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October 2011 Archives
October 31
Not content to keep funding expeditions of Westerners to learn about Tanna, in 2007 the National Geographic funded an expedition of five men from Tanna's
Prince Philip movement cargo cult to visit England, stay with families, and eventually meet Prince Philip himself whom they revere as the son of their God. Jimmy, who was a member of the expedition and the narrator for the film has posted the video on his
youtube account.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
In 2009 the Travel Channel aired Meet the Natives: USA, which brought five men from
another group from Tanna to the United States. Their tribe within Tanna reveres Tom Navy, an American World War II sailor who generations ago had taught the inhabitants to live in peace. The Tanna ambassadors were taken across, visiting five states, and eventually meeting former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell and verifying with him that the spirit of peace taught by Tom Navy lives on in the current U.S. President, Barack Obama. While visiting with a family on Fort Stewart, a US Army Major-General conferred a World War II Victory Medal and an Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal upon the chief in representation of the contribution the people of Tanna in World War II.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Be sure to look for Jimmy's responses to questions in the mercifully uncharacteristic youtube comments
[more inside]posted by Blasdelb at 8:22 PM PST - 16 comments
In this little-known but fast-growing corner of the auto market, dealers command premium prices for road-worn vehicles and finance the sales at interest rates that can top 30%.
posted by sf9719 at 7:34 PM PST - 66 comments
Alex Cox:
REPO MAN was made as a "negative pickup" by Universal at the time when Bob Rehme was head of the studio. At the time, the big deal over there was STREETS OF FIRE, and nobody really noticed our film [8 MB PDF] at all. Which was lucky for us, since Bob Rehme had "green-lighted" a film which was quite unusual by studio standards. (previously)posted by Trurl at 7:07 PM PST - 92 comments
A reformed skinhead, Bryon Widner was desperate to rid himself of the racist tattoos that covered his face - so desperate that he turned to former enemies for help, and was willing to endure months of pain in a journey from
racism to
redemption.
[more inside]posted by mannequito at 4:33 PM PST - 161 comments
After the, aheh, weirdness surrounding Ann Vandermeer's departure from Weird Tales (
Previously), Jeff and Ann Vandermeer have now released the succinctly titled compendium of weird fiction, "
The Weird," covering 100 years and 750,000 words of weird fiction.
The hitherto-silent "companion site,"
Weird Fiction Review, launches today, revealing itself to be a bit of an all-purpose blog about fiction as well as general strangeness and affiliated oddities.
[more inside]posted by Scattercat at 3:44 PM PST - 27 comments
This is why a prefer being under a canopy with a cutaway handle.
posted by Dean358 at 2:59 PM PST - 63 comments
WoodTreks is a well-produced video blog about traditional woodworking with hand tools. Many of the videos are aimed at the beginner.
[more inside]posted by jedicus at 11:32 AM PST - 21 comments
The remarkable occurrences of which I am about to write were related by certain French persons of sound sense and unimpeachable veracity, who happened to be in Berlin a few weeks before the outbreak of the European War. The Kaiser, the most superstitious monarch who ever sat upon the Prussian throne, sternly forbade the circulation of the report of these happenings in his own country, but our gallant Allies across the Channel are, fortunately, not obliged to obey the despotic commands of Wilhelm II, and these persons, therefore, upon their return to France, related, to those interested in such matters, the following story of the great War Lord's three visitations from the dreaded ghost of the Hohenzollerns.
From "Wilhelm II and the White Lady of the Hohenzollerns," by Katharine Cox, as reproduced in S. Mukerji's charmingly digressive
Indian Ghost Stories.
posted by Iridic at 10:19 AM PST - 2 comments
does anyone remember this kid’s show “I think Candle Cove ran for only a couple months in ’71, not ’72. I was 12 and I watched it a few times with my brother. It was channel 58, whatever station that was. My mom would let me switch to it after the news. Let me see what I remember.”
posted by kipmanley at 10:10 AM PST - 20 comments
October 30
There is this perception that the only China skeptics are foreigners. Let me tell you that is completely wrong. The debate within China is much more interesting and much more ferocious than the debate outside of China about problems with the growth model.
Michael Pettis is a professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management, where he specializes in Chinese financial markets. Here
he talks about China's economic prospects.
posted by storybored at 8:59 PM PST - 25 comments
My purpose here has been to inquire into mediated understandings of Hindley, and to question how popular texts delineate between the deeds of a human being and the way those deeds are culturally inscribed. The task is neither conclusive nor complete, for monsters are illusive. There is always some part of them that evades both enunciation and comprehension.posted by Trurl at 7:05 PM PST - 15 comments
"Rather than adopting the popular perspective on gaming as a way of escaping life, engaging in violence or being antisocial, the film focuses on the gamers’ pure joy in their hard-sought achievements, the thrill of high-level competition, the significance it gives their lives, and the communities they create."
Jon Rafman's (
previously, and
previously) Codes of Honor.
Text and
Video.
[more inside]posted by codacorolla at 6:48 PM PST - 8 comments
Microwhat is a website where people microwave stuff, just to see what it looks like after 60 seconds on setting 9. [warning: blinky]
posted by mippy at 2:20 PM PST - 33 comments
Cedric Laquieze is a sculptor specializing in unusual creatures like fairy flowers and goddesses made from organic materials.
posted by netbros at 11:48 AM PST - 6 comments
The Movie Set That Ate Itself. Five years ago, a relatively unknown (and unhinged) director began one of the wildest experiments in film history. Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshaled a cast of thousands and thousands, and constructed a totalitarian society in which the cameras are always rolling and the actors never go home.posted by mykescipark at 11:47 AM PST - 53 comments
Wanwanlink weaves together a sequence of motion in realtime, using fragments of archival footages that are being collected daily. When a human figure appears on the screen, the sound is deliberately distorted into a slow 'wan wan.' This project, with a theme linking to classification and dependency, shall continue to be developed for a very long time. (Footages featured on this website belong to the public domain. Clips were downloaded from http://www.archive.org/).
posted by bonsai forest at 9:30 AM PST - 14 comments
October 29
This is a 2 minute single link youtube video entitled
Thanks, Smokey! . It has dancing, hoodies, surprises and I don't know why it is called 'Thanks, Smokey!'. God bless
. (NSFW)
posted by dgaicun at 7:09 PM PST - 37 comments
in 1994, Gary Larson's
Far Side came to life on television in the form of an animated Halloween special like no other.
Tales From The Far Side only aired once, and the television version differs from the not-easily-located DVD version. You can read more about this dark and hilarious animated classic
courtesy of Vinnie Rattolle's, and find a copy of the television version for your very own holiday viewing.
posted by hippybear at 7:03 PM PST - 28 comments
Just wait till we're alone together. Then I will tell you something new, something cold, something sleepy, something of cease and peace and the long bright curve of space. Go upstairs to your room. I will be waiting for you... As a rare October blizzard drifts a blanket of white across the Northeast just before Halloween, what better time to settle in and read (or watch)
Conrad Aiken's most famous short story,
"Silent Snow, Secret Snow." About a small boy who increasingly slips into an ominous fantasy of isolation and endless snow, it could be viewed as a metaphor about autism, Asperger's syndrome, and even schizophrenia before such conditions even had names. In addition to the 1934 short story, the tale has also been adapted as a
creepy 1966 black-and-white
short film (also at
the Internet Archive) and as a
Night Gallery episode (
1,
2) narrated by Orson Welles. Or for a more academic take, see the essay
"The Delicious Progress" examining Aiken's use of white as a symbol of psychological regression.
posted by Rhaomi at 4:15 PM PST - 9 comments
Sick. Parts
11,
12,
13, and
14.
[NSFW] An incredibly dark, raw, self-aware, and often insightful look into the depressed mind of a cartoonist evaluating his life.
posted by spiderskull at 3:23 PM PST - 29 comments
The Last Act of the Notorious Howie Spira. The conventional shorthand for what George Steinbrenner did wrong, in press accounts of the mudslinging-and-extortion scandal, is this: The Yankees owner had an "association with Howard Spira." It made Spira sound menacing—this known gambler, this criminal element. He was the embodiment of the Yankees owner's dark side: Steinbrenner the Nixon bagman, the convicted-and-pardoned felon. Under questioning in court, Steinbrenner described their relationship in ominous terms. Did Spira "destroy" him? "As far as baseball is concerned, yes," Steinbrenner said. "He did a very good job."posted by auto-correct at 3:06 PM PST - 2 comments
YouTube
(Google) is
spending $100 million dollars to create 25hrs a day of new original content. Intending to compete with cable TV, they'll have
100 "channels" with regular series and well-known talent. The channels are being developed "specifically for the digital age," which sounds like they're trying to create a new type of media, they compare it to the advent of cable television. There's a graveyard of
ideas like this that failed, but maybe YouTube is different this time. First channels show up in a few weeks, most appear in 2012.
posted by stbalbach at 11:08 AM PST - 51 comments
October 28
A McAfee researcher has demonstrated that certain Medtronic insulin pumps can be remotely controlled without authorization. An unscrupulous hacker could, for instance, command the pump to release its full load of insulin, which would kill the diabetic.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:57 PM PST - 82 comments
Armstrong is an online graphic novel in 3 parts (with more potentially to come), each on a long-scrolling 'infinite canvas'.
1,
2,
3. It has everything, Superheroes, Zombies, Pirates, Cowboys and Cooties. Cooties? Well, it is set in a playground full of 4th graders.
[more inside]posted by oneswellfoop at 4:03 PM PST - 7 comments
More Mayo is the podcast version of BBC's
Simon Mayo Drivetime. Mayo is best known outside of the UK as one half of the Mayo and Kermode's Film Reviews. The centerpiece of the More Mayo podcast is the confessions, where listeners write in asking forgiveness for past transgressions. They are often funny and sometimes jaw-dropping (such as the first one in the latest episode). The podcasts are generally around a half an hour long and contain three or four confessions and a short interview with anyone from huge celebrities to debut novelists to children. The podcasts are available to download for 30 days.
posted by Kattullus at 1:20 PM PST - 6 comments
Préludes Op. 28 by Chopin, played live by Vladimir Ashkenazy. This must have been recorded around 1980, when he was touring with these pieces. No.
1-6 [more inside]posted by Namlit at 12:18 PM PST - 9 comments
We and the Color is a blog about creative inspiration in art, graphic design, illustration, photography, architecture, fashion, product, interior, video and motion design. Also
on Flickr.
posted by netbros at 9:20 AM PST - 1 comments
"For the last two weeks, people have been like, "talk about sluts on Halloween!" And at first I didn't even really want to make this video because you, my friend, are talking to a slut on Halloween. But because people kept bombarding my social media platforms with requests for me to do a video on sluts on Halloween, I'm gonna do a video on sluts on Halloween. But I'll tell you one thing right now: you're not gonna like it."
(nsfw language, her avatar is a lingerie pic, plus it's a single-link vlog post)
[more inside]posted by juliplease at 9:11 AM PST - 146 comments
Dusan Stulik and his colleagues at the Getty institute are taking a
very much closer look at alternative photographic processes – a molecular-level-look, that may even change history. Here is a
NY Times profile of Stulik and the GCI.
posted by beshtya at 1:20 AM PST - 6 comments
Wikipedia has an
experimental feature called
Feedback Dashboard that allows new editors to leave a brief comment and a mood of 3 choices: Happy, Confused, Sad. It's sort of addictive to scroll through as people discover Wikipedia and reactions.
posted by stbalbach at 12:33 AM PST - 18 comments
October 27
The Texas Rangers were one strike away from winning the World Series for the first time in their 40-year history in
Game 6 Thursday night. Twice.
