MetaFilter

Porn Movie Music (generally sfw) Streaming audio that is surprisingly more varied then you might imagine. A few rude lyrics every now and then, but for the most part easy listening.
posted by kablam at 6:07 PM PST - 10 comments

National Budget Simulation Think Washington is doing a poor job of allocating funds? See if you can eliminate the deficit with this little game.
posted by synecdoche at 5:13 PM PST - 24 comments

The Ultimate Game. Game theory was applied extensively by US foreign policy-makers during the Cold War, and many would credit those "moves" with the triumph of the West. But can it work now? Are rogue states and terrorists "rational actors?" Are we seeing a classic two-player game playing out with the US and Iraq? What does it even mean to "win" in the post-Soviet era? If these theories interest you, try these online simulations.
posted by _sirmissalot_ at 2:49 PM PST - 20 comments

Maybe there are no weapons, after all... "On February 24, Newsweek broke what may be the biggest story of the Iraq crisis. In a revelation that "raises questions about whether the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist," the magazine's issue dated March 3 reported that the Iraqi weapons chief who defected from the regime in 1995 told U.N. inspectors that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles, as Iraq claims...." This is the same defector cited by the Bush administration numerous times as a reliable informant on the scope of Saddam's long-term WMD plans.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:36 PM PST - 48 comments

Stupidity should be cured, says DNA discoverer. "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."
posted by ColdChef at 2:30 PM PST - 22 comments

Yerba Mate is a drink that is enormously popular in South America. Given to the world by the Guarani Indians, its a bitter brew reminiscent of tea but with interesting properties. A coworker returned from Argentina and brought me some. I'm addicted.
posted by Dantien at 2:20 PM PST - 20 comments

Save the Goldfish! Friday Flash Fun.
posted by essexjan at 2:14 PM PST - 4 comments

Everyone hates Canada. Here are a few of the reasons I do. Since it's invade Canada day on MeFi, let's take a moment to realize what Canada has given us. Their most precious gift to us Americans? Canadian Celebrities. Bryan Adams, Bachman-Turner-Overdrive, Jim Carrey, Hayden Christensen, Celine Dion, Avril.... and even Robert Goulet! Oh it goes on and on! My friends, the decision to attack Canada is not pre-emptive. We're already under siege.
posted by Stan Chin at 1:27 PM PST - 45 comments

The group's intent "is to support the right of Augusta National to choose their members regardless of race, religion, sex or creed," Powell said.

The group in question is the Ku Klux Klan. Silly.
posted by donkeyschlong at 12:35 PM PST - 19 comments

Michael Newdow is probably smiling today. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has refused to reconsider last June's ruling finding the Pledge of Allegiance to be unconstitutional.
posted by mrbula at 12:30 PM PST - 12 comments

Civil disobedience ANTI-WAR ACTIVISTS PLAN TO DISRUPT DAILY ACTIVITIES IF WAR BREAKS OUT--but, shush, don't let this news get out yet.
posted by Postroad at 11:53 AM PST - 55 comments

Elvis so loved the world that he died, fat and bloated, in a bathroom. For unto you is born this day in the city of Memphis a Presley, which is Elvis the King. And Elvis saw them berating the poor recording artist, whose music was terrible and lyrics insipid, and Lo, the King said unto the mob: "Let him who is without bad singles cast the first rhinestone." And the mob turned down their eyes, each considering his own Don't Worry Be Happy or Man in the Mirror, and shuffled off. "Thank you," said Elvis. "Thank you very much."
posted by quonsar at 11:31 AM PST - 18 comments

Play the classic lemonade stand game. (jave req'd). Or, for more grown-up fun, play BeerStand (no java req'd).
posted by Ufez Jones at 10:45 AM PST - 14 comments

Most anyone who has been involved in college radio is familiar with the uphill battle faced in injecting something new, different, and cool into the music world when so many artists and labels lack the clout required to get noticed. It is a shame that the College Media Journal, the music charting hub of the college radio world, has admitted to falsifying playlists for their own apparent gain. What does this say about the place of college radio and indie music in the music industry these days?
posted by dytiq at 10:38 AM PST - 11 comments

"A little invasion is precisely what Canada needs" wrote Jonah Goldberg last November. According to Rush Limbaugh, Canada isn't a country, it's a "country". Tucker Carlson on CNN has said Canada "should be bombed" so that they are taught a lesson. Doesn't he remember April 17th? No matter. Since Canada will never be able to defend itself from the US using conventional means, it's time for Canada to reactivate it's nuclear weapons program.
posted by johnnydark at 10:26 AM PST - 30 comments

Purchasing an one-way airplane ticket with cash May trigger airport security alert on you. No credit card ? Bad Guy ! Credit Card ? Good guy ! Unofficially sponsored by VISA or Amex ?
posted by elpapacito at 8:56 AM PST - 56 comments

Friday Flash Fun with Cutethulhu. That right kids, he's not just Cthulhu, demon squid and priest of the Great Old Ones from H. P. Lovecraft mythos. He's a popular plush toy and the cuddly inanimate star of his own flash anime-style short. Enjoy!
posted by VelvetHellvis at 7:26 AM PST - 14 comments

If You Could Choose But One Photograph Or Picture of the place where you live, unadorned and true to its spirit, capable of giving those who had never been there a shadow of what it feel like to actually live there and see there, what image, whether oblique or direct, moody or humorous, would you show and stand by? This photograph, by Luiz Carvalho, is most definitely my own city, Lisbon. [I found him through American Photo Journalist's outstanding website, which I highly recommend as a starting point for those who wish to join in the fun. The "Analyzed" feature, incidentally, is well worth browsing.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 7:10 AM PST - 64 comments

One jar; check. One liter formaldehyde agent; check. Thing proxy; check. Bottle and enjoy.
posted by pedantic at 7:05 AM PST - 29 comments

Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, had a difficult end to his press briefing [Real]. Skip forward to 29 minutes.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 6:58 AM PST - 80 comments

«The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests.» A US Diplomat’s Letter of Resignation. Yes, there are also people like this in Politics. From NYT. It requires registration, but it’s for free.
posted by acrobat at 5:59 AM PST - 45 comments

What am I thinking? A computer asks you twenty questions, and tries to guess what you are thinking about. Can you stump the computer?
posted by patrickje at 12:04 AM PST - 117 comments

Demography is destiny Alan Greespan in Senate testimony discusses the implications of an aging population. While the US is getting older, other countries are relatively young. Can immigration and technology provide, as Greenspan says, a "potent antidote for slowing growth in the working-age population," or are such projections academic?
posted by kliuless at 10:08 PM PST - 5 comments

When Flash meets news cheese. The drums come in like Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks." The cop show synth-strings are ratcheted up to the most intense possible level. It's CNN having a war orgasm, in this ad for the Iraq Tracker, which apparently sits on your desktop and provides news as exciting as a coke overdose.
posted by inksyndicate at 8:33 PM PST - 31 comments

Even the ugliest cuts make beautiful flakes.
posted by crunchland at 8:20 PM PST - 35 comments

20 Years of Frontline... Online The PBS documentary show Frontline has been discussed many times here on MetaFilter. This year, in September, it turns twenty years old, and to commemorate this event a number of popular and recent shows have been put online: The Merchants of Cool, A Class Divided, American Porn, Abortion Clinic, The Choice 2000, and more. Rewatch some of the episodes, then reread the comments. How's that for meta?
posted by tittergrrl at 8:10 PM PST - 11 comments

It's Carnival Time! New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrations are steeped in tradition. From beads and king cakes to invitation-only balls, carnival has been a part of the city's history since the French held private masked balls and parties in 1718. Although Spanish rule interrupted the party for 90 years, many of the krewes have been around since the 1800s. Today, parade floats are considered an art form and some krewes spend up to $700,000 on a single float. With such excess abounding, consider yourself warned.
posted by ajr at 7:42 PM PST - 15 comments

A new study published by the Institute for Policy Studies examines the methods that the U.S. uses to bully, cajole and bribe other nations to support its policies in the U.N. Security Council. Full report [pdf]
posted by cbrody at 7:27 PM PST - 15 comments

Say hello to audioBLOGGER - a service ("simpler than publishing a text post") that lets bloggers post 2 minutes of audio to their blogs from any phone.
posted by boost ventilator at 7:12 PM PST - 21 comments

"May I have the envelope please? Oh, the paperboy threw it up on the roof?" The National Cartoonists Society has annouced the finalists for their annual Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year: "Simpsons" creator Matt Groening, whose weekly "Life in Hell" is alive and well, Pat Brady of "Rose is Rose", Greg Evans of "Luann", and Dan Piraro of "Bizarro" Gamut running at its semi-best.
posted by wendell at 5:19 PM PST - 16 comments

On the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the double helix spare a thought for Rosalind Franklin the chemist who produced the data that supported the structure.
Franklin, who died before the Nobel prize was awarded, never received credit for her contribution and was on the receiving end of Watson's sexism . But with a new book let's hope in this 50th anniversary year that Rosalind Franklin gets her contribution to this great discovery recognised.
posted by stunned at 5:17 PM PST - 4 comments

Basketball player refuses to honor flag. Going along with the anti-protesting sentiment found here, A Vietnam veteran ran on to the court waving an American flag in response to Toni Smith, a Div. III basketball player who refuses to face the flag. Conservatives have already chimed in here . Smith briefly explains her position in this article. Should players be allowed to protest during collegiate basketball games? What if she wasn't protesting the war?
posted by cohappy at 4:52 PM PST - 63 comments

Freedom and the Future. Text of President Bush's speech last night to the American Enterprise Institute's annual dinner.
posted by Ty Webb at 3:26 PM PST - 27 comments

Women in the Middle Ages [er, 1969] and now. Here are funny articles on money, work, sex and some other things, from the wonderful Pussycat Magazine. Women may have "come a long way, baby" - but have men? Do some of them still secretly approve of - or yearn for - the ideal woman of days gone by? Or, given the present climate of surrendered wives and secondary virginities, are there still some women who agree? [Even though I harbour a secret suspicion Pussycat Magazine is at least partially written by men...]
posted by Carlos Quevedo at 2:53 PM PST - 12 comments

Who would you rather vote for - Frankenstein, Hitler, or Tony Curtis? That's the decision facing some voters in India ... Have you ever run across other 'repurposed' names?
posted by Jos Bleau at 2:52 PM PST - 6 comments

Radio-controlled blimp: harmless toy, or minion of evil? Read the story, then decide. Too bad Zany Brainyis going bankrupt.
posted by kewms at 2:28 PM PST - 32 comments

The Name Game Valley Creek Farms "solicits help from clever people each year to help name their young horses." If you consider yourself a gifted wordsmith with a knack for penning equine monikers that will get the bugs a buzzin' and make the farrier smile, this is your chance to take the reins. But it's not easy. The rules are extensive and your choice may already be taken. But with luck, you may one day hear your literary masterpiece of 18 letters or less roll off the caller's tongue and become part of thoroughbred history.
posted by snez at 10:32 AM PST - 13 comments

Listening in. Marches are debated, but few of us get to watch them happen and hear the thoughts of the marchers. This is one of the items we're looking for: "most interesting of the web."
posted by ?! at 10:25 AM PST - 8 comments

Protest Is Not Tolerated

I wasn't sure how much good I could do or how much power one person has but I wanted to do it. When I took my place on the sidewalk across the street from my church, I was struck with this Norman Rockwell picture of America. Families with their balloons, flags and signs made it feel like the Fourth of July. I was thrilled by all the patriotism and was proud to be part of this community that cares enough to turn out to greet the most powerful politician in our land. But when I unrolled my sign, all that changed, and I may never be able to look at my community the same way again.

