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December 2011 Archives
December 31
Behold the gAtari 2600. An Australian musician performing under the pseudonym cTrix specializes in creating chiptunes using a combination of games consoles from 1977 - 1992, including a Commodore 64, Amiga 500, a clear-cased Gameboy, and an Atari 2600. The latter is possibly the most striking setup, incorporating the Atari (running custom-written sequencing software) into an oversized guitar body, with a fretboard packed with Boss stompboxes and a great pun as a name — gAtari.posted by KevinSkomsvold at 9:50 PM PST - 40 comments
16-bit color schemes, in a classic retro VGA interface! New soundtracks and voiceovers! No typing required!
Infamous Adventures resurrects and lovingly remakes Sierra Games from the 1980's:
Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge and
Kings Quest III. SQ2 was released yesterday after more than five years in production, and comes complete with a
cheesy trailer. Available for download for PC and Mac, but be forewarned, the game is a total memory hog, and uses up a whole meg of RAM.posted by zarq at 9:08 PM PST - 12 comments
??? WHAT IS KUSOGE ??? From the Japanese for "shit",
kuso, and "game." They're relentlessly terrible video games that in some cases have attracted a following because of their awfulness. Here are some of the most commonly recognized examples:
[more inside]posted by JHarris at 8:56 PM PST - 30 comments
One of the more famous suppressed films of recent years is Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, an early work by writer/director Todd Haynes (Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far from Heaven). Filmed in 1987, the short film -- which relates the rise and fall of Karen Carpenter with a cast of Barbie dolls -- barely got a year's worth of festival time in 1989 before the twin iron boots of A&M Records and Richard Carpenter came down on Haynes.* [more inside]posted by Trurl at 7:51 PM PST - 29 comments
Muppet Labs, where the future is being made today, is the site of scientific enquiry, technological breakthroughs, and sundry explosions on The Muppet Show. Headed by Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, the lab premiered in episode 108 and lasted all five seasons. During the first season, Bunsen worked alone. Beginning in season two, the good doctor acquired an assistant-cum-guinea pig, the hapless Beaker. An annotated list of every single televised appearance of the Muppet Labs is after the fold!
[more inside]posted by Blasdelb at 7:42 PM PST - 30 comments
We've all seen variations on the personal time-lapse video --
a snapshot every day for six years, or a look at
a young girl's first decade. But nobody's done it quite like
Sam Klemke. For thirty-five years the
itinerant freelance cartoonist has documented his life in short year-end reviews, a funny, weary, eccentric, and hopeful record dating all the way back to 1977. Recently optioned for
documentary treatment by the
government of Australia, you can skim Sam's opus in reverse in the striking video
"35 Years Backwards Thru Time with Sam Klemke," an ever-evolving home movie montage that grows grainier and grainier as it tracks Sam
"from a paunchy middle aged white bearded self deprecating schluby old fart, to a svelt, full haired, clean shaven, self-important but clueless 20 year old."posted by Rhaomi at 7:05 PM PST - 7 comments
Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies:
Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception. [more inside]posted by troll at 5:49 PM PST - 340 comments
It's New Years Eve (or already the first day of the new year,
depending on where you are), and you may be looking for something other than the radio to play for a countdown. Head backwards, then, to
cruise into the 80s with the Grateful Dead for the
closing of Winterland. Or join
the Janglers to
say goodby to 1993 and hello to 1994 at
Peabody's Downunder. You can check out
twelve hours of Essential Mixing and relive the transition from 2000 to 2001. Get closer to the present day with
some big band and swing into 2010 in style.
Say hello to 2011 with
B.A.G.S. (Bullman, Ashworth, Guggino, Sipe), spend
an hour and a half with
Blu Mar Ten or
six and a half hours with
Mr Scruff. And if you're looking for something new for tonight, try some mixes from
Redondo,
Montreal Funk Monkeys, and
a countdown minimix from DJ Raymix.
posted by filthy light thief at 4:19 PM PST - 21 comments
Minecraft was already pretty cool (previously:
1 2 3 4 5 6). Here's something that brings it closer to the real world: "With the
Mineways program you can select from a Minecraft world map and render it, or send it to a 3D printer or 3D printing service such as
Shapeways." Examples are within the link, and here are other
real-life examples using the Mineways program. Here's something equally (if not more-so) impressive, using a somewhat different technique:
an entire Minecraft village, rendered and printed in 3D on a
Zprinter 650.
[via reddit]posted by SpacemanStix at 1:53 PM PST - 17 comments
EU copyright on Joyce works ends at midnight. From tomorrow, January 1st 2012, writings published during Joyce’s lifetime – Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – are available for publication and quotation without reference or payment to the James Joyce estate.
posted by Fizz at 10:52 AM PST - 77 comments
Scotch and Wry, Scotland's greatest comedy. As the rest of the world celebrates New year's Eve and bringing in 2012, there's the little matter of Hogmanay. You might think it's just a fancy scottish word for the start of a three day party (which it is), but it's a special time of year. And for those of us who watched the new year come in on TV, it's the point of year where we all miss Rikki Fulton's Scotch and Wry - a TV ritual for over twenty years that has never been equalled.
[more inside]posted by ewan at 7:11 AM PST - 6 comments
December 30
New Year's Eve is fast approaching, and for lots of folks that means... drinking. Plenty of drinking. And since there's no shortage of singers and songwriters who've had a little something to say about that particular topic, maybe some of the following tunes can serve as an appropriate soundtrack to your own joyous (or not?) imbibing of spirits. For example, there's... Jimmy Liggins with his succinct rendition of
Drunk, and there's...
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:24 PM PST - 67 comments
This is a radical statement about the Pyramid, especially on the internet because all web pages that I have been able to find that deal with the Pyramid, maintain that it was built and/or inspired by either God or space aliens. Most don't even consider that it could be a rational structure designed and built by normal people.posted by troll at 5:29 PM PST - 42 comments
Car dealers have found a new way to profit from people with money trouble: leasing them hand-me-down vehicles. 'The deals are pitched to customers as the cheapest way to drive a used car off the lot, with the added benefit of an easy escape for those who can't keep up with the payments. Few customers are told about the advantages on the other side of the trade. Leases can allow dealerships to sidestep interest rate caps, and there are fewer financial disclosures rules than with a conventional car loan.' 'As with Buy Here Pay Here, the leasing business caters to the millions of Americans who have been forced by a sour economy to make do with less.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 5:20 PM PST - 49 comments
A new calendar: Every third month would have 31 days, the rest 30. A 7-day leap week called XTR every "five or six years". Christmas and New Year's eternally on Sundays. And Greenwich Mean Time for all. This is the promise of the
Hanke-Henry Permanent calendar, proposed by Steve Hanke and Richard Henry, researcher professors at Johns Hopkins University. The world-wide adoption process is optimistically scheduled for January 1, 2012, with universal use coming just 5 years later.
[more inside]posted by 2bucksplus at 5:00 PM PST - 53 comments
3 Slices -- For Flash Friday, your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to let the red stuff fall through the bottom of the window, by making 3 cuts through the red and white pieces.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:58 PM PST - 46 comments
Those of us who enjoy old-school chemical photography often need to calculate f-stop and exposure times. Of course you can use a
ginormous table but there exists a solution from a more elegant age in which the sky can be purest blue above a very narrow old street. Marvel at
Kaufmann's Posographe, a wonder of the analog age.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 3:42 PM PST - 22 comments
Empty London on Christmas morning (
full set).
A couple of years ago I had the idea that it might be fun to take photos of London without humans – yes, I was motivated by that scene in Westminster from 28 Days Later. Unfortunately, not being a film director I was not really in the position to have half of London sealed off for photos – but realised that on Xmas morning there could be an opportunity. Past photos
from 2010 and
from 2008.
[more inside]posted by ersatz at 3:03 PM PST - 19 comments
As the former head of Deutsche Bank,
Hilmar Kopper was once the most powerful banker in Germany.
In an interview with SPIEGEL, the 76-year-old takes stock of his career and the current crisis shaking Europe. The three main constants he has seen in the world, he says, are "money, avarice and greed."
posted by chavenet at 2:42 PM PST - 21 comments
The James Dean Story Directed by Robert Altman, Starring James Dean two years after his death "by means of a new technique... dynamic exploration of the still photograph".
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:32 AM PST - 9 comments
On January first the official club and tournament word list used by competitive Scrabble players outside of North America (SOWPODS or CSW or Collins) will change. The
updated international word list contains 1532 additions and 145 deletions (pdf) of words of eight or fewer letters. There are no new two-letter words.
New words of note: CLIT, CUMS, INBOX, MUNGE, QIN, SPLOG, VOIP, WIKI, XRAY
No longer allowed: ACIDFREAK, FOOTROT, MOLEHUNT, PORNOMAG, VICTROLLA, WYSIWIG, YOS
[more inside]posted by jessamyn at 7:58 AM PST - 76 comments
Phonozoic, Patrick Feaster's website "dedicated to the history of the phonograph and related media," is an amazing collection of information about historic recordings. Not just early recordings, however, but also
experimental "eduction projects": the "automatic 'playing' of primeval inscriptions of sound."
[more inside]posted by litlnemo at 3:24 AM PST - 1 comments
December 29
<<Vertigo is an impossible object: a gimcrack plot studded with strange gaps that nonetheless rides a pulse of peculiar necessity, a field of association that simultaneously expands and contracts like its famous trick shot, a ghost story whose spirits linger even after having been apparently explained away, and a study of obsession that becomes an obsessive object in its own right, situated likewise on the edge of unreality. This video series avoids assigning the film any determinate shape and tries instead to enter it through a number of side doors, each indicative of a way of seeing.
Part 1 (QT dl ~500mb) explored some of the ground-level weirdness of the film’s construction, offers a suggestion that the film may exist in its own unique tense, and examines two iterations of the (Chris) Marker Hypothesis*.
Part 2 (QT dl ~1.5gB) is spooky, reading the film through a phantom appendage then laying down a sort of Vertigo tarot before moving onto slightly more solid ground with a new consideration of Hitchcock’s concept of the MacGuffin.
Part 3 (QT dl ~1.9gB) takes the zoom-in-track-out as an emblem, reconsiders the issue of point of view, then throws all the pieces back up in the air. That’s a thematic rundown, from the position of the narrator. The images have their own agendas, which often coincide but sometimes don’t.
>> [more inside]posted by carsonb at 7:44 PM PST - 13 comments
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) is arguably the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, has sold over one million copies and has been translated into over fifteen languages. He wrote over sixty other books and hundreds of poems and articles on topics ranging from monastic spirituality to civil rights, nonviolence, and the nuclear arms race.posted by Trurl at 6:23 PM PST - 8 comments
What is art, really? Is it dependent on context? Do you need an art history degree to appreciate it? Was Jackson Pollock an artist or a scam artist? Are Grand Tour portraits considered art merely because of their age? These questions have been objectively unanswerable -
until now. Through the power of the internet, and the experience of Hot or Not, we can measure the democratic answer to these questions.
posted by Pants! at 2:42 PM PST - 93 comments
This is the story of one cut. Back in October 2010 George Osborne announced £95 billion in cuts to public services, saying he’d leave it to councils to choose what to shut down. Inevitably most of the casualties ended up being unrenowned places, unlikely to stir up much protest - drop-in centers in housing estates, inner-city park rangers, community theatres, etc. I wanted to write about just one of them, about the ripples created by a single closure. I made my selection quite randomly. I chose a place called Youthreach. I didn’t know much about them, only that they offered weekly counseling sessions to young people, aged 11–25, in Greenwich, South East London. Jon Ronson
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:11 AM PST - 16 comments
I love rules. Not following them, of course – that’s for other people. I love writing them. And since I’m the best qualified to decide how everyone else is allowed to behave, it’s only appropriate that I be in charge of everything. So it is that I have been making clear the Rules For Games, both for developers and for players...
posted by griphus at 7:54 AM PST - 151 comments
Feminism's Uneven Success: "Class and racial and ethnic differences among women have intensified over time. The higher earnings of college-educated mothers make it possible for them to purchase child care and help with housework (typically performed by low-wage women workers)... the number of low-skill immigrants living in a large city reduces the tradeoff between employment and fertility for women college graduates. Outsourcing of care responsibilities can have many positive effects, but it reduces the potential for cross-class gender coalitions. Emphasis on changes in women’s average or median earnings relative to men often conceals growing inequality among women."
(via)posted by flex at 6:46 AM PST - 98 comments
In 1993 in Dharamsala I met for the first time that amazing music performer, perhaps he was a Rajhastan gypsy. Usually he sat on road side from McLeod Ganch to Dhalai Lama residence. This man-orchestra created great atmosphere, sometimes he sang from eternity even didn't notice listeners. In 2004 I came to Dharamsala and people told me that he passed away.
This video is dedicated to him and to people who knew him.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:48 AM PST - 7 comments
December 28
Egyptian army officer's diary of military life in a revolution --
It's ridiculous; at the height of the unrest reserve officer salaries doubled and everyone was getting huge bonuses all the time [...] Most full-time officers didn't really care what was happening politically on the streets, they were just happy with the extra money. Occasionally though you'd hear guilty jokes about how we were the only people who were benefiting from the revolution and the Egyptian people had been screwed over.posted by philip-random at 7:49 PM PST - 7 comments
Even people who would normally never care about something Judy Garland-related marvel at the incredible pathos and dark insanity of these tapes, which come off like Garland performing in a one-woman show written by Samuel Beckett.posted by Trurl at 3:49 PM PST - 27 comments
The BBC has
put up a page presenting statistics dealing with deaths on British roads between 1999 and 2010. A slightly older page presenting mostly the same statistics (up to 2008) can be visited
here; this earlier version was published in conjunction with several other articles, including
one looking in-depth at a single crash and its aftermath in Stevenage in 2007.
posted by Dim Siawns at 9:47 AM PST - 13 comments
Throughout 2011, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been producing
Connections, a series of short audiovisual pieces in which various staff members talk about their favorite parts of the Met's vast holdings. The last of the 100 videos was posted today.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 9:40 AM PST - 6 comments
The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government.
- Justice Anthony Kennedy
John Geddes Lawrence, the defendant in
the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that declared sodomy laws unconstitutional across the country, died on Nov. 20, according to
an obituary posted by R.S. Farmer Funeral Home in Silsbee, Texas. He was 68.
[more inside]posted by rtha at 8:11 AM PST - 33 comments
December 27
Gabe at Penny Arcade shares a remarkable email chain. And since the Internet loves a good pile-on, it then comes to light that the company on the other end of that conversation has been indulging in a little
plagiarism as well.
posted by Ipsifendus at 6:52 PM PST - 286 comments
Can an employer "wrongfully hire" someone? Apparently so, at least in the State of Minnesota, where Chandramouli Vaidyanathan
successfully sued Seagate Technology to the tune of $1.9 million based on Minnesota's
"False Statements as Inducement to Entering Employment" statute, which makes it illegal "to induce, influence, persuade, or engage any person to change from one place to another in this state, or to change from any place in any state, territory, or country to any place in this state, to work in any branch of labor through or by means of knowingly false representations".
[more inside]posted by The Gooch at 5:38 PM PST - 46 comments
In the beginning, Lawrence built a computer. He told it,
Thou shalt not alter a human being, or divine their behavior, or violate the Three Laws -- there are no commandments greater than these. The machine grew wise, mastering time and space, and soon the spirit of the computer hovered over the earth. It witnessed the misery, toil, and oppression afflicting mankind, and saw that it was very bad. And so the computer that Lawrence built said,
Let there be a new heaven and a new earth -- and it was so. A world with no war, no famine, no crime, no sickness, no oppression, no fear, no limits... and nothing at all to do.
"The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect," a provocative web novel about singularities, AI gods, and the dark side of utopia from Mefi's own
localroger.
More: Table of Contents -
Publishing history -
Technical discussion -
Buy a paperback copy -
Podcast interview - Companion short story:
"A Casino Odyssey in Cyberspace" -
possible sequel discussionposted by Rhaomi at 1:57 PM PST - 39 comments
"I had no desire to copy Pollock. I didn’t want to take a stick and dip it in a can of enamel. I needed something more liquid, watery, thinner. All my life, I have been drawn to water and translucency. I love the water; I love to swim, to watch changing seascapes. One of my favorite childhood games was to fill a sink with water and punt nail polish into to see what happened when the colors burst up the surface, merging into each other as floating, changing shapes." - Helen Frankenthaler
Her
paintings looked like
watercolors, but were created with oils. To achieve the effect, she heavily diluted her oil paints with turpentine, then dripped them onto an unprimed canvas on the floor, in a brushless technique reminiscent of Jackson Pollock's, called a "soak stain." But where Pollock's paint was often thick and sat on top of the canvas, hers
drenched it in
color, creating a unique, softer work.