[more inside]posted by kirkaracha at 11:21 PM PST - 140 comments
The
Mad Hatter’s Tea Party was a popular children’s birthday-party venue that was run out of several locations in North Toronto in the 1980's. Whisked away in a hearse, throngs of elementary-school children were led through a "magical underground kingdom" by teenaged attendants, participating in whipped-cream fights and shopping-cart bumpercars, with
no parents allowed.
[more inside]posted by murphy slaw at 11:01 PM PST - 29 comments
[Arvo] Pärt’s mature style was inaugurated in 1976 with a small piano piece, “Für Alina”, that remains one of his best-known works. It is governed by the compositional system that he called “tintinnabuli,” derived from the Latin word for “bells.” The tintinnabuli method pairs each note of the melody with a note that comes from a harmonizing chord, so they ring together with bell-like resonance. [more inside]posted by Trurl at 6:53 PM PST - 53 comments
Oh hi! You're here just in time for a trifecta of things we love: Cute little robots, fixed gear bicycles, and single-link YouTube posts!
I hope you like it!posted by ardgedee at 4:38 PM PST - 41 comments
Carl Sagan famously said that
we are all made of star stuff. In his vision the basic building blocks of life were jettisoned into interstellar space by the massive explosions of stars going supernova. Now scientists from Hong Kong University
have claimed that the results of their
latest study(paywall), published in Nature, indicate that stars can create complex organic compounds on the very short timescale of weeks.
[more inside]posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 4:04 PM PST - 48 comments
The U.S. House of Representatives has
drafted their version of Senator
Leahy's Protect IP Act,
renaming the bill the
E-Parasites Act. Among other changes discussed
previ
ously, the bill
now makes internet service providers and websites liable for activities of their users that infringe upon copyrights, effectively overturning parts of the 13-year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:00 PM PST - 120 comments
In December 1946, 100,000 union members participated in a 54-hour general strike that effectively shut down Oakland, California. Since November,
425 non-union retail clerks at Kahn’s and Hastings department stores had been picketing for several weeks, attempting to organize as the Retail Clerks (Local 1265). On December 1, after Teamsters refused to deliver merchandise to the stores in solidarity, the Retail Merchants Association,
sent in 12 trucks driven by non-union strikebreakers, supported by a 300-member police escort [PDF]. The next day, "the bus drivers," remembers Secretary of the Alameda County Central Labor Council Robert Ash, "
told the police that the carmen had never crossed a picket line, and so long as that cop picket line was across the street, they were not going to take the streetcars or the buses through."
[more inside]posted by liketitanic at 11:02 AM PST - 92 comments
A Planetary Crisis Is A Terrible Thing to Waste There are striking similarities between the current economic and ecological crises — both involve indulgent over-consumption and a failure to consider the impacts on future generations. But it’s not too late to look to new economic and environmental models and to dramatically change course. opines Der Spiegel environmental journalist,
Christian Schwägerlposted by infini at 10:48 AM PST - 17 comments
How the Joy of Sex was illustrated. [BBC] Forty years ago, a London publisher was working on a groundbreaking sex manual - a "gourmet guide" to sexual pleasure, with copious and detailed illustrations. But how could this be done tastefully and legally?
posted by Fizz at 10:42 AM PST - 26 comments
Today's New York Times has
an article about young Mormons finding a way to live their values while remaining socially "with it" -- by turning to hipster culture.
posted by naturalog at 6:31 AM PST - 71 comments
When we did "Beat It," Michael came in the van with us to scout locations. I remember saying, "I'm hungry, let's stop for a pizza." Michael said, "Oh good, I've never had a pizza." This is a 25-year-old man who'd never had pizza. Now he wasn't accessible like that. He was a superstar, but then he became a deity.
I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution
is a hugely readable and fun new oral history of the first decade of MTV. Veteran music writers Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum interviewed many of the era's major players, putting a microscope on the biggest, weirdest, and most memorable videos of the time, and [Pitchfork is] thrilled to present the following excerpt.posted by obscurator at 12:06 AM PST - 28 comments
October 26
The Burton Holmes Archive has information about Burton Holmes, the travel writer who became the first person to make filmic travelogues. More importantly, they also have a lot of
film clips by Holmes and his associate,
André de la Varre, who was also a great travelogue maker himself. Watching these clips is not quite time travel, but it is as close as we can get. Take a look at
Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1926,
Lake Michigan in 20s,
Cairo in 1932 and
the 1955 Rio de Janeiro carnival. The later films have sound and narration, but I prefer the silent ones.
[Burton Holmes previously, André de la Varre previously, and the Travel Film Archive, which runs Burton Holmes site, previously]posted by Kattullus at 7:30 AM PST - 5 comments
For weeks,
Occupy Oakland had been developing into a miniature city in Frank Ogawa Plaza—renamed Oscar Grant (
previously) Plaza by the occupiers—in front of City Hall:
Still, seven days into the protest and there is no longer any room for tents on the plaza’s large lawn. Tents are squeezed together so tightly that in many areas there is no room to move in between them, for me in my wheelchair or for someone who walks. There is more access to the community tents. There is a free school, an art station, a Sukkot tent, a medical tent, a children’s area, a people of color tent, and a quite remarkable food station, where huge batches of soups and beans are made, and tea, coffee, and healthy snacks seem to be abundant. The various projects the camp is working on include installing solar panels, and reclaiming parts of the park as a community garden.
—Sunaura Taylor writing in the excellent
Occupy! An OWS-Inspired Gazette from n+1 magazine (PDF, quote from page 21)
Early yesterday morning the occupation was
forcibly evicted by Oakland police. Last night, occupiers marched to reclaim the plaza and were again
attacked by police using tear gas, flash grenades, bean bag rounds, and possibly rubber bullets.
[more inside]posted by enn at 7:09 AM PST - 348 comments
When the machines take over, how will people make a living? Paul Allen:
Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter machines will soon outrun all human capabilities. They call this tipping point the singularity, because they believe it is impossible to predict how the human future might unfold after this point. Once these machines exist, Kurzweil and Vinge claim, they'll possess a superhuman intelligence that is so incomprehensible to us that we cannot even rationally guess how our life experiences would be altered. Vinge asks us to ponder the role of humans in a world where machines are as much smarter than us as we are smarter than our pet dogs and cats. Kurzweil, who is a bit more optimistic, envisions a future in which developments in medical nanotechnology will allow us to download a copy of our individual brains into these superhuman machines, leave our bodies behind, and, in a sense, live forever. It's heady stuff. [more inside]posted by kgasmart at 6:49 AM PST - 100 comments
So. While hunting for a
live performance of
a song from the
Beatmania IIDX series, a totally sweet primarily-piano piece known for its near-impossibility to play as a video game, much less on real instruments, I stumbled upon
this incredible version, performed by
the phenomenal TeppeikunViolin and his lovely pianist assistant.
Of course, it turns out that beyond just having RIDICULOUS chops on the violin, he's also a nerd in the best sense. Not only has he done a
great violin cover of the
internet sensation "Bad Apple!!", he's also done
a cover of the music from the original Legend of Zelda that must be seen, a
cover of Super Mario Bros. that makes subtle reference in the background, as any good Japanese Nintendo fan should, to
"Kintamario," and a little something he calls
"Tetris being played on a Game Boy with a dying battery" that absolutely must be seen to be believed.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:06 AM PST - 4 comments
Ross Becker's
photographs of Christchurch. The central business district reopens this weekend for the first time since the earthquake (Previously:
1,
2,
3) on February 22, 2011.
[more inside]posted by doublehappy at 3:53 AM PST - 3 comments
"Offstage, with his Fleshlight in his hand, 'D-Bone', who will be flown to Austin to compete in the Air Sex finals next month, didn't break character. 'I feel fantastic,' he said. 'It's always a pleasure to be the best air-fucker in the city. I'm going to have tons of chicks over at my place tonight, with lots of cocaine and drugs.'"--L.A. Weekly covers
the Air Sex (Regional) World Championships (kinda NSFW)
posted by bardic at 12:49 AM PST - 38 comments
October 25
"Because you know most babies don't cry ..." "In South Dakota, Native American children make up only 15 percent of the child population, yet they make up more than half the children in foster care. An NPR News investigation has found that the state is removing 700 native children every year, sometimes in questionable circumstances. "
posted by HuronBob at 8:03 PM PST - 95 comments
The San Francisco Symphony’s radio project, The Keeping Score Series: 13 Days When Music Changed Forever, is about musical revolutions—about the composers, compositions, and musical movements that changed the way people heard, or thought about, music. Each program explores the historical backdrop and the musical precursors to the revolutionary change, as well as the lasting influence of that moment in music history. [more inside]posted by hippybear at 4:08 PM PST - 35 comments
The B53 wasn’t just any old megabomb. It was the first bunker buster. U.S. nuclear doctrine called for it to be delivered over suspected underground Soviet command-and-control facilities. The dumb bomb wouldn’t destroy them so much as it would destroy everything remotely near it, leaving — literally — a smoldering crater. That was the U.S. plan for “victory” in a nuclear war right up until the implosion of the Soviet Empire. (related) [more inside]posted by Trurl at 2:59 PM PST - 75 comments
"Before you make a complete fool of yourself when you send a link to your friends,
colleagues or twitter followers (or post it to Metafilter) use
ISITOLD.COM to make sure it's fresh enough." May not work on some long urls.
=== That's "IS IT OLD", not "IS I TOLD". ===posted by oneswellfoop at 2:24 PM PST - 49 comments
"
Art Tatum was [one of the two] dominant piano players of the 1930s, astounding everyone with his technique, most especially other piano players, who were convinced he was playing the impossible" -- Chick Corea, hosting a segment on the largely overlooked
Arthur "Art" Tatum, Jr. If that display of skill and improvisation has you interested, here are a few documentaries about the mostly blind piano man who made other pianists question their instrument choice, yet often left the public at large overwhelmed (or unimpressed):
Toledo Stories: The Tatum Legacy (YouTube, 28 minutes) ::
Art Tatum - The Art Of Jazz Piano (YT, 52 min.) ::
Art Tatum: A Talent Never to Be Duplicated (NPR, audio only, 11 min.) ::
Art Tatum, 'The Musician's Musician' (NPR audio, 54 min.)
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 2:20 PM PST - 33 comments
Inside the Mind of the Octopus: "The heavy lid covering her tank separated our two worlds. One world was mine and yours, the reality of air and land, where we lumber through life governed by a backbone and constrained by jointed limbs and gravity. The other world was hers, the reality of a nearly gelatinous being breathing water and moving weightlessly through it."
In exploring the world and personality of the octopus, a journalist relates his interactions with a Giant Pacific Octopus and provides a look at the remarkable intelligence of the short lived cephalopods.