Ain't that America? Proud to be Born in the USA? Constitutional rights? Not with the "Defenders Of All Things Duhbya!"
posted by nofundy at 9:21 AM PST - 141 comments

Jacqui's fight to become whole again after a devastating accident. She has a whole lot of love, courage, and hope.
posted by john at 9:04 AM PST - 6 comments

The crew of the ISS captured a fantastic picture of London at night [1M jpg]
posted by stbalbach at 8:52 AM PST - 24 comments

A Vast Repository of Toonological Knowledge I found this while I was googling for Howard the Duck. Enjoy!
posted by konolia at 8:03 AM PST - 13 comments

You can find me in the club, bottle full of bub
Look mami I got the X if you into taking drugs
I'm into having sex, I ain't into making love
So come give me a hug if you into to getting rubbed

Lyrics from crack dealer/rapper 50 Cent's "song" "In Da Club", this week's most popular single according to Billboard.
posted by johnnydark at 7:45 AM PST - 74 comments

RIFT: in "The madness of empire", American Conservative Magazine breaks with Neoconservatism. Meanwhile Norman Mailer, in Gaining an empire, losing democracy? warns "America is going to become a mega-banana republic where the army will have more and more importance...democracy, noble and delicate as it is, may give way".

What can we say about a nation so powerfull that it can simply bury thousands of troublesome humans with bulldozers?
posted by troutfishing at 5:45 AM PST - 102 comments

Thought you were rid of the telemarketers? Perhaps not. It looks like they're fighting back to items like the TeleZapper that fake telemarketers into thinking your phone is disconnected by playing the three tones you get if your phone doesn't work. Castel, Inc claims their DirectQuest software defeats devices like Telezapper by reading the connect messages delivered by your public switched telephone network. Fave quote - “It’s a privacy arms race.." Will this ever end?
posted by djspicerack at 5:31 AM PST - 17 comments

According to toxicologists, pollution is good for you in small doses. Pardon my pedantism, but isn't the term "pollution" synonymous with "too much"?
posted by titboy at 5:21 AM PST - 9 comments

"The National Palace Museum collects, preserves, and promotes the essence of Chinese art and crafts. Accumulated over a thousand years by Chinese emperors and royal families, its collections include ceramics, porcelain, calligraphy, painting, and ritual bronzes". [more]
posted by hama7 at 5:18 AM PST - 7 comments

Hard of Hearing Radio (warning: link goes fullscreen AND has popup windows. but it's worth it, really!) is a Canadian radio program targeted at listeners with mild hearing loss, that aims to "challenge the assumption that broadcast media should be tailored only to those with a flawless ability to perceive it's content." The site contains lots of high quality mp3s of broadcasts as well as some articles about the subject and links to related topics. Recommended listening for fans of bands like Sigur Ros, Godspeed You Black Emperor, labels like Constellation, and readers of FakeJazz. Quite possibly might also be enjoyed by those who smoke a lot of . . . Yeah. So for those deaf folks out there, what do you listen for in music? What are your favorite genres and groups?
posted by atom128 at 4:08 AM PST - 10 comments

Yay, after the flash fest that was Royksopp's 'Remind Me', here's anoter retro-pixel music video (and a damn catchy choon), from Junior Senior and it can be distributed freely too. "A Tummy Touch-esque slab of nu-disco breaks. The single The Avalanches forgot to make, slick discoid beats, wonderful smile-inducing vocal & beats to make you throw down the funk." according to breaksworld.com
posted by MintSauce at 3:25 AM PST - 7 comments

Mr. Rogers Dead. Fred Rogers of "Mister Roger's Neighborhood" died of stomach cancer at age 74. To be honest, his was never my personal favorite PBS kid's show growing up (I preferred off-brand shows like "Zoom" and "3-2-1 Contact"). But my appreciation for him when I was an adult was pretty high. Anyway, it's a sad day in the neighborhood.
posted by jscalzi at 2:17 AM PST - 129 comments

A complex of angular buildings and a 1,776-foot spire designed by architect Daniel Libeskind was chosen as the plan for the World Trade Center site on Wednesday, The Associated Press has learned. (via Salon)
posted by black8 at 1:51 AM PST - 44 comments

The Wooly Bullies Of MetaFilter - Uncovered! Sweating heavily as I perused this unholy website's rhetorical machinations late into the night, I was suddenly shaken by a strange feeling of dread, for it was the spectre of MetaFilter itself I was seeing before my bulging eyes, in all its hideous familiarity, emerging from the fetid depths of my guilt-wracked soul...
posted by MiguelCardoso at 1:00 AM PST - 16 comments

The minimal compact: An open-source constitution for post-national states. "What sorts of arrangements of power between humans can account for the deep variation in beliefs and assumptions among the six billion of us who share this planet, while still providing for a common jurisprudence? What measures can be taken that enhance the common security without unduly infringing on the sovereignty of the individual?

I believe that a useful model for the desired structure can be found in the open-source or "free" software movement."

Our own adamgreenfield has been thinking about emergent democracy and the widening gap between power and politics, and has written a 'minifesto,' and would like some feedback. Democracy for the rest of us : fascinating, 'deep geek' stuff, and worth your time.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:13 PM PST - 11 comments

So, we all know the Patriot Act allows for the monitoring of library and computer usage. Big deal, right? I mean how many people can they watch and what are the odds?

Maybe not as good (or bad, depending on your view) as you might think,"A St. John’s College Library visit by a former public defender was abruptly interrupted February 13 when city police officers arrested him about 9 p.m. at the computer terminal he was using, handcuffed him, and brought him to the Santa Fe, New Mexico, police station for questioning by Secret Service agents from Albuquerque."
posted by cedar at 9:25 PM PST - 43 comments

Give It Up for MC Zhirinovsky Flamboyant Russian ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, renowned for his controversial views on Iraq, has had his words turned into an anti-war rap song. The song, titled "Don't you dare go shooting at Baghdad", is being launched on the internet, according to the Russian television station TVS.
posted by turbanhead at 8:36 PM PST - 7 comments

Need a pair of Nikes? Fifteen or so thousand pairs of Nikes were lost overboard December 12th while on their way to Tacoma and are making their way north. Some of those shoes started to show up on the Washington coast late last month. The bulk of these shoes will find their way to the Alaskan coast and the Aleutian shores. You may have a problem finding a good pair; the shoes were not bound to their mates. This isn't the first time Nike has lost a load of shoes (and here). In fact, in just a little poking around, it seems that there is all sorts of flotsam drifting along the ocean currents.
posted by YohonTheLarge at 8:01 PM PST - 13 comments

Head Scan is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their heads wedged into their scanners, or why.
posted by Stan Chin at 5:28 PM PST - 71 comments

Justice Department Seizes Top Internet Site Involved In Copyright Piracy "The leading public Internet site dedicated to online copyright piracy was seized by the Justice Department today. Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff and Paul J. McNulty, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia today announced the seizure of www.iSONEWS.com as part of a previous plea agreement entered into by a defendant convicted of violating the criminal copyright laws."
Law enforcement seizes computers everyday for one reason or another, but leaving the site up and displaying a rather finger-wagging message is a new one!
posted by quonsar at 4:34 PM PST - 34 comments

PerversionTracker "locates the very worst of Mac software. We search the web for 15 minutes a day -- so you don't have to!" [via Macintouch]
posted by kirkaracha at 3:40 PM PST - 11 comments

What do you think of when you consider... sand Some beautiful pictures of sand under a microscope, as well as description of what sand is...
posted by darsh at 3:36 PM PST - 9 comments

U.S. BUNKERS: Life assurance, not life insurance. If you lack faith in duct tape and plastic sheeting, perhaps this is the solution for you.
posted by aladfar at 1:05 PM PST - 9 comments

Boneheads of the Year - The year may only be just shy of two months old, but these two Massachusetts men have already wrapped up the award for 2003. Really, how dumb can TWO people be?
posted by MediaMan at 1:04 PM PST - 11 comments

You may have seen the PSAs with Nick & Norm (So it is alright to support terrorism, a little?) Now the Marijuana Policy Project in their War on Drug Czar has released a parody. [QT, Real, or WMP]
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 1:04 PM PST - 14 comments

MassKilling.com: Holocaust on Your Plate, where PETA compares the holocaust to the meat industry really boils my blood. Sure they are seeking approval from the Jewish Community to take the exhibit on a national tour, but Jews weren’t the only ones killing in the concentration camps.
posted by ambirex at 1:03 PM PST - 76 comments

Jeff Bezos has patented the idea for "A method and system for conducting an electronic discussion relating to a topic." Clearly, an idea way ahead of its time... (via somebodydial911)
posted by bluno at 12:14 PM PST - 14 comments

Since it's Hump Day here on MeFi, I thought I'd let everyone know that the National Sexuality Resource Center opened last week in San Francisco. (SF Chron article here.) So far, the site seems pretty sparse information-wise, but there's an interesting article on disability and sexuality.
posted by DakotaPaul at 11:59 AM PST - 12 comments

Very Interesting French Music Video The movie is somewhat hard to explain without giving away the ending, but the movie addresses very interesting implications for the future of mankind.
posted by banished at 11:49 AM PST - 26 comments

Teachers Traumatizing Students of Deployed Soldiers "WABI TV reported Friday that the Maine National Guard Family Assistance Center has received about 30 complaints from children of deployed soldiers concerning Principals, Teachers and Guidance Counselors reportedly demeaning the role of their deployed parent. Some children involved are 7 to 9 years of age." More inside...
posted by darian at 11:27 AM PST - 65 comments

Ohio to approve 14th Amendment — 135 years late People think I'm kidding when I say it's the 19th century in my neighborhood.
posted by elgoose at 11:16 AM PST - 18 comments

Justice is served. A career criminal, high on cocaine breaks into a bar that has been fitted with a security system that turns out to be lethal. The bar owner installed the system after the 3rd break in in the past month, and posted numerous signs outside warning of the danger. The criminal is electrocuted to death, and this being America, the widow of the bar's owner (who has passed away during the years of litigation over this issue) is forced to pay $75,000 to the family of the robber, who understandably need the money now that the breadwinner is no longer around to provide for them via a life of robbery.
posted by jonson at 10:19 AM PST - 126 comments