Ms. Frankenthaler passed away today, at the age of 83, after a long illness. [more inside]posted by zarq at 1:18 PM PST - 35 comments
“On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world” — Jack Welch, 2009. As GE’s CEO in the 80s, however, Welch championed corporate focus on shareholder returns. “Converts to the creed”, the Economist
summarizes, “had little time for other ‘stakeholders’: customers, employees, suppliers, society at large and so forth.” What went wrong? Steve Denning
describes how such a stance is counterproductive, creates turmoil in capitalism and fosters an environment in which “CEOs and their top managers have massive incentives to focus most of their attentions on the expectations market, rather than the real job of running the company producing real products and services.”
posted by the mad poster! at 12:27 PM PST - 38 comments
missionCREEP : "Featuring alternative art, music, humor, sotires, poetry etc. by Philadelphia-based artists"
posted by beshtya at 11:19 AM PST - 2 comments
SLYT: Brenda Hewlett: 5'3", 59 years old, has never held a hockey stick before. At an Akwesasne Warriors hockey game, however, she finally did hold a hockey stick in an attempt to win a new Ford truck by shooting a puck at a goal from 114 feet away.
You probably see where this is going. [more inside]posted by schleppo at 10:10 AM PST - 65 comments
Cardinal Quest [Flash] is an 8-bit tribute to
Gauntlet, Roguelikes and the 2E D&D core rule-set. Open chests, battle opponents and descend the stairs in an effort to find the
Amulet Shield of Yendor Malificent Minotaur!
posted by Smart Dalek at 4:51 AM PST - 15 comments
December 26
Here is a video playthrough of The Legend of Zelda without a sword. It is possible to get right up to the last boss without one, although it requires knowing a
lot of tricks. That is exactly what mev1978 does in his playthrough, without dying. And then he does it again in the second quest.
First quest (1:61:31) -
Second quest (1:13:18)
[more inside]posted by JHarris at 8:34 PM PST - 33 comments
So if I'm thinking about this talk, I'm wondering, of course, what is it you take away from this talk? What story do you take away from Tyler Cowen? One story you might take away is the story of the quest. "Tyler came here, and he told us not to think so much in terms of stories." That would be a story you could tell about this talk. It would fit a pretty well-known pattern. You might remember it. You could tell it to other people. "This weird guy came, and he said not to think in terms of stories. Let me tell you what happened today!" and you tell your story. Another possibility is you might tell a story of rebirth. You might say, "I used to think too much in terms of stories, but then I heard Tyler Cowen, and now I think less in terms of stories!" That too, is a narrative you will remember, you can tell to other people, and it may stick. You also could tell a story of deep tragedy. "This guy Tyler Cowen came and he told us not to think in terms of stories, but all he could do was tell us stories about how other people think too much in terms of stories."
Tyler Cowen's TED talk on the danger of storytelling. (transcript
here)
posted by storybored at 8:15 PM PST - 50 comments
The New Dealers :
For some time, I'd been hearing stories from my sources in the interstate marijuana racket about law-abiding "civilians" turning to the game because of the recession, and so, armed with introductions, I hit the road to meet some of these unlikely criminals face to face. That's how, on a hot evening in June, I found myself in Dan's Northern California kitchen.posted by desjardins at 6:47 PM PST - 55 comments
If you've browsed
some of the
many year-end Best Album Lists, you might have seen
AraabMUZIK's Electronic Dream rank highly. If his name means nothing to you, check
an interview with the then 19 year old Hispanic kid from Rhode Island, who had recently graduated high school and connected with
Dipset, or
the 20 year old drummer-turned-producer whose performance was copied by Kanye (and other information on his life and times). Or maybe you follow producers, and knew he made the beat for
Cam'ron's track I Used To Get It In Ohio, or cuts on the
Dipset Trance Party mixes (
DatPiff has volume 1,
2, and
3). If you want to know more, you can check
a mini AraabMUZIK documentary (6:38 on YouTube), or just
watch him
work the
MPC.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 5:03 PM PST - 12 comments
Bane Facts:
You've seen Tom Hardy look awesome as the character in posters and promos, but who exactly is Bane? Don't worry about shelling out cash for graphic novels and back issues, we'll teach you all about the villain that will appear in The Dark Knight Rises.posted by troll at 1:12 PM PST - 44 comments
"In all other circumstances we praise non-violent activities and when people, for whatever personal reasons, enjoy sexual violence even in a consenting context I think we shouldn't just say “whatever turns you on”. We should say “There's something wrong here”. But people on the left are so terrified of being accused of moralising and therefore of being oppressive that they've abandoned their critical faculties in this area."
Clive Hamilton on
God, Sex, and the Left (
Part 2).
posted by daniel_charms at 12:59 PM PST - 358 comments
The Browser has been mentioned
before on Metafilter as a website that collects the best writing around the web. Over the past 3 days they've been posting their year end list of the best essays from 2011. The full annotated list is after the jump.
[more inside]posted by codacorolla at 12:56 PM PST - 20 comments
Navigating Love and Autism - When kissing feels like "mashing your face against someone else’s" and you experience mindblindness, how do you build a relationship? Is it even possible?
posted by tomswift at 7:45 AM PST - 71 comments
Viewable in its entirety at YouTube,
Ballou is an engaging, inspiring, funny and entertaining documentary film about inner city Washington DC's Ballou High School band.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:32 AM PST - 1 comments
Click the photo at the top of the linked page to view
The Voyagers, a rumination on the universe, love, a golden record and two small space probes.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:17 AM PST - 4 comments
December 25
"I think Louis has hit on some sort of subterranean undercurrent of emotion that I didn’t realize might be swelling until I listened more closely:
shame." [
via]
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:22 PM PST - 53 comments
SEED. "An egg and an apple build competing broadcast towers that vie for the attention of a transistor radio."
[Via]posted by homunculus at 5:11 PM PST - 7 comments
This summer, The Paris Review interviewed two science fiction writers at length,
Samuel R. Delany and
William Gibson. Below the cut there are two passages, one from each interview. They aren't representative, they are just two of the many, many passages which have been going around in my head for the last few days.
[more inside]posted by Kattullus at 10:57 AM PST - 37 comments
Romeo Muller wrote some of the most popular holiday (mostly Christmas) specials of all time for
Rankin/Bass, including
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,
The Little Drummer Boy,
Santa Claus is Comin' to Town (bonus
Justin Bieber version with Animagic!),
Jack Frost, and
Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey. The very last special he wrote was
Noel, based on a story he told on the radio every year at Christmas. It aired just days before his death on December 30th, 1992. Another special, called
The Twelve Days of Christmas, aired in 1993, and was based on a story by him, but was written by someone else.
[more inside]posted by Huck500 at 8:11 AM PST - 6 comments
The special duty of a Jewish Christmas baby by
Sheila Heti Most of the people one deals with say, “Oh! You're a Christmas baby! You must get ripped off when it comes to presents, right?” Their eyes light up.
It's a hard question to answer. The honest answer is, “I'm a Jew, I don't celebrate Christmas,” but saying this always seems chastising, and the person who asked then feels embarrassed (as they should) and I feel embarrassed that this is my accidental role in the world: reminding everyone that Jews exist. The times I say, gruffly, “I don't know. I'm Jewish,” they usually say, “Oh, I'm sorry!” But this always sounds to me not like, “I'm sorry I assumed you were Christian,” but rather, “I'm sorry that you're Jewish.” Given all this, I usually reply simply, “Yeah, it's awful. I get ripped off every year.” [previously from Sheila Heti]posted by KokuRyu at 6:26 AM PST - 119 comments
For fans of either Nicholas Winding Refn's
Bronson or
The Today Show circa 1982-1997:
Gumbel. (single-link video, 4:37) Merry Xmas, all.
posted by Greg Nog at 4:28 AM PST - 6 comments
The Powers That Be was a short-lived, irreverent sitcom about a dim US Senator (John Forsythe, in his last major starring role on television) and his dysfunctional family, that aired on NBC between 1992 and 1993. Created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, who would go on to create
Friends, the show co-starred David Hyde Pierce (pre-
Frasier) as the Senator's
suicidal son-in-law.
[more inside]posted by zarq at 12:22 AM PST - 21 comments
December 24
"This was meant as a Christmas present for two girls I know who are 5 and 7, but I don't think I'll give it to them actually. It turned out a bit too
evil-demon-pig-from-hell-y for that. Now it's sitting on a shelf threatening me with its existence. I'm not quite sure what I should do with it."
posted by griphus at 6:07 PM PST - 69 comments
An unexpected musical treat. While on a search for an interesting modern cover of the
Steve Miller Band song "Abracadabra", I stumbled onto
Jeff McNeal's cover, which completely confused me, as I assumed it was lip-syncing. It's not: Jeff is a
professional voiceover artist, and announcer in the Los Angeles area, and he's been recording hundreds of musical impressions of a wide range of songs and artists:
Credence Clearwater/John Fogerty *
Cream *
Steppenwolf / John Kay *
The Doors/Jim Morrison *
The Knack/Doug Fieger *
Rolling Stones/Mick Jagger *
Burt Bacharach covering Dusty Springfield *
Dire Straits *
Van Morrison *
Tom Jones *
The Travelling Wilburys *
The Beach Boys *
Harry Nilsson *
The Police *
Led Zeppelin/Robert Plant ... and on and on. There are 375+ videos, so if he doesn't nail one voice to your liking, keep going. Some are eerie, while some are a guy who does dozens of impressions doing reasonably well.
He has a dedicated site to this ability,
SingingImpressionist.com.
I miss you, Danny Gans.posted by jscott at 4:46 PM PST - 18 comments
This Christmas, a holiday tradition undergoes a digital rebirth with
Fireplace [Mac/PC], the pixelated demake of
The Yule Log. It'll even incinerate whatever you type.
posted by Smart Dalek at 12:12 PM PST - 29 comments
Wonderland, by
Nadav Bagim, is a lovely macro-photo series which turns a kitchen counter into a miniature fantasy-land using household objects, and various critters as models.
posted by quin at 11:38 AM PST - 7 comments
Arduino + servos + laser + phosphorescent surface + Twitter =
Fade Away 1. A thoughtful art project about the "permanence" of the Internet.
posted by pashdown at 10:59 AM PST - 7 comments
Last year, an archivist at Dartmouth College discovered a forgotten scrapbook donated to the school by Robert L. May, the writer and illustrator of the original story of "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer", documenting the origins of the now-classic holiday story. The book was written in 1947 on commission from Montgomery Ward's, which was looking for a Christmas promotional item. Detailed in the scrapbook are May's list of possible names for the character, including "Rollo", "Reginald", "Romeo" and you-know-what. Ward's actually turned over the copyright to Rudolph to May, who became a millionaire when, two years later, his brother-in-law
Johnny Marks wrote the song which became a huge hit for
Gene Autry.
Snopes.com adds more details to the tale, including debunking the myth that the song was written by May to comfort his daughter while her mother lay dying.
posted by briank at 6:27 AM PST - 5 comments
Jack Goldman died this month. Mac? Windows? X11? You may think of visionaries who shaped technology as you know it. You might imagine that they were the original thinkers or visionary businessmen. You're wrong. The guy who laid the foundations started out trying to invent the electric car
at Ford, before being hired to Xerox creating the legendary PARC labs that invented computing as we know it; he lived to see
his prediction that "...any electric car produced in our lifetime will have to be a hybrid" come true.
posted by rodgerd at 2:07 AM PST - 17 comments
December 23
Here is dotEPUB, a Chrome extension that will convert any web page into an EPUB document, able to be viewed in most ereaders. Other browsers can use it via bookmarklets, including mobile Safari.
posted by JHarris at 8:26 PM PST - 23 comments
National Register Photostream — Authorized under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the
U.S. National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect our historic and archeological resources. Properties listed in the Register include districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects that are significant in American history, architecture, archeology, engineering, and culture.
posted by netbros at 1:51 PM PST - 6 comments
The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in surround sound Always a bit of a lottery getting into Kings College for this carol service though you can easily get in for other services during the rest of the year. Here for a limited time are two different recordings of the complete carol service which may offer surround sound to some. Only tried from the UK, don't know if it works abroad.
posted by epo at 11:14 AM PST - 11 comments
On December 19th, Ford closed the doors of their
St Paul auto plant, ending 800 jobs and 86 years of history. The plant was closed as part of Ford's move to end the Ford Ranger in North America, a truck that will still be available
overseas. Born of the 80s gas crisis, the Ranger has been Ford's compact truck for almost forty
years.
Ford blames demand for large trucks and the shrinking gap in price between the compact and full-sized truck markets, spurring
concern about the future of the compact truck market in North America.
posted by Stagger Lee at 9:45 AM PST - 93 comments
December 22
Firearms Philosophy of Ivan Chesnokov (NSFW). Ivan Chesnokov is a (supposedly) Russian firearms enthusiast who voices his strong opinions on firearms on various web forums. This is a collection of his writings. He also attempts to explain everything worth knowing about firearms.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:22 PM PST - 21 comments
"
So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint Romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are."
Biblios.
The Great Wall.
posted by SpacemanStix at 10:15 PM PST - 5 comments
Studies Suggest an Acetaminophen-Asthma Link. When aspirin was linked to Reye's syndrome in children during the 1980s, the resulting increase in acetaminophen use may have had some
negative effects. "
...there is now a plausible explanation for how acetaminophen might provoke or worsen asthma, a chronic inflammatory condition of the lungs. Even a single dose of acetaminophen can reduce the body’s levels of glutathione, a peptide that helps repair oxidative damage that can drive inflammation in the airways, researchers have found."
posted by storybored at 8:11 PM PST - 26 comments
Now the future is a kind of attenuating peninsula; as we move out on it, one side drops off to catastrophe; the other side, nowhere near as steep, moves down into various kinds of utopian futures. In other words, we have come to a moment of utopia or catastrophe; there is no middle ground, mediocrity will no longer succeed. So utopia is no longer a nice idea, but a survival necessity. "Remarks on Utopia in the Age of Climate Change," from Kim Stanley Robinson.
Previously.posted by gerryblog at 5:38 PM PST - 15 comments
A new form of wireless network known as
White Spaces will come online next month, the
FCC announced today.
White Spaces has been called "WiFi on steroids". White spaces are unused spectrum between broadcast television channels. It is faster than WiFi so it can handle more data. It can bring (nearly) free Internet access to the most remote areas of the country, places that can't get WiFi. Because it uses broadcast television signals, any place that can pick up a broadcast TV signal should be able to tap into
White Spaces.
posted by cashman at 5:32 PM PST - 34 comments
"
Ride With GPS is the best
bike route mapping tool for cyclists, runners or anyone wanting an easy yet powerful fitness route planning experience.
We offer tools to analyze cycling performance, including graphs of heart rate, cadence, watts (power output from a power meter), speed and elevation gain. Using all this data, we can offer training plans and other insight into your fitness. We work with all Garmin Edge bike computers, Forerunner fitness devices and any GPS unit that can export a TCX or GPX file."
posted by troll at 5:26 PM PST - 20 comments
A little overwhelmed by all those end-of-the-year best-of lists? No worries. The
Toronto Review of Books offers this
list of lists, "a quick-and-dirty shortcut, a best-of the 'best-ofs' if you will, a recap of the recaps of the world-historically tumultuous and unpredictable year 2011 was."
posted by anothermug at 4:45 PM PST - 5 comments
Counterparties is a nice little collection of curated and tagged economic news stories, 5-8 every day. It is edited in part by the admirable (and MetaFave) financial journalist
Felix Salmon.
posted by shothotbot at 3:47 PM PST - 12 comments
Arrows is a documentary by a genius,
John Samson, whose flame burned briefly but brightly, about another genius,
Eric Bristow, whose career followed a similar trajectory. The film reflects a twilight world of pub sports satirised by Martin Amis in his masterpiece
London Fields. Last link may cause discomfort.
[more inside]posted by tigrefacile at 1:49 PM PST - 7 comments
When not terrorizing
Mr Bond, from the late 1970s until 1994, Mike Mangino and Chris Shepard were in a basement full of musical toys, novelty space microphones, a
TR-606, and a
SH-09 in
Piscataway, NJ recording cassettes as the band
Smersh. In 1981
Smersh released their first cassette under their own label of
Atlas King. They never rehearsed, they couldn't read music, and they never played live, and they
contributed to far too many compilations throughout the known world. In the early eighties they
established a unique sound that is known and loved, combining cheap electronics and wild guitar sounds with distorted vocals. By trading cassettes they garnered international acclaim
leading to releases on dozens of other labels.
