple social networks. The best part is NoseRub is released under the open source MIT license." via
eHub.
Previously related.
posted by yoga at 5:02 PM PST - 23 comments
The
J! Archive is an impressive collection of answers and questions from Jeopardy! It includes not only every answer (of those revealed on the show), but also the correct and incorrect questions supplied by the contestants, how much was wagered on each Daily Double and Final Jeopardy, and the contestant's scores after Single and Double Jeopardy.
[more inside]posted by jlub at 12:09 PM PST - 34 comments
Elizabeth "Grandma" Layton was coaxed by her sister at the age of 68 to take a
blind contour drawing class in Ottawa, Kansas, in order to possibly help alleviate her 35-year bout with clinical depression. By the time of her death in 1993,
her work (article includes quicktime link of Elizabeth discussing her work and photo gallery) had been shown in several museums, including the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art, and celebrated as an honest depiction of aging, mental health, and
feminist issues (google book link) in the US.
[more inside]posted by sleepy pete at 12:00 PM PST - 15 comments
Secret U. S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations. The New York Times has a 4000-word report today on secret Justice Department opinions--never previously disclosed--authorizing severe interrogation methods. Congress has outlawed cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; in response, Justice declared that the CIA's most extreme interrogation methods are not cruel, inhuman, and degrading. These secret opinions, issued in 2005, are still in effect. Most lawmakers did not know they existed.
White House response: "This country does not torture."
posted by russilwvong at 11:00 AM PST - 107 comments
It's the first Monday in October and time for Supreme Court Justices to compare liberals, unfavorably, to the Ku Klux Klan. In his new
memoir, released on the first day of the Supreme Court's 2007 term, Justice Clarence Thomas writes that he grew up fearing the KKK, but now knows he had
"been afraid of the wrong white people all along. My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony. " No small man, he also comments on Anita Hill's bad breath. Slate's spectacular legal columnist, Dahlia Lithwick, notes that
"in the few hundred pages of his new book, Thomas has managed to undo years of effort by his colleagues to depoliticize the judicial branch." As usual, only
Jon Stewart can make us laugh through the tears.
posted by The Bellman at 8:12 AM PST - 110 comments
As Beijing prepares for the Olympics next year it is trying to clean up some of the shadier sides of the city. Apparently, one way of doing this is going to the popular bar street,
Sanlitun, and
arresting and beating all the men who appear to be of African decent, even if one happens to be the
son of a diplomat.
posted by afu at 7:47 AM PST - 40 comments
Tired of waiting an hour for your luggage? Can't fit all your gear into a tiny suitcase? Struggling to find the perfect carry-on?
OneBag can help.
posted by brain_drain at 7:13 AM PST - 34 comments
Fly Jumpers Junior are a new product that give the wearer near-superhuman abilities, according to the promotional video on this amazon UK page. The vid also includes a surprising, albeit hilarious gory ending. The problem? These are Fly Jumpers
Junior, aimed at kids. As one reviewer has already noted, isn't this a bit too much for advertising a product aimed at children?
posted by hnnrs at 4:26 AM PST - 24 comments
October 3
It's a lesson all listserv managers dread learning the hard way: Don't let your subscribers "Reply to All." The WSJ Washington Wire
reports on an incident today in which one user's reply started all those on a Department of Homeland Security "Open Source Intelligence Report" e-mail list on a chain-reaction of replies and counter replies that offers lessons on how (not?) to run an e-mail list. Maybe Michael Chertoff was on to something last year
when he stopped using e-mail at all.
posted by mmahaffie at 8:39 PM PST - 42 comments
Picture if you will Mississippi, a state still sweltering from heat, and injustice. A place where juke joints in and around Clarksdale are still home to the blues. Junior Kimbrough redefined the blues here. He started playing at a young age, but he was 62 before he released his first album, just 5 years before he died of heart failure in Holly Springs.