Agatha Christie and Archaeology. 'Many years ago, when I was once saying sadly to Max it was a pity I couldn't have taken up archaeology when I was a girl, so as to be more knowledgeable on the subject, he said, 'Don't you realize that at this moment you know more about prehistoric pottery than any woman in England?' [more inside]
posted by plep at 9:43 AM PST - 13 comments

"Imagine, five elephants — with a combined weight of maybe 50,000 pounds — fanned out in a circle, defending their territory against puny you." Marlin Perkins might've been the host of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, all comfy and cozy in the studio, but it was reliable Jim who did all the daring face-to-face encounters with ferocious fauna. And you can relive those mid-70s Sunday nights spent in front of the television right here.
posted by grabbingsand at 9:23 AM PST - 5 comments

It's official! Watching porn can make you a bad person. So says the FBI. Get ready for the crackdown. "Pornography teaches ideas that validate aberrant behavior," according to detective Nate Gittins of the Madison County Sheriff’s office. The use of illicit materials is not exclusively related to sex crimes. It may also lead to other criminal activities, FBI officials say. Oh my! What does this mean for us deviants?
posted by eas98 at 8:51 AM PST - 55 comments

Sex Week at Yale
posted by semmi at 8:31 AM PST - 13 comments

BLUEDANIEL: DJ, jazz drummer, animator, and Blair Witch website designer Dan Karcher's webpage, a true gem, is particularly timely right now. Great site design, great Flash/MX, great music. (More inside.)
posted by Shane at 8:04 AM PST - 22 comments

With his own blog in place Tristan makes interesting observations on today's blogs. He's definitely got a point when it comes to the variety of information on most blogs... sometimes it seems I can visit 20 blogs and see the exact same source articles over and over again. An interesting read from tnl.net, as always.
posted by clevershark at 7:19 AM PST - 18 comments

How does one assure global stability in a world where there is only one strong power? John Perry Barlow (previously mentioned here) thinks Dick Cheney has the answer.
posted by ashbury at 6:05 AM PST - 54 comments

We know that the French take their food seriously, and restaurant ratings are a BIG deal over there. But here's a sad illustration of that: famed chef Bernard Loiseau was found dead yesterday of an apparent suicide, and speculation centers around his downgraded rating from the influential GaultMillau guide. Shades of Vatel?
posted by Vidiot at 5:38 AM PST - 17 comments

The thought of Concorde services ending saddens me ( possibly because 101 sits less than half a mile from my doorstep). It [with it' s clone Concordeski] was the only supersonic passenger jet to even make it to prototype status. Considering things like it's massive fuel consumption, should we ditch the beast, find something else or go back to subsonics?
posted by twine42 at 4:47 AM PST - 16 comments

"It is with pleasure that I welcome you to the Website of the Kyoto National Museum. We hope this site will open up the fascinating world of East Asian art to a broader audience than ever before possible." [1]
posted by hama7 at 3:54 AM PST - 7 comments

Busker Dü: You're short of money. You're not afraid to make a fool of yourself. You have no pride. You have a musical instrument to abuse. Well - that, apparently, is easy. At least if you're a Guardian journalist. But what else can a feller do these days to drum up that old "Buddy, Can You Spare A Dime?" spirit?
posted by Carlos Quevedo at 1:55 AM PST - 12 comments

model rocketry woes. the article mentions a wyoming senator who wants to amend the bill, but the homeland security act is/would put the squeeze on model rocketry, as the fuel of some engines will/would be classified as an explosive. whoa. wonder if the NHRA is gonna follow this. hate to see 'em stop the top fuelers.
posted by asparagus_berlin at 12:40 AM PST - 7 comments

Pioneer 10 space probe finally packs it in for good. So long, little fella...
posted by 40 Watt at 10:41 PM PST - 26 comments

"ByteShark is the TIVO of the Internet" Prominently featured in the Reuters Internet story "Imagine a World Without Ads". But that's not all the ByteShark claims to do. Is this going to be the killer app that does to Google what Google did to AltaVista? Or should we trust a guy whose previous product was simulated interactive interrogation software for solving murders"? Something about this whole enterprise smells like spyware, or worse. But there are lots of better webware experts at MeFi than Me. Would YOU swim with this Shark?
posted by wendell at 10:11 PM PST - 11 comments

La Catedral de Girona - visit this Gothic masterpiece on the Costa Brava through a flash exhibition that affords a fascinating exploration of internal and external architectural details, stained glass, artwork, sepulchres, and more. Be sure to take the visit and don't miss the famous Tapestry of Creation.
(found at MeFi member Zootoon's wonderful blog by the same name - lots of great treasures there too!)
posted by madamjujujive at 9:16 PM PST - 14 comments

The life of a pig, from conception to Christmas ham. A frank and charming slide show of the life of pig Onni, backed by horns, narrated in melodius Finnish, and subtitled in English. Be warned: it uses Flash, and ends in death.
posted by Mo Nickels at 7:38 PM PST - 30 comments

"The study of feelings, once the province of psychology, is now spreading to history, literature, and other fields." Scholarship on the emotions is a rich field for historians and philosophers. Martha Nussbaum (previously discussed here) has written on historical views of the relationship between morality and emotion, and delves more deeply into it in her recent book, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Of particular relevance these days may be M.F. Burnyeat's new book, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity, which focuses on Classical views of anger and its proper place in human action. Many today could learn from Marcus Aurelius: "as grief is a mark of weakness, so is anger, for both have been wounded and have surrendered to the wound." [First link via Ye Olde Phart.]
posted by homunculus at 4:31 PM PST - 17 comments

Techno-cool cars include a fingerprint access system that locks out thieves and a heartbeat detector that sniffs out left-behind infants and pets. In the worst case—when a sensor detects a hostile life form, Star-Trek style, hiding in the car—the driver can hit a button that alerts the police. The truly paranoid, with access to a freewheeling aftermarket, might prefer to fit the button to an ejection seat. [via WebMonkey]
posted by dg at 3:17 PM PST - 11 comments

"64 grams of fat, 2,090 milligrams of sodium, and enough cholesterol to kill anything that's ever lived." 104% of your USDA daily requirements of saturated fat. 231% of your daily intake of cholesterol. Swanson's Hungry-Man All-Day Breakfast! (Pancakes included.)
posted by crunchland at 2:37 PM PST - 47 comments

Blair unveils global warming plan, says U.S. must do more "We will continue to make the case to the U.S. and to others that climate change is a serious threat that we must address together as an international community," he said. "We in Britain have shown that it is possible to break the relationship between economic growth and ever-rising pollution." With the Bush administration relying so heavily on British support of its war plans, does Blair have some real leverage here to push for more progressive Bush policies on other issues?
posted by damn yankee at 1:47 PM PST - 30 comments

Be a GOP Team Leader! Mentioned briefly in a previous post, you can join the Team to send pre-written letters to the newspaper editors around the country to tell them what you think of our President, or better yet, create your own differing viewpoints using the same technology. Thanks GOP and thank you Sneakemail! You're the best!
posted by CrazyJub at 1:22 PM PST - 26 comments

Emerging Storm Weblog The Gartner Group has put together a formidable weblog of sorts to discuss hot topics in workplace security, crises, and other happenings. The best part is that you can comment along with the "best" of the industry. check out the comments about Social Security. We knew blogging was mainstreaming, but this is a significant use of the application outside of the general media. I don't believe registration is required to view the weblog.
posted by djspicerack at 1:08 PM PST - 6 comments

Alberto Sordi, one of the greatest italian actor of all times, died today. Just wanted to let all the italians around the world without .it TV access know. He'll be so incredibly missed.
posted by elpapacito at 12:13 PM PST - 5 comments

Homeland Security Threat Monitor is a small Windows application that runs in your system tray, showing the current terrorism threat level. Features blinking notification of increased threat level! [via Small Values of Cool]
posted by kirkaracha at 11:55 AM PST - 17 comments

State of Validation 2003. Off the 430 W3C members, only 28 (6.5%) have sites that validate with the W3C validator as either HTML or XHTML! This represents an increase in standards compliance of 75.7% from the year ago tests. [via the big orange Z]
posted by riffola at 11:16 AM PST - 28 comments

A Mighty Wind - courtesy of Christopher Guest, folk music finally gets the spinal tap treatment.
posted by lilboo at 10:45 AM PST - 30 comments

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. [More inside.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 10:43 AM PST - 33 comments

Do you know these men? Recently, the Saint Paul Police Department released a picture online of two suspects who are wanted for an unsolved aggrevated assault case which occurred in December. Nobody who was at the party knew the men. It's fascinating seeing police departments use the Net for modern-day wanted posters. Incidentally, the Saint Paul Police Department also runs the infamous prositution arrest mugshots page.
posted by manero at 10:37 AM PST - 46 comments

Konono No. 1 "This band is one of the main exponents of a spectacular style of music which has developed in the suburbs of Kinshasa (DR Congo). The Congolese call it "tradi-modern", in other words: electrified traditional music. These are musicians who left the bush to settle in the capital and who, in order to go on keep fulfilling their social role and make themselves heard by the ancestors (and, more concretely, by their fellow citizens) despite the high level of urban noise, have had to resort to DIY amplification of their instruments, and to megaphones (conical speakers). This makeshift electrification has provoked a radical mutation of their sound, as it has introduced distortions which they have integrated to their style. [...] The band's line-up includes three electric likembés [thumb pianos] (bass, medium and treble), equipped with hand-made microphones built from magnets salvaged from old car parts, and plugged into amplifiers." Via womanonfire.
posted by jokeefe at 10:18 AM PST - 16 comments

Know what time it is, Kidz? It's U.S. Department of Justice Time!

On today's show, we'll learn why Hacking is REAL BAD, and give you a chance to find out if you are a good cybercitizen. Next, we'll meet Axel, the talking drug dog, and his friends the Bomb Dog Bunch! Then, we'll check in on the ATF, for some cool science fair ideas.