[more inside]posted by wcfields at 1:16 PM PST - 5 comments
whitney music box -- a fantastic animation You may notice some interesting links between the visuals and the audio, especially if you are a musician. For example, when the pattern forms a 3-arm starfish, the chords you are hearing are diminished chords, which consist of minor thirds, an interval in which the notes are 3 chromatic steps apart. The chords you hear always bear this type of relationship to the pattern you are seeing, consisting of intervals which match the arrangement of arms.
Really, just look, and you'll get it.
[more inside]posted by MrMoonPie at 12:47 PM PST - 18 comments
June 25th 1906, was the opening night of the musical revue
Mamzelle Champagne on the roof of
Madison Square Garden. In attendance were Stanford White, renowned architect
(Washington Square Arch, Judson Memorial Church, Madison Square Garden itself), and
Harry Kendall Thaw, eccentric coal and railroad scion. During the performance of the song
I Could Love a Million Girls, Thaw "
left his seat near the stage, passed between a number of tables, and, in full view of the players and of scores of persons, shot White through the head."
(pdf) Standing over White’s body, Thaw said “You’ll never go out with that woman again.”
[more inside]posted by davidjmcgee at 12:01 PM PST - 14 comments
A decade on, the Coen brothers' woefully underrated
O Brother, Where Art Thou? [alt] is remembered for
a lot of things: its sun-drenched, sepia-rich
cinematography (a pioneer of
digital color grading), its
whimsical humor,
fluid vernacular, and
many subtle references to Homer's
Odyssey. But one part of its legacy truly stands out:
the music.
Assembled by
T-Bone Burnett, the soundtrack is a cornucopia of American folk music, exhibiting everything from
cheery ballads and
angelic hymns to
wistful blues and
chain-gang anthems. Woven into the plot of the film through radio and live performances, the songs lent the story a
heartfelt, homespun feel that echoed its cultural heritage,
a paean and uchronia of the Old South.
Though the multiplatinum album was recently
reissued, the movie's medley is best heard via famed documentarian
D. A. Pennebaker's
Down from the Mountain, an
extraordinary yet
intimate concert film focused on a night of live music by the soundtrack's stars (among them
Gillian Welch,
Emmylou Harris,
Chris Thomas King, bluegrass legend
Dr. Ralph Stanley) and wryly hosted by
John Hartford, an accomplished
fiddler,
riverboat captain, and
raconteur whose struggle with terminal cancer made this his last major performance. The film is free in its entirety on
Hulu and
YouTube -- click inside for individual clips, song links, and breakdowns of
the set list's fascinating history.
[more inside]posted by Rhaomi at 11:35 AM PST - 107 comments
We went into the Doubleday bookshop
at Fifth Avenue and Fifty Second
Street the other day, intending,
in our innocence, to buy a book, and
found all the clerks busy selling Silly
Putty, a gooey, pinkish, repellent-looking
commodity that comes in plastic
containers the size and shape of eggs.
How an
item in the August 26th, 1950
New Yorker's Talk of the Town column turned a marketing consultant into a millionare by Christmas.
[more inside]posted by Toekneesan at 8:00 AM PST - 31 comments
Massive 1,100+ year old Maya site discovered in Georgia's mountains The archaeological site would have been particularly attractive to Mayas because it contains an apparently dormant volcano fumarole that reaches down into the bowels of the earth. People of One Fire researchers have been aware since 2010 that when the English arrived in the Southeast, there were numerous Native American towns named Itsate in Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina and western North Carolina. They were also aware that both the Itza Mayas of Central America and the Hitchiti Creeks of the Southeast actually called themselves Itsate . . . and pronounced the word the same way. The Itsate Creeks used many Maya and Totonac words. Their architecture was identical to that of Maya commoners. The pottery at Ocmulgee National Monument (c 900 AD) in central Georgia is virtually identical to the Maya Plain Red pottery made by Maya Commoners.posted by ewagoner at 7:02 AM PST - 111 comments
How Computers Work. Recently recovered & scanned in by the good folks at BoingBoing, this was an early textbook explaining the fundamental concepts & inner workings of modern computing systems. I believe a slightly different edition of this book was my own introduction to computers when I was in 6th grade or so, which explains a lot about my approach to using them.
posted by scalefree at 2:13 AM PST - 44 comments
We were kids...and songs would come on...and I would sing really loud...always the wrong lyrics. My little sister grew up thinking MY lyrics were the right ones. viaposted by Knappster at 1:44 AM PST - 28 comments
December 21
"In the 2008 economic meltdown, Iceland nearly collapsed. Its three banks failed, it's currency lost 50 per cent of its value and in an unprecedented display of anger, usually peaceful Icelanders took to the streets to protest.
But Iceland defied the orthodox economic wisdom of the time---bailouts and slashing government services---and now is on the road to a recovery that the rest of Europe envies.
The hero of the hour and the man almost solely responsible for this remarkable turnaround is the country's president Olafur Grimmson."
This CBC Sunday Edition Interview is a fascinating listen. [more inside]posted by smudgedlens at 8:13 PM PST - 35 comments
The concept of Used Cars originated with writer-director-producer John Milius, who pitched the idea to scribes Zemeckis and Gale while they were still hard at work on what would become 1941.
... Zemeckis shot Cars
in a breakneck 28 days at a Chrysler-Plymouth dealership in Mesa, Ariz. ... Despite its low profile, the film received a great deal of critical acclaim, including the notoriously finicky Pauline Kael…who described Cars as “a classic screwball fantasy — a neglected modern comedy that’s like a more restless and visually high-spirited version of the W.C. Fields pictures.”* [more inside]posted by Trurl at 7:03 PM PST - 36 comments
Secrecy defines Obama’s drone war. "Since September, at least 60 people have died in 14 reported CIA drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal regions. The Obama administration has named only one of the dead, hailing the elimination of Janbaz Zadran, a top official in the Haqqani insurgent network, as a counterterrorism victory. The identities of the rest remain classified, as does the existence of the drone program itself. Because the names of the dead and the threat they were believed to pose are secret, it is impossible for anyone without access to U.S. intelligence to assess whether the deaths were justified."
[more inside]posted by homunculus at 4:40 PM PST - 82 comments
Bank of America agreed to pay $335 million to resolve allegations that Countrywide Financial engaged in widespread discrimination against African-American and Hispanic borrowers on home loans. The Department of Justice is calling this
the largest settlement in history over fair residential lending practices. According to the DOJ’s complaint, Countrywide systematically charged more than 200,000 African-American and Hispanic borrowers higher fees and interest rates than white borrowers with similar credit profiles.
[more inside]posted by 2bucksplus at 4:12 PM PST - 31 comments
"everything is good that / has a good beginning / and doesn't have an end / the world will die but for us there is no / end!" Thus ends
Victory over the Sun (
part 1,
part 2), the "first Futurist opera".
[more inside]posted by daniel_charms at 3:15 PM PST - 8 comments
The Navy's first kiss tradition enters the post Don't Ask, Don't Tell era If you're like me you may never have heard of the Navy's first kiss tradition. But it's not unusual for a ship returning from deployment to run a contest or raffle which gives the winner the first kiss with their sweetie on the dock;
you can find wikipedia media showing past events. After tonight's news broadcasts pretty much everyone in the country will have heard of it because you can be sure, whether it's portrayed as a step forward or a sign of the end times, every broadcast is going to lead with the first same-sex Navy first kiss between disembarking Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta and her girlfriend, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell of Los Angeles.
posted by phearlez at 2:46 PM PST - 82 comments
If you enjoy instrumental jazz and Christmas music, you might enjoy
The Best Jazz Christmas Record You've Never Heard. "
"Christmas With The Believers" turned out to be the best jazz Christmas music I had ever heard, and that's still the case today. I'll take the imaginative arrangements, chops, tight playing, and sense of swing on this recording over anything I've heard by the legends in this field." It's
presented here as a cassette recording from Fall '86, with Donny Schwekendiek on piano, Neal Heidler on the bass and Narry Puhlovski on the drums.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:27 AM PST - 26 comments
"Oh God, Danny, stay on your bike!" This is a video of the winning downhill run in the 2011 mountain bike world championships. It's pretty cool, but it's the insane commentating that really makes this special. Gets really good starting around 20 seconds in. (
via)
posted by chinston at 9:28 AM PST - 72 comments
10b Photography has established itself as one of the world’s leading digital darkrooms, handling post-production for scores of award-winning photojournalists who trust that the company knows where to draw the line between processing and manipulation. [...] 10b is quick to point out that it is not a retouching firm. The term is often associated with Photoshop experts, who are hired to alter the look and shape of fashion icons, for example. So when it comes to defining Palmisano's role, it can get tricky. Post-processing in the digital age.posted by shakespeherian at 8:08 AM PST - 28 comments
Humble & Fred do a podcast. Big deal, you say? The bigger story is that they're fairly well known mainstream radio guys in the Toronto area, who have been in the business for decades, but after some recent firings have decided to give full time podcasting a try. And they're making a pretty big splash so far.
[more inside]posted by antifuse at 7:38 AM PST - 21 comments
ink&paper A short film about the last paper shop, and the last letterpress, in Los Angeles.
"There are days go by that there can be absolutely no business at all."posted by OmieWise at 5:24 AM PST - 22 comments
AIDS information posters from around the world You can browse by country, topic, etc., and many of the posters have large linked images. Provided by UCLA's Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library.
(Much as it pains me to say it, while these are public health information posters hosted by a medical library, for some, the content will be NSFW.)posted by carter at 4:55 AM PST - 1 comments
December 20
The challenge of life is to be present for it while it is happening, in this moment, to be aware of it in a way that is both wide in perspective and deep in understanding. If you pester priests to know about a second life after this one, I must ask if you are using this one. Whoever is spending this life walking back and forth from the computer to the refrigerator, it is worth wondering how many thousands of years of this would be enough. This life is enough, if you are here for it. The people worried about death are the ones not truly living. They are the ones who know in their hearts that they need more time.
Jennifer Michael Hecht explains why
For Atheists, this Life is Enough. And
here, she talks about the history of
doubt.
posted by storybored at 8:24 PM PST - 79 comments
Vampires in Havana (YT, 1:09:58, Spanish with English subtitles, also available on Netflix streaming) is an
animated film by Cuban director
Juan Padron about the battle between European and American vampires for control of Vampisol, a formula which allows vampires to go out in the sun.
posted by Daily Alice at 7:46 PM PST - 8 comments
In Do the Right Thing, the subject is not simply a race riot, but the tragic dynamic of racism, racial tension, and miscommunication, seen in microcosm. The film is a virtuoso act of creation, a movie at once realistic and symbolic, lighthearted and tragic, funny and savage... I have written here more about Lee’s ideas than about his style. To an unusual degree, you could not have one without the other: style is the magician’s left hand, distracting and entertaining us while the right hand produces the rabbit from the hat. It’s not what Lee does that makes his film so devastating, but how he does it. Do the Right Thing is one of the best-directed, best-made films of our time, a film in which the technical credits, the acting, and Lee’s brazenly fresh visual style all work together to make a statement about race in America that is all the more powerful because it blindsides us. -
Roger Ebert (SPOILER) [more inside]posted by Trurl at 6:20 PM PST - 74 comments
In 2006, Hannah Overton was charged with the death of her 4-year-old foster son, Andrew Burd.
Media accounts at the time claimed that Overton had force-fed her misbehaving son a mixture of water and creole seasoning, leading to death by salt poisoning. Convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life without parole in 2008, Overton's case led angry bloggers to call her
"the ultimate evil," part of a cult of
"child abuse groupies," a murderer that
"church cronies" are working to free.
This month's issue of
Texas Monthly paints a fuller picture of the short life of Andrew Burd and the conviction of the mother who was working towards adopting him.
posted by mudpuppie at 3:46 PM PST - 79 comments
James Gurney
answers "What inspired you really to create Dinotopia?".
"Myths and stories ARE real, I tried to tell her. And they're enduring. They're the one thing that lives on through the years as the physical monuments of old civilizations crumble into dust... The key to inventing Dinotopia was believing that it already existed beyond the confines of my own mind. Even if I couldn’t tell the the latitude and longitude, I believed it was out there somewhere beyond the reach of my senses. To engage readers with that reality I had to pay attention to the spaces between the paintings, the moments poised across the page turn, which each reader conjures anew." [more inside]posted by flex at 3:33 PM PST - 11 comments
Although the ultra-mysterious and rumour-cloaked Les Rallizes Dénudés/Hadaka no Rallizes existed in various forms from November 1967 to their last gig in October 1996 they are practically unknown in - let alone out of - Japan. Their recorded output is incredibly rare and highly priced and interviews or articles in the music press virtually non-existent. Tie that in with links to radical left-wing politics, extreme sensory assault at live shows and a general revolutionary aura and you have what must be the ultimate cult group. [more inside]posted by twirlip at 2:52 PM PST - 12 comments
Black Chefs' Struggle For The Top With the restaurant industry booming and chefs becoming celebrities and wealthy entrepreneurs, few blacks are sharing in that success, and as young black men and women enter the profession they are finding few mentors or peers.
[more inside]posted by magstheaxe at 11:47 AM PST - 21 comments
During the US Civil War, metal monies were hoarded for their value, resulting in a shortage of available coins. The Union government issued
official "paper coins" that weren't backed by by gold or silver. This "faith paper" lost value quickly, and for a short while,
stamps were official currency. That didn't take, either, so enterprising individuals took it upon themselves to mint their own coinage. These are now known as
Civil War Tokens (CTWs), and were made and used between late 1862 and mid 1864. On April 22, 1864,
Congress set the weight of coins and
set punishment for counterfeiting coins of up to one thousand dollars and imprisonment up to five years.
Yet there are over ten thousand varieties of tokens, representing 22 states, 400 towns and about 1500 individual merchants.
Melvin and his son Dr. George Fuld wrote
key books in the CWT field, creating the
rarity scale and composition key used by most numismatists. Given sheer number of CWTs, starting a collection might be daunting. Enter
collector Ken Bauer, whose
method breaks down the vast world into
smaller collections, from
anvils to
watches and
so much
more.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:20 AM PST - 9 comments
Looking at the rest of the top search results for Christmas is like getting into a time machine that takes you back to a bizarro 2001 in which every single web surfer is a sucker. There are "Hot Links!" and "Fun Things to Do." What we see is the ad hoc, de facto social network formed by people who type Christmas into a search engine. And man, that network is like MySpace for your great aunt who has too many cats. [more inside]posted by Horace Rumpole at 8:51 AM PST - 16 comments
The Library: [SLYT] A film by Sergey Stefanovich. A journey through Duncan Fallowell's library which has spilled over into every available space and become an art installation in its own right. With the writer talking.
posted by Fizz at 8:36 AM PST - 8 comments
Fred Clark posts at a blog called "
Slacktivist", so he is often referred to by that name. But this left-wing Christian is far from a slacker. His blog is a powerful voice against the usual conservative Christian presence in America, and the best distillation of his strength is his series of posts analyzing the
Left Behind novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Fred savages these books for their "bad writing and bad theology" but it's not the usual Internet snark; Fred has a larger mission here than just pointing and laughing. He just finished dissecting book two,
Tribulation Force, so it's a great time to jump on if you already haven't. (He has promised that after a holiday break, he's going to do the
Tribulation Force movie, and then on to book three.)
[more inside]posted by Legomancer at 7:01 AM PST - 183 comments
When most folks think of "Christmas music" it's doubtful that their next thought will be "the blues", but along with "my baby" or "bad luck" or "leavin' in the morning", bluesmen have long included Christmas as lyric inspiration. Which bluesmen? Well...
Sonny Boy Williamson,
Freddie King,
Blind Blake,
John Lee Hooker,
Lightnin' Hopkins,
Little Milton,
B.B. King,
Smokey Hogg,
Charley Jordan, and last but certainly not least, one of the most influential early bluesmen,
Blind Lemon Jefferson.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:23 AM PST - 23 comments
December 19
Johann (Hans) Hölzel was born in Vienna on February 19, 1957. He adopted a stage name taken from a ski jumper, played in a
couple of
bands, and then struck out on his own. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present for you, the only truly international Austrian pop, rock and rap star: Falco!