[via]posted by quin at 1:16 PM PST - 66 comments
The Golden Age of Music Video blog, chock full of "
amazing true tales from Music Video's greatest era (1976-1993), is written by Stephen Pitalo, a music video historian currently writing a book with interviews of more than fifty music video directors who shot iconic clips during the genre's heyday."
posted by not_on_display at 12:48 PM PST - 11 comments
October 24
Hanover Historical Texts Project is a collection of primary source texts from ancient times to the modern era in English translation. There is a great number of interesting texts, for instance accounts of
Zeno, he of the paradoxes,
the diary of Lady Sarashina, a lady-in-waiting in Heian era Japan,
a letter from Count Stephen of Blois and Chartres, a crusader writing to his wife,
Arthur Young's travels in France before and during the Revolution,
a report by the American ambassador in St. Petersburg on March 20th, 1917, immediately after the February Revolution, and finally
Petrarch's letter about his graphomania. That last one is from what is perhaps my favorite part of the website, a trove of
Petrarch's Familiar Letters. But there's much more in the Hanover Historical Texts Projects besides what I've mentioned.
posted by Kattullus at 9:53 PM PST - 6 comments
BlizzCon, the monumental annual event that Blizzard Entertainment puts on every year, just wrapped up this weekend. It concluded with a massive party and concert, during which George Fisher was at one point invited on stage. Mr. Fisher is also known by his stage name "Corpsegrinder" and is the singer for heavy metal band Cannibal Corpse. In order to introduce him to the audience,
this snippet of an interview with him was played (YT link). In case it's not totally clear what's getting beeped out,
here's the unedited version (YT link, NSFW language).
[more inside]posted by kavasa at 9:16 PM PST - 61 comments
"Long ago Occidental man acquired a definite preference for raised bread instead of cooked cereals and flat breads. Bread reigned over the ancient world; no food before or after exerted such mastery over man. The Egyptians, who invented it, based their entire administrative system on it; the Jews made bread the starting point of their religious and social laws. The Greeks created profound and solemn legends for their Bread Church of Eleusis. And the Romans converted bread into a political factor. They ruled by it, conquered an entire world by it, and lost the world again through it. At last the day came when Jesus Christ made consummate all the spiritual significance that had become attached to it, saying, 'Eat! I am the bread.'" (
Reinhart,
Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History). (Google Books)
The Romans ruled through bread and circuses; "bread" (and "dough") are money, and the "bread-winner" is the head of the household. The next big invention is always "the greatest thing since sliced bread" Wheat, Rye, Brioche, Challah, Matzo, Limpa--a look inside the long and fascinating history of bread.
[more inside]posted by kittenmarlowe at 2:51 PM PST - 55 comments
How
Dropbox said "No" to Steve Jobs and lived happily ever after. (So far.)
posted by Trurl at 2:39 PM PST - 110 comments
John McCarthy, AI pioneer, ACM Turning Award winner, National Medal of Science winner, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University and inventor of the
Lisp programming language
passed away suddenly last night at the age of 84.
posted by eriko at 1:21 PM PST - 84 comments
Vancouver aims to "end homelessness by 2015". Officials have been working over the years to reduce the city’s homelessness, and in July passed an ambitious plan that targets eliminating street homelessness by 2015 and creating nearly 40,000 new units of social, rental, and condo housing by 2021.
The plan is aimed at building multiple types of housing to address shortages, but the first three years focus mainly on supportive and social housing. It calls for 3,650 units of such housing, 1,700 of which are already funded and in either the planning or construction phase. According to city councilor Kerry Jang, the need for this type of supportive housing has skyrocketed in recent years.
posted by modernnomad at 12:39 PM PST - 96 comments
Daily Racing Form: from nags to doping! Horse racing is one of the oldest pastimes, with wagering on the nags following closely after. Betting intelligently requires either a good eye or an available record of past performance. Originally a Chicago newspaper, this periodical gives the tout the inside scoop on past performances. The monumental digitization of this paper brings a
new light on racing sport. And they're off and running...
posted by mfoight at 10:27 AM PST - 19 comments
Here is a nice wee video that visualises special relativity; not by imagining the viewer to be travelling very fast, but rather by imagining the speed of light to be very slow. The creators of the code used to generate the images in the video have a rather accessible paper explaining the physics behind it
here, and a page full of other lovely relativistic odds and sods
here.
posted by Dim Siawns at 9:13 AM PST - 15 comments
A High-Profile Executive Job as Defense Against Mental Ills. “I feel my brain is damaged; I don’t know any other way to say it,” Ms. Myrick said. “I don’t know if it’s from the illness, the medications, all those side effects or what. I only know that I do need certain things in my life, and for a long time — well, I had to get to know myself first.” (Nytimes link). Keris Myrick is also on the board of
NAMI, National Alliance on Mental Illness.
posted by sweetkid at 8:04 AM PST - 71 comments
A Coconut Cake From Emily Dickinson: Reclusive Poet, Passionate Baker. [NPR.org] Poet Emily Dickinson withdrew from society for most of her adult life. And yet, she was known to lower a basket full of cakes from the window of the home she rarely left to crowds of expectant children on the street below.
The Poet's House in New York City put on exhibit an original manuscript of a Dickinson cake recipe that contained coconut. That recipe calls for the following ingredients.
1 cup coconut,
2 cups flour,
1 cup sugar,
1/2 cup butter,
1/2 cup milk,
2 eggs,
1/2 teaspoon soda,
1 teaspoon cream of tartar.
posted by Fizz at 7:31 AM PST - 25 comments
October 23
A man finds out the
story of his parents' second date.
[Warning: may cause dust to be attracted to your eye]posted by shothotbot at 8:17 PM PST - 33 comments
In this annual
contest, each dance must be based on a scientist's Ph.D. research, and the scientist must be part of the dance. Biomedical engineer Joel Miller has won
Best Ph.D. Dance of 2011. The crowning ceremony will be held at
TEDxBrussels in Belgium on November 22, 2011. No word yet on whether the winning choreography will be performed.
Previously danced here.
posted by Laminda at 7:29 PM PST - 18 comments
150 years ago, a primitive Internet united the USA. "Long before there was an Internet or an iPad, before people were social networking and instant messaging, Americans had already gotten wired. Monday marks the 150th anniversary of the completion of the
transcontinental telegraph. From sea to sea, it electronically knitted together a nation that was simultaneously tearing itself apart, North and South, in the Civil War. Americans soon saw that a
breakthrough in the spread of technology could enhance national identity and, just as today, that it could vastly change lives."
posted by homunculus at 6:42 PM PST - 49 comments
Folk-punk,
Orgcore (
UD definition) and
Dadpunk are all names for a
new wave of earnest, authentic rock that draws its roots from The Clash,
Billy Bragg, The Pogues, Social Distortion and Bruce Springsteen. In England, its best represented by
Frank Turner, the former singer of hardcore band
Million Dead. His anthemic songs about
life on the margins of fame,
poetry,
death,
inspiration and
the power of rock and roll have made him famous in England, leading to an upcoming
show at Wembley Arena. He follows in the footsteps of British folk-punk pioneers
Leatherface.
[more inside]posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 6:07 PM PST - 92 comments
What is the only professional, modern dance company to grow directly out of a college modern dance class? ... What is the only professional modern dance company directed by not a singular choreographer, but rather a group collaboration, using improvisational techniques? The answer to... those questions is the world famous dance company, Pilobolus. (links nsfw - previously) [more inside]posted by Trurl at 12:20 PM PST - 8 comments
Time lapse videos can be breathtaking, lovely, and a joy to watch… but they can also show you something you may not have thought about before. Before I even read the caption for Murray Fredericks’ video called "IRIDIUM", I knew it was filmed in the southern hemisphere. Can you guess how? [more inside]posted by infinite intimation at 11:15 AM PST - 14 comments
The iPod turns 10 Today marks the 10th anniversary of the introduction of the iPod. Touted in a low-key
presentation as a player that would let you carry 1000 (!) songs in a player the size of a pack of cards (!), the 1st gen model didn't really impress
techies (or
mefi), though consumers quickly fell for the stylish white and stainless player. In the ensuing years, Apple kept plugging away at new
models, and today, few even remember that Apple was late to this game. (
previously)
posted by Gilbert at 9:35 AM PST - 318 comments
October 22
Gory images of Gaddafi. Exotic pets being slaughtered. The EU on the verge of a financial meltdown... Your 90-second
mental health break, courtesy of Lynda Carter.
posted by wensink at 12:32 PM PST - 90 comments
October 21
Derek Crozier was an idiosyncratic crossword setter who, under the pseudonym Crosaire, ran the Irish Times cryptic crossword singlehandedly for almost 70 years.
He died in April 2010 at the age of 92, having compiled over 14000 daily crosswords. The last puzzle completed before his death, number 14605, runs in today's
Irish Times.
[more inside]posted by rollick at 8:11 PM PST - 6 comments
For more than a decade
E-Sword: The sword of the lord with an electronic edge has been the standard electronic bible available as freeware to anyone with a computer. E-sword is a fantastic resource for anyone wanting to get to know the bible better, whether you are reading from a devotional, historical, critical, or literary standpoint; or just have a habit of getting into arguments with street pastors, doorknockers, or religious relatives and like to win.
[more inside]posted by Blasdelb at 7:11 PM PST - 40 comments
Bathos. A simple puzzle game. Avoid reading spoilers! Players may want to avoid this thread until finished with the game.
posted by kmz at 1:02 PM PST - 57 comments
Manila folders (the common paper good, not the
Filipino contortionists) are made from the fiber of the abacá plant. Sometimes called "Manila hemp" due to its
origin in the Philippines, it is not a true hemp because the fibers come from the
leaf petiole, not the
bast fibers (sourced from the phloem or inner bark) of the plant. The petiole layers, called "tuxies", are stripped off using a
tuxying knife and separated either by hand or mechanically. Abacá (
Musa textilis) is a relative of bananas and plaintains (both also
Musa species). Other than its utility for making the aforementioned common cream-colored office product (also available in non-folder form as "oak tag" or "tag board"), abacá is resistant to salt water and therefore
valued for cordage (especially
hawsers) and nets. It is also used to make a fabric called
Sinamay (often used to make hats) and other common products like rugs and twine (with the coarser outer fibers) and tea bags, filter paper, vacuum cleaner bags, and other papers (with the finer inner fibers.)
posted by nekton at 6:54 AM PST - 26 comments
October 20
Because it's Fall, f*ckfaces. Realizing that McSweeney's is disfavored on MeFi, and that many will have seen this before, I offer this nonetheless. Because it's that time of the year, and goddamit, it's funny.
posted by mikeand1 at 8:11 PM PST - 59 comments
Treshr makes it easy to give things away, or, the other way around, find free stuff. Everyone has stuff they don’t need anymore. Maybe your child outgrew their old clothes, or you moved to a new place and have old furniture to get rid of. Whatever it is you’re looking for, someone somewhere is trying to throw it away. Treshr is basically a search engine for
Freecycle, a nonprofit movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. [
via]
[more inside]posted by netbros at 4:57 PM PST - 28 comments
Here's the deal: If you don't play for, or you are not an employee of, the team in question, "we" is not the pronoun you're looking for.
"They" is the word you want.