And finally, just for you kids with crooks or international terrorists for parents, here's a nifty PDF coloring book (Native American version also available).
posted by eatitlive at 9:51 AM PST - 11 comments

America and England: Separated By Humor? "This laughter gulf between two otherwise co-dependent cultures should not be thought surprising. The two most fundamental aspects of comedy are observation and speech rhythms and these are necessarily subject to local variation. The point has often been made that British jokes derive most often from class and puns, while US humour is rooted in gags." While talk show host Ruby Wax claims "If your language consists of little more than guttural grunts and cherry pie, you can't be blamed for not getting it." Is it any wonder her little show tanked so fast?
posted by owillis at 9:39 AM PST - 45 comments

The thinking man's MMOG is now live and accepting subscriptions. Someone on mefi noticed this game in development last July, but very little attention was given to it at that time. What has evolved in the game is an interesting social experiment, rather than your typical hack and slash Massive Multiplayer game. Many have equated it to Sims Online, but whereas that game appears to have failed to result in anything that doesn't smell of pig excrement, this title appears to have a soul. In fact, it's garnished its first review since opening on Feb 15th (shameless self-linking).
posted by thanotopsis at 9:07 AM PST - 16 comments

In this exposé a Wired News reporter easily gains access to some sensitive areas of the Los Alamos National Lab, and brings back pictures to prove it. While certainly an embarrassment for a place throwing workshops on homeland security (and doubly so because their seminars started today), is it wise for Wired News to post essentially a how-to guide on breaking into the lab where America's nuclear secrets reside?
posted by mathowie at 8:27 AM PST - 16 comments

Even Shakespeare bashed the French. Here's the play in which Willie the Shake indulges in a bit of Frog-bashing.
posted by mrmanley at 8:22 AM PST - 53 comments

Virtual march on Washington. "On February 26th, in every Senate office and in the White House, the phones will be ringing off their hooks...Working together, we'll direct a steady stream of phone calls - about one per minute, all day...while at the same time delivering a constant stream of emails and faxes."
posted by gottabefunky at 7:51 AM PST - 52 comments

In the house where I grew up, we had a 1950's-era Bomb Shelter in the backyard (a cold war relic inherited from the previous owner). We used our shelter as a playground, but many are now forgotten, repurposed, or restored as museum exhibits. Although such shelters are still for sale (often marketed as Tornado or Storm Shelters), many people today regard these shelters as relics from an earlier time. For some, however, the current terror alerts are reviving cold war shelter memories. As demonstrated by sites like the excellent civildefensemuseum.com, we are clearly still fascinated with this important and revealing part of our history.
posted by anastasiav at 7:51 AM PST - 7 comments

The troll gap - Despite heroic American efforts such as the "Kick/nuke their ass and take the gas" troll, "Each year, the Institute for Comparative Troll Studies publishes a report on the state of trolling vis a vis national security of the United States. This year, the outlook is not good..."(via Kuro5hin)
posted by troutfishing at 7:42 AM PST - 19 comments

Kevin Bacon and Bill Gates spawn love child. In a surprisingly un-clumsy attempt to a) figure out what teens really like to do online, b) create an app to tap into this behavior, and c) rule world, a skunkworks project inside MS has beta released the surprisingly clued-in threedegrees. It most literally rocks.
posted by i blame your mother at 6:48 AM PST - 33 comments

How come Dan Rather can get to him, but the CIA can't?
posted by luser at 5:39 AM PST - 32 comments

In these difficult times it's a relief to know that Nethack is still being updated.
posted by chrisgregory at 4:16 AM PST - 23 comments

Take a piss. Not the time for Munday Mash Mun, but I thought it was very entertaining. Post your scores here! And also, is it just me, or does your mouse control become a bit tweaked after playing a few rounds of that game?
posted by aznblader at 11:25 PM PST - 16 comments

Those crazy PETA kids, well, now they've gone and done it. They've admitted that being a vegan is punishment, by sending a letter to the NY Prison Commissioner telling him that "Feeding inmates exclusively vegan food sends a message to inmates and the public that our society isn't molly-coddling them..." Funny, funny PETA people, hoisted by their own celery stick, as it were. I'm guessing that being that anemic makes them a little short on irony.
posted by dejah420 at 10:07 PM PST - 32 comments

Gulf Bounty Is Drying Up in Southern India For three decades, Indians have helped build and serve countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait — reflecting a world where, for many families, making ends meet means living apart. Gulf rulers, wanting to counter what they saw as a demographic overload by Indians, [have] made them less welcome. (New York Times login req)
posted by turbanhead at 9:11 PM PST - 3 comments

Ask not for whom the Bush burns: it burns for Blair. [Quicktime req; via Bifurcated Rivets.]
posted by Carlos Quevedo at 8:04 PM PST - 8 comments

Operation Pipe Dreams And Headhunter - retail smiley-face ceramic pipes are gone. The DEA, maintaining its track record of ineffectual policies, programs, methods, procedures, and purpose has successfully brought an evil crime ring to its knees. No more will you have to worry about tobacco water pipe accessory related muder or hippy headshop related gang activity. In addition to striking fear in the hearts of college freshman and sophmores everywhere, I hope this spells the beginning of the end of those who would sell incense and tapestries to our children. OUR CHILDREN.
posted by jdaura at 6:12 PM PST - 54 comments

Bush wants to deploy a new missile system - without testing it. Seems like a relatively bad idea, considering the numerous things that can do terribly awry with such a complex situation.
posted by tatochip at 3:59 PM PST - 38 comments

A spammer has successfully been sued, using anti-junk Fax laws in a Michigan small-claims court.
posted by o2b at 3:47 PM PST - 12 comments

The great duct tape conspiracy? It seems that 46% of all duct tape is produced by the Manco Company of Avon, Ohio. The company, a division on Henkel inc, was run by Jack Kahl until just after Bush's 2000 election. It turns out Mr. Kahl donated no less than $100,000 to GOP committees in the 2000 election cycle. Has Tom Ridge become the official spokesperson of all things duct tape purely out of his concerns for our security here in the Homeland? Got duct tape? via boingboing
posted by elwoodwiles at 2:23 PM PST - 30 comments

New Wallace and Gromit movie ~ "Cracking Contraptions" from Atom Films and Shockwave... but $9.95 to download it? Oh, I don't think so! I guess I don't expect them to give it away for free, but who thought up this hair-brained scheme? I bet that dodgey lodger, the Penguin, is behind it somehow.
posted by crunchland at 2:03 PM PST - 12 comments

Although the haiku as meme has fallen on hard times here at MeFi, there are still some practioners lurking about in the wilderness, no doubt. If you still feel the urge to get freaky with the 5-7-5, and you think you've got what it takes, you might want to try your hand at competitive haiku over at The Guardian, where quality haikuing will score you 20 lbs worth of Penguin Books. Damn, that's a lot of paperbacks!
posted by jonson at 12:56 PM PST - 30 comments

Strange is this little animal, because of its exceptional and strange morphology and because it closely resembles a bear en miniature. -- So says one of the first men to behold "water bears" or tardigrades as they are better known. Resembling a large gummy bear, or a bear walking on its claws, but measuring in at no larger than a few 100 microns, the tardigrade occupies its own phylum in the animal kingdom. Cuteness aside, they are also known for their extraordinary abilities to survive extreme conditions: Tardigrades can survive the process of freezing or thawing, as well as changes in salinity, extreme vacuum pressure conditions, and a lack of oxygen.
posted by vacapinta at 12:40 PM PST - 17 comments

Korean pop group has "Seoul". Covered in greasepaint and sticking their lips out in exaggerated fashion, Korean girl group, the Bubble Sisters, sing and dance to teenybopper pop in blackface. In homogenous countries, racism seems to play out differently than in diverse countries such as the United States. In Asia, putting on blackface may be seen as a way to pay homage to artists of African ethnicity, but in the U.S. it makes most people cringe and recoil in horror much like hearing someone say the "N" word. The Bubble Sisters profess a love for black music and seek to emulate it, but in their “Bubble Song” video, the group wears blackface while lamenting they are ugly and praying to be pretty for their true loves. Is this an earnest homage to African-American musicians, blatantly offensive Sambo-esque imagery or a cultural misinterpretation of flattery?
posted by VelvetHellvis at 12:00 PM PST - 53 comments

The Nigerian Scam Email also known as the 419 scam, claims a death. People get scammed all the time, hopefully with less dire consequences. The FTC has a list of the 12 most common scams. Has anybody here been scammed lately (it happens to the best of us and most likely all of us, at one time or another)?
posted by ashbury at 11:51 AM PST - 17 comments

Modeling the Roman Army. The author of this site uses CAD software to examine the mechanics and problems of manuevering large masses of men in ancient warfare. Good stuff for people interested in the subject.
posted by moonbiter at 10:48 AM PST - 9 comments

"With VinylVideo™, you can now transform your old record player and your TV set into a brand-new home movie medium - quickly, conveniently, and without complicated instruction manuals. With the revolutionary VinylVideo™ Picture Disks, for which numerous top-name artists have already produced exclusive works, you can now design your own TV viewing program featuring picture quality that is truly extraordinary." Hey hey that sounds useful! Maybe their next big idea is replacing DVDs with Viewmaster reels. Check out the real audio informercial if you have the chacne.
posted by Stan Chin at 9:17 AM PST - 8 comments

What's with that tacky ass name? A coffee shop which opened in a rather prominent area of the city in which I reside has started a little controversy here. Turns out the shop's name has created a fair amount of controversy elsewhere. How long until the f-word shows up in prominent signage across America? Meantime, what's the wildest or tackiest name for a business you've ever heard? Any ideas for potential businesses with "cuss" word-oriented names? Is there a possible trend in there somewhere?
posted by raysmj at 8:03 AM PST - 89 comments

The Human Nature Daily Review, SciTech Daily Review, Arts & Letters Daily, Business Daily Review. The busier I get the more I value these sites that separate news signal from noise and present the results in a simple and almost standardized fashion. Are there other great newsfilters out there?
posted by srboisvert at 8:00 AM PST - 11 comments

She never asked for anything. Everything I ever did was voluntary. Mother tricks community (and her daughter) into believing that her daughter has leukaemia. I suppose scams like this are so successful because you just don't make stuff like this up, right? The article doesn't mention it but is this what they call Munchausen's by Proxy?
posted by jontyjago at 7:39 AM PST - 17 comments

Bush Cited Non-Existent eport There was only one problem with President George W. Bush's claim Thursday that the nation's top economists forecast substantial economic growth if Congress passed the president's tax cut: The forecast with that conclusion doesn't exist.
posted by orange swan at 7:19 AM PST - 82 comments

"If the Americans think this is success, then outright failure must be pretty horrible to behold." something for US, British and world citizens to think about as we bang the drums for war on Iraq.
posted by specialk420 at 7:17 AM PST - 30 comments

The innocence of the accused should not necessarily prevent an execution (NYT link) "The word 'innocent' has been tortured beyond recognition", say U.S. prosecutors. Question is, by who?
posted by magullo at 3:30 AM PST - 57 comments

Mark Dornblaster's photographs are deliciously cool and stunningly beautiful. Check them out. Enjoy. I did.
posted by essexjan at 3:00 AM PST - 7 comments

Are you happy with what the World Wide Web has turned out so far? Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web answers that question and others like it.
posted by riffola at 12:03 AM PST - 13 comments

Did you hear the one about the Harvard girls and the large snow phallus? Oh, and here's the response featuring the memorable line: "it means that we, as women, must be subject to erect penises whether we like it or not."
posted by adrober at 9:43 PM PST - 111 comments