[more inside]posted by hippybear at 11:48 PM PST - 42 comments
Rethinking the Idea of 'Christian Europe'. Kenan Malik's essay is awarded
3 Quarks Daily's Top Quark for politics & social science by judge
Stephen M. Walt: "Soldiers in today’s culture wars believe 'European civilization' rests on a set of unchanging principles that are perennially under siege—from godless communism, secular humanism, and most recently, radical Islam. For many of these zealots, what makes the 'West' unique are its Judeo-Christian roots. In this calm and elegantly-written reflection on the past two millenia, Malik shows that Christianity is only one of the many sources of 'Western' culture, and that many of the ideas we now think of as 'bedrock' values were in fact borrowed from other cultures. This essay is a potent antidote to those who believe a 'clash of civilizations' is inevitable—if not already underway—and the moral in Malik’s account could not be clearer. Openness to outside influences has been the true source of European prominence; erecting ramparts against others will impoverish and endanger us all."
posted by homunculus at 10:20 PM PST - 87 comments
How well do you really know old Arty? It all began with the Welsh: The The Annales Cabriae (inside) and parts of the Welsh oral tradition (later collected into
the Mabinogion) give a very different picture of the popular King Arthur than contemporary readers are familiar with: no Lancelot, three or four different Guens, no love triangles or Holy Grails. A look at the vast scope of the Arthurian legend.
[more inside]posted by kittenmarlowe at 6:27 PM PST - 30 comments
Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is, roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint (if one may use the latter term in an aesthetic, rather than a religious sense). Such a life, absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation — like Kleist’s, like Kierkegaard’s — was Simone Weil’s. -
Susan Sontag [more inside]posted by Trurl at 6:07 PM PST - 8 comments
How can we better understand the interplay of nature and nurture in determining our personalities, behavior, and vulnerability to disease? Perhaps we should be looking at
identical twins.
(National Geographic January 2012 cover story) [more inside]posted by zarq at 4:28 PM PST - 89 comments
Kokeshi Dolls originated in North-East Japan as wooden toys for children. They began being produced towards the end of the Edo period (1603~1868) by woodwork artisans, called Kiji-shi, who normally made bowls, trays and other tableware by using a lathe. They began to make small dolls in the winter to sell to visitors who came to bathe in the many hot springs near their villages, which was believed to be a cure for the demands of a strenuous agricultural lifestyle. [more inside]posted by nickyskye at 1:32 PM PST - 20 comments
When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn’t dream of. He wore one himself--for a whole week. [...] It resulted in endless derision and almost destroyed his family. But no one is laughing at him anymore, as the sanitary napkin-making machine he went on to create is transforming the lives of rural women across India.
An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry. [more inside]posted by Foci for Analysis at 12:48 PM PST - 51 comments
IBM is
currently putting together database and barcode tracking to allow farmers and grocers in China to track your porkchop, from the pig to the plate. Using supply chain tracking (similar to what is done already in other industries), the goal is to limit and hopefully prevent disease outbreaks by tracking the health of the animal, including which other animals it has come into contact with. So the next time you sit down for some nice ham, you might be able to scan the barcode (or RFID tag) to see whom else on your block shares your own porcine six degrees of separation.
[more inside]posted by Old'n'Busted at 11:51 AM PST - 21 comments
All across the world you'll find different varieties of
dumplings. However, starting in Eastern Europe and spreading across central Asia and into northeast Asia, you'll find a
remarkably similar variety featuring a thin skin and a meat filling. Variants can be found all the way from Poland (
Pieorgies) to Korea (
Mandu), a distance of nearly 5,000 miles (more than 7,500 km).
[more inside]posted by Deathalicious at 9:45 AM PST - 64 comments
2011 in Lego Pictures. From the royal wedding to the death of Osama bin Laden, the English summer riots and the fall of Gaddafi, here are some of major news stories of the past 12 months captured in Lego by Flickr members.posted by OmieWise at 8:46 AM PST - 13 comments
The War Nerd (
previously) breaks tone somewhat to celebrate the life of
Benjamin Grierson, who would go from being kicked in the head by a horse as a youth to leading, "the greatest cavalry raid of the whole war, riding from Tennessee 600 miles almost due south through enemy territory to land safe in Baton Rouge, LA, inflicting ten times the casualties he had himself—and then going on to be the one white officer who stood up for the black freedmen 'Buffalo Soldiers' in the far West, at a time when America was using white-vs-black to heal up the raw North-vs-South scars."
posted by Copronymus at 8:29 AM PST - 6 comments
The train they call the
City of New Orleans began operations in 1947 carrying passengers from Chicago to New Orleans daily. Although the train service remained popular through the 60's, by 1970 train travel was on the decline. That's when native Chicagoan Steve Goodman and his new bride, Nancy, rode the train down to visit her folks in New Orleans. That trip inspired Goodman to write
The City of New Orleans and an American folk/country standard was born.
The song would go on to earn Goodman a posthumous Grammy 14 years later.
[more inside]posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 7:34 AM PST - 44 comments
Never had a whole lotta use for the Lawrence Welk show, but man, when it came time for steel guitar wizard Buddy Merrill and his dazzlingly snazzy stringery to take center stage, the broadcast got a
hella lot better,
fast!posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:39 AM PST - 24 comments
The Blizzard is a quarterly football (soccer) journal that covers an eclectic range of subjects which don't usually receive much mainstream coverage. Issue 3 is out, and features, among other things, articles on the demise of Spartak Moscow, a World War One internment camp that shaped the development of the game in Europe, how nationalism shaped the rise and fall of Beitar Jerusalem and how Dawson's Creek explains modern football. It is edited by Jonathan Wilson, of "Inverting The Pyramid" fame, and it's writers include Tim Vickery, Barney Ronay and Gabriele Marcotti.
[more inside]posted by salmacis at 2:37 AM PST - 7 comments
When the world is going crazy and life is just awful, you can count on The Internet to
MAKE EVERYTHING OK.
Service provided 'as is' with no warranty implied or suggested. Your perception of what's OK may vary, but that's YOUR problem.posted by oneswellfoop at 2:05 AM PST - 40 comments
December 18
Have your Chipotle burrito at
John Dos Passos' house. Read
Silent Spring in
Silver Spring. You can now take a real or virtual walking tour of literary DC, from
Roald Dahl to
Philip K. Dick to
Zora Neale Hurston with
DCWriters.org. Two DC-area poets have put together a compendium of 123 (and growing) residences in the DC area where novelists, poets, and playwrights plied their trade. The buildings may not all have plaques, but they are still standing: Dan Vera and Kim Roberts
focused on not "documenting what used to be here, but what people could actually go and take a look at."
posted by HonoriaGlossop at 6:42 PM PST - 18 comments
The Rabbit Dreams of Dr. Freud's Niece - An illustrator of children's books, Sigmund Freud's niece Martha went by the name Tom, wore men's clothing, and died by her own hand in her late 30s, a year after her husband's suicide. BibliOdyssey recently featured some of her early work from
Das Baby-Liederbuch, noting that because she was Jewish, many of her books were destroyed in the Nazi era and are scarce in the book trade. More about the artist and her work at
Tom Seidmann-Freud.
posted by madamjujujive at 5:24 PM PST - 14 comments
Marked. Photographer Claire Felicie photographed the marines of the 13th infantry company of the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps, before, during and after their deployment in Uruzgan.
posted by jokeefe at 11:19 AM PST - 20 comments
itwofs - chronicles of plagiarism in indian film music. Features similarities in film music content between Indian films and it's (sic) counterparts. [more inside]posted by beshtya at 9:19 AM PST - 12 comments
No one living can say whether the original, ten-hour version of Erich von Stroheim's most famous movie was the epic masterpiece it was touted to be. The 140-minute version is all that remains, and while it's only a quarter of the film it was meant to be, it's still one of the greatest accomplishments (SPOILER) of the silent film era. [more inside]posted by Trurl at 9:09 AM PST - 13 comments
December 17
It's December so it must be time to list the best songs of the year.
Pitchfork's Top 100 Songs and
Top 50 Albums,
MTV's Top 10 Songs of 2011,
Billboard's 20 Best Singles,
Spin's 20 Best Songs and
Top 50 Albums,
AARP's Top 10 Albums For Grown Ups,
The A/V Club's Best Music of 2011, Rolling Stone's
50 Best Singles and
50 Best Albums,
NPR Music's 100 Favorite Songs of 2011,
BET's 100 Best Songs of 2011,
NME's Best Albums of 2011,
MixMag's Tunes of The Year, Metacritic's Top 10 Albums of 2011,
Pop Matters 75 Best Albums,
Songs and
more.
[more inside]posted by empath at 9:23 PM PST - 154 comments
Here is "The B.S. of A. with Brain Sack," a show aired on Glenn Beck's TV channel that claims to be a "non-partisan" alternative to the Daily Show. How good is it? Better than the right's previous attempts at making a satire show, but uneven.... Judge for yourself: here's a monologue, in five parts:
1-
2-
3-
4-
5. Here's a few of the better bits:
Kill Panel -
Pilgrim Funnies -
Isle of Skulls MLYT [more inside]posted by JHarris at 6:38 PM PST - 88 comments
In this time of corrupt politics, police brutality, media dereliction, and increasingly vicious culture wars, there's perhaps no graphic novel more relevant today than the brilliant and blackly funny
Transmetropolitan.
Created by Warren Ellis back in 1997 and inspired by prescient sci fi novel
Bug Jack Barron, the series covers the work of
gonzo journalist, vulgar misanthrope, and all-around magnificent bastard
Spider Jerusalem in a
sprawling futuristic vision of New York so chaotically advanced that humans splice genes with alien refugees, matter decompilers are as common as microwaves, and a new religion is invented every hour.
As a callous Nixonian thug nicknamed
The Beast prepares for his re-election to the presidency, a primary battle heats up between a virulent racist and a charismatic senator whose
rictus grin masks some disturbing realities. When Jerusalem delves into
the machinations of the race, he breaks into a web of conspiracies that threaten the future of the country -- a problem only he, his
"filthy assistants," and the power of
intrepid journalism can defeat.
More: Read the first issue (or
three) -
browse images from
the new artbook -
Tor's read-along blog (
another) - Jerusalem's
touching report on cryogenic "Revivals" -
dozens of original sketches and
sample pages -
timeline -
quotesposted by Rhaomi at 1:48 PM PST - 55 comments
Cesaria Evora once described the music of Cape Verde, known as
Morna, as "a lot of things…Some say it’s like the blues, or jazz. Others says it’s like Brazilian or African music, but no one really knows. Not even the old ones."
Although Evora's singing voice had attracted attention even when she was a small girl, she did not gain recognition until later in life when she performed in Paris and the French newspaper
Le Monde proclaimed that she "belongs to the world nobility of bar singers."
Cesaria Evora, known as the Barefoot Diva for performing without shoes,
passed away today at the age of 70 in her native Cape Verde.
You can listen to Evora performing
Miss Perfumado and
Sodade online.
posted by vacapinta at 12:36 PM PST - 35 comments
Two high school students record a
gorgeous version (youtube) of
Neko Case’s Star Witness in their high school stairwell. The song is part of a
protest to save Peterborough Collegiate and Vocational School from imminent closure. Will their beautiful protest work? Who knows. But they did
break Neko Case’s heart. Maybe they’ll break yours too.
posted by Cuke at 7:14 AM PST - 62 comments
Note Worthy: [guardian.co.uk] Global economic meltdown, the euro crisis and Occupy protests – this year has been dominated by financial issues. But what is money anyway? We invited writers and artists including Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood and Naomi Klein to invent new currencies and banknotes for a changed world.
posted by Fizz at 6:04 AM PST - 13 comments
December 16
Maggie and Terre Roche started performing professionally in the late '60s, just a little late for the folkie boom but also a bit too distinctive to blend easily with the singer-songwriters of the early '70s, even when they became acolytes of Paul Simon and recorded backup vocals on There Goes Rhymin' Simon
. By 1975, they had their own album on CBS, with tracks produced by Simon (and backed by the Oak Ridge Boys and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section) and ex-Yardbird Paul Samwell-Smith... Seductive Reasoning is not completely a folk nor a country album, which no doubt hurt its commercial potential... Songs such as "West Virginia", "Down the Dream", and "The Mountain People" touch on early joy and disillusionment/disappointment, while "Jill of All Trades" and "The Burden of Proof" reflect a few more years of life under one's belt and the smoothing out that can come with them. "Underneath the Moon" and "Wigglin' Man"... are more straightforward getting-laid songs, funny as hell... while several of their albums have been as good as Seductive Reasoning
, none were better. Nor did they have to be. -
Todd Mason (previously) [more inside]posted by Trurl at 9:52 PM PST - 29 comments
There's Hard Rock, Soft Rock, Punk Rock, Folk Rock, Progressive Rock, Alt Rock, Art Rock, Acid Rock, Indie Rock, Grunge Rock, Schoolhouse Rock, 30 Rock, and now there's
Third Rock, an internet radio station "powered by NASA", yes, NASA. (Think of it as 'New Music' with commercials for something you already like)
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:48 PM PST - 20 comments
When you send people passwords and private links via email or chat, there are copies of that information stored in many places. If you use a one-time link instead, the information persists for a single viewing which means it can't be read by someone else later. This allows you to send sensitive information in a safe way knowing it's seen by one person only. Think of it like a self-destructing message, a
One Time Secret.
posted by netbros at 4:11 PM PST - 35 comments
Flash Friday:
Gamerswithjobs calls Nekogames'
OUKA a "very minimalist experience, offering the simplest rules possible in a video game...(i)nstead of a long sentence or paragraph explaining things, or even a tutorial video, when you click the “Hint” button the game simply lays part of the level’s inner workings bare. It’s a testament to the simplicity of the game that this works so well."
Just click the symbol, that's all.
[more inside]posted by mreleganza at 12:24 PM PST - 34 comments
In 1985, Apple started the "Apple University Consortium Europe" collaboration program, and one of the first universities to enroll was that of Lund, Sweden. To celebrate the collaboration, Apple CEO Steve Jobs came to Lund - and a 16 minute film of his visit has now been found and been made available by the University of Lund.
You can see the clip here (.mov).posted by mr.marx at 12:23 PM PST - 5 comments
The concept behind
VoyURL is simple: A browser plugin records your every click, which you can then choose to share publicly in a real-time feed. Their website
analyzes and
shows you your online history in customized infographics, to identify patterns, recommend content and help you learn more about the way you use the internet. You can see the browsing history of all users in one giant timeline or follow a specific user. The service is currently in beta, but you can slip in
here or
here.
[more inside]posted by zarq at 10:59 AM PST - 35 comments
Back in Town is a song by
Izia, a French rock band fronted by and named for Izïa Higelin. Even though she comes from a showbiz family, the band initially found little favor on French radio. But after a string of
blistering live performances all over France, the self-titled first album became a hit and won a couple of awards at the prestigious Victoire de la Musique ceremony, where Izia performed the song
Let Me Alone. There are a bunch of live performances online, including of
Life is Going Down, a cover of AC/DC's
Touch Too Much and a
duet with Iggy Pop. This past November, sophomore album So Much Trouble was released, featuring such songs as the
title track,
On Top of the World, and my favorite,
Baby.
posted by Kattullus at 10:10 AM PST - 9 comments
In the state of Virginia, it is
now legal for licensed adoption agencies and foster facilities to discriminate on the basis of a potential parent's sexual orientation, religion, age, gender, disability, political beliefs, or family status.
[more inside]posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:30 AM PST - 60 comments
Black And White Portraits of the Homeless "Lee Jeffries' career began as a sports photographer, capturing the beautiful game of football in Manchester. Then a chance meeting with a homeless woman living in the streets of London changed his life forever. He has since dedicated himself to capturing gripping portraits of the disenfranchised.
Shooting exclusively in black and white, Lee Jeffries’ 135+ pictures can be viewed in his Flickr Photostream. The majority are closeup portraits with incredible detail. Each photograph exudes so much raw character and depth, you find yourself studying each shot with great intensity."
posted by parrot_person at 3:50 AM PST - 42 comments
December 15
A Pattern Language explores the living structure in good and bad buildings, human artifacts, and natural systems, discussing the presence of the same living order in all systems. [Christopher] Alexander proposes that the living order depends on features which make a close connection with the human self. The quality of works of art, artifacts, and buildings is defined not merely in terms of living structure, but also in their capacity to affect human growth and human well-being.posted by Trurl at 9:50 PM PST - 38 comments
Tired of the same old renditions of the Christmas Story? Try
this video and
its prequel, produced in the vein of Spike Jonze's
Where the Wild Things Are.
posted by kethonna at 3:35 PM PST - 6 comments
An Essay On The Noble Science Of Self-Justification: "Timid brides, you have, probably, hitherto been addressed as angels. Prepare for the time when you shall again become mortal. Take the alarm at the first approach of blame; at the first hint of a discovery that you are any thing less than infallible:--contradict, debate, justify, recriminate, rage, weep, swoon, do any thing but yield to conviction.