Why
"We" is the most overused term in sports.
posted by The Gooch at 1:45 PM PST - 154 comments
Here's a little musical journey. Let's start with
Sherlock's Daughter, a dream-pop group of Brooklyn-based
Aussies. From this, extract the keyboardist and electronics wizard Jonti Danilewitz, creating:
D'Animals, then simplified as Danimals. It started as a solo outing, but
turned into a group, who
produced an odd single (which spun off
an animated music video under the name Djanimals). The group also won the chance to
work with Mark Ronson and
a bunch of well-known musicians, producing
a single with a video. Spin out a bit further, and Jonti is on his own (again), releasing
a mixtape "album" from his private collection, and most recently signing with
Stones Throw Records, where he has finally released
his solo debut album (streaming online). Bonus tangents inside.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 1:11 PM PST - 6 comments
October 19
The familiar '70s query, "Is it art or porn?," took on a whole new dimension with The Night Porter (NSFW), a stylish and astoundingly seamy fusion of erotica and stark concentration camp trauma. While many subsequent films, mostly Italian, took the Nazi sexploitation route to unbelievably tastless levels, Liliana Cavani's treatment remains more problematic. More concerned with mood and characterization than cheap thrills, the film is nevertheless extremely kinky and shocking enough to prove that its R rating is the product of a ratings system far different than the one we have now. [more inside]posted by Trurl at 6:57 PM PST - 17 comments
Many of us weren't born yet, but those who were, see 1968 was a pivotal year in US history.
The 1968 Exhibit. Everything you wanted to know about
1968 but were afraid to ask.
posted by Xurando at 5:33 PM PST - 53 comments
The book covers at Paris's famed Shakespeare and Company bookstore come to life in this stop-motion collaboration between director Spike Jonze and designer Olympia Le-Tan,
Mourir Auprès De Toi (To Die By Your Side).
[more inside]posted by Horace Rumpole at 2:02 PM PST - 15 comments
From May 12, 1939 to June 30, 1949, a fleet of
Stinson Reliants were used for a unique form of mail pick-up and delivery:
skyhooking. Similar in notion to the
mail-on-the-fly and
mail cranes used along rail lines,
the Reliants would fly low, deposit one load of mail and pick up the next, without stopping, providing mail service to rural communities. The Smithsonian National Postal Museum has
a 39 minute documentary presentation on YouTube, but it's a guy talking over powerpoint slides, which is pretty dry. Instead,
here is a modern news report with interviews of a skyhook pilot and old newsreel footage.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:35 PM PST - 24 comments
Penguin announces a cover contest for John Green's An Abundance of Katherines. John Green, one half of the
VlogBrothers (
previously on metafilter), is also a
Young Adult novelist. His upcoming book,
The Fault in Our Stars, has topped pre-order lists since its title was announced in June of 2011, thanks in no small part to Green's promise to
sign all pre-ordered copies of the book (150,000 total, as determined by his publisher).
Since the upcoming novel's title release,
fan-made covers have made the rounds on Tumblr, some for which Green has expressed
admiration himself. As it turns out, Penguin went with a
professionally-designed cover for TFiOS, but has also announced a contest to determine which fan-made cover it'll use for the next printing of Green's second novel,
An Abundance of Katherines.
posted by litnerd at 11:04 AM PST - 18 comments
October 18
Take This Lollipop personalizes the classic trope of the cyberstalker via Facebook.
“When you see your personal information in an environment where you normally wouldn’t, it creates a strong emotional response,” [TTL director Jason Zada] said. “It’s tied into the fears about privacy and personal info that we have now that we live online.” [more inside]posted by Tubalcain at 2:07 PM PST - 66 comments
The Midnight Sun is a natural phenomenon that occurs in the summer months near the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, where the sun remains visible at the local midnight. This short, time lapse film was shot in June 2011 over 17 days and incorporates 38,000 images. The photographer/videographer traveled over 2,900 miles throughout Iceland.
Midnight Sun (SL-vimeo, via) [more inside]posted by zarq at 1:58 PM PST - 24 comments
"We finally flew our first thermal camera flight yesterday afternoon. About 10 seconds after launch my co pilot looked at the screen and said something like, 'We now have our very own predator drone'" A rice farmer in Louisiana had a real problem, feral pigs were coming out of the woods at night, into the rice fields, tearing up his crops and causing
thousands of dollars worth of damage. The only solution is to bring in hunters to shoot the pigs.
Hunting feral pigs in waist high rice plants, in the dead of night, is very difficult. You have to be within 10 feet of them to shoot them and it can take hours to stalk them down. So the farmer calls his brother, an Electronic Warfare engineer who flies
RC airplanes as a hobby.
$5000 worth of electronics, including a
$4500 infrared camera, are installed on a $80 model airplane, and the
Dehogaflier is born!posted by smoothvirus at 12:28 PM PST - 52 comments
A new malaria vaccine has been shown effective in large-scale field trials. After decades of disappointment, researchers think they're finally on track to unleash the first practical vaccine against malaria, one of mankind's ancient scourges.
In the world's first large field trial of an experimental malaria vaccine, several thousand young children who got three doses had about 55 percent less risk of getting the disease over a year than those who got a control vaccine against rabies or meningitis. [more inside]posted by BobbyVan at 12:24 PM PST - 21 comments
"For EVERY youtube video, I always open the video and then immediately punch the slider bar to about 30 percent." -
Wadsworth
Thus was born the Wadsworth Constant, now implemented across YouTube. Add
&wadsworth=1 to any YouTube URL to jump 30% into the content.
[more inside]posted by odinsdream at 5:55 AM PST - 73 comments
October 17
Today is the 50th anniversary of the Paris massacre of
17 October 1961, when the city's police under
Maurice Papon murdered dozens if not hundreds of Algerians who were demonstrating peacefully against the curfew they were living under. A number of
commemorations were held in the city. For French speakers, an hour-long 1991 documentary on the massacre, Le silence du fleuve, can be
viewed in its entirety on Médiapart. (The title means 'the silence of the river': many of the dead drowned after being thrown in the Seine.)
posted by lapsangsouchong at 2:03 PM PST - 8 comments
The
Cynic's Corner, abandoned in 2003, features a handful of reviews for various Star Trek TV franchises, as well as Andromeda (ostensibly a Roddenberry project) and Babylon 5. Each review covers a variety of topics, including the Temporal Anomaly Of The Week, Spatial Anomaly Of The Week, Unexplained Mystery Of The Week, and the War Crime Of The Week. An entertaining read, and serious time sink, for anyone currently skipping past Lwaxana Troi episodes on Netflix Instant.
posted by Brocktoon at 11:20 AM PST - 15 comments
"The days when you could buy a videogame one day and get an expansion a year later are, sadly, lost in time. Instead, it seems there's a constant bombardment of DLC and microtransaction items all vying for our credit card numbers. They're in everything, from MMORPGs through to singleplayer shooters, and it's only getting worse as time goes on." -
An investigation into microtransactions and gaming.
posted by Artw at 10:34 AM PST - 114 comments
The government of Canada has decided to
end the
Canadian Wheat Board's single desk system for the sale and export of wheat and barley. This has been on the
Conservative agenda for
some time now, despite some claims that farmers
support the Wheat Board. Many are suggesting that the repercussions could stretch beyond wheat farmers; including concern for the town of Churchill, known mostly for the local
bear population, which does
95% of their port business through the Wheat Board.
A
history and
primer of the Wheat Board.
Previously
It's
co-op week on metafiler?
posted by Stagger Lee at 9:03 AM PST - 96 comments
There is
one argument that has taken the soccer world by storm:
Can Barcelona win on a cold, windy, night at The Britannia Stadium, home of Stoke City?
Conceived by Andy Gray (
talked about on the Blue before) when he said: “I don’t know if Barcelona have ever gone to a place like the Britannia Stadium and suffered the kind of onslaught from Tony Pulis’ team of long throws and free-kicks or been up to a place like Blackburn and been beaten up by their long ball into the box.”
There has certainly been
analysis of this
thorny question.
Of course, Stoke is in the Europa league this year. If they were to win the competition and advance to a Champions league spot, we might actually see this fixture.
posted by josher71 at 8:47 AM PST - 42 comments
The Reel History of Britain, a BFI/BBC co-production, brings archive film into the nation’s living rooms. The footage shown in the series has been selected from the hundreds of thousands of films and programmes preserved in Britain’s film and television archives. We are complementing the series by making many of the films featured in The Reel History of Britain available online in their entirety, alongside expert commentary from the nation’s archive curators.posted by Trurl at 8:38 AM PST - 4 comments
Feeling tired today? Back a little sore from that yard work? Morning run left your knees aching? Maybe you just had a lazy weekend. Well, in case you aren't frustrated enough with yourself for what you're (not) accomplishing, enjoy the story of Fauja Singh. Yesterday, the 100 year old
became the oldest person ever to complete a full marathon, finishing the 42 km Toronto Waterfront Marathon in under 9 hours (beating his personal target).
[more inside]posted by dry white toast at 8:21 AM PST - 30 comments
During the cold war Wartburg and Skoda exported cars from the Eastern Bloc to the United States. An action that was . . . controversial. One dealership received both
love and hate mail.
posted by Mitheral at 6:55 AM PST - 20 comments
The
Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition challenges higher degree students (PhD and MPhil) from Australia and New Zealand to communicate their research in three minutes to a non-specialist audience. Contestants are judged according to communication style, comprehension and engagement criteria. Here's the 2011 Winner, Matthew Thompson (
University of Queensland):
Suspects, science and CSI.
[more inside]posted by paleyellowwithorange at 2:00 AM PST - 31 comments
October 16
The Percentages: A Biography of Class. An autobiographical essay about growing up in the working class (as the author defines it) and then meeting the middle class (again, as the author defines it).
This is so far outside my experience that I can't even summarize it properly, but it's worth reading.posted by d. z. wang at 11:52 AM PST - 123 comments
Jamie Johnson, a heir to the
Johnson & Johnson fortune, uses his family connections to gain a critical insider’s perspective and remarkable unguarded interviews of those who hold 50% of America’s wealth in two self-made documentaries: The One Percent (parts
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7 and
8) and
Born Rich, along with a
Vanity Fair blog. From the other side:
Elizabeth Warren, The Woman Who Knew Too Much.
[more inside]posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 11:45 AM PST - 60 comments
F*ck You! Pay Me! Customers not wanting to pay for work done (or pay less than what was originally agreed to) is a common problem that many business owners run into. In this 40 minute video, Mike Monteiro, a web designer, and his lawyer offer advice on how to get clients to pay up. The talk is aimed at freelancers and small firms that provide creative services. Note: There is some swearing in this video. [via
Ask Mefi]
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 8:08 AM PST - 51 comments
Do Androids Dream of Electric Authors? [NYTimes.com] "So who was Lambert M. Surhone? Just looking at the numbers, you could argue that he’s one of the most prolific creators of literature who ever lived. But was he even human? There are now software programs — robots, if you will — that can gather text and organize it into a book. Surhone might be one of them."
posted by Fizz at 6:47 AM PST - 23 comments
October 15
"Somehow, we all end up in the same place, chasing the same trends while drinking the same drink while staring at the same app on the same phone." Jonah Lehrer (previously
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6)
looks at the drive for distinctiveness via
a recently published study [PDF] by Jonah Berger and Baba Shiv. "The point is that our most essential desires are weirdly intertwined, which is why it’s interesting that making people think about distinctiveness has such a big impact
on how badly they crave food."
posted by cashman at 7:58 PM PST - 26 comments
Now available for online viewing: the first episode of the new webseries by Felicia Day and her production company Knights Of Good, in association with Bioware --
Dragon Age: Redemption.
posted by hippybear at 5:46 PM PST - 38 comments
Underwater methane seeps may host ecosystem that nourishes shark eggs. It has been understood for some time that deep water methane seeps nourish bacteria far from the reach of photosynthesis. As part of the food chain worms and clams eat the same bacteria far from the reach of photosynthesis. Now, underwater photos from two locations on the globe show fertilized shark, ray, and skate eggs nestled in the worms nourished from the bacteria far from the reach of photosynthesis.