Synthetic Trees could purify the air - "It looks like a goal post with Venetian blinds," said the Columbia University physicist...synthetic trees could help clean up an atmosphere grown heavy with carbon dioxide..."You can be a thousand times better than a living tree...There are a number of engineering issues which need to be worked out," he said. (BBC) Hurry up, then - "Ice dams are blocking Latvian ports, winds and storms are battering Europe, Portugal is freezing, Vietnam has lost one-third its rice crop, and the cold has caused close to 2,000 deaths in usually temperate South Asia."
posted by troutfishing at 9:00 PM PST - 18 comments

There's One In Every Family: You know that uncle whose name can't be mentioned at table, without loud swallowing, dark looks and deathly silence ensuing? The shady New Orleans grandmother whose photographs have been hastily removed from the family album, though the red stain from one of her garters remains? Call them black sheep or family skeletons, the Internet keeps making it easier and easier to dig them up and out. Outing your forebears and close family members has become an up and coming thing. In other words: I'll show you my black sheep if you show me yours.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 8:15 PM PST - 31 comments

If you worship SpongeBob Squarepants as much as I do, then you know that superb voice talent is one of the things that makes this particular cartoon so wonderfully entertaining. But what you might not realize is just how much top-drawer showbiz talent the show's executive producer, Stephen Hillenburg, has assembled to bring his cast of wacky undersea characters to life: film actors like Clancy Brown (Mr. Krabs), Ernest Borgnine (Mermaid Man), and John Rhys-Davies (The Evil Man Ray), along with teevee legends Tim Conway (Barnacle Boy) and Charles Nelson Reilly (The Dirty Bubble). Who knows, maybe they'll they cast Gary Oldman in the role of Plankton for the upcoming film?
posted by MrBaliHai at 6:57 PM PST - 13 comments

Just Party like it's 2060 According to some researchers, this will be the year sir Issac Newton predicted the world will come to an end, based on his Biblical interpretations. Like we didn't have enough depressing news already.
posted by betobeto at 6:26 PM PST - 17 comments

LOST LABOR: Images of Vanished American Workers 1900-1980 , a selection of 155 photographs by Raymon Elozua. Many of the images document factories and jobs that no longer exist. Whether it is a photograph of a laborer hauling a three foot block of ice at the York Ice Machinery Corporation, or one of a man carving a half hull model for the New York Shipbuilders Corporation, or others jiggering ceramic plates for the Mayer China Company, hand spraying a wicker baby carriage for the E.A. Whitney Carriage Company, or blocking a rim for the Knox Hat Company, all are examples of lost skill and crafts.
posted by jokeefe at 4:49 PM PST - 15 comments

Buried within the $397 billion spending bill passed last night [Feb. 13] by Congress is a provision that would permit livestock producers to certify and label meat as "organic" even if the animals had been fed partly or entirely on conventional rather than organic grain. [from NYT] [more inside]
posted by MzB at 3:17 PM PST - 26 comments

Anti-Bush T-shirt banned at Michigan school "DEARBORN, Michigan (AP) -- School officials ordered a 16-year-old student to either take off a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "International Terrorist" and a picture of President Bush and or go home, saying they worried it would inflame passions at the school where a majority of students are Arab-American. " That amazes me. Heard the same thing with a canadian teenager wearing this Tshirt of his favorite rock star, Matthew Good. "Freedom of fashion?"...
posted by Sijeka at 2:18 PM PST - 43 comments

Did downsizing and inexperience lead to Columbia's destruction? In the rush to cut costs and 'downsize' NASA in the 1990s the agency outsourced most Space Transportation System (STS, or the Shuttle) functions to a private consortium called United Space Alliance. Now, senior engineers at Boeing (lead member of the USA) are beginning to talk about the lack of experience, 'brain drain', and negative effects of downsizing and privatization. This begs the issue of market imperatives, relative value of privatization and the question of how to better manage projects of this magnitude in a mixed private/public arrangement.
posted by tgrundke at 8:30 AM PST - 3 comments

Make Love Not War - Again? The anti-war movement has all the best slogans. And quite rightly too. Which doesn't mean they're not still rehashed, unimaginative and lame. "Don't attack Iraq"? "Make tea, not war"? Don't make me laugh. What's the best you've come across, if at all? And why are the hawks so lacking in the most basic sense of humor?
posted by Carlos Quevedo at 7:31 AM PST - 126 comments

The Republic of Cascadia. "The former American states of Oregon and Washington and the former Canadian province of British Columbia must join together as a sovereign nation. Only then can we have self-determination and take our rightful place in the Global Community."
posted by Joey Michaels at 4:38 AM PST - 35 comments

"Badges? We Don't Need No Stinking Badges!" Your number one web destination for the timeless "badges" quote, including comic strips, video, and cartoons
posted by owillis at 1:42 AM PST - 18 comments

Organ donation has become a hot topic on Me Fi lately. Unfortunately, this thread has not spawned the best discussion. But the ethics of organ tansplantation can become difficult. Do donors have the right to specify who gets their organs? If they do, what does that imply for living donors; in other words, are you really volunteering to donate that kidney to your brother? And should we have an opt-in or opt-out system? Most religions approve of organ donation; even Jehovah's Witnesses that do not accept blood transfusions. And of course, the US government is involved, for better or worse. Not everyone thinks organ donation is good. More links here and here.
posted by TedW at 12:39 AM PST - 42 comments

Are Jazz And Gay Culture Antithetical? When an American friend of mine told me recently that gay men hate jazz, although that's not my experience in my part of the world, it got me thinking. But the article I found, by Francis Davis, only added to the mystery. Is the audience for Jazz overwhelmingly and creepily white, bourgeois, straight, macho and middle-aged (which, embarrassingly, just about describes this Jazz fan...)? If it is, why the hell is it? Why are there so few outed gay Afro-American musicians, for instance? Is there still a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" mentality? Or, more interestingly, does it have something to do with Jazz itself? Or even being gay? And what about the other musical stereotypes (Garland, Streisand et al.) used in caricatures of gay men? Is there anything in them? [NYT reg. required for main link; atrocious text garbling in the second.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 7:43 PM PST - 31 comments

Unmitigated gall. The illegal aliens who got two hearts and two lungs for their daughter REFUSED to have any of her organs donated when it was clear she was brain-dead...
posted by MattD at 5:35 PM PST - 238 comments

Evan Williams could not be reached for comment. "Evan Williams, Pyra's co-founder, blogged his day-to-day life for the last three years right up until it got interesting. Williams pulled his blog offline earlier this week." Leander Kahney at Wired asks Why Did Google Want Blogger? and thinks it might have something to do with that slippery idea of a semantic Web.
posted by tranquileye at 1:52 PM PST - 21 comments

A reporter's quest to get to the bottom of the Nigerian email money scam. An amusing read.
posted by psmealey at 1:07 PM PST - 9 comments

Three giant cargo ships are being tracked by US and British intelligence on suspicion that they might be carrying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The ships have been sailing around the world's oceans for the past three months while maintaining radio silence in clear violation of international maritime law.
posted by stbalbach at 12:06 PM PST - 59 comments

Pianist Looks for Justice After Losing Finger I'm sure there is a Cable TV movie in this somewhere. Expect dodgy accents and Prague passing itself off as Russia as usual. And Brian Dennehy as the head of customs.
posted by feelinglistless at 12:03 PM PST - 6 comments

"Killing Goliath: Life During Wartime": New agit-prop weblog. Founder Tom Dolan writes: I'm hoping killing Goliath can be a voice of sane lunacy in the midst of insane rationalism... I hope to provoke some thought, among ourselves, and among the modest (or just perhaps not so modest) circle of visitors we may reach. The web can be an amazing beast.

Plus, Jennifer from Sharpeworld is an editor. Roar!!
posted by sparky at 10:46 AM PST - 9 comments

"I imagine this is the last we will hear of this." Or not. NASA releases email between NASA engineers leading up to the Columbia disaster documenting significant concerns regarding damage done to the shuttle on takeoff. Engineers calculated the likelihood of a 7" x 30" gouge in the heat shields, but when they let management know of their concerns, they weren't taken seriously, were forced to work "at night" to do simulations, and found that requests for additional information were "treated like the plague."
posted by insomnia_lj at 8:22 AM PST - 33 comments

Saturday diversion. Oren BenTov is a young Israeli animator whose touching story of Bernie the windowcleaner has brightened my weekend. Not for dial-up users, I'm afraid, these are meaty downloads, unless you have lots of patience.
posted by essexjan at 8:17 AM PST - 2 comments

Look out disc spinners. Why are they paying those DJs so much? How about a Mefi theme song? Maybe too late for Friday but still some flash fun.
posted by johnny7 at 6:57 AM PST - 8 comments

Hounen Matsuri is Japanese and means Festival for a prosperous year.
There are many festivals in Japan. But this one is quite different. Not many Japanese know about this Matsuri, and they are very surprized [QuickTime video] when they hear about it for the first time. Well, what is it?
posted by hama7 at 5:56 AM PST - 11 comments

The Indie Rock of Dawson's Creek If you're in a rock band and desperatly wanna get famous, then you might consider selling your songs to the devil. Err, i meant to teenagers TV shows.
posted by Sijeka at 5:50 AM PST - 6 comments

Subway franchise "CBS) Plans for a Baghdad subway were used instead to build underground tunnels to hide Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, says one of the Iraqi dictator’s former top scientists. Dr. Hussein Shahristani, once Iraq’s top nuclear scientist, speaks to Steve Kroft for a 60 Minutes report to be broadcast " This Suday [note: title mine}
posted by Postroad at 5:31 AM PST - 12 comments

An anthology of early comics from the 9^th century till the early 20^th. Includes early examples of speechballons in sequential images, ranging from the 13^th century to the 19^th. Andy Konkykru's "Dachshund Homepage" is filled with such gems.
posted by riffola at 12:39 AM PST - 13 comments

HULK SMASH!!! Now check out Hulk's wish list!! In advance of his upcoming summer movie, the Incredible Hulk has taken the time out of his busy smashing/crushing schedule to jump on the blog bandwagon. Note for the sarcasm impaired: Blog not actually written by The Incredible Hulk, who is, in fact, fictional.
posted by jonson at 12:07 AM PST - 10 comments

The Museum of Jurassic Technology contains strange exhibits that test one's sense of authenticity. It has been the subject of a radio documentary and a book.
posted by juv3nal at 11:59 PM PST - 12 comments

USS Rainbow Trek - combining everyone's two favorite memes, homosexuality and Star Trek: Hi Folks, I'm Captain Leather Menace. I'd like to tell you a little about the USS Rainbow Trek. In reality we are a group of *Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Straight folks with open minds, Transgendered people, Intersexed people, and people who are Questioning their sexual preference or identity. We are also Star Trek fans who believe that Gene Roddenberry's dream of Inifinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations included "US" too. (safe for work)
posted by RylandDotNet at 9:52 PM PST - 28 comments