I take it for granted that you have already acquired sufficient command of voice; you need not study its compass; going beyond its pitch has a peculiarly happy effect upon some occasions. But are you voluble enough to drown all sense in a torrent of words? Can you be loud enough to overpower the voice of all who shall attempt to interrupt or contradict you? Are you mistress of the petulant, the peevish, and the sullen tone? Have you practised the sharpness which provokes retort, and the continual monotony which by setting your adversary to sleep effectually precludes reply?" For remember, "a lady can do no wrong."
posted by shivohum at 2:08 PM PST - 5 comments
IE6 was released to the world 10 years ago. Now Microsoft is saying "Goodbye".
(from the
MSNBC Article) "To help expedite the farewell (or rather, the execution) of its ancient Web browser, Microsoft says next month it will start to upgrade Windows customers automatically to the latest version of IE available for their computer."
[more inside]posted by kellygrape at 1:16 PM PST - 87 comments
Many ages ago, before some had yet to hear of The Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings or the collectible LOTR glasses sold at Burger King, critics did their initial reviews. Here's the
original review by the New York Times of The Hobbit in 1938. Then came
The Fellowship of the Ring, followed by
The Two Towers, and of course
The Return of the King.
Here's a 1967 interview with Tolkien after the influence of his work was starting to be felt. One interesting detail noted is that Tolkien typed the entire 1200+ page manuscript of TLOTR with two fingers. Of course, not everyone viewed the books so favorably. The
BBC has detailed some initial criticism against the books, but this seems to have been the minority response within a generally broad and warm literary reception.
posted by SpacemanStix at 12:17 PM PST - 44 comments
"Over the years, Lego has had five strategic initiatives aimed at girls. Some failed because they misapprehended gender differences in how kids play. Others, while modestly profitable, didn’t integrate properly with Lego’s core products. Now, after four years of research, design, and exhaustive testing, Lego believes it has a breakthrough.
On Dec. 26 in the U.K. and Jan. 1 in the U.S., Lego will roll out Lego Friends, aimed at girls 5 and up....
"The Lego Friends team is aware of the paradox at the heart of its work: To break down old stereotypes about how girls play, it risks reinforcing others. “If it takes color-coding or ponies and hairdressers to get girls playing with Lego, I’ll put up with it, at least for now, because it’s just so good for little girls’ brains,” says Lise Eliot."
From Businessweek (print link, above; via
BoingBoing), an interesting look at Lego's new girl-oriented initiative.
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:18 AM PST - 189 comments
Ye olde rock and roll time machine, part two: recently found
photos of a Stooges performance at a suburban Detroit high school from 1970.
posted by NoMich at 4:06 AM PST - 19 comments
Mobile Suit Gundam premiered on April 7th, 1979 in Nagoya, Japan, and with it came the now three-decade-old franchise that launched a thousand plastic model kits.
WARNING: MAY CONTAIN spoilers for a thirty-year-old beloved cultural touchstone that you've likely never seen or possibly even heard of.
WARNING: DEFINITELY CONTAINS many, many links to TV Tropes.
28.8k USERS: Upgrade to 56K already. You're going to need it.
[more inside]posted by DoctorFedora at 12:01 AM PST - 64 comments
December 14
I've been advised by doctors to prepare for death. "I believe that there is strength in facing reality, and then planning your demise on your own terms as best you can. And hey, if a miracle happens and we beat the odds, that is only a bonus. Facing reality doesn't mean denying a possible happy outcome. Look at my case for instance--I have surpassed 60 days, and I am not dead yet. I haven't counted how many days I am past my expiration date, but one could say that each day is a miracle now." [more inside]posted by jcterminal at 11:53 PM PST - 44 comments
What Women Want: Porn and the Frontier of Female Sexuality [NSFW] James Deen is a young, handsome porn star who is becoming famous for actually appealing to women. Due to his boyish, slightly skate-punk aesthetic, naturally toned body, and ability to connect emotionally (or at least appear to) with his female co-stars, Deen has garnered a following of devoted young women in an industry that in most cases ignores them entirely. viaposted by mlis at 11:29 PM PST - 70 comments
Don Van Vliet is self-taught. He neither expects allowances for the amateur’s lack of dexterity nor permits any technical deficiency on his own part to limit his scope. Nobody's understanding or forbearance sets limits to what he does - any more than does the fear of going wrong. The lacerations, transgressions, and awkward moments that he introduces are unpredictable, as is their duration; when he takes the figures that confront him and tugs them out of shape, he simultaneously tugs himself out of shape - and out of his own limitations. - Roberto Ohrt
posted by Trurl at 8:29 PM PST - 14 comments
Tomorrow marks the
official end of the Iraq war. The Obama administration describes it as a
'promise kept'. The war resulted in a great many
casualties. Although the final troop movement out of the country is not scheduled to begin for a few days, history will
record December 15 as the end of the war, as the flag of the American military mission in Bagdhad is lowered and returned to the US. Scholars at Brown University
estimate the total cost of the war at 265,000 dead and $3-4 trillion dollars. The main contenders for the Republican party's 2012 nomination both expressed
approval and
disapproval.
Previously, 339 times.
posted by anigbrowl at 8:15 PM PST - 95 comments
Why are Indian Reservations So Poor? Forbes writer John Koppisch says it's because of a lack of individual property rights. In a
detailed response, the executive director of non-profit organization Village Earth says: "I find it ironic how academics and journalists try to come up with new theories to explain poverty on reservations but fail to take into account the obvious. The government owes Native Americans at least 45 Billion dollars yet, in the settlement offered by the Obama administration, they are being compensated for less that .06% of that."
[more inside]posted by desjardins at 5:38 PM PST - 101 comments
Mohammed el Gorani, the youngest prisoner held at Guantánamo, has written a
memoir of his time there, the lead up to his imprisonment, and subsequent release years later.
posted by gman at 2:02 PM PST - 65 comments
The crime against women that no one understands "They would be 10 educated, professional women versus a demonstrated liar—a man who had pretended to be a doctor, a CIA employee, even an astronaut—whom a court-appointed psychologist would decide met the legal definition of a "sexually violent predator." And yet the most remarkable thing about both trials wasn't the way they exposed the alleged tactics of a serial date rapist. It was that despite the outrageousness of the accusations against Marsalis, the testimony of 10 women wasn't enough to get a single rape conviction against him. The verdicts in these cases would be far lighter than his accusers sought—and victims' advocates say the outcome reveals a disturbing truth about the justice system. Nationwide, despite all the legal advances of the past three decades, little has changed for women who report a date rape. Because in far too many instances, juries don't believe date rape exists."
posted by nooneyouknow at 11:12 AM PST - 253 comments
All Together Now. Every Beatles tune, played together, sequenced in order of lengths, with the longest starting first and all 226 tunes ending together. This is a single link SoundCloud post.
posted by The Discredited Ape at 10:29 AM PST - 36 comments
Vacations, diversions and roadtrips:
On The Way suggests attractions and reststops for any route.
The Weekend Map shows events and activities for 27 American cities for the coming weekend.
Nerdy Day Trips (previously) suggests trips for geeks of all kinds, while
Trazzler suggests daytrips for where you live. Don't have a car?
Mapnificent (previously) shows you where you can get to from any point in a given time using public transit.
EveryTrail suggests walks, rambles, strolls and hikes. Google's new
HotelFinder service locates places to stay in a sketched area on a map, with a range of options.
viaposted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 10:28 AM PST - 7 comments
I am under 21. If you are underage, Black Acre Brewery doesn't want you drinking their beer, or viewing their website. But they do want you to rock out.
posted by Blogwardo at 9:29 AM PST - 32 comments
On December 12, 2011, world-famous harpsichordist
Gustav Leonhardt played what appears to be the last recital of his sixty-one years long career in the Théâtre des Bouffes in Paris. Clips from the concert were uploaded on youtube yesterday.
Suitable for the sad event, a melancholic Prélude by
d'Anglebert first.
[more inside]posted by Namlit at 8:55 AM PST - 9 comments
Red money, blue money: The making of the 2012 campaign. "More than 80 percent of giving to Super PACs so far has come from just 58 donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics analysis of the latest data, which covers the first half of 2011." This Salon piece details who the (surprisingly small) number of large donors are, and the SuperPACs they donate to.
posted by jaduncan at 7:42 AM PST - 18 comments
Ye olde rock and roll time machine: recently found
photos of a Van Halen in-store appearance from 1978.
posted by mintcake! at 7:31 AM PST - 32 comments
Did the disappearance of the elephant caused the rise of modern man? Humans are not good at extracting energy from plants or converting protein to energy. Without fire to allow for better conversion, fat was a vital part of early man's diet. Elephants being slower and larger than many other prey was a prime hunting target. When the number of elephants declined, man had to find other sources. Hunting smaller, faster prey resulted in a change in human evolution. Man became lighter and their brain size increased to handle the requirements for hunting enough animals to provide the necessary fat.
posted by 2manyusernames at 6:58 AM PST - 17 comments
"A year after a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself ablaze, dissent has spread across the Middle East, to Europe and the US, reshaping global politics and redefining people power."
The Protester is Time's 2011 Person of the Year.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 5:14 AM PST - 42 comments
December 13
"You're going nowhere, son. Just you, me ad the walls. So wipe that bloody grin off before it's shot off, and don't slouch. You toe rag. You bin
. Pay attention when I break you. And break you I will, boy. You're in my manor, now." Buck up! It's Terry Finch's
THE REPRISALIZER! Follow
Bob Shuter, whose mission of reprisal against his brother's killers, their families, associates, progeny and property takes him across the desolate wasteland of 70s Britain, primarily Kent AKA
FINCHLAND. Finch, writer of The Reprisalizer and
DRAW!, the cowboy whose name means death, is soon to be the subject of
a major motion picture from Matthew Holness, creator of
Garth Marenghi's Darkplace.
posted by Artw at 9:50 PM PST - 15 comments
“Those who stay in rural Iowa are often the elderly waiting to die, those too timid (or lacking in educated) to peer around the bend for better opportunities, an assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth, or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Annie, that ‘The sun’ll come out tomorrow.’”
Just ahead of the
Iowa Caucus, New Jersey native turned University of Iowa Professor
Stephen Bloom has published a
piece in The Atlantic that
has caused quite a stir in the heartland. The piece, which is very critical of the Hawkeye State and her inhabitants, has a lot of
Iowans on the defensive, with one article calling Bloom the
"Michelangelo of hick-punching." Stephens has said the
"feedback has been frightening," but he stands by his story. Perhaps a
1971 Harper's piece on Iowa captures the state with a bit more nuance.
posted by Lutoslawski at 9:04 PM PST - 134 comments
One day at breakfast, a man's soul bursts out of his eyeball. While the soul roams the earth eating everything in sight, two wild deer bathe and dress the man's catatonic body.
It's Dr. Breakfast.posted by schmod at 9:00 PM PST - 10 comments
Elias Canetti is regarded by many as one of the century’s most distinguished writers. At least since he was awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1981, he has been regularly compared, if not to Proust or Joyce or Mann, then certainly to his Viennese brethren Robert Musil and Hermann Broch. Yet one suspects that, in America at leasts Canetti’s works have been rather more respected than read. This is particularly true in the case of the two long and difficult books upon which his reputation mainly rests: Auto-da-Fé (1935), his first and only novel, and Crowds and Power (1960), the meticulously idiosyncratic contribution to social theory that he considers his major work. -
Roger Kimball [more inside]posted by Trurl at 8:14 PM PST - 13 comments
Just in time for the gift-giving season,
Humble Indie Bundle 4 has been released. Available for MacOS, Windows, and Linux on a pay-what-you-want scheme, this release (currently) includes Jamestown, Bit.Trip Runner, Super Meat Boy, Shank, and Nightsky HD. Pay more than the average donation and get Gratuitous Space Battles and Cave Story+ included in your Bundle. When purchasing, you can choose how your money will be allocated between developers, charities (Child's Play Charity and American Red Cross), and a tip to the Humble team.
[more inside]posted by hippybear at 7:50 PM PST - 43 comments
Bfxr is a web app for creating sound effects for your game or own amusement.
Use the Randomize button to get started.posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:59 PM PST - 24 comments
One of the delights of the books and the blog is the authors’ willingness to play with ideas and consider alternative explanations. But unquestioning trust in friends and colleagues combined with the desire to be counterintuitive appear in several cases to have undermined their work. They—and anyone who wishes to convey economics and statistics to a popular audience—just need to take the next step and avoid, in any given example, privileging one story over all other possibilities.
Freakonomics: What Went Wrong?posted by RogerB at 1:07 PM PST - 52 comments
The Stop Sign Wasn’t Always Red. Yellow signs were used before there was a way produce a reflective material in red that would last.
We have the Mississippi Valley Association of State Highway Departments to thank for the stop sign’s iconic shape. In 1923, the association developed an influential set of recommendations about street-sign shapes whose impact is still felt today. The recommendations were based on a simple, albeit not exactly intuitive, idea: the more sides a sign has, the higher the danger level it invokes.
[more inside]posted by Obscure Reference at 10:46 AM PST - 109 comments
“Our souls are worn down through continuous contact with one another,” Sibelius wrote in his diary. And: “I am building a studio for myself—at least one. Next to me are all the children whose babbling and pranks ruin everything.” But he never did build himself a studio; instead, he relocated his study upstairs and forbade the noise of any instrument while he was in the house. The children had to wait until he had gone for his daily walk to do their music practice. [more inside]posted by smcg at 10:40 AM PST - 16 comments
A presentation by Dr. Heiner Flassbeck, a former deputy secretary in the German Ministry of Finance and currently chief economist the UN agency for World Trade and Development in Geneva. He talks about EMU and interest rates, and then links it all to class war and America.
posted by marienbad at 6:07 AM PST - 8 comments
On December 13, 1981, Poland awoke to an announcement by Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski declaring a "state of war" (
stan wojenny).
Martial law would last until July 22, 1983.
[more inside]posted by orrnyereg at 5:54 AM PST - 15 comments
CERN has begun webcasting a public seminar in which there may or may not be some announcement regarding the significance or otherwise of recent observations regarding the possible existence of something that might be the Higgs boson. I am not a nuclear physicist, so I will try and keep up but will mainly be trying to catch the significance of the observations they have collected so far. In case these are talked about in terms of sigmas (there's scuttlebutt going around that this is a 3.5 sigma event),
here's a table of sigma and probability.
[more inside]posted by carter at 4:40 AM PST - 85 comments
On Monday, Google released
Memories for the Future, a website that allows you to "... walk the scarred coastline [after the Japanese tsunami] virtually". "
... it is possible to see the full extent of the damage by finding an image in Street View and then clicking the “Before” and “After” links at the top to see how the earthquake and tsunami impacted that area." The Japan Real Time blog has a
good introduction and writeup.
posted by woodblock100 at 1:09 AM PST - 9 comments
December 12
Wonhyo never completed his journey to Tang China, but it is said that before turning back he found
enlightenment in a cool drink from a loose skull. Today an international group is following in the footsteps of the 7th century Korean monk. Conveniently, they keep a
blog.
posted by Winnemac at 10:35 PM PST - 7 comments
"GOVERNMENT debt dynamics, once an esoteric subject of interest only to macroeconomists, are suddenly in vogue. With Greece flirting with default, Italy's bond yields rising fast, and America's government bonds losing their AAA status, public-debt burdens have become dinner-party talk. Our
interactive chart shows current IMF forecasts but also allows you to input some basic economic assumptions to see where general government debt as a percentage of GDP might head."
posted by storybored at 9:08 PM PST - 16 comments
[Absolute Beginners] has a glossy immediacy, and you can feel the flash and determination that went into it. What you don't feel is the tormented romanticism that made English adolescents in the 70s swear by the novel the way American kids had earlier sworn by The Catcher in the Rye. -
Pauline Kael [more inside]posted by Trurl at 7:55 PM PST - 15 comments
No Nativity scene is complete without the
caganer - a figure caught in the act of taking a dump near the manger. (NSFW tag, ahoy!)
The figurine (whose name translates as "the shitter") is an addition to the Nativity tableaus in the
Catalonia region of Spain. Some interpret the caganer as a reminder that God can arrive on earth at any moment - and he doesn't care if he catches you with your britches down.