Sad Days, Lonely Nights [Youtube] [more inside]posted by nola at 6:44 PM PST - 8 comments
Wallettest. "...Each of the 100 wallets contained $2.10 in real money, a fake $50.00 gift certificate, some miscellaneous items and a clearly written ID card identifying the lost wallet's rightful owner. We were curious as to how honest people would be and wanted to see how different groups would compare to each other. For example, who would return the wallets more often... men or women? Young or old?"
Results.posted by goo at 2:16 PM PST - 103 comments
Darling it's better down where it's wetter. For $2.5 million, this beautiful home can be yours:
Jelly-fish 45, designed by Giancarlo Zema is a floating dwelling unit for up to six persons. It's spacious dimensions are 10 metres high with a diameter of over 15 metres. The Jelly-fish 45 would be ideally situated in sea parks, atolls, bays and seas rich in flora and fauna. The Jelly-fish 45 allows the sea dwelling owners to live either above or below sea level in perfect harmony with the ocean environment. posted by Astro Zombie at 12:11 PM PST - 54 comments
Choro (the Portuguese for 'crying', pronounced "shoh-roh") is a style of Brazilian music that originated in Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century.
Choro combines Afro-Brazilian rhythms with conventions of
European dance music. It is primarily instrumental music with great scope for improvisation and is traditionally played by flute or clarinet, guitar and/or
cavaquinho (page includes English translation), although banjo or
bandolim are also commonly heard.
Some names to know in choro are
Pixinguinha (1897-1973), Jacob
do Bandolim (1918-1969), and
Paulinho da Viola, (born 1942).
[more inside]posted by winna at 10:01 AM PST - 15 comments
Shoegazer 101 Shoegazing (also known as shoegaze or shoegazer; practitioners referred to as shoegazers) is a genre of alternative rock that emerged from the United Kingdom in the late 1980s. It lasted until the mid 1990s, peaking circa 1990 to 1991. The British music press (notably
NME and Melody Maker) called this genre "shoegazing" because the musicians in these bands often maintained a motionless performing style, standing on stage and staring at the floor while playing their instruments; hence, the idea that they were gazing at their shoes. The shoegazing sound featured extensive use of guitar effects, and indistinguishable vocal melodies that blended into the creative noise of the guitars. Some notable bands are
Ride,
Lush,
Swervedriver,
Slowdive,
Curve, and American bands
Lilys and the
Swirlies.
[more inside]posted by psmealey at 7:41 AM PST - 113 comments
If you like electronic music, you probably already know about some of the
blogs that
offer free live set downloads. You might even know about
mpiii. But, they all pale in comparison to the one and only
mixes db. posted by milarepa at 7:37 AM PST - 26 comments
Why is there so much
Viking-
themed architecture in Boston? The answer lies in racism and baking powder.
Eben Horsfeld revolutionized bread-making in the 1890s when he developed
Rumford's Baking Powder. Inspired by a
Norwegian superstar and nationalist and a
mysterious stone, he became convinced that the Viking
Lief Ericson had
landed in Cambridge, which he called Norumbega, and funded monuments and research to that effect. The Boston elite, threatened by new Irish immigrants, quickly seized on this concept,
since it showed that the cleaned-up Viking, and not Catholic Columbus, that had first settled their sacred city. A century later, it was
discovered that the Vikings did reach America first, though never Boston.
posted by blahblahblah at 7:12 AM PST - 34 comments
So you want to own a dog, but without all the hassles of dog ownership? Well, there's always doggy
daycare, dog walkers and even bakeries that cater to Cujo. But in the end, you're still stuck with the
worst chore of all - picking up all the yard mines that Poopsy has left for you.