Into the Garden of Good and Evil - Muhammad Iqbal's "THE DEVELOPMENT OF METAPHYSICS IN PERSIA" (first published in 1908 and free online courtesy the Bahai's): "The most remarkable feature of the character of the Persian people is their love of Metaphysical speculation." Strong, bipolar Good vs. Evil distinctions, and the notion of a cosmic struggle between the two, seem to have originated in ancient Persia as Persian Dualism. See Manicheanism here, here (warning-spurious windows), and here. Special bonus - Freepers fulminate over a German theologian's exegesis of Manichean american political rhetoric!
posted by troutfishing at 8:37 PM PST - 14 comments

Heart surgery in our family has triggered something of a crisis of fitness with everyone vowing to loose weight. Ironically its the runner in the family that has suggested the most sensible solution: buy a pedometer and increase the number of steps per day you walk to 10,000. (Although some say to just increase.) The idea supposedly started in Japan. The idea is to add a bit of activity here and there (the first site recommends going to a restroom on a different floor) rather than trying to lump the 30 minutes per day all ot once. So far with a desk-potato lifestyle 3,000 is easy but adding the extra few miles every day will require some extra work. Less social than a Volksmarch but compatable with a mall walk. And definitely less hazardous than freestyle walking.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:32 PM PST - 24 comments

When U.S. Foreign Policy Meets Biblical Prophecy "Does the Bible foretell regime change in Iraq? Did God establish Israel's boundaries millennia ago? Is the United Nations a forerunner of a satanic world order? For millions of Americans, the answer to all those questions is a resounding yes" "Leaders have always invoked God's blessing on their wars, and, in this respect, the Bush administration is simply carrying on a familiar tradition."
posted by thedailygrowl at 7:27 PM PST - 10 comments

In 1969, Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" will be published on DVD. December 31, 1969 to be exact. If you don't believe me, check here too. apparently, 1969 was a good year, because it was also back then that Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" was released. Oh, and if you want to read a copy of "Montenegro: The Bradt Travel Guide," by Annalisa Rellie, you'll just have to wait. It won't be available until December 31, 1969. Other titles to be released on December 31, 1969 include "Giant," these movies and these books. Now all I need is a time machine!
posted by grumblebee at 5:54 PM PST - 14 comments

How to Speak and Write Postmodern. Here is an etymology of the word postmodern--it begins with Walter Toynbee. Who'd athunk? All of this comes from Contemporary Philosophy, Critical Theory and Postmodern Thought . The names lead not to essays but thorough links pages, like Ludwig Wittgenstein or Edmund Husserl. All the usual suspects are here--your Adorno, Baudrillard and the infamous Frankfurt School. *spooky ghost voice* Whoo-oo-oo! */spooky ghost voice* Well, there is Edward Said, but that one confuses me--I mean I read Edmund Husserl, and he, sir, is no Edmund Husserl. He actually makes sense. Which is more than I can say for Edmund Husserl. And it's all one huge page so you can scroll on down. Even I can do that. Hope I didn't brain my damage! To trump the smarty-pants who's going to link the Postmodernism Generator, I'm upping the ante--here's your Postmodern Mr. T.
                                                             Hey man, This time we're gonna do it my way!
posted by y2karl at 4:48 PM PST - 38 comments

This is a friend of a friend. Jon and Heidi Connal traveled around the world from June 2001 to Oct 2002. They included all of their experiences in a journal on their website. Jon Andrew Connal ran a marathon almost every month. Then he got sick and started throwing up blood for no apparent reason. The doctor thought it might be some sort of pneumonia. He was a very healthy man but for no apparent reason he suddenly died 3 days later. It's a sad story about wonderful people.
posted by suprfli at 4:28 PM PST - 3 comments

Those crazy scientists have discovered a gene that determines how sensitive somebody is to pain. The gene comes in two forms, and you get one from each parent, so a quarter of the people end up tough, half end up in the middle, and the other quarter comprise of wusses. Interesting stuff.
posted by zeoslap at 2:23 PM PST - 14 comments

Friday Flash Fun!!! A little present from me to all of you who can't stand work anymore. I for one have never felt so alive. You may be confused by this simulation, so here's an informative Instruction Diagram to get you up to speed. While you're being driven to pure ecstacy, be sure to check out the remarkable History and Gallery of this God-Given Device, at the remarkable Early Office Museum.
posted by Stan Chin at 1:34 PM PST - 10 comments

Personal Computing Environments - Herman Miller, eat your heart out. Personal Computing Environments has what has to be the strangest piece of office furniture ever made. There's no denying the interesting and unique design, but with prices ranging from $4,000 to $9,000 and up and the economy in somewhat dire straits, is there a market for this? I mean, I could almost buy a couple of these for that kind of dough.
posted by phong3d at 12:41 PM PST - 30 comments

GoogObits I have always had a fascination with the obituaries page and dead pools. I have hosted a small dead pool for friends for the past few years and have collected obituaries of famous and sent them out as email salvos to friends. But this is an inspiration to us all. The joy of google, the fascination with the obit. Enjoy the dead.
posted by majikwah at 10:49 AM PST - 3 comments

"The Story About The Baby" - this consistently funny and entertaining website is well suited to anyone who has ever thought about having kids, has kids or anyone else. An endearing yet fantastically cynical take on the first year of raising a child has just wrapped up and in its completion is a great antidote to the overbearing cutesy-wootsy baby web pages that proliferate the internet. With entry titles such as: The Unbearable Grossness of Being, Dawn of the Neglectomatic and The Use Of Skinnerian Conditioning To Mold My Child's Brain, well how could you go wrong?
posted by BrodieShadeTree at 10:46 AM PST - 34 comments

Give It Up For The Axis Of Evil Tour Ahmed Ahmed travels a lot. Just the other day, says the heavily bearded Egyptian, he was at the airport. An older couple waiting for a flight came over and asked him where he was headed. "I told them, 'I have a one-way ticket to Paradise,' " he says. Pause for laughter. Yup, he says, airports are tough for him right now. They are for everyone, he adds. Nobody likes having to get there an extra hour early or being delayed by all the extra security. But just to make sure, he says, "I get there a month and a half early."
posted by turbanhead at 10:28 AM PST - 18 comments

The tiny island nation of Nauru (pop 12,329) once had one of the highest per-capita incomes in the world. Recently, though, the "poor little rich kid of the Pacific" has dissolved into political chaos. In an address three weeks ago, just before the country's telecommunications network collapsed, President Bernard Dowiyogo said, “You are all aware and conscious of our critical situation.” Since then – silence. (via boingboing)
posted by gottabefunky at 9:56 AM PST - 28 comments

Los Diablos Guapos! the world's finest no-holds-barred, full-contact, anything-goes bowling team. check the archives for proof!
posted by Peter H at 9:42 AM PST - 6 comments

Next week's 'Ed' is devoted to lucid dreaming - "ED CONTROLS HIS OWN DREAM," blares the show synopsis. While TV and dreaming usually lead to simple silliness, this episode could be a watershed moment in pop-culture awareness of lucid dreaming, which has a fascinating history and continues to be controversial. [much more inside]
posted by soyjoy at 9:42 AM PST - 42 comments

University City, Missouri stands up against homeland security and gets reprimanded by a U.S. Attorney. A resolution passed by the city council to protect citizens' rights from being violated by city employees, including police, "puts all citizens at risk" and could result in "catastrophic loss of life," according to U.S. Attorney Ray Gruender.
posted by zsazsa at 9:38 AM PST - 4 comments

Once Upon A Time In Malaysia I’ve seen lion dances performed before but never anything like this. (windows media)
posted by snez at 9:25 AM PST - 8 comments

Toke off Hoser! If it was just a bunch of hippie pinkos, no one would care. But when 69% of the Canadian public at large would prefer relaxed marijuana laws, maybe something might actually happen. And it's not like the government has studied this and suggested the same thing...oh wait, they did.
posted by CrazyJub at 9:03 AM PST - 17 comments

Prepare yourself for terrorist season. The "Department of scaring the hell out of folks" thinks "every American should prepare themselves for a terrorist attack" the way Floridians prepare for hurricane season; as something inevitable and imminent. Oh yeah, and in the event of a nuclear blast, close the door.
posted by answergrape at 8:56 AM PST - 18 comments

Hollywood isn't out of ideas, they're just tucked away. Enjoy. Quicktime required. [via The Presurfer]
posted by pedantic at 8:47 AM PST - 11 comments

When the CIA Comes and Asks What You've Read In reaction to the Patriot Act, a Montpelier, VT bookstore has purged all customer purchase records so that it would be impossible to comply with the government's demands to see such records. Co-owner Michael Katzenberg told the Associated Press, "When the CIA comes and asks what you've read because they're suspicious of you, we can't tell them because we don't have it. We may have lost our marketing potential by doing this, but at the moment that's the price we have to pay to safeguard people's privacy." Much more information on the "resistance movement," including how to start your own grass-roots campaign, from the Bill of Rights Defense Committee FightBack. Also, what's going on with the people who lend 'em, not sell 'em, the American Library Association: ALAPatriots.
posted by NorthernLite at 8:07 AM PST - 26 comments

Staten Island oil and gas facility on fire...
The BBC reports that a massive explosion has struck an oil and gas facility on Staten Island, on the outskirts of New York City.
posted by tomcosgrave at 7:54 AM PST - 31 comments

Friday Flash! Actually, it's a movie, but it sure is hilarious... Bush + Blair = LUV
posted by sparky at 7:42 AM PST - 8 comments

So just how many protesters WERE there at the anti-war demonstration? Throughout history organizers give a higher turnout estimate and police give a lower one. The San Francisco Chronicle hired an independent third party to take aerial photos and estimate the number of demonstrators last Sunday, and the results show a crowd count much lower than what either the organizers OR the police had estimated. In Washington, DC, as USA Today notes, the Park Service "counted crowds for decades until 1995, when Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan threatened to sue after Park Police estimated attendance at the Million Man March at 400,000." Is having an accurate count a good thing? Will anyone care?
posted by twsf at 7:25 AM PST - 48 comments

The War Behind Closed Doors PBS' newest "Frontline" focuses on what has been happening behind the scenes within the Bush administration during the buildup to war against Iraq. Wolfowitz is seen as supporting a policy of US preemptive wars starting in 1992 and urging a US invasion of Iraq just four days after 9/11, Richard Perle says that "it was understood that Iraq had to be dealt with" in the earliest days of the Bush presidential campaign, and Colin Powell is shown as the only reason the US sought UN approval at all.
posted by insomnia_lj at 6:51 AM PST - 17 comments

A toaster with a PC in it
Via b3ta
posted by Mwongozi at 6:03 AM PST - 17 comments