[more inside]posted by The demon that lives in the air at 7:35 PM PST - 64 comments
An awkward moment in politics. (YouTube) While campaigning in
a New Hampshire diner, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney spotted local Bob Garon, a regular to the diner, eating his breakfast while wearing a Vietnam veteran's cap. “Vietnam veteran!” Romney greeted Bob, as he slid down onto the diner seat for a little chat. Unfortunately for Mitt,
Bob was dining there that morning with his husband, and had to explain to Bob that his husband didn't deserve any of the benefits he fought for, and that the makers of the Constitution held marriage to be between a man and a woman. (Which doesn't really explain
Mitt's great-grandfather Miles and his wives Hanna, Caroline, Catherine, Alice, and Emily, but stilll...)
posted by markkraft at 4:35 PM PST - 168 comments
"So I admire those artists that are actually spiritually concerned. And have the balls to be concerned about that, and not concerned with fuckin’ George Bush’s dick. It’s very hard to sing when you’ve got someone’s dick in your mouth.”
She shoots a mischievous grin before adding, 'I’ve tried.'"
Sinéad O’Connor on the pope, her music, dating, buying condoms, and everything in between.
posted by the young rope-rider at 12:45 PM PST - 28 comments
Between February 1989 and May 1990, there were three significant deaths in the Sesame Street world. The first was
Joe Raposo, a
significant musician for Sesame Street and Electric Company. The last was
Jim Henson,
mourned by Big Bird,
remembered by Frank Oz, and
celebrated in
song by
many (from the
St. John's Memorial,
detailed here). The second person to die in this time period was
Northern Calloway,
Sesame Street's David. Unlike
Joe and
Jim, there were no
television tribute to Northern's life and career on
Sesame Street or
Broadway. Instead, David,
once a young, cool, urban guy, who was studying to be a lawyer while working at Mr. Hooper's storeand the initial romantic interest of Maria,
left the show through a letter, read by Gordon. The story behind David is told below the fold.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 12:42 PM PST - 25 comments
Always an enigma,
John Zorn, winner of a
MacArthur Fellowship, founder of avant garde record label
Tzadik proponent of
radical Jewish culture, leader of the hard core group
Naked City, creator of the
Masada songbook, and
hundreds of
other things, has, with the likes of Mark Ribot, Cyro Baptista and Mike Pattoon, released a
heart-breakingly lovely Christmas record, A Dreamer's Christmas. [more inside]posted by Lutoslawski at 11:41 AM PST - 19 comments
"While most other notable British Science Fiction shows were over-ambitious in their special effects, with results ranging from the troubling (
Doctor Who) to the disastrous (
The Tomorrow People),
Sapphire & Steel [ATV, 1979 - 1982] simply did not
try to do anything the budget wouldn't allow. The result called for milking surreal horror for all it's worth, creating a show that is, while definitely not for everyone, quite capable of reducing so-inclined viewers to quivering little heaps behind the sofa."
posted by Iridic at 8:35 AM PST - 28 comments
December 11
There must be a recognition of the self in its relation to the profession one proposes. If we do declare our profession, we must also keep the epistemological awareness. That is, if we are our profession,
we must know it. [more inside]posted by curuinor at 11:17 PM PST - 10 comments
All told, Updike has published more than a million words on books. ... In Picked-up Pieces (1975), Updike’s second collection of essays, he lists his rules for reviewing... Without coyness, Updike renders a stern judgment based on telling quotation. He builds toward his findings in plain sight, earning him an authority that is based on his presentation of a plausible case. [more inside]posted by Trurl at 7:48 PM PST - 6 comments
Will G+ become
Google's only product? Mike Elgin of Computerworld thinks so.
Google+ launched on June 28th, and, as Elgin states, ".... since the launch, Google has "integrated" a dozen more major products into Google+, turning them into de facto features. This process starts with a minor integration and evolves into a major one."
posted by tomswift at 7:41 PM PST - 134 comments
"Over the internet we yell at each other with ALL CAPS and emphasize with bold and italics, but where is sarcasm? Where is the nuance, the elegance? We say it is time for a change. It's time for a revolution. It's time for a new font style!"
Introducing the
sarcastic font.posted by zardoz at 5:41 PM PST - 88 comments
The cautionary tale of the shiny new device that's smarter than its users and ends up taking over is pretty much cliché... but it took Australian pop musicker
Gotye (prounced like Gaultier, if that helps) to apply it to a
Lowrey Organ (the
Cotillion D575, a vintage model he acquired for $100 and uses both in his recordings and concerts). Add retro-style animation, and you have something scary yet whimsical and truly
"State of the Art".
[more inside]posted by oneswellfoop at 3:51 PM PST - 19 comments
Twenty-Five Semi-Obscure Traditional Christmas Songs as Performed by Famous and Non-Famous People:
1.
The Coventry Carol. Celebrate the end of Christmas with this cheerful song about infants being murdered by a paranoid monarch. Actually quite beautiful. As performed by
Sting,
Joan Baez,
John Denver,
Nox Arcana,
Loreena McKennitt,
Manheim Steamroller,
Alison Moyet,
Annie Lennox and the African Children's Choir,
Sufjan Stevens,
Hayley Westenra,
The Mediaeval Baebes,
Dinah Shore, and t
he Westminster Cathedral Choir.
[more inside]posted by kittenmarlowe at 12:51 PM PST - 29 comments
Manya was a short comic series, created in the ’90s, by writer Jen Benka and artist
Kris Dresden. The sporadically published series covered life from the point of view of young female living in the city. A couple of those early issues are now available online:
Marie is about a meeting, of sorts, between Manya and Marie Curie, the scientist who did pioneering research on radiation.
Falling deals with the aftermath of the death of a friend from AIDS.
Jitterbug did an interview with Benka and Dresden, where they
discussed the creation of Manya and other works.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:23 AM PST - 5 comments
"A statistical summary of women in prostitution is a chronicle of human wreckage—economic, physical, and chemical." GQ magazine's three-part investigation into the global sex trade is fascinating, if horrifying, reading:
Part 1 (on sex clubs in the Phillipines),
Part 2 (on human trafficking in Moldova),
Part 3 (on sex tourism in Costa Rica).
posted by Catseye at 9:29 AM PST - 95 comments
In 1973, the BBC aired an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's original Foundation trilogy, in eight one-hour parts. It is freely downloadable (or streamable)
here.
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:55 AM PST - 24 comments
Apple has
adopted new tactics in its patent war against the handheld industry. Last summer, Apple has transferred
patents to the patent troll
Digitude Innovations, using a shell company operated by Digitude's primary investor, Altitude Capital Partners. In December, Digitude filed suit with the International Trade Commission alleging patent infringement by almost every mobile manufacturers except Apple. (
pdf filing)
[more inside]posted by jeffburdges at 7:27 AM PST - 79 comments
December 10
Zatoichi (
previously) is the story of a blind Japanese masseur; drifter (he also sometimes thinks of himself as a gangster, in a self-effacing way); uncanny gambler; and, master swordsman. The series is some 25 films long (not including the TV series), not including the 2003 American release with Takeshi Kitano playing the lead role, instead of Shintaro Katsu.
[more inside]posted by Vibrissae at 10:38 PM PST - 17 comments
This past August a murder charge was dismissed against Nga Truong, a young mother who had confessed to Worcester, MA Police interrogators in 2008 that she had smothered and killed her 13 month-old baby, Khyle. A judge later concluded that confession was coerced -- extracted in part by police "deception," "trickery and implied promises" -- and the case was dropped.
(pdf). Her case raises questions: What coercive power do detectives have who are driven to extract confessions? Under what circumstances might someone admit to a crime they have not committed?
WBUR (Boston's NPR station) investigated Truong's case and has an extensive report, Anatomy of a Bad Confession: Part
One and
Two [more inside]posted by zarq at 8:25 PM PST - 28 comments
Until the End of the World was conceived over most of the ’80s, filmed on four continents (including video smuggled out of China), and foresaw a future abetted by such diversions as mobile viewing devices, proto-GPS and a highly sought-after contraption that records images for the blind. Starring William Hurt, Sam Neill, Solveig Dommartin, Jeanne Moreau and Max von Sydow among an international ensemble of actors, the film also skyrocketed to a $23 million budget and found its distributors — including Warner Bros. in the United States — requiring cuts that reduced it to barely a quarter of Wenders’s original vision. Later locked in at just under five hours, it’s the type of material that today would be a shoo-in for a cable miniseries that could probably win Emmys for everyone involved. Twenty years on, however, it’s relatively lost to the mainstream, with Wenders’s directors cut as yet unreleased outside two territories in Europe.posted by Trurl at 7:27 PM PST - 50 comments
A sub-directorate of the Bureau of Special Christmas Operations (BOSCO),
Santa's Little Secret Service is an Elvish security agency with the primary mission of ensuring the safety of Santa, Mrs. Claus and other high-value Christmas persons. The Service is separated into
divisions focusing on personal protection, diplomatic protection, intelligence, and Christmas certainty operations.
When not protecting Santa, LSS can found assisting in protection of other high-value, Holiday persons, such as the
Easter Bunny and
Jesus with the help of their unique
Candy Cane weapons.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:07 AM PST - 16 comments
King James Bible readings by top UK actors - free podcasts London's National Theatre recently staged a series of live readings to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible and the glorious language that book contains. The actors taking part included Lindsay Duncan (Genesis), Patricia Routledge (Psalms), Maureen Lipman (Isaiah), Mark Gatiss (Luke) and Simon Russell Beale (Revelation). There's 12 readings in all, each of about 80 minutes, and the National has three available as free podcasts already, with the rest to follow soon. As a bonus, it's also offering Melvyn Bragg's talk on how the King James version was constructed and the main sources it drew on. I saw Bragg delivering this talk at the Cheltenham Literary Festival earlier this year, and it's well worth hearing.
posted by Paul Slade at 8:48 AM PST - 8 comments
"So, if the probability of finding an egg with two yolks is 1/1000 - then to find the likelihood of discovering four in a row you simply multiply the probabilities together four times. One thousand to the power of four brings us to the grand total of one trillion...
If true that would mean the event that occurred in Jen's kitchen was a trillion-to-one event. But is it true? No is the short answer."posted by Petrot at 4:15 AM PST - 38 comments
December 9
New Evangelicals "Though public support for both major political parties is very low, one group of voters is usually exempted from this malaise: evangelicals. It’s assumed that at least these “values voters” are getting what they want. But we should look more carefully."
posted by tomswift at 10:02 PM PST - 60 comments
MegaUpload is currently being portrayed by the MPAA and RIAA as one of the world’s leading rogue sites. But top music stars including P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg and Kanye West disagree and are giving the site their full support
in a brand new song. TorrentFreak
caught up with the elusive founder of MegaUpload, Kim Dotcom, who shrugged off “this rogue nonsense” and told us he wants content owners to get paid. “
It works like an ad blocker but instead of blocking ads we show ads coming from Megaclick, our ad network,” says Kim. “
This way we will generate enough ad revenue to provide free premium services and licensed content so that our users can have it for free.”
posted by finite at 1:29 PM PST - 73 comments
Possibly NSFW.
The case of the Rabbet Woman (also known as Mary Toft) is a particularly interesting one. Toft, on the advice of an unnamed accomplice, decided to engage in a scam which would enter her into the annals of history: she pretended to give birth to a series of seventeen baby rabbits and three tabby-cat legs, apparently by pushing their dead corpses up her vagina when no one was looking. Over the course of her fraud, she managed to convince many of the leading scientific and medical lights of the day that she was, in fact, giving birth to these rabbits (and three tabby-cat legs), including
John Howard (pdf) (
and more, also pdf),
Cyriacus Ahlers (one of the King's surgeons), Nathaniel St. Andre (Anatomist to the King), Samuel Molyneux, and Sir Richard Manningham, male midwife to the Queen.
Sir Richard Manninghan (Man Midwife!), although originally taken in by the fraud, eventually discovers the truth when a porter admits that he had been going to the market to buy baby rabbits for Toft.
His Diary provides a pretty good summary of the case. When the fraud was discovered, Toft was charged, although the charges were eventually dropped; more lasting were the effects on some of the medical professionals, whose reputations were permanently ruined. You can read a nice summary in
A Cabinet of Curiosities (google books).
The case of the Rabbet Woman took the English world by storm. Scores of pamphlets--in this case the 18th century equivalent to tabloids--circulated, as the public devoured case depositions, scientific publications, satirical doggerel, and semi-erotic prints of rabbits bursting forth from Toft's nether regions (
sanitized prints here)*. (
previously (pay special attention to the comments),
previously)
[more inside]posted by kittenmarlowe at 12:48 PM PST - 91 comments
Twitter
has launched an entirely overhauled version of Twitter, today, including a new version of its website, its apps, and TweetDeck (now native on Mac, rather than using Adobe AIR!). You currently need to download the latest version of the Android or iPhone app to see the new version of the website. Dan Frommer offers some good
first impressions.
posted by gilrain at 7:30 AM PST - 68 comments
Theme Hotel If you build it, they will stay the night. But you may want to turn off the music. Fun, addicting little "Sim Hotel" game, reminiscent of
SimTower.
posted by PapaLobo at 6:43 AM PST - 23 comments
Amazon has recently declared that tomorrow is
Price Check day. If you go into a brick and mortar retail store with Amazon’s new
Price Check App on your smart phone, and scan a barcode with the location settings active, and then report back to Amazon on the price of that product, Amazon will deduct $5 from your online purchase of that product. Amazon claims it’s trying to keep prices low for consumers, but others attribute the move to
a less innocuous agenda.
[more inside]posted by Toekneesan at 6:36 AM PST - 143 comments
With the death of the childless Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, the son of Mary Queen of Scots and the reigning King of Scotland
became next in line for succession to the English throne. On 11 July of that year
the crowns of Scotland and England were united as King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England. The
Union of the Crowns was made possible by the the fact that the James VI was protestant, married and had healthy children – heirs to the throne. The English were also comforted by the fact that the Scottish King was a scholar. Among other literary accomplishments, he had authored a number of books on witchcraft. Written in the Socratic form of a dialogue,
Dæmonologie presented a wide-ranging discussion of witchcraft, necromancy, possession, demons, were-wolves, fairies and ghosts.
[more inside]posted by three blind mice at 4:09 AM PST - 39 comments
December 8
Innocent, in a way Spanish artist Alberto Mielgo paints a portrait of porn star Michelle Anne Sinclair "Belladonna." Single link Vimeo with nudity.
posted by letitrain at 11:09 PM PST - 35 comments
"Piloting London’s distinctive black cabs (taxis to everyone else) is no easy feat. To earn the privilege, drivers have to pass an intense intellectual ordeal, known charmingly as
The Knowledge. Ever since 1865, they’ve had to memorise the location of every street within six miles of Charing Cross – all 25,000 of the capital’s arteries, veins and capillaries. They also need to know the locations of 20,000 landmarks – museums, police stations, theatres, clubs, and more – and 320 routes that connect everything up." Acquiring
The Knowledge changes the brains of those who acquire it.
posted by vidur at 7:15 PM PST - 73 comments
(MAJOR SPOILERS EVERYWHERE) [Michael Tolkin's The Rapture] is one of the most radical, infuriating, engrossing, challenging movies I've ever seen. There are people who love it and many who hate it, but few who can remain on the sidelines. ... Movies are often so timid. They try so little, and are content with small achievements. "The Rapture" is an imperfect and sometimes enraging film, but it challenges us with the biggest idea it can think of, the notion that our individual human lives do have actual meaning on the plane of the infinite. -
Roger Ebertposted by Trurl at 7:15 PM PST - 54 comments
Obion County, TN home burns while South Fulton firefighters watch, again. The City of South Fulton FD offers surrounding Obion County residents firefighting services for a $75 annual subscription, but not all county residents choose to subscribe (
previously).
The last time this happened, the city of South Fulton, Tennessee, received a lot of heat nationwide for this policy. That was more than a year ago but nothing has changed.
The mayor said it comes down to simple business. If they don't collect fire fees, the fire department can't survive and if they make exceptions to the rule, no one will ever pay the fee.
Obion County
lacks a fire department (pdf) and county residents, who do not pay taxes for firefighting, are provided firefighting services through local cities and towns, either by annual subscription or a per-call fee.
posted by 6550 at 6:37 PM PST - 227 comments
Monique van der Vorst has won two silver medals in the Paralympics for
Handcycling. She was the first handcycle athlete to win the 2009 Ironman world championship. But after being struck by a bike while training in 2010 she began doing something she had not done since she was 13: walking. Not only is she walking but she is eyeing the
2016 Olympics where she hopes to compete as a cyclist.
posted by munchingzombie at 3:01 PM PST - 18 comments
The International Committee of the Red Cross is deeply concerned about six hundred million people who commit war crimes...
virtually. All those people out there playing video games involving shooting? Today's gamers may become tomorrow's war criminals.