[more inside]posted by pandabearjohnson at 11:51 AM PST - 17 comments
It's all 'Moneyball' Now "You didn’t have to spend the day dancing around the drum circle in Zuccotti Park to see Game 5 of the Yankees-Tigers division series in New York — with its constant cutaways to those slick-suited men hunched over their BlackBerrys in the Legends Suites — as more than just a baseball game."posted by mecran01 at 10:02 AM PST - 28 comments
Taksim Trio is a super-group from Istanbul composed of Hüsnü Senlendirici, one of the greatest clarinet players alive, Aytac Dogan on qanun (zither) and Ismail Tuncbilek on saz (long necked lute). More of their music that can be found on
Youtube. A glowing
Album review & some background. Their
Myspace.
posted by growabrain at 6:48 AM PST - 6 comments
In the year 1968, at the height of her powers, one of the greatest singers America has ever produced was in Stockholm, where she served up a breathtakingly powerful and characteristically soulful performance that, lucky for us, was filmed by Swedish television. You know who I'm talking about, of course. "Lady Soul" - parts
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6 and
7.
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:57 AM PST - 19 comments
October 14
If you met Phil Pressel at a party anytime over the past half-century, he couldn't tell you what he did for a living. If you were his wife, you didn't even know where he was staying on those mysterious business trips.
Today, after 46 years, the man who made the camera that prevented a war finally got to show off his magnum opus.
posted by Spike at 9:36 PM PST - 37 comments
"I've been called over the top," Steinman says. "How silly. If you don't go over the top, you can't see what's on the other side."
James Richard Steinman is best known for
his collaborations with artists such as Meatloaf (
Paradise by the Dashboard Light,) and Bonnie Tyler
Total Eclipse of the Heart. His songs have been covered by artists such as
Barbara Streisand(
Left in the Dark - here's Steinman's original.)
Barry Manilow (
Read 'Em and Weep, here performed by Meatloaf)
Air Supply (
Demo with Rory Dodd on vocals) And of course, many of us have seen the “literal versions of his videos for
Making Love out of Nothing At All, I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That) Total Eclipse of the Heart, inspired by his flamboyant, theatrical style,
which does lend itself to parody.
But of course, there is much, much more.
[more inside]posted by louche mustachio at 7:04 PM PST - 90 comments
Fan Animation about Applejack The My Little Pony eating many, many apples (NSFW sound, Not Safe For Bronies in general)
posted by The Whelk at 6:06 PM PST - 47 comments
From the bankruptcy beat:
Kerner Optical shut down. The original Industrial Light and Magic (in a building labeled "Kerner Optical" to hide from industry snoops and avid fans), the practical effects (in contrast to computer effects) shop became a department of a diversifying ILM, which sold it off in 2006. It struggled along on the margins of bankruptcy before filing for Chapter 11 early this year and closing for good in August, its final words a
bitter letter about an uncooperative creditor. The
Kerner Optical site (entirely in Flash) is still up, where you can see its credits (up through 2008) and view its demo reel.
Souvenir hounds and budding SFX shop owners can have a blast at the
liquidation auction, and bid on a
box of skulls, a
pizza oven,
studio props,
stage props,
leftover models, and tons of shop tools.
posted by ardgedee at 9:59 AM PST - 19 comments
If you've ever had those moments where you try to hit undo for something that just happened in real life, or had the impulse to hit control+c to duplicate something on a piece of paper, you might enjoy watching
this 1-year-old, for whom a magazine is an iPad that does not work.
posted by cashman at 9:54 AM PST - 117 comments
Friday Flash Fun: Japanese designer
Tesshi-e makes beautiful, evocative, maddening
escape games. Most recent among them is
Escape Hotel 4. You may like to check into rooms
3,
2 or
1. Or perhaps you'd prefer to escape from the
tatami room, the
small bar, the
hexagon room, the
dome room or the
restroom. Examine every item carefully, because nothing is quite as it seems. Expect a lot of lateral thinking and a sprinkling of maths. And before you leave, be sure to take one last look for the Happy Coin:
Happy coin will bring happiness to you!! English-language reviews and walkthroughs are
here.
posted by embrangled at 3:05 AM PST - 9 comments
October 13
"Are you a lady? Then finally there’s a game for you! While too many games are pretending that ladies enjoy the same things as men, like shooting, building cities or exploring alien worlds, Lady Popular properly recognizes what it is that makes a true, strong, independent lady: shopping, hairstyles, and having a boyfriend."
John Walker of Rock Paper Shotgun gives a
no-holds-barred review (NSFW) of the game
Lady Popular.
posted by happyroach at 9:58 PM PST - 93 comments
One way to
measure corporate fraud is look at reported numbers and see if they follow
Benford's law - number sets that are manipulated usually deviate from Benford's law. A
recent analysis of all public companies over the past 50 years has shown a steady upward deviation, strongly suggesting there is more corporate fraud now than ever before (peaked in 2008).
[more inside]posted by stbalbach at 9:07 PM PST - 41 comments
Lean Publishing is the act of self-publishing a book while you are writing it, evolving the book with feedback from your readers and finishing a first draft before using the traditional publishing workflow, with or without a publisher.posted by Trurl at 7:49 PM PST - 20 comments
In 1782, a French colony in the Indian Ocean prepared for a rumored assault by British ships. Before the governor's reconnaissance ship could report back on the flotilla, however, a member of the local engineering corps reported that the group of ships had changed course.
Etienne Bottineau claimed to be the inventor of a whole new “science” that he called nauscopy: “The art of discovering ships and land at a great distance.”
[more inside]posted by mudpuppie at 4:25 PM PST - 16 comments
GQ: The Man Who Sailed His House. On the third day after the Japanese tsunami, after the waves had left their destruction, as rescue workers searched the ruins, news came of an almost surreal survival: Nine miles out at sea, a man had been found alone, riding on nothing but the roof of his house. [more inside]posted by zarq at 10:06 AM PST - 19 comments
The decline of play. As a society, we have come to the conclusion that to protect children from danger and to educate them, we must deprive them of the very activity that makes them happiest...
posted by bitmage at 7:32 AM PST - 115 comments
October 12
In 2000, acclaimed playwright and screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan directed his first film, the critically acclaimed
You Can Count on Me, which among other things kickstarted the career of
Mark Ruffalo. In 2006, Lonergan got $12 million to film his follow-up, called
Margaret, and starring Ruffalo, Anna Paquin, Jeannie Berlin, Matt Damon, Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno, Allison Janney, and Kieran Culkin.
Then things got ugly. [more inside]posted by eugenen at 11:23 PM PST - 37 comments
It's raining radiation. It's a quiet night. We are well into autumn. And despite the growing sense in the Tokyo metropolitan area that things are now all right -- with train services back to pre-disaster schedules and the regret we once felt over our wasteful consumption of electricity dissipating -- Fukushima remains a war zone. [more inside]posted by KokuRyu at 9:23 PM PST - 41 comments
The Pervocracy is a kinky, feminist sexblog. Holly writes about her experiences as an active member of the BDSM community, a partner in a polyamorous relationship, and an all-around completely horny slut. She also writes editorials from a sex-positive feminist perspective, advice on sexuality and kink, and humorous critiques of sexism online and in the media. [more inside]posted by Blasdelb at 9:18 PM PST - 86 comments
According to breaking
news,
Dennis Ritchie, inventor of the C programming language, co-author with Brian Kernigham of the famous
book on it, and creator with Ken Thompson of the Unix operating system, has died.
[more inside]posted by grimjeer at 6:49 PM PST - 242 comments
Pioneer and tireless activist for the LGBT civil rights movement, Frank Kameny was fired from his job as an astronomer for the US government in the late 1950s because he was gay. He
co-organized the Mattachine Society of Washington,
campaigned for equal treatment of gay employees in the Federal government, was the
first openly gay candidate for Congress and worked to remove the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The Library of Congress holds his papers, the
Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History includes in its collections Kameny's picket signs carried in front of the White House in 1965, his home has been made a DC Historic Landmark, and a street near Dupont Circle was declared Frank Kameny Way in 2010. In 2009, John Berry, Director of the Office of Personnel Management, formally apologized to Kameny on behalf of the United States government.
Frank Kameny died on
National Coming Out Day this October 11, 2011.
[more inside]posted by Morrigan at 5:46 PM PST - 56 comments
Horror movie blog
Arbogast on Film is counting down the days of October with studies of
31 cinematic screams. Considered thus far: shrieks from
The Tingler,
The Pit and the Pendulum,
Two on a Guillotine,
Macchie Solari,
The Black Cat,
Monster House,
The Silence of the Lambs,
She Demons,
The Thing,
L'Amante del Vampiro,
The Nesting, and
Witchcraft.
[more inside]posted by Iridic at 10:47 AM PST - 17 comments
Rate your EX. ExRated's mission is to empower singles by giving them character reviews of potential dates, and allow them to express themselves through multiple choice reviews designed to help them realize what went wrong in the past and how to make the right dating choices in the future.
How does it work?posted by Fizz at 9:48 AM PST - 65 comments
Final Salute. Between 2004 and 2005, "Rocky Mountain News reporter Jim Sheeler and photographer Todd Heisler spent a year with the Marines stationed at Aurora's Buckley Air Force Base who have found themselves called upon to notify families of the deaths of their sons in Iraq. In each case in this story, the families agreed to let Sheeler and Heisler chronicle their loss and grief. They wanted people to know their sons, the men and women who brought them home, and the bond of traditions more than 200 years old that unite them. Though readers are led through the story by the white-gloved hand of Maj. Steve Beck, he remains a reluctant hero. He is, he insists, only a small part of the massive mosaic that is the Marine Corps."
The full story ran on Veteran's Day, 2005 and won two Pulitzer Prizes: one for
Feature Photography, another for
feature writing in 2006. A nice single-page version of one section:
Katherine Cathey and 2nd Lt. James J. Cathey (
via.) The Rocky Mountain News closed in 2009.
[more inside]posted by zarq at 9:16 AM PST - 12 comments
80 Blocks from Tiffany’s was what The Warriors
, the cultish and campy Hollywood street gang movie involving roller skates and a race to Coney Island, could never be. It was real. Shot over the course of a couple of weeks in the summer of ’79 (as the seeds of hip-hop culture were slowly sprouting in the BX), 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s
, produced by Lorne Michaels [and directed by SNL director Gary Weis], veers away from the social commentary typically associated with gang exposés. Instead, the 60-minute documentary focuses on the personalities behind the news reports, including a tough NYPD detective from the Bronx Youth Gang Task Force and a sympathetic community activist. Quoted from the introduction to
an interview with Gary Weis.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:30 AM PST - 15 comments
You must have heard about
frisbee, a flying disc based pastime, haven't you? Throwing a flying disc can be more exciting than you think. You can try to break one of the
world records (there's a record for 1-year olds and a challenge for 102+ years old women). Alternatively, you can play some competitive
games, including some well known ones like
ultimate and some you probably haven't heard about:
buttgutts,
a game of immense skill played between two teams of one to ten players each. The objective is to hit the oppostition's butts with discs.posted by kamil_antosiewicz at 7:50 AM PST - 17 comments
When New York State sentenced convicted murderer William Kemmler to death, he was slated to become the first man to be executed in an electric chair. Killing criminals with electricity “is a good idea,” Edison said at the time. “It will be so quick that the criminal can’t suffer much.” He even introduced a new word to the American public, which was becoming more and more concerned by the dangers of electricity. The convicted criminals would be “Westinghoused.”posted by monju_bosatsu at 6:18 AM PST - 54 comments
October 11
Political revolution, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street notwithstanding, what actual policy steps could be taken to prevent the U.S. from falling into a Japanese-like decade of stagnation (or worse)? Economists from the
New America Foundation offer a rather balanced, clearly articulated, and comprehensive proposal:
The Way Forward.