Wheaton College (IL) Lifts Dance Ban. The small evangelical Christian liberal arts college in the suburbs of Chicago, lifted its 143-year-old ban that prohibited students from participating in "most forms of social dancing." In its place, the college has established a community covenant that permits dancing by students, but still prohibits the use of tobacco, the consumption of alcohol, and pre-marital sex by students. It does allow faculty and staff to drink and smoke (which had previously been prohibited) but never in front of students. Wheaton grads include Rev. Billy Graham, Wes Craven, Rep. Dennis Hastert, Todd Beamer, and Bush speechwriter Mike Gerson.
posted by marcusb at 5:16 AM PST - 23 comments

Same Difference, Derek Kirk Kim's great online comic has come to it's conclusion. For Kim it's been "2 years. 79 pages. 9 pens. 2 countries. 3 computers. 4 residences. 6 conventions. 725 lonely nights." But for us it's been nothing less than the slow episodic revelation of an amazing talent. I love his elegant line and the depth of his characters. It's funny as hell, but touching enough to make you cry.
posted by gametone at 2:49 AM PST - 24 comments

Following yesterdays papers planes, how about playing the classic Gridlock, some 3D Pong, Reflections or a horribly addictive game based on Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars. Much work will late today I feel...
posted by twine42 at 2:47 AM PST - 12 comments

Take this life and shove it: So goodbye then, Johnny PayCheck. Even the very British and conservative Daily Telegraph honoured you today with an affectionate obituary [Reg. required: full text inside.] I wonder how many unrepentant rebel-singin', cocaine-sniffin', bar-brawlin', hard-drinkin', good-lovin', corn-munchin' musicians there are left. And whether any of the young 'uns today will be able to keep up, livin' the life, as long as you did. Even though you too eventually succumbed to preaching against drink and drugs. I suspect most of the new generation will become health freaks by the time they hit forty and that you, Sir, were one of a dying breed.
posted by Carlos Quevedo at 1:44 AM PST - 1 comment

Nightclub fire injures scores at the Station nightclub in West Warwick, RI at a Great White concert on Thursday night. WHJY-FM reports that 150 people have been taken to area hospitals and 10-20 bodies have been recovered from the scene so far; blood is needed in the Providence area and a press conference is imminent. A Kent County official reports 40-50 unconfirmed casualties, and an unnamed West Warwick fire official has been quoted as saying that bodies "are stacked in there like cordwood [Providence Journal; requires registration]."
posted by dayan at 11:37 PM PST - 78 comments

Konfabulator For Mac users (OSX), desktop widgets of a cute and useful nature. Create your own if you're so inclined; they'll add it to the gallery. Keep track of weather, the latest Homeland Security Department alert level, sports scores, your iTunes status--all in a tiny little application.
posted by padraigin at 10:12 PM PST - 16 comments

Miss Germany wants to disarm Saddam - uhm - the old fashioned way. Would you give it up for peace? Would you lay down (for) the ... ultimate sacrifice? Miss Germany seems to say "Ja!" ... from India via Pakistan (if that isn't a sign that peace is possible, I don't know what is ...)
posted by Jos Bleau at 9:20 PM PST - 23 comments

Caring for Your Introvert An amusingly succinct essay about the "habits and needs of a little-understood group"
posted by stefanie at 6:39 PM PST - 69 comments

anyone been to safer america to stock up on tin foil hats or mustard gas spit shields? is it strange to capitalize on paranoia like this, or to open flag shops after sept. 11th? joking aside, any reports from the store from new yawkers?
posted by asparagus_berlin at 6:18 PM PST - 13 comments

Giving lip. Put your words in the mouths of talking heads. Or dogs, with Scottish accents. Brought to you by the good folks at Bud. Weis. Er. Excellent pronunciation!
posted by steef at 5:01 PM PST - 24 comments

Shooting Holes in Wounding Theories. A long, technical, in-depth essay on how bullets injure and kill living creatures. The political part of the essay seems to be clearly labled, and is largely confined to a discussion on the infighting that goes on in the field of firearms ballistics. It is not a light read, but might be of interest to the morbidly curious.
posted by moonbiter at 3:27 PM PST - 6 comments

Open Source Content Management Systems Great resource for software (typically free) that allows you to start and maintain websites. The owners have gone so far as to install each one of them and give users admin access to try them out before downloading them.
posted by oissubke at 2:51 PM PST - 27 comments

Lost Disney Memo Found. McSweeney's posts a posthumously uncovered memo from the Disney board to Walt regarding his initial plans for a radically different "Disney-Land."
posted by jonson at 1:40 PM PST - 19 comments

The bird flu is back. Despite denials by the Hong Kong government, the World Health Organization announced yesterday that two people were killed by the same virulent species-jumpingstrain of influenza that caused the 1997 panic. It's certainly less gruesome than the ebola outbreak going on in Congo right now, but, unlike ebola, the flu is highly contagious. [more inside]
posted by ptermit at 1:05 PM PST - 14 comments

For all those who spent hours in the darkness of Introduction to Western Art I staring at slides out of context perhaps you should take a look at African art. In the West, to a large degree, art hangs on walls or resides only in museums, but most "traditional" African art needs to be understood in context. Among my favorites are the linguist staffs of the Ashanti people of the Akan. These staffs are used to tell parables, but they also create a nexus between culture, politics and beauty.
posted by Bag Man at 12:56 PM PST - 8 comments

Reality Bites? A reality show featuring Mike Tyson could be announced in the coming weeks, according to a Hollywood TV show producer who says he's been having substantive negotiations with a major television network. Schreiberg wouldn't give specifics about the format to the show, only to say it would be "Rocky-esque, with good dramatic story telling of characters over many weeks that eventually builds to a live event." Doubt it will happen since none of the networks seem to admitting interest... but if it does, could this be the lowest low for reality TV?
posted by orange swan at 12:37 PM PST - 15 comments

Self Portrait with My Grandmother. A rather beautiful way of meeting the ancestors at Modern Ruins
posted by gravelshoes at 12:26 PM PST - 9 comments

If Saddam Hussein were to use chemical/biological weapons in an Iraq conflict, how safe would soldiers in the field be? The Department of the Defense says "no problem", but some of the men on the ground seem to believe otherwise. The gear the soldiers will use to protect themselves and their water supply appears to be old, prone to failure while the training received in the usage of these tools looks inadequate. It could be the return of "Gulf War Syndrome" (PDF).
posted by owillis at 11:19 AM PST - 19 comments

The Skyline Terrorist Survival Kit. Tom Ridge's suggested kit may not be enough. How can you be prepared for a terrorist attack without a martini glass, a can of Ranch Style Beans and a copy of Red Dawn?
posted by sixfoot6 at 11:11 AM PST - 14 comments

Mini Nukes - Major Treaty Threats. "A leaked Pentagon document has confirmed that the US is considering the introduction of a new breed of smaller nuclear weapons designed for use in conventional warfare. Such a move would mean abandoning global arms treaties." The document was made available by The Los Alamos Study Group, which comments "It is impossible to overstate the challenge these plans pose to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the existing nuclear test moratorium, and US compliance with Article VI of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which is binding law in the US....These plans deserve outrage – first in the United States, and throughout the world. It may or may not be obvious that if allowed to proceed further -- especially in the present jingoistic atmosphere now prevailing in Washington -- the process outlined here will be quite hard to stop. "
posted by fold_and_mutilate at 10:32 AM PST - 26 comments

David Pogue in today's NYTDirect/CIRCUITS: "Wouldn't it be great if you could look up a person and read the real scoop about what he or she is really like? Think how many weeks of dating you'd be able to avoid if you had capsule summaries available: "Comes across great on a first date, but beware — runs out of stories by Day 2." Or, "A bit unkempt, but you'll never meet a more loving, loyal mate." Or, "Sharp dresser, warped mind." "Of course, a Web site where you could review friends and coworkers probably wouldn't work. I'm kind of kidding about this whole thing." (Rate-A-Mate.biz still available.)
posted by azul at 10:20 AM PST - 11 comments

"Humility cannot be a majority decision." In these times of tension and trouble, the randomly generated wisdom of Zentances comes as a whiff of precious fresh air. Lest you forget, "Beauty can make everything beautiful".
posted by BrodieShadeTree at 10:16 AM PST - 9 comments

If it happened here. A lengthy, reality-based scenario of a bioterrorism attack on Los Angeles (and its aftermath). Like a horror movie.
posted by xowie at 9:00 AM PST - 39 comments

Jihad in textbooks: yesterday and today.
posted by troybob at 8:13 AM PST - 4 comments

At some point in 2001 one of my favorite bands got it's own website and I didn't notice until just now. I mention this not because it's particularly mefi worthy just because I like it, but because I have four of their albums and they never fail to cheer me up when nothing else will. It's the steel drums I'm sure. Alas, doesn't look they will be playing near me anytime soon, but there are still many other steel drum bands out there and if this one isn't coming your way either you can probably find one that is.
posted by wobh at 7:58 AM PST - 6 comments

"I'm your only friend, I'm not your only friend, but I'm a little glowing friend, but really I'm not actually your friend but I am." or "Everything I needed to know I learned by listening to [insert band name here]."
posted by poopy at 7:39 AM PST - 112 comments

Takes the phrase "Get a Life" to a new level. Those masterminds of marketing, those night rocking, day partying satanic minions, KISS, have achieved the ultimate score in product merchandising. That's right, it's your very own KISS coffin, and while you might think "What's the point?", keep in mind that before you shuffle off this mortal coil, it doubles as a beer cooler.
posted by jeremias at 6:37 AM PST - 36 comments

Did you know what's behind that "new car smell"?
These apparently.
"What's that Stuff" explores the chemistry of everyday stuff.
posted by talos at 6:19 AM PST - 12 comments

Shift given shaft - After over 10 years, it looks like Shift Magazine (founded by Evan Solomon and Andrew Heintzman and published by Multi-Vision Publishing Inc.) is going away...again. The last issue will hit newsstands the first week of March.
posted by boost ventilator at 6:15 AM PST - 13 comments

Bunraku is Japan's professional puppet theater. Developed primarily in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is one of the four forms of Japanese classical theater, the others being kabuki, noh and kyogen.[more]
posted by hama7 at 5:31 AM PST - 17 comments

"In the midst of this conference, Senator Dole called Mack on his cell phone." The Jesica Santillan piece that didn't make CNN. Hehe...I thought that hospital was a bit too eager to accept responsibility for its actions...cheers to Mrs. Dole for stepping in; lets hope Jesica pulls through!
posted by effugas at 4:56 AM PST - 18 comments

EXTRY! EXTRY! Read All About It! New York Times commits Freudian-Slippish Typo in title of AltaVista story! (link ironically via Google News)
But seriously, with CMGI selling AV for about 6% of what it paid to buy it, and Overture's stock price dropping 20% the day the deal was announced, does this mean AltaVista is D.O.A.? If so, where will we go for a dopey translation/Douglas Adams tribute?
In other Search Engine News, those Norwegians at FAST (aka alltheweb.com) are gettin' a Dell, dude. And the guy who started all this by selling out to Google is real quiet.
posted by wendell at 3:15 AM PST - 10 comments