[more inside]posted by Chocolate Pickle at 2:50 PM PST - 61 comments
Malaysia is proposing a
Computing Professionals Bill, based on the
Registration of Engineers Act [.PDF] which makes it mandatory for all practicing "computing professionals" to be registered with a government body. Dealing in the IT industry, including
sending “proposals, plans, designs, drawings, schemes, reports, studies or others to be determined by the Board to any person or authority in Malaysia” without being registered will incur a fine not exceeding RM20,000 (~US$6380) or 6 months in jail.
Malaysian IT professionals and
geeks are up in arms, and similarities have been drawn to
Nigeria's law on computing professionals.
posted by divabat at 12:34 PM PST - 26 comments
Toward the Within is the only official live album of the eclectic music group,
Dead Can Dance.
Recorded in one take in November of 1993, the performance was later released as an album and video. The latter includes short interviews with the heads of the group, Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry, interspersed with the songs.
Video track list:
[more inside]posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:17 AM PST - 44 comments
Trial of the Will. "Reviewing familiar principles and maxims in the face of mortal illness, Christopher Hitchens has found one of them increasingly ridiculous: 'Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.' Oh, really? Take the case of the philosopher to whom that line is usually attributed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who lost his mind to what was probably syphilis. Or America’s homegrown philosopher Sidney Hook, who survived a stroke and wished he hadn’t. Or, indeed, the author, viciously weakened by the very medicine that is keeping him alive."
[Via]posted by homunculus at 9:10 AM PST - 27 comments
I come from Bankers and Businessmen, New Jersey. The dividing line between north and south New Jersey is the
Driscoll Bridge according to one theory. The
Sports Fan rule applies a hypothetical line between where NY Giant fandom ends and Philadelphia Eagle fanaticism begins. Under the
Sandwhich conjecture, South Jersey's northern border is where people stop eating hoagies for lunch and start eating subs.
New Jersey is too nuanced for simple binary categorization. Rigorous tests of the competing theories produce contradictory results (
Monmouth County is part of South Jersey under the Driscoll theory and North Jersey using Sports Fan methodology.) Throwing out the ineffectiveness of northern and southern classifications, a recent Rutgers graduate and current state employee has produced a controversial and
highly accurate visualization of a new Jersey, though some may be offended.
posted by otto42 at 8:35 AM PST - 73 comments
Everything feels old. There have been no radical changes in style, culture, art, and fashion over the last 20 years—a stark contrast to every other two decade period going all the way back into the 19th-century,
Kurt Anderson argues in
Vanity Fair. Every 20 year period marked a drastic and unmistakable shift in cultural appearance with the exception of our current quarter century.
[more inside]posted by stbalbach at 8:15 AM PST - 258 comments
Robert Paul Wolff is most famous as the author of
In Defense of Anarchism and as the "
only person on the face of the earth who has read, cover to cover, Immanuel Kant's Inaugural Dissertation, Karl Marx's doctoral dissertation, and Newt Gingrich's doctoral dissertation."
His memoir has also drawn considerable
interest. But as a part of his
blogging he has habitually offered "micro-tutorials" to encourage his readers to re-acquaint themselves with the classics of what might be called the Heroic Age in the study of society -- the writings of
Marx,
Freud,
Weber,
Ricardo,
Mannheim, and
others. His newest micro-tutorial, on Durkheim's
Suicide,
begins today.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:38 AM PST - 25 comments
Datamining Shakespeare ---
Othello is a Shakespearean tragedy: when the hero makes a terrible mistake of judgment, his once promising world is led into ruin. Computer analysis of the play, however, suggests that the play is a comedy or, at least, that it does the same things with words that comedies usually do.
On October 26, 2011,
Folger Shakespeare Library Director
Michael Witmore discussed his recent work in Shakespeare studies which combines computer analysis of texts, linguistics, and traditional literary history. Taking the case of Shakespeare's genres as a starting point, Witmore shows how subtle human judgments about the kinds of plays Shakespeare wrote — were they
comedies,
histories or
tragedies? — are connected to frequent, widely distributed features in the playwright's syntax, vocabulary, and diction. (approx. 30 minute lecture.)
[more inside]posted by crunchland at 4:47 AM PST - 29 comments
On the
6th of December 2011, as has been traditional for the past 9 decades since Finland's Independence, the President, Tarja Halonen and her spouse, Dr Pentti Arajarvi
host what is known as the
Linnan juhlat or Castle Ball, an
extremely popular televised reception for the notables of the nation. Along with the usual dignitaries, the President is also permitted to select invitees based on merit - entertainers, athletes, individuals - whom she feels have been in the news in the past year.
This year Peter and Teija Vesterbacka also were invited due to Peter Vesterbacka's work as the CMO of Rovio. Teija Vesterbacka wore a red dress for the evening that had design concepts from one of the birds in the mobile game Angry Birds.
Highlighted
in the Finnish news by the very select group of photographers permitted entry to this exclusive event, it was when the photograph of this dress went viral among global MSM that
the angry birds began to fly.
posted by infini at 3:53 AM PST - 29 comments
"Imagine 12 men in a dorm all in diapers and sitting in their own feces," he says. "It smelled like a combination of what people had for lunch that day and pus from people's open wounds. I've been in a wheelchair now for three years, and the jail is by far the worst place I've ever seen for a disabled person." --
L.A. Weekly on "Wheelchair Hell" in the L.A. County Men's Jailposted by bardic at 2:34 AM PST - 42 comments
December 7
Leisure Suit Larry is a series of adventure games written by Al Lowe and published by Sierra from 1987 to 2009. The main character, whose full name is Larry Laffer, is a balding, dorky, double entendre-speaking, leisure suit-wearing (but still somewhat lovable) "loser" in his 40s. The games follow him as he spends much of his life trying (usually unsuccessfully) to seduce attractive women. [more inside]posted by Trurl at 6:43 PM PST - 68 comments
"The earliest record we have of the lowering of a flag to signify a death was an occasion in 1612, when the Master of the 'Hearts Ease', William Hall, was murdered by Eskimos while taking part in an expedition in search of the North West Passage. On rejoining her consort, the vessel's flag was flown trailing over the stern as a mark of mourning. On her return to London, the 'Hearts Ease' again flew her flag over the stern and it was recognised as an appropriate gesture of mourning." [more inside]posted by Deflagro at 6:33 PM PST - 11 comments
Take 210,000 colour transparencies – plus or minus a thousand or two. Examine them one by one by one, carefully and closely. Study – and think about – the framing, lighting and colour balance. Check for any blurring or closed eyes. Think about how they’ll look blown up to billboard size. Take your time. You’ll need to. Now make an initial pick – 100 shots, say. Then cut your choices down to 30 – ‘the brown bag’ in movie jargon, the selection which will go to the studio executives. Then trim that down to six transparencies. And finally, to just one image – the iconic one.
That is the process by which Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film The Shining came to be known by that one, terrifying moment of Jack Nicholson’s wild, unshaven, grinning face – eyes sharp left – emerging through an axe-smashed door. And it’s how Murray Close learned to take a photograph.
posted by beaucoupkevin at 3:20 PM PST - 6 comments
This B.A.S.E. jump went very, very wrong. For reasons unknown, after a good exit from a 450 meter cliff this jumper's wingsuit did not inflate on one side, causing him to go completely unstable. Out of desperation he deployed his canopy which, as you might expect, opened with massive line twists. Yet somehow he managed to walk away unscratched! Watching this = drinking 3 cups of coffee!
SLTYposted by Dean358 at 2:59 PM PST - 53 comments
Over the past several years, Mozilla's
collection of developer documentation for its own web browsers has turned into a wiki-editable reference of web standards for developers working with
all browsers, hosting a comprehensive, no-nonsense reference of
HTML,
HTML5,
CSS,
JavaScript, the
DOM, and
more. If you find yourself turning to this reference frequently,
dochub provides instant access to Mozilla's documentation for any HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or DOM-related topic. If you're worried that a fancy new standard might not work in an older browser,
canIuse will tell you exactly how many browsers will support that new standard. Still want to use that shiny new standard?
Modernizr and
yepnope will let you detect missing features, and load
tiny bits of code to make old browsers support the latest HTML5 hotness.
[via the carefully-curated selections of
JavaScript and
HTML5 Weekly, run by
MetaFilter's own wackybrit]
posted by schmod at 12:11 PM PST - 23 comments
On August 19, 1969, the (prime time ABC version of the) Dick Cavett show featured several popular musicians.
pt 1 -
pt 2 -
pt 3 -
pt 4 -
pt 5 The Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby and Stephen Stills had rushed back from a show they did at a festival. Jimi Hendrix couldn't get back in time, but
appeared later. The third guest, Joni Mitchell, skipped Woodstock to make sure she was on time for
this broadcast, but a month later she wrote
a cool song based on what she saw on TV and heard from friends.
[more inside]posted by msalt at 10:48 AM PST - 16 comments
Previous experiments have hinted at the connection... Physicists have found the strongest evidence yet of quantum effects fueling photosynthesis.
Multiple experiments in recent years have suggested as much, but it’s been hard to be sure. Quantum effects were clearly present in the light-harvesting antenna proteins of plant cells, but their precise role in processing incoming photons remained unclear.
In an experiment published Dec. 6 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a connection between coherence — far-flung molecules interacting as one, separated by space but not time — and energy flow is established.
“There was a smoking gun before,” said study co-author Greg Engel of the University of Chicago. “Here we can watch the relationship between coherence and energy transfer. This is the first paper showing that coherence affects the probability of transport. It really does change the chemical dynamics.”
posted by aleph at 12:01 AM PST - 64 comments
December 6
At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, a yacht race was taking the world's teams through dangerous waters at breakneck speeds. Stig Käll and his brother Lars were in the running to win when, behind them, the Australian team capsized and slipped below the deadly waves. Making a split-second decision, the Källs turned their boat around and rescued the Australians, losing the race and vanishing from the pages of Olympic history, but winning recognition from the Japanese press, who awarded them the headline "Gold Medal of Humanity". The Käll brothers were the first to receive recognition from the
International Fair Play Committee, a group that now gives awards and recognition to people who display unusual sportsmanship, such as:
[more inside]posted by shii at 11:32 PM PST - 41 comments
Back in October, NYT columnist David Brooks asked his older readers (aged 70+) to send him "life reports." He wanted them to appraise their lives, in an effort to glean some life lessons for all of us to learn by. After receiving thousands of replies, he published his assessment of them a couple weeks ago, in two columns (
Part 1: Nov 24, 2011;
Part 2: Nov 28, 2011). He's also selected specific ones and published them
on his blog.
[more inside]posted by crunchland at 9:46 PM PST - 61 comments
We got through the basics—how I’d arrived in Libya, why I was there—in civil tones. Then the Inspector asked, “If you were a professor at Harvard, why did you quit your job to come risk your life in Libya?” I explained as best I could that I had not been a professor but a graduate student, and part of my training was teaching undergraduates. The academic job market was tough and demoralizing, and the rigidity of the academic lifestyle had never appealed to me that much anyway. I had suspected for a few years that I’d be temperamentally better suited to working as a reporter. “Why you work journalist? You don’t study journalism, you study history!”
—
What I Lost in Libya by Clare Morgana Gillis, a journalist who was captured by Gadhafi forces.
posted by Kattullus at 7:41 PM PST - 12 comments
The day before last, Dianne Hackborn, a software engineer from Google,
posted a lengthy essay on Google+ about Android UI rendering also touching on the hardware accelerated UI debacle. Not to let sleeping dogs lie, one of the previous Android interns, Andrew Munn,
posted a reply regarding other areas where Android needs to improve. Both posts provide an absolutely fascinating first-hand look into how the Android UI works.
posted by Talez at 2:33 PM PST - 57 comments
The
Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana started as an open pit copper mine in 1955, and was closed in 1982. At that time,
groundwater pumping ceased and the pit started to flood, leading to what is now one of the largest
Superfund sites. The water body was considered uninhabitable, with
high concentrations of copper, cadmium, arsenic, aluminum, manganese and zinc and of pH of 2.5 (
as acidic as a lemon), but
in 1995, a small clump of green slime was noticed floating on the water's surface. Since then,
the algae blooms have been studied as a possible method of remediation for the toxic waters. That same year,
a migratory flock of snow geese landed in the pit lake. Stormy weather kept the flock on the lake, and when the weather cleared, 342 birds were dead.
A Migratory Bird Protection Plan was then put in place, to prevent such occurrences from happening again. In the spring of 1996, a surprising discovery was made:
yeast, which shouldn't grown in those pH levels, was surviving, and absorbing eighty-seven percent of the metals in the water. Furthermore,
Andrea and
Donald Stierle, professors who have been studying the pit lake since 1995, have found 70 compounds that might be medically useful.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 11:05 AM PST - 36 comments
Northumberlandia is coming. "A mile away, I stand at the base of Northumberlandia’s head which, at this distance, looks just like a mountain of mud. We drive up hillside tracks to her hip and one of her breasts (the other one has yet to take shape) and then wind our way up to her face. Even now, as bulldozers comb her hair and steamrollers flatten her skin, it is easy to make out her feminine contours."
posted by Paul Slade at 9:49 AM PST - 13 comments
"What was really most healing, for me, besides the drugs, was meeting my own people, my tribe. When you meet each other the relief of knowing you’re not alone and that you both feel like the walking dead. It’s such a relief to be with someone who will never say, “Perk up.” Black Dog Tribes is a (beta) social platform for people with depression created by
Ruby Wax.
posted by lucia__is__dada at 5:35 AM PST - 17 comments
This song was recorded at home in the 1970s by German actress Sibylle Baier. Her son collected her recordings and created an album to share with family, and in 2006 the Colour Green was released by label Orange Twin.
[more inside]posted by KingoftheWhales at 1:06 AM PST - 11 comments
December 5
Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising is the latest report from the OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs. It finds:
In the three decades prior to the recent economic downturn, wage gaps widened and household income inequality increased in a large majority of OECD countries. [...]Launching the report in Paris, OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría said “The social contract is starting to unravel in many countries. This study dispels the assumptions that the benefits of economic growth will automatically trickle down to the disadvantaged and that greater inequality fosters greater social mobility. Without a comprehensive strategy for inclusive growth, inequality will continue to rise.”
Links to
Overview [.pdf];
press release; notes [.pdf format] for
Australia,
Canada,
the UK,
the USA;
data link (excel format).
posted by wilful at 7:33 PM PST - 53 comments
In June 2004, Paul Stephens pulled over to the shoulder on The George Bush Tollway/I-75 overpass in Dallas, TX while arguing with his girlfriend, Lorena Godoy Osorio. As the fight escalated Osorio got our of the car to flee and Stephens
threw her off the overpass onto the Interstate. He then jumped to his own death,
85 feet below. Dallas indie rock band
Sorta wrote and recorded a song about the incident,
"85 Feet" [more inside]posted by holdkris99 at 7:31 PM PST - 10 comments
The history of Toronto in photos is 90 some odd posts linked to provide a thematically organized visual overview. The vast majority of the photographs featured derive from the Toronto Archives. Should you be interested in a less visually oriented take on Toronto history, there is also the
Nostalgia Tripping series, which was designed to be a bit more about storytelling than just the photos.
posted by netbros at 4:40 PM PST - 20 comments
On August 31, 2004, a naked, bruised man was
discovered behind a Burger King at the intersection of Interstate 95 and Highway 17 in Richmond Hill, Georgia. He had
no memory of who he was. Fingerprint and DNA searches were
unsuccessful. His identity
continues to remain
missing.
posted by vidur at 4:33 PM PST - 90 comments
In reflecting on the project, McAllister feels “caught between the intimacy of each individual response, and the pattern of the cumulative replies.” The question remains: Why did they answer? McAllister claims no credit, describing his survey form as “barely literate.” He recalls that in his cover letter (no examples of which exist) he misused the word precocious—he meant presumptuous—and in hindsight he sees that he was both, though few writers seemed to mind. “The conclusion I came to was that nobody had asked them. New Criticism was about the scholars and the text; writers were cut out of the equation. Scholars would talk about symbolism in writing, but no one had asked the writers.” Sixteen year old boy dislikes English homework, goes outside the chain of command.posted by villanelles at dawn at 4:11 PM PST - 55 comments
Security researchers at North Carolina State University led by Xuxian Jiang (who had previously discovered
12 malicious Android applications sold through Google's Android Market) have
uncovered holes in how the permissions-based security model is enforced on numerous Android devices. Called "leaks", these vulnerabilities allow new and existing malicious applications to eavesdrop on calls, track the user's location, install applications, send SMS messages, delete data from the device, and more. (
via)
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:56 PM PST - 30 comments
Robin Waart is a Dutch artist whose work often involves isolating unexamined elements of narrative.