[more inside]posted by GnomeChompsky at 10:53 PM PST - 66 comments
Rafael Aguilar always wanted to make a difference, and for more than two years the he has done just that in eastern Europe. On Monday, the 25-year-old returned to Bregovo, Bulgaria, where he has been teaching English to students in grades 1 through 12, to extend his stay for a third - and final - year as a Peace Corps volunteer. He plans to continue working toward improving his students’ understanding of the English language. Aguilar’s return to the village of 1,500 residents that he has called home since 2009 comes weeks after he made a star appearance on X Factor Bulgaria singing in Bulgarian. [more inside]posted by Blasdelb at 9:05 PM PST - 13 comments
Why people like digital comics: you can charge for them, and they look pretty on an iPad. Why people like webcomics: they're free. - Warren Ellis looks at
The Broadcast Of Comics.
posted by Artw at 3:42 PM PST - 14 comments
Three years ago, a question was posed to two
Internet forums. Could you build a wind powered vehicle that could travel downwind, faster than the wind? The lines were quickly drawn and the battle was on, including
here on the blue. It took nearly two years for the debate to be settled, and on July 2, 2010, what seemed impossible was
achieved. The answer is
yes,
you can.
posted by smoothvirus at 12:13 PM PST - 96 comments
Welcome to
Gassigns.org, the online collection of gasoline logos from photos and maps. I began this project in 1996 by scanning some images of my small collection of roadmaps,and photographing some of the gas stations I saw during my travels.Since then, many people from all over the world have kindly donated photos, map scans, and information about gas stations from their area. We are presenting them here for history's sake, lest they be forgotten in the world of ever-changing gasoline brands.
posted by asockpuppet at 10:09 AM PST - 9 comments
India's Lost Southern Border: Somewhere near the town of
Mandapam on peninsular India, India's vast rail network
is at its closest to the sea-coast; indeed, it crosses a
2.4 kilometre stretch of the sea, and then extends for another 12 kilometres, before terminating in an ancient temple town,
Rameswaram(YouTube), close to the impressive
Ramanatha Swamy temple around which the town is centered. Another 20 kilometres through an increasingly rough terrain brings us to a forgotten fishing hamlet, Moonram Chathiram, before bringing us to some
ruined buildings,
abandoned rain-tracks, a
submerged temple and a ruined church.
Welcome to
Dhanushkodi(YouTube). Till tragedy struck on the night of December 22nd 1964, this was India's only border-town in the south.
[more inside]posted by the cydonian at 9:57 AM PST - 12 comments
October 10
One of America's most idiosyncratic musical geniuses was, of course, the great Thelonious Monk (
Wiki), and what better way to celebrate his birthday today than viewing (in its entirety!) an excellent documentary on the man and his music?
Straight, No Chaserposted by flapjax at midnite at 4:18 PM PST - 25 comments
The sign-holders are a minority among the [Detroit's] vagrants and homeless. They're the handful with enough drive and dedication to spend hours standing in one place, making a sales pitch. They could probably succeed at a real job somewhere with such determination. But who's going to hire a depressed guy with three teeth, a felony record and a drinking problem?
So sign-holding becomes their career. And it's a demanding one. They have to be sellers of something that's not a product, isn't a service, and has little benefit for the customer other than perhaps inner satisfaction. They have to sell their misery. And though almost none of them have actual jobs, make no mistake — this is hard work. Here are the stories they tell.posted by mudpuppie at 2:51 PM PST - 19 comments
"On the 28th October 1975 my
mother gave birth to a
heroinhead - that was/is me.
My father was a young Glaswegian junkie nicknamed Puggy. I was born with heroin in my veins. 7 years after my birth, my father was brutally murdered by infamous British serial-killer
Dennis Nilsen.
[more inside]posted by metaxa at 2:21 PM PST - 36 comments
Special report: China's debt pileup raises risk of hard landing. 'When China announced a nearly $600 billion package to ward off the 2008 global financial crisis, city planners across the country happily embarked on a frenzy of infrastructure projects, some of them of arguable need.' 'Barclays Capital has predicted a global recession would trigger a "hard landing" in China, with gross domestic product sinking well below the 8 percent mark seen as the minimum for assuring enough job creation to keep up with urban migration. A severe economic slump would depress land sales, a vital source of funding for local governments, and make their debt load even more precarious.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 1:05 PM PST - 13 comments
On September 30, 2011 at 11:08am, Derek Deville's Qu8k (pronounced "Quake")
launched from the Black Rock Desert in Nevada to an altitude of 121,000' before returning safely to earth. Above 99% of the atmosphere the sky turns black in the middle of the day and the curvature of the earth is clearly visible. Direct video links inside.
[more inside]posted by lazaruslong at 11:14 AM PST - 25 comments
DJ Zhao brings contemporary and classic dance music together from all five continents, with focus on Africa. While his DJ sets reach from culture centers to remote areas of the globe, and from now back through the ages, DJ Zhao’s remix and mashup work directly connects “East” and “West”, acoustic and electronic, traditional and hyper-modern. Equal parts ethno-musicologist and booty shaker, Zhao is an ambassador of boom not only talking about, but demonstrating through raw sound experience, the underlying unity of all earth cultures and peoples. [more inside]posted by Trurl at 8:24 AM PST - 6 comments
"Madeleine encounters Leonard in the lit crit seminar. He's a hulking, attractive guy who alternates between silence and bursts of intellectual virtuosity. He chews tobacco. He wears a bandanna. He's
David Foster Wallace." (via Slate)
[more inside]posted by GraceCathedral at 6:45 AM PST - 74 comments
WDET- Detroit Public Radio: "Detroit and Berlin are iconic cities; symbols of cultural and economic domination, as well as of collapse, and (potential) rebirth. Detroit and Berlin have ideological similarities that go far beyond industrial power. As beacons of culture, Detroit and Berlin have both been on the cutting edge of arts activities. Berlin is a crossroads of European film, art, music and food; Detroit is a center of African-American culture, with global credibility in jazz, techno, and emerging cultural expressions."
Audio Preview. [more inside]posted by HLD at 6:05 AM PST - 13 comments
"There was no sleight of hand; each bite was cut open, pushed back together, then dropped on a table. The goal was to see moist white meat when it bounced."
Inside the world of tabletop directing - the people whose job it is to make food look delicious.
posted by mippy at 1:30 AM PST - 46 comments
October 9
Joyce Carol Vincent, 38, died in her North London flat in 2003; her skeleton was found three years later, on the sofa; the television was still on, and a pile of unopened Christmas presents lay on the floor. The story was mentioned briefly in the press, but then forgotten. Now, filmmaker Carol Morley has tracked down and interviewed people who knew her before she retreated and
reconstructed her story, all the more tragic because of the deceptively promising life it showed.
[more inside]posted by acb at 6:12 PM PST - 63 comments
As he sings, the walls of the apartment begin to move off, and
the city walls surrounding them begin to close in on them. Then
the apartment it self goes, and the two lovers begin to run,
battering against the walls of the city, beginning to break
through as chaotic figures of the gangs, of violence, fail around
them. But they do break through, and suddenly-they are in a world
of space and air and sun. They stop, looking at it, pleased,
startled, as boys and girls both sides come on. And they, too,
stop and stare, happy, pleased. Their clothes are soft and pastel
versions of what they have worn before. They begin to dance, to
play: no sides, no hostility now; join, making a world that Tony
and Maria want to be in, belong to, share their love with. As
they go into the steps of a gentle love dance, a voice is heard
singing. [more inside]posted by silby at 2:24 PM PST - 11 comments
In 1992, MicroProse published their first and only CRPG:
Darklands. Set in medieval Germany, the game gives a lot of immersion,
from its innovative lifepath system for
character generation, to its use of
period music, to the importance of knowing your
saints, to tatzelwurms, quite fearsome
dragons and
raubritters. The
game play is good, with lots of different ways of handling any conflict and a semi-realtime
combat system. The game is also fundamentally open-ended; while there is a main plot (
spoilers), it's possible to ignore that thread and keep playing for years.
[more inside]posted by jiawen at 9:58 AM PST - 35 comments
As the protests begun by
Occupy Wall Street begin to spread and gain a foothold in the public consciousness, many question the movement's apparent unwillingness to focus its outrage into a coherent platform of demands. Meanwhile, others question whether the demographics of the protesters themselves are truly representative of the so-called
99 percent (previously). Why the lack of focus, and what is to be done to keep the movement growing and moving forward?
[more inside]posted by Scientist at 8:54 AM PST - 545 comments
October 8
You would be hard pressed to find an article about Obama that didn't mention approval ratings. Ditto during Bush's presidency. This
interactive graph lets you compare approval ratings over time for presidents since Truman (article itself is dated but the chart is current).
This graph offers less interactivity but adds some historical points of context.
posted by Defenestrator at 7:35 PM PST - 15 comments
The failure to fix electricity infrastructure in Afghanistan. IEEE Spectrum published a
damning investigation into the ongoing incompetence, corruption, and waste of the
USAID and its murky
cost-plus contracts, some 'so vague that it did not require the contractor to provide "specific deliverables with concrete delivery dates."' [from
here] Not surprisingly, they spend a
lot of money.
previouslyposted by thandal at 12:33 PM PST - 5 comments
Gauche the Cellist [Google video, 63 minutes] is based on a story [Japanese; English translation #1, #2] by Kenji Miyazawa, one of the most-loved poet/storytellers in Japan (Miyazaki and Takahata love his works, and have been influenced by him). The movie was made as an independent project by a Japanese animation studio, OH Production (wiki), and took 6 years to complete. It is rather difficult to make a Kenji story into a movie because there are many Japanese just waiting to rip you apart if you screw up, but Gauche has been highly acclaimed, and is considered one of the best Miyazawa movies (IMDb). The story is about a cellist, Gauche, who becomes a better cellist by interacting with animals who visit his home every night. *posted by filthy light thief at 9:12 AM PST - 8 comments
October 7
The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program manages information about hundreds of murals that have made Philadelphia famous.
Muralfarm.org is the site where information about the growing body of public art created by the Mural Arts Program has been planted. Pictures and detailed information about murals can be searched by artist, theme, date, location, neighborhood, and other key terms.
[more inside]posted by netbros at 9:29 PM PST - 12 comments
"Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event."
Charlie Kaufman: Why I Wrote Being John Malkovich. [more inside]posted by codacorolla at 5:05 PM PST - 47 comments
Jim Shooter, the
comics writer and former Marvel Editor-in-Chief has weighed in on DC's comic relaunch,
The New 52.