Not anymore.
posted by itchylick at 6:58 AM PST - 32 comments
Handbags of Horror High-fashion handbags: They're expensive and ugly. So ugly, in fact, that they could only have been inspired by monsters from horror movies. Radar compares and contrasts.
posted by Faint of Butt at 3:15 AM PST - 23 comments
The Right Livelihood Award "celebrates and supports people of vision. People who have ideas and apply them in concrete initiatives for the public good. They give hope for tomorrow, for a world in peace and balance. They demonstrate how we can overcome oppression, war, poverty, the destruction of our environment, and a widespread sense of meaninglessness and fear."
posted by homunculus at 1:16 AM PST - 6 comments
October 2
King of Fruits, Tempter of Adam, Prize of Paris: It's
apple-picking time. The apple's
origins reach into prehistory. Thanks to tremendous
genetic variance in each new generation, humans have cultivated a
dizzying number of
named varieties, as many as
17,000, of which
7500 are available as growth stock. In the past,
different apples were prized for particular strengths:
cider pressing,
storage,
cooking,
drying, or eating out of hand. Despite this bounty,
just 15 shelf-stable, shiny,
easy-to-pick varieties account for 90% of apple sales today. But
heirloom apple growers are
working to preserve the old flavors of the
Roxbury Russet, the
Westfield Seek-No-Further, the
Fallawater, the
Limbertwig, the
King Luscious...
posted by Miko at 1:59 PM PST - 58 comments
The 12 Memorable Moments From The Late Show With David Letterman. Inspired by his recent
interview with everyone's favorite socialite cum ex-convict, Paris Hilton, here are is a YouTube link dump of some of Dave's crazier moments over the years, including,
the Alka-Seltzer suit,
Borat,
Pee Wee Herman,
Drew Barrymore,
Jerry Lawler slapping Andy Kaufman,
Sam Kinison,
Cher, and the incomparable
Crispin Glover. [
Previously]
posted by psmealey at 5:18 AM PST - 105 comments
Science Daily reports that researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center, have built a low-cost robotic device that enables any digital camera to produce breathtaking panormamic images called
Gigapans.
posted by Dave Faris at 4:55 AM PST - 25 comments
In the U.S., motorists do not pay their way. The US government spends more on highways and other auto-related expenses than it receives from auto-related taxes, unlike almost every country in Europe. In a recent
report [pdf], Mark Delucchi calculates automobile-related costs and revenues in three different ways and concludes the subsidy is around 20-70 cents per gallon or $24-105 billion in 2002. But what are automobile-related costs, you ask?
[more inside]posted by salvia at 2:02 AM PST - 99 comments
October 1
Any experienced studio engineer or producer knows that the presence of visitors in the studio can dramatically affect the performance of singers and musicians. Using advanced proprietary computer modelling, the
Virtual Studio Visitor plug-in convincingly emulates the effect of various studio visitors on a performance, without the need for the visitors to actually be present. Also from the visionaries at
Sonic Finger: the
Dead Quietenator provides you with the highest quality pure digital silence, including several highly sought-after vintage silences previously unattainable.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:44 PM PST - 20 comments
In October 1947, the directors of
J. Lyons & Co (think - teashops, nippies, bakeries, ice-creams, steakhouses, hotels, Wimpy Bars and Dunkin' Donuts), decided to take an active role in promoting the commercial development of computers.
In 1951 the
LEO I computer was operational and ran the world's first regular routine office computer job.
posted by tellurian at 8:53 PM PST - 13 comments
Last weekend's
PICNIC'07 conference in Amsterdam featured a
Green Challenge: to come up with the best marketable green idea that could be developed and sold to consumers within two years. Dutch decentralized renewable energy company
Qurrent took down the big €500,000 prize for the
Qbox: a device which creates optimizing energy algorithms for all devices in a home.
See also:
Green Thing.
posted by chuckdarwin at 1:42 PM PST - 10 comments
This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants... Now the emphasis is on 'surgical' strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism... The former intelligence official added...'Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, 'You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.' But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.'
Shifting
Targets by Seymour Hersh
See also
'The President Has Accepted Ethnic Cleansing'posted by y2karl at 12:25 PM PST - 148 comments
In 1975, armed with a big pile of 8-track car stereos and a whole lot of moxie, Dave Biro set out to change the sound of rock music. He failed spectacularly. This is the fascinating and tragic story of one of the rarest instruments in rock music-
The Birotron.
[more inside]posted by 40 Watt at 12:14 PM PST - 19 comments
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