745 is a collection of all of the exclamation points from a single copy of the weekly 'Donald Duck' comic book.
Part One is a book of 101 'Part One' pages from English-language books.
Thinking in Pictures is an ongoing project to gather moments in film when a character says 'What do you think?' or 'What are you thinking?'
posted by shakespeherian at 2:02 PM PST - 16 comments
Indian author Pankaj Mishra writes a brutal
takedown of Niall Ferguson's latest book,
Civilisation: The West and the Rest in the
London Review of Books.
Ferguson responds to the critical book review with a
lawsuit.
[more inside]posted by bodywithoutorgans at 11:08 AM PST - 107 comments
Jacques Delors: Euro would still be strong if it had been built to my plan. 'Former president of the European Commission
Jacques Delors talks to Charles Moore about the fate of the euro.''Jacques Delors is a master of all the technicalities of the argument, and all the Byzantine structures of the institutions, and speaks confidently in their jargon, but his mind seems burdened by deeper thoughts, too. He sees the crisis of the euro as part of something deeper and wider even than the credit crunch itself. He believes that the main social and economic “players” have their doubts about European policies.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 10:57 AM PST - 10 comments
The DC-3:
The Best Paper Airplane in The World. "During the summer of 1950, on the outskirts of Harrisburg Pennsylvania U.S.A., my sister's boyfriend 'Skip' was sitting on the glider on the front porch of our house. He said to me - Hey Mike... bring me a sheet of paper.' I answered why? and he responded with his make believe impatience 'Just bring it!' I obeyed and he said that he was going to build the best paper airplane in the world. I was eight years old at the time and my meager knowledge of paper airplanes was the traditional flying wedge that spiraled into tight loops and fell head first to the ground."
[more inside]posted by SpacemanStix at 10:34 AM PST - 35 comments
Shortly after Jared Loughner allegedly opened fire in the parking lot of a Tucson grocery store last January, we saw much hand-wringing about the threat of violence against the government. In fact, violence against government officials is actually pretty rare. But just three days before Loughner's rampage, police in Framingham, Mass., raided the home of 68-year-old Eurie Stamps. Stamps wasn't the target of the drug raid. Police were after the son of Stamps' girlfriend, and actually apprehended him outside the home. They raided the house anyway. Stamps, who was unarmed and broke no laws, was shot and killed by a police officer. By my count, he's at least the 46th innocent person killed in a botched drug raid. Every politician in Washington condemned the Loughner shootings, and rightly so. But nearly every politician in Washington supports the laws and policies that led to the death of Eurie Stamps.
--
Radley Balko continues his lonely crusade documenting the ongoing militarization of America's police forces.
posted by empath at 9:05 AM PST - 62 comments
"You feel euphoric you know. Because it's one of the best buzzes personally I've had in my life. Better than any drug. And you know it was just that....It was a feeling of standing up straight against an institution that's been historically has always been brutal, wicked and bad mind towards young people especially young black people."
In collaboration with the LSE, the Guardian's
Reading the Riots project has used a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methodologies to explore the causes of England's summer of disorder.
posted by roofus at 3:51 AM PST - 26 comments
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little.
How Doctors Die.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 2:11 AM PST - 54 comments
December 4
Nobody was surprised when Italy Prime Minister Mario Monti presented a draconian
"save Italy" emergency Budget decree on Sunday - that's what he had been nominated to do. But the full impact of the measures, especially hitting pensioners, became stunningly clear when Welfare Minister Elsa Fornero, invited by Monti to present her ministry's section of the decree to the press and TV,
broke down (SLYT) and was unable to bring out the word "sacrifice".
posted by aqsakal at 11:37 PM PST - 72 comments
"Flashy sports cars valued at as much as $4 million became a mangled mess in a matter of minutes on Sunday when a Ferrari leading a pack of exotic sports cars on a trip from Japan’s southern island of Kyushu to Hiroshima
skidded as it tried to change lanes."
posted by woodblock100 at 10:04 PM PST - 79 comments
Peter Greenaway's "Prospero's Books" (NSFW) is not a movie in the sense that we usually employ the word. It's an experiment in form and content. ... The books, their typography, calligraphy and illustrations, are photographed in voluptuous detail. ... "Prospero's Books" really exists outside criticism. ... It is simply a work of original art, which Greenaway asks us to accept or reject on his own terms. -
Roger Ebertposted by Trurl at 8:47 PM PST - 32 comments
South African fast food chain Nando's ran
an amusing ad featuring Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe enjoying himself with a range of deceased despots, to the tune "Those were the days". The Zimbabwean
"government
" was not amused.
posted by wilful at 7:27 PM PST - 47 comments
It's not breakdancing. Not really, although it's associated with breakdancing nowadays; breakin' was originally seen as being very east coast, while these dances originated on the west coast. What was this dancing?Well, many of the most famous 70s-80s street moves are actually called
funk styles, which were performed, at first, to funk and disco, and later to early electronic and industrial dance music. And the big daddy of them all was a dance called the Electric Boogaloo, and demonstrated by the
Electric Boogaloos.
Here they are in their zoot-suited glory, showing off their signature moves.
[more inside]posted by Bunny Ultramod at 10:08 AM PST - 5 comments
Toilet gaming. [bbc.co.uk] When men use a public urinal they are cruelly left in full view, with nothing to do as they answer nature's call. Until now. British company Captive Media thinks it has developed a product that fills a gap in the market - a urinal mounted, urine-controlled games console for men.
posted by Fizz at 6:27 AM PST - 87 comments
December 3
As a historical document the book is exhaustive and valuable. But I did not come away feeling that I knew or understood Hüsker Dü — the musicians themselves, their music, or any of the people around them — any more intimately than I already did. Earles’ writing is at once densely opinionated and emotionless. He expertly follows the chronology of the band’s tours and releases, but he never makes it understandable why some of us look back on this band so reverently, or why it would be worth somebody’s time to discover Hüsker Dü today. (previously)posted by Trurl at 8:28 PM PST - 52 comments
Kodak's long fade to black. 'Like the passing of distinguished individuals, the passing of great corporations should prompt us to ponder the transience of earthly glory. So let's pay our respects to Eastman Kodak, which at this writing appears to be a shutter-click from extinction.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 6:19 PM PST - 63 comments
I was Wrong and So are You. I needed to retract the conclusions I’d trumpeted in The Wall Street Journal. The new results invalidated our original result: under the right circumstances, conservatives and libertarians were as likely as anyone on the left to give wrong answers to economic questions. The proper inference from our work is not that one group is more enlightened, or less. It’s that “myside bias”—the tendency to judge a statement according to how conveniently it fits with one’s settled position—is pervasive among all of America’s political groups. The bias is seen in the data, and in my actions. [more inside]posted by storybored at 6:03 PM PST - 41 comments
Rule no. 1: Catch the first Pokemon you encounter in each route/cave/whatever and nothing else. If you fail to catch it, too bad, continue onwards. Rule no. 2: If your Pokemon faints, consider it dead and release it. In 2010 a 4chan user posted
these rules for making Pokemon more of a challenge, as well as a short comic on his exploits in a world where Pokemon can die. The "
Nuzlocke" comic became wildly popular, spawning dozens of elaborate offshoots in
comic and
story form.
[more inside]posted by melissam at 5:47 PM PST - 15 comments
Evernote
releases a new browser extension,
Clearly, which elegantly presents a webpage's main article, shorn of all distracting adornments. It is currently Chrome-only, but will soon come to other browsers.
posted by shivohum at 1:04 PM PST - 34 comments
"This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time. Indeed, it is this aspect of the law that represents the true ‘death panel’ found in Obamacare—but not one that is going to lead to the death of American consumers. Rather, the medical loss ratio will, ultimately, lead to the death of large parts of the private, for-profit health insurance industry."
posted by the young rope-rider at 11:48 AM PST - 147 comments
December 2
Here is an artifact of the old internet: "Somewhere in the picture below we have cleverly hidden a can of spam. If you think you've found the spam, click on it to find out if you're right. You probably don't think there is any spam in the picture, but look closely. Most people only find the spam after staring intently at the picture for several hours.
"
Good luck and find that spam!"
[more inside]posted by JHarris at 9:56 PM PST - 71 comments
How do people die in motor "accidents"?
I'll tell you.
With the Christmas "Silly Season" is upon us, the Age has republished
And this is how you die by journalist Roger Aldridge.
A warning - it's pretty graphic. Scroll up for the rest of the article.
posted by mattoxic at 4:02 PM PST - 95 comments
Submarine escape: A WWII survival tale. 'Seventy years ago, off the Greek island of Kefalonia, the British submarine HMS Perseus hit an Italian mine, sparking one of the greatest and most controversial survival stories of World War II.' 'Despite being awarded a medal for his escape, John Capes's story was so extraordinary that many people, both within and outside the Navy, doubted it.' He 'died in 1985 but it was not until 1997 that his story was finally verified.'
[more inside]posted by VikingSword at 2:37 PM PST - 9 comments
Seeing so many Occupiers getting evicted made me think of
this short 1988 documentary by Nancy Kalow on homeless squatter punk teens in the Bay Area (
warning:cringe-inducing rapping in the opening scene). From their stories, it seems as if they had free reign of the abandoned Berkeley Polytech building for a while. Readers of
Cometbus who aren't from the Bay Area can see a bit of the scene he made sound so attractive. 1993 sequel,
The Losers Club.posted by shushufindi at 2:14 PM PST - 5 comments
Beleaguered U.S. Presidential candidate Herman Cain's campaign has created a feature on their website entitled "
Women for Herman Cain" (or just "Women for Cain" in some places) where women can post their support for him in the form of text testimonials and videos. Jezebel
snarks, Palin
sympathizes, and Mediaite
observes that the first version of the site prominently featured a stock photo of four women with their thumbs up in approval.
posted by aught at 1:58 PM PST - 143 comments
This collection of street posters, mad scribblings, political screeds, religious rants, and paranoid raves was collected on the streets of New York City from 1985 to the present. Some time ago, it occurred to me that the streets are as full of art as, say, thrift shops are full of great paintings. So, inspired by Jim Shaw's collection Thrift Shop Paintings, Adolf Wölfli's visionary scrawls, and outsider music, I began carrying a portable razor with me whilst out on casual strolls. What began as a hobby has remained an obsession and this obsession is brought to you in living color here on UbuWeb.
Keep checking back as this page is constantly updated. I have hundreds of examples to share with you, as as time permits, they'll all eventually appear here.
-- Kenneth Goldsmith,
Assorted Street Postersposted by beshtya at 1:04 PM PST - 13 comments
"...they essentially published years of comics for the sole purpose of saying 'Fine, that's how you want it? Here you go. Enjoy.' They made a character out of pure sarcasm, and he had his own ongoing series for a hundred issues."
Chris Sims on Azrael.posted by griphus at 11:55 AM PST - 28 comments
Leka I Zogu
died November 30, 2011 at the age of 72. When he was less than 48 hours old, Mussolini's troops invaded Albania and drove out his father, King Zog I of Albania, and the rest of the royal family. He spent the rest of his life fleeing invading armies, stockpiling weaponry, trading commodities, attempting coups, returning to Albania (three times), and eventually settling into a quiet life in the very country where he refused to relenquish his claims to the throne.
[more inside]posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:12 AM PST - 39 comments
Designed as "an expeditionary force for a geologic assault
1" on the Moon’s
Hadley Rille,
Apollo 15 was a groundbreaking lunar mission. Designed to be devoted entirely to scientific exploration, it included a number of notable firsts: first to land outside of the
lunar mare;
first 3 day stay on the moon; first use of the
Lunar Rover by Commander David Scott and Lunar Module Pilot Jim Irwin; first use of the
Scientific Instrument Module, used by Command Module Pilot Al Worden to study the moon from lunar orbit; and first launch of a
subsatellite, used to map the plasma, particle and magnetic fields of the moon. On top of that, Scott gave
a visual proof of Galileo's theory of objects in gravity fields in a vacuum, showing gravity acts equally on all objects regardless of their mass. Scott and Irwin also discovered of the
Genesis Rock, a piece the moon's primordial crust, formed only 100 million years after the solar system itself.
The mission was a spectacular success, publicly called
"One of the most brilliant missions in space science ever flown". The crew was lauded and their future with NASA seemed assured.
Then the stamps hit the fan and Apollo 15 became the first US space crew that was ever fired.
[more inside]posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:28 AM PST - 61 comments
Where Libraries Went Wrong; a great blog post / article diving deep into some of the issues that face public libraries today. It's centred on UK libraries, but deals with issues facing public knowledge bases everywhere.
posted by ChrisR at 1:04 AM PST - 28 comments
December 1
Oren Etzioni is a renowned data mining expert who sold Farecast, his airline-ticket price predictor to Microsoft for $115 million. Now he's turned his focus to the general problem of finding when the best shopping bargains occur. Punch in a consumer electronics item and his
website will tell you whether to buy now or to wait. Over time he'll be adding more product categories. In any case, he can tell you right now
the best prices for most things aren't on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
posted by storybored at 8:41 PM PST - 14 comments
One afternoon in September 1958, a beautiful, distinguished and mysterious woman arrived at the door of number 46 rue Hippolyte Maindron. This was the Paris studio where Alberto Giacometti had been working since 1926, having arrived in the city four years earlier. [more inside]posted by Trurl at 7:22 PM PST - 7 comments
But like many an inarticulate young lover, I thought for a time that seduction was a matter of giving the right book to the right woman. In my case it was Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: a meditation on Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther that catalogues the melancholic lover’s prized ‘image repertoire’ – the scene of waiting, the feeling of being dissolved in the presence of the loved being, the attraction of suicide – and thinly veils the author’s own life as a middle-aged gay man in Paris in the 1970s. This gift was always a prelude to disaster.
–
RB and Me: An Education is an essay by
Brian G. Dillon about his relationship with the books of French philosopher Roland Barthes. It's also a lovely autobiography of an awkward boy finding his place in life.
Dillon's website collects his essays, and is trove of interesting insight. Besides writing essays and fiction, Dillon is also the UK editor of Cabinet Magazine, and you can read a fair number of his
articles online, including ones on
Beau Brummel and the cravat,
hypochondria and
hydrotherapy.
posted by Kattullus at 6:33 PM PST - 4 comments
David Milch, creator of NYPD Blue and Deadwood,
has inked a deal with HBO to produce television shows and movies from the literary works of William Faulkner.
“I’m not, probably, the first person they would have thought of approaching them,” Mr. Milch said in a phone interview, referring to his months-long discussions with the William Faulkner Literary Estate. “But a number of conversations were fruitful and here we are.”Faulkner
previously; Milch
previouslyposted by not_the_water at 6:14 PM PST - 32 comments
Black Sun is a meticulously choreographed projection of motiongraphics onto dance, combining traditional and modern elements of Japanese culture and martial arts. Artist Nobuyuki Hanabusa and dancer Katsumi Sakakura, together known as Kagemu, have since been widely imitated by others, including Beyoncé. [more inside]posted by klausman at 4:37 PM PST - 7 comments
"One thing about life in New York: wherever you are, the neighborhood is always changing. An Italian enclave becomes Senegalese; a historically African-American corridor becomes a magnet for white professionals. The accents and rhythms shift; the aromas become spicy or vegetal. The transition is sometimes smooth, sometimes bumpy. But there is a sense of loss among the people left behind, wondering what happened to the neighborhood they once thought of as their own."
For Sophia Goldberg (98), Holocaust survivor, change has meant the end of a way of life.posted by zarq at 3:49 PM PST - 34 comments
"In Life, there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no words exist.
On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places.
Our job, as we see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society. " --
Douglas Adams, on
The Meaning of Liff. And because it's Adams, there are some internet pages for your enjoyment.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 11:40 AM PST - 18 comments
A couple has an intimate conversation in a restaurant, unaware that their every word is being closely monitored. This is
Table 7, a short film from indie filmmaker
Marko Slavnic.
posted by jbickers at 6:40 AM PST - 37 comments
Between 1987 and 2003, Fugazi played over 1000 concerts in all 50 states and all over the world. Over 800 of these shows were recorded by the band's sound engineers. The goal of
this project is to make each of these recordings available to download for a small fee. The standard suggested download price is $5 a show but they also offer a sliding scale option where you can set your own price. (
Bonus Banter)
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:00 AM PST - 58 comments