Shooter is no stranger to
controversy regarding his tenure at Marvel and has received his share of
criticism over his handling of female characters. He also claims his analysis is more about the writing and artwork but nevertheless, he has added this comment to the chorus of
complaints about the
handling of DCs
female characters and
female fans:
"But, let it be known, personally, I didn’t like the way the female characters were portrayed. It’s not that I think that there is anything, any situation or any type of character, male or female, that cannot be done if it is done with rare excellence and surpassing skill. The problem is that, too often, comic book writers and artists who belong in creator kindergarten think they’re already Ph.D’s." [more inside]posted by happyroach at 4:19 PM PST - 41 comments
How to hatch a dinosaur: 'So making a chicken egg hatch a baby dinosaur should really just be an issue of erasing what evolution has done to make a chicken. Every cell of a turkey carries the blueprints for making a tyrannosaurus, but the way the plans get read changes over time as the species evolves.' [
via]
posted by dhruva at 9:26 AM PST - 54 comments
Celebrating pornographers who go the extra mile when set dressing classroom porn and actually write something on the blackboard.
What do they write, and is it correct? (NSFW? No screenshots contain nudity, but Justice Stewart would know it if he saw it)posted by Blasdelb at 9:16 AM PST - 40 comments
We've all gotten used to the idea that certains movies will be available only on certain cable channels, that certain albums will be available only via certain webstores, etc. However, it does seem a little bit stranger of an idea when applied to hard copy books. And
yet...
posted by Ipsifendus at 8:02 AM PST - 51 comments
To meet this need for high speed data processing, the scientists and technicians of the Eckert-Mauchly division of Remington Rand have created a miracle of electronic development: UNIVAC! [more inside]posted by Trurl at 7:33 AM PST - 8 comments
November 2007 -- Barack Obama: "[I]f the science and the doctors suggest that the best palliative care and the way to relieve pain and suffering is medical marijuana then that's something I'm open to ... But I want to do it under strict guidelines. I want it prescribed in the same way that other painkillers or palliative drugs are prescribed."
[more inside]posted by waraw at 3:29 AM PST - 250 comments
October 6
Margaret Atwood defines science fiction "Is [the term science fiction] a corral with real fences that separate what is clearly 'science fiction' from what is not, or is it merely a shelving aid, there to help workers in bookstores place the book in a semi-accurate or at least lucrative way? If you put skin-tight black or silver clothing on a book cover along with some jetlike flames and/or colourful planets, does that make the work 'science fiction'? What about dragons and manticores, or backgrounds that contain volcanoes or atomic clouds, or plants with tentacles, or landscapes reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch? Does there have to be any actual science in such a book, or is the skin-tight clothing enough? These seemed to me to be open questions."
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 1:55 PM PST - 228 comments
In Issue 391 of the Batman magazine published by Editorial Novaro there is a Flash adventure titled "The Flash Stakes His Life On You." This comic is the most important literary argument of recent months. The Flash vs. Gurdjieff by Alejandro Jodorowsky. bonus craziness: The comics journal talks to
Alejandro Jodorowsky (Sample answer: "This question is too long and annoying for me. I stop to fart.")
posted by Artw at 12:46 PM PST - 27 comments
In 1971, Hunter Thompson first published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
in Rolling Stone. Forty years later, The Daily’s Zach Baron revisits the piece and the town in which it was born, chasing Thompson's ghost through crazy desert car races, a dying local economy and a massive and menacing hacker convention known as DEFCON. (previously)posted by Trurl at 7:13 AM PST - 26 comments
British Fantasy Award winner returns prize; Sam Stone hands back award after criticism of judging process. [The Guardian] "Controversy has riven the 40-year-old British Fantasy Awards, with the winner of the best novel prize handing her award back just three days after it was bestowed.
But the organisation and presentation of the awards has been drawing criticism since then, culminating in Sam Stone, the winner of the best novel award – named after American writer and editor August Derleth – announcing yesterday that she is giving it back.
The biggest attack on the awards was delivered by editor and anthologist Stephen Jones, who on Tuesday
posted a lengthy blog decrying the organisation of the BFAs and making several allegations against awards co-ordinator and British Fantasy Society chairman David Howe."
posted by Fizz at 7:08 AM PST - 27 comments
October 5
Even as medical marijuana activists in states like
Arkansas,
Ohio, and
Massachusetts look to legalize medical use in 2012, the ATF has sent
letters to gun shops in existing medical marijuana states. The letter says that shop owners cannot sell guns or ammunition if they have
"reasonable cause to believe" that the customer is a drug user, even if their use is legal under state law -- and that having or even mentioning a medical marijuana card constitutes reasonable cause. The entire text of the letter can be viewed
here.
[more inside]posted by vorfeed at 3:36 PM PST - 145 comments
Dark Souls, the spiritual sequel to 2009's
Demon's Souls (previously
1,
2) and heir to the
King's Field series of games, is out in most of the world this week. Reviews have been
excellent, sales have been surprisingly robust;
Dark Souls was the top selling title in Japan last week, with
279,567 copies sold, compared to an estimated 40,000 for Demon's Souls first week of release.
From Software has taken an interesting approach to players who somehow acquire the game early: rather than banning the player outright or limited online features, From Software is embracing
Dark Souls' unique multiplayer model, sending super leveled invaders into player's games
to hunt them mercilessly.
[more inside]posted by 2bucksplus at 1:01 PM PST - 51 comments
Miss Representation is a
film by Jen Siebel Newsom about the images, representations and media constructions that shape American society in a harmful way for women. It explores the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence that result. Shorter trailer
here.
[more inside]posted by cashman at 10:30 AM PST - 18 comments
"Born
Shigeyoshi Murao in 1926, he was universally known as Shig. His playful demeanor—not to mention his signature beard, Pendleton shirts, Royal Air Force exercise vest, horn-rimmed glasses, and bowler—rendered him unforgettable. But that did not make him easy to know.
Shig, who died in 1999, is largely remembered for an event that occurred on June 3, 1957, when two undercover agents from the San Francisco Police Juvenile Squad showed up at City Lights
to buy a seventy-five-cent book of poetry."
[more inside]posted by Toekneesan at 8:59 AM PST - 10 comments
As was not widely
reported,
The Rodale Institute has just published the results of a 30-year study that claims that -in terms of yields, economic viability, energy usage, and human health- organic farming is better than conventional farming, and they have the data to
prove it.
posted by Cobalt at 8:27 AM PST - 61 comments
October 4
An American writer hasn't won the Nobel Prize for Literature since 1993 (Toni Morrison).
Slate's Alexander Nazaryan tells us why: "The rising generation of writers behind Oates, Roth and DeLillo are dominated by Great Male Narcissists — even the writers who aren’t male (or white)."
posted by bardic at 10:29 PM PST - 121 comments
There's a new crop of Australian bands that take inspiration from old blues, but twist the music in a strange fashion. The trend may have started with
CW Stoneking (Jungle Blues,
Love Me Or Die), who channeled the old bluesmen despite being a
young man. Its continued on to Sydney's
Snowdroppers, who started out as a
house band for burlesque shows and kept that dirty sensibility up with songs like
Rosemary ,
Do The Stomp, and their signature tune
Good Drugs, Bad Women (lyrics NSW). Frequent Snowdroppers touring partners
Gay Paris add a Southern horror twist (
House Fire In the Origami District, My First Wife? She Was A Foxqueen! ) and an antic stage energy. Some of the bands relay on gimmicks, like Adelaide's
The Beards, who sing about how
you should consider having sex with a bearded man and point out that
if your dad doesn't have a beard, you've got two moms. The Beards recently performed at the
World Beard and Mustache Championships. Horror-country-rockers
Graveyard Train have picked up the torch dropped when Sydney psychobilly masters
Zombie Ghost Train (
Graveyard Queen) disbanded. Graveyard Train tunes like
Mummy,
Ballad for Beelzebub ,
Tall Shadow and
Dead Folk Dance combine cheerful Misfits horror theming with stompy country. Most of the singers from this loose scene are joining forces in Sydney this week to
pay tribute to Tom Waits.posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 7:25 PM PST - 32 comments
The Best of #OccupySesameStreet. Since its launched two weeks ago, the #OccupyWallStreet movement has gone national, spawning copy-cat demonstrations in far-flung locales like Tulsa and Boise. Its members have serious concerns--about income inequality, the influence of large corporations in our political system, and their own financial futures. The #OccupySesameStreet movement? Not so much.
posted by sweetkid at 6:34 PM PST - 30 comments
"I remember back in the '90s, when I first heard about their discovery of cell receptors activated by pathogenic microorganisms. I was in this bar called Alumni Club on Clark Street in Chicago. It's gone now, which is fine because it was terrible. Doesn't matter, I guess, but me and my buddies had just polished off a mound of wings and, like, seven buckets of Corona when this dude comes in blabbing about the critical role dendritic cells play in adaptive immunity. I almost kicked the hell out of him on the spot, but I have to admit the slides he brought made me a believer."
Dennis O'Toole uses the Nobel Prize to satirize sports commentary in hilarious fashion. (SLNPR)
posted by jbickers at 3:33 PM PST - 9 comments
In 1987 Apple predicted a
complex language voice assistant built into something called the Apple Knowledge Navigator, a tablet computer. With today's announcement of the refined (and integrated) version of
Siri, it appears they were less than a month off.
posted by mrzarquon at 1:17 PM PST - 405 comments
Most people know that Venice has long been threatened by chronic flooding, but in recent years the Queen of the Adriatic has faced a rising tide of a different sort:
advertising.
From the
Doge's Palace to
St. Mark's Square to the bittersweet
Bridge of Sighs -- named for the grief its splendid views once inspired in crossing death row prisoners -- immense billboards
lit late into the night now mar the city's most treasured places.
Allegedly built to cover the cost of restoration work in the face of government cutbacks, the ads have brought in around $600,000 per year since 2008 -- a fraction of the shortfall -- and show no sign of going away any time soon. Their presence prompted a consortium of the world's leading cultural experts led by the
Venice in Peril Fund to air
an open letter demanding the city government put a stop to the placards that "hit you in the eye and ruin your experience of one of the most beautiful creations of humankind." Mayor Giorgio Orsoni, for one, was not moved, saying last year "If people want to see the building
they should go home and look at a picture of it in a book."posted by Rhaomi at 10:39 AM PST - 59 comments
"As the sun rose on that fateful day, thousands of blackshirts gathered in the cool morning air, trading jokes and cigarettes. Their boots and belts were well-polished. Those with peaked caps wore them at no angle but the true. The Union’s flags hung limply on their poles, waiting to be unfurled and waved in the faces of the fearful public. Hundreds of policemen – also, in a technical sense, in black shirts, boots and belts – formed up alongside the Fascist column, determined to escort them on an errand that none thought wise or good but which no one had said was illegal.
The signal was given. The march began. It was
October 4th, 1936"
It has been 75 years since the battle of Cable Street, when "people in the East End of London stopped Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists marching through Cable Street, in Stepney, then a mainly Jewish area. A slogan from the Spanish Civil War, a popular anti-fascist cause of the time, was widely used:
They Shall Not Pass - No Pasaran!"
[more inside]posted by Stagger Lee at 8:49 AM PST - 44 comments
The official
SI definition of a kilogram is "equal to the mass of the international prototype," a cylinder of nine-tenths platinum and one-tenth iridium, forged in the 1880s. "Le Grand K," as the prototype is affectionately known, is the basis not only for the measurement of mass and volume, but of
force,
energy, and
luminosity—and since the 1940s, Le Grand K has been losing weight. Now scientists are trying to
redefine the kilogram in terms of fundamental constants—and in doing so, perhaps fulfill the 18th-century promise of a universal, fundamental system of measurement "for all people, for all time."
posted by Zozo at 8:12 AM PST - 58 comments
Cioran's literary elitism is unparalleled in modern literature, and for that reason he often appears as a nuisance for modern and sentimental ears poised for the lullaby words of eternal earthly or spiritual bliss. Cioran's hatred of the present and the future, his disrespect for life, will certainly continue to antagonize the apostles of modernity who never tire of chanting vague promises about the "better here-and-now." ... If one could reduce the portrayal of Cioran to one short paragraph, then one must depict him as an author who sees in the modern veneration of the intellect a blueprint for spiritual gulags and the uglification of the world. Indeed, for Cioran, man's task is to wash himself in the school of existential futility, for futility is not hopelessness; futility is a reward for those wishing to rid themselves of the epidemic of life and the virus of hope. Probably, this picture best befits the man who describes himself as a fanatic without any convictions--a stranded accident in the cosmos who casts nostalgic looks towards his quick disappearance. -
Tomislav Sunic [more inside]posted by Trurl at 6:28 AM PST - 29 comments
Brianna Amat, 18, of Pinckney High School in Ann Arbor, kicked the game-winning field goal against rival Grand Blanc on the same night that she was crowned
homecoming queen (SLNYT).
posted by dabug at 4:22 AM PST - 66 comments
Over the past few centuries, Western cultures have been very good at creating general prosperity for themselves. Historian Niall Ferguson asks: Why the West, and less so the rest? He suggests half a dozen big ideas from Western culture -- call them
the 6 killer apps -- that promote wealth, stability and innovation. And in this new century, he says, these apps are all shareable.
[more inside]posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:19 AM PST - 97 comments
October 3
On May 25, Betty L. Prentis
passed away in West Palm Beach, FL at the age of 89. Mrs. Prentis was preceded in death by her husband of 41 years, Edmund "Ned" Prentis, in 1997. Prior to her marriage, Betty Luster had enjoyed a long career as an actress and dancer on stage in London (where her career got started in 1938), Broadway, Miami, and Philadelphia.
In her last acting role before marrying Ned, Betty performed in a promotional film sponsored by
C.G. Conn, makers of brass band instruments. The 1956 (or
1957) film, "Mr. B Natural," is undoubtedly the most infamous of the shorts to ever air on
Mystery Science Theater 3000, so as a final tribute to Betty, it's time to snap on those tights and torment young Buzz
for one last time.posted by stannate at 9:16 PM PST - 62 comments
Dissolve my Nobel Prize! Fast! It's 1940. The Nazis have taken Copenhagen. They are literally marching through the streets, and physicist Niels Bohr has just hours, maybe minutes, to make two Nobel Prize medals disappear.
posted by sweetkid at 6:16 PM PST - 70 comments
“What About The Men” is a term of occasional derision and dismissal in feminist circles, used by those who either don’t want conversations about women’s issues constantly derailed, or perhaps sometimes don’t want to provide space for men’s issues.
They’re hijacking and reclaiming the phrase with a little tongue-in-cheek mockery at those who use it, since they think that men and men’s issues should have a bigger role in feminism, and that, additionally, men need spaces dedicated to their issues as well. So it’s not “What About The Men” to chase the guys out; it’s “No, Seriously, ‘What About Teh Menz?’” to bring them back in to the feminist fold. (FAQ)
For a 10 second minute introduction to what inspired this blog’s creation, read our seminal piece, Who Cares About Men’s Rights?. [more inside]posted by Blasdelb at 4:19 PM PST - 108 comments
Four friends who collectively call themselves Igloo Tornado wrote a series of fictional tales of the love between Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig, plus some jokes from their Satan worshiping neighbors, Daryl Hall and John Oates. This land of make-believe is contained in
Glenn & Henry Forever. There isn't a preview in one handy location, but various
interviews,
reviews, and
blogs have posted
some of the comics (more:
Henry has no shoes, Hall & Oats play D&D,
a postcard from Henry to Glenn, and
a page from Danzig's diary). Danzig,
often the butt of internet jokes, was not thrilled. His thoughts were made into
a final comic. Oh, and there's
an anti-Christmas animation special/advert. And
a gallery show with more artists joining the fun.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:17 PM PST - 18 comments
Chris Christie Is Fat.
Who Cares? "What is it about fat that turns otherwise smart people into complacent fools? No, this isn’t a new discovery about the supposed health risks of obesity: it’s an observation about how the sight of a fat body can transform people like
Michael Kinsley and
Eugene Robinson—writers whose work I usually admire—into bigoted know-nothings, spouting absurd prejudices they would mock if they were aimed at almost any group other than fat people."
posted by Fizz at 11:04 AM PST - 299 comments
(NSFW)
In all of my years of work with the lens (since 1906) I've dreamed of and loved to work with the human figure - to embody it in rocks and trees, to make it part of the elements.
The Glory of the Open - Camera Craft - April 1926.
At a time when decent Christian women in the U.S. were expected to be modest and to achieve fulfillment in motherhood, Anne Brigman was trekking up into the mountains in trousers…a scandal in itself…carrying a heavy pack of camera equipment. There she
shucked off her pants and societal expectations, and she entered into a pagan world inhabited by dryads and nixies...and there she made art.
Anne photographed herself, her sister,
and friends using California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains to backdrop a
liberated woman decades ahead of her time.
YouTube
slideshow.
She was championed into the
Photo Secession movement by Alfred Stiglietz, and she was the only woman member from west of the Missouri.
posted by adamvasco at 9:50 AM PST - 20 comments
The American Journalism Review asks,
is automotive journalism fundamentally corrupt? Car manufacturers pay for lavish trips and grant extensive seat time in their most desirable cars – in exchange for good reviews. Journalists who write critical reviews are blacklisted. Among the worst offenders is Porsche, who
blacklisted journalist Jack Baruth after lukewarm (or simply balanced)
print and
video reviews of the Porsche Panamera in 2009. Since then, Baruth, who owns three Porsches, has taken to compiling lists of Porsche’s deadly sins (
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6, but
not 7),
fabricating Porsche test drives,
bashing fellow automotive journalists who he sees as being
too soft on Porsche, and
borrowing privately-owned cars in order to write reviews. Baruth writes mostly for
The Truth About Cars, which guards the independence of its writers so fiercely that its reviews of the Prius, for instance, ranged from the
unremittingly hostile to
defensively positive to
relatively balanced. But what about journalistic independence in mainstream outlets, which often rely on freelancers who simply don't have the funds to be functionally independent of car manufacturers, and which don't want to displease advertisers?
posted by Dasein at 9:15 AM PST - 85 comments
The best wind in America is in Wyoming. It is a door-snapping, heart-pounding wind that barrels in from the west, chasing the truckers along Interstate 80 as they race to make Omaha by nightfall. It is sometimes described with words ordinarily associated with dark chocolate or exceptional pinot noir. It has been called dense, world-class, consistently extraordinary, special, and fabulous..
Advocates of wind power though are faced with a conundrum. [more inside]posted by storybored at 8:59 AM PST - 29 comments
There's no place like home. It's where we live, work and dream. It's our sanctuary and our refuge. We can love them or hate them. It can be just for the night or for the rest of our lives. But whoever we may be, we all have a place we call home. THIS MUST BE THE PLACE is a series of short films that explore the idea of home; what makes them, how they represent us, why we need them. [more inside]posted by Ahab at 7:22 AM PST - 3 comments
The “Copiale Cipher” is a 105 pages manuscript containing all in all around 75 000 characters. Beautifully bound in green and gold brocade paper, written on high quality paper with two different watermarks, the manuscript can be dated back to 1760-1780. [...] the manuscript is completely encoded.
[more inside]posted by tykky at 4:11 AM PST - 15 comments
October 2
October 1
[Arthur Penn's
Night Moves]
does belong to a traditional, indeed obsolescent genre, but the distance it keeps from it (not an ironic or critical distance, just a distance) is such that genre-related expectations become irrelevant. Most of the time, the story line seems to meander aimlessly, taking in extraneous material, doubling back, going round in circles (the aimless is deceptive, a smoke screen obfuscating the complex, rigorous organization of an exceptionally well-structured script). The "mystery" aspect of the plot is dealt with in the most peculiar, topsy-turvy manner, withholding not the solution of the problem but the problem itself until the very end, when, in a dazzling visual tour de force, both are conjured up almost simultaneously. - Jean Pierre Coursodon
[more inside]posted by Trurl at 9:27 PM PST - 19 comments
Nants ingonyama bagithi baba! It's been nearly two decades since that glorious savanna sunrise, and once again
The Lion King is
at the top of the box office. It's a good chance to revisit what made the original the capstone of the
Disney Renaissance, starting with the music. Not the gaudy show tunes or the Elton John ballads, but the soaring, elegiac score by Hans Zimmer which, despite winning an Oscar, never saw a full release outside of
an unofficial bootleg.
Luckily, it's unabridged and high-quality, allowing one to lay Zimmer's
haunting,
pulse-pounding,
joyful tracks
alongside the original video (
part 2,
3,
4), revealing the subtle leitmotifs and careful matching of music and action.
In addition, South African collaborator
Lebo M wove traditional Zulu chorals into the score, providing
veiled commentary on
scenes like this; his work was later
expanded into
a full album,
the Broadway stage show, and
projects closer to his heart. Speaking of expanded works, there were inevitable sequels -- all of which you can experience with
The Lion King: Full Circle (
download guide), a fan-made, three-hour supercut of the original film and its two follow-ups.
Want more? Look...
harder... [more inside]posted by Rhaomi at 3:28 PM PST - 22 comments
Why big business needs unemployment benefits. 'Many business leaders are shrugging off the forthcoming expiration of extended unemployment benefits, but they may regret it. In this downturn, every little bit of extra money in consumer pockets counts.' 'Steve Burd, the CEO of Safeway (SWY), told an analyst during the company's last earnings call that he did not think temporary benefits provided a meaningful boost to consumer confidence. "There are those that would argue that unemployment benefits, the longer they are, the longer people stay unemployed," said Burd, whose supermarket chain did $41 billion in sales last year. The CEO went on to cite the theory that extending unemployment insurance artificially props up wages, slowing the pace of economic recovery.' 'Some Republicans have already come out against renewing the emergency aid. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is currently running for president, recently said that he thought it was "fundamentally wrong to give people money for 99 weeks for doing nothing."'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 10:51 AM PST - 85 comments
The war against red-haired males. [Time.com] Cryos International, the world’s largest sperm bank, recently announced that it will be turning away redheaded donors at the door. The company’s red-haired sperm supply is full up, and not often called upon. Clinic director Ole Schou told a Danish newspaper that parents are inclined to select donors who are physically similar to themselves, and red’s rareness makes it an unpopular choice.
posted by Fizz at 10:38 AM PST - 102 comments
Britain's finest Baroque portraitist , on a par with Frans Hals, has been all but forgotten, but a new BBC documentary and associated website seek to address that. William Dobson, 1611-46, was painter to Charles I's court during the English Civil War, and the turmoil of the period meant that much of his biography and even the names of the subjects of his portraits were lost. But
many of his portraits have survived, and they're astonishing.
[more inside]posted by rory at 4:13 AM PST - 18 comments
Two Aussie psychologists studied the 66-year-old testimony of 70 German sailors rescued after their boat sank. The ship which sank it, the HMAS Sydney, also sank ... taking 645 sailors with it.
After analyzing the stories the shrinks - knowledgeable in the vagaries of storytelling - found that the Germans weren't lying. They crowdsourced the stories, sat down together with a map of the Indian Ocean and ...
posted by Twang at 12:35 AM PST - 21 comments