Museum of Soviet synthesizers.
posted by soundofsuburbia at 1:21 AM PST - 16 comments

Lets go fly a kite, up to the... Oh... it's paper planes, but it's still addictive in a stupid kind of a way... And it's a day early. Sue me.
posted by twine42 at 1:04 AM PST - 15 comments

Do us all a favor and shut up. You're for the war? Wrote an essay about it? Good, good. Good for you. Guess what? Shut up about it. Thanks. Oh, you're against the war? Fantastic. Wrote a poem about it? Find the nearest closet and tell it to the coats. Yea, that's right. Shut it.
posted by raaka at 6:45 PM PST - 87 comments

Jack Valenti (head of the Motion Picture Association of America) has been quoted numerous times recently, saying "A 12-year-old, with a click of a mouse, can send a movie hurtling to all of the five continents". A graduate researcher at MIT set to test out the accuracy of the soundbite, with interesting results.
posted by mathowie at 4:08 PM PST - 41 comments

Listen to what some anti-war protesters had to say this weekend about possible war with Iraq. Quicktime required.
posted by Ron at 4:06 PM PST - 40 comments

Freedom Fries? Patriotism gone to far? I can understand some people's disappointment that the french don't support the war in Iraq. But boycotting french wine, and other french imports? Maybe? But to start renaming things because they have the word french in them? That's what one restaurant owner is doing in North Carolina!
posted by tljenson at 2:44 PM PST - 82 comments

Standing With Osama? "Some of the more bilious right-wing pundits... have taken to describing those who oppose the invasion as 'siding with Saddam.' But if such sleazy rhetoric is allowable, then maybe we should say that those like our President, who seem to have ignored Osama’s decrees, or like Powell, who are hawking a Saddam/Al Qaeda connection based on overblown evidence, are standing with Osama." Is this accusation fair? If so, is it productive? I doubt it, but I'm not certain. Rohan Gunaratna, the author of "Inside Al Qaeda," warns that an invasion of Iraq would undermine the international campaign against Al Qaeda and give terrorist groups a new lease on life. Oh well, at least it's funny. [Via Cursor.] [More inside.]
posted by homunculus at 1:48 PM PST - 21 comments

The author of the worst novel ever published in the English language gamely submits to an interview by the Washington Post.
posted by alms at 1:01 PM PST - 47 comments

SBC Customer Service staffed by bots? The bots themselves don't bother me too much, I think its pretty cool if SBC Yahoo has bots advanced enough that they can use them for online customer service and the bots turn out to be actually helpful (I don't know, since I never have problems with my DSL and have never used them). What is disturbing, though, is the apparent deceit involved by having that the bots insist on being human. Anyone know anything more?
posted by akmonday at 12:48 PM PST - 17 comments

These guys are running across the United States from New Jersey to Oregon and they're looking for a place to stay. Check to see if they're coming to your town or read their blog. It's not as hard as walking around the world or running for 1000 miles in 1000 hours, but it's still ambitious.
posted by Frank Grimes at 12:04 PM PST - 11 comments

Tantric Teddies. There's not a whole lot to it, but it's pretty funny. (nsfw if you can't display plushies pumping. may be sound, but I don't know, I have no soundcard on this comp. via daypop top 40)
posted by Ufez Jones at 12:02 PM PST - 10 comments

Our Almighty Father Indeed Did'nt Write His Bible For Toilet Paper! FOXY RELIGIONIST-POLITICAL discrimination for Inhuman Economic Exploitation forever prevails against our so-called "World's 'Minorities'" so perpetually deprived of Their God-given Most Primordial and Quintessential Human Rights and Property - AND THIS IS INDEED A FIRST-CLASS DOLLAR-CAMOUFLAGED EVIL.
posted by MrMoonPie at 11:59 AM PST - 24 comments

What is Film Sampling? According to Mike Myers and Dreamworks Films, it's a revolutionary way to insert himself into old movies by using the wonders of technology. Have we created so much content in the past 50 years that it needs to be recycled before there is room for anything truly new? Will this work for films the way it's 'worked' in Music? Will the next generation of filmmakers be Puff Daddy clones reworking classic films, and are there films that should never, ever be touched?
posted by cell divide at 11:39 AM PST - 28 comments

"Rad, wicked, bad, barry, and definitely not sad". Amazingly, James Runcie is talking about glasses. He also describes his own endearing misadventures with NHS specs and how he's changed his opinion from glasses as stigmata (used by "the shy, the gangly, the awkward; people whose voices had not yet broken; the pyromaniacs, the mummy missers, and worst of all, the people who actually liked classical music") to the joy of myopia ("we look in a concentrated manner or not at all, for we cannot bear very much reality"). As to Dorothy Parker's famous dictum, the obsessive, often unsafe for work BBS and links on eyescene should offer some evidence to the contrary.
posted by 111 at 11:06 AM PST - 12 comments

"It's a beautiful day..." So i hear U2's singer, the great and charismatic Bono, has just been nominated for nobel peace prize. Of course, we the french, find it very amusing to find Chirac nominated. (Oh, the hysteria if ever he won). Also in the race is ex Gov. George H Ryan, who amongst other achievements declared a moratorium in 2000, before leaving his job a few months ago... with class. Or maybe they'll just choose Bono & Chirac for knowing how to work together on the 'drop the debt' issue? So, what do you say? (i'd have to go with Bono, i'm afraid. Rock n roll but effective and passionate...)
posted by Sijeka at 10:18 AM PST - 38 comments

talking loud, voting on nothing. georgia's new governor is following through on his campaign promise to "let the people speak" regarding the design of our state flag. the flag was last redesigned in 2001 to put to rest a substantial amount of controversy revolving around the inclusion of a confederate battle flag.

this opportunity to voice an opinion will be offered to the populace next spring in the form of a non-binding referendum. and while the results will not result in an official decision either way, the mayor of atlanta has said she will take a strong stance in the matter by "purposely not [voting] either way on the ballot questions."

is doing nothing an effective means of protest? sounds more like a kid on a playground declaring themselves "switzerland" in the middle of a fight.
posted by grabbingsand at 10:02 AM PST - 13 comments

A rather unbiased look at the US-Europe chasm, and the future of European political aspirations, from four different authors (the first is probably the best). Login information inside.
posted by bokononito at 9:51 AM PST - 4 comments

Mamiko picked up a cork that had rolled on the floor at the restaurant where she worked. From it she made her first tiny cork doll. She is often asked where she gets all of her corks. "I don't drink so much, but all of my friends who can drink quite a lot keep many corks for me." The pacifist is my favorite.
posted by iconomy at 9:35 AM PST - 21 comments

Race-Baiting Bake Sale at U of Michigan: student group sells donuts and bagels for $1 to whites, $0.80 to "non-whites," to "raise awareness of the school's affirmative action admission policies." And to piss off a lot of students, apparently. Clever direct political action, or misguided bunch of jackasses?
posted by serafinapekkala at 8:23 AM PST - 105 comments

Matisse|Picasso, head to head. Pablo just couldn't be sure he's number one as long as Henri was alive and working. And he's right to look over his shoulder. I admire Pablo, and even like some of his canvases, but for my money Henri is the greatest painter since the renaissance, with Vincent at no. two and Pablo in third. It's nice to see some other folks starting to give Henri his props. (P.S. here's the introduction to the show. Here's the slide show. Here's a review from slate with another slide show with a somewhat different and larger selection of the images.)
posted by jfuller at 8:20 AM PST - 19 comments

Ever feel a need to molest a statue? Some people seem to enjoy the statues they encounter a little too much. A lot of pictures showing people groping and sucking unsuspecting statues.
posted by sebas at 7:40 AM PST - 18 comments

How to love the US is a story on the newly redesigned BBC pages, just recently mentioned here. I was struck by the tone of the piece, which seemed to me to be a desperate bid to find good things to say about the US.
Have things really sunk so low? Is the US so despised that it needs the BBC to pimp it?
posted by jpburns at 6:50 AM PST - 83 comments

Wonder Woman to turn in her V-Card After 60 long years of chastity, everybody's favorite Amazon (you may remember the Lynda Carter TV show) will reportedly get it on with character Trevor Barnes in a "tasteful and peaceful" manner. Sequential Tart asks what the definition of 'virginity' is, claiming the strong possibility that on an island full of amazons there had to be some lesbian freaky freaky going on somewhere. However, I am far more concerned if she'll suffer from the same dilemma as Superman does in Larry Niven's Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex. Best. Controversy. Ever.
posted by Stan Chin at 6:49 AM PST - 17 comments

Ronald Reagan used many of the same good vs evil themes we are hearing from the current Administration. However, a comparison of his famous Evil Empire Speech with the recent words and actions of the U.S. makes you wonder if we are becoming what we once fought against.
posted by quirked at 6:38 AM PST - 11 comments

Comixpedia is a new site dedicated to discussion of webcomics news. The Comicon.com Pulse is normally a comic book news site, but they're currently running an interview with Keenspot Prez Chris Crosby. Are webcomics finally getting some decent coverage?
posted by clango at 6:27 AM PST - 1 comment

The BBC's News website has undergone a re-design. The primary change is the switch from using a 640x480 based design to a 800x600 design. BBC News Online's Editor-in-Chief explains their reasons for the change here. What do MeFi users think of the re-design? Personally, I find it's a little CNN-esque and I'm not totally convinced.
posted by metaxa at 5:04 AM PST - 38 comments

Site Mirror. Can you hear Satan speaking?
posted by Pretty_Generic at 4:44 AM PST - 21 comments

You may remember the Lords of the Rhymes from a previous post, but now they've taken the next step towards Middle Earth-wide fame and released a video. The hour long download on a 56k is well worth it, so get going!
posted by Orange Goblin at 4:08 AM PST - 8 comments

Your cat? Yeah...perhaps. Maybe. Mine? Certainly not! This Internet thing - it lies, right? The money you spend on litty litter: how many important paperbacks would it buy?
posted by Carlos Quevedo at 11:21 PM PST - 16 comments

Cigarette filters don't want to go away. A sigh of releaf from the smokers except our lovid earth. Not as harmless as the Everlasting Gobstopper, eh.
The word biodegradable doesn't warrant interest from the companies making cigarettes. The gov should be able to protect us...maybe they sponsor the grassroot with all the money made.
posted by lightweight at 10:04 PM PST - 15 comments

Scotty the Blue Bunny - add some color to your next party or family get together with Scotty. "There's something to be said about a seven foot pastel rabbit hurling insults at a party-worn Sunday evening crowd..." via Presurfer
posted by madamjujujive at 9:31 PM PST - 10 comments

Yams, yams, yams. Immortalized by Michelle Shocked's song about the Yamboree Queen. (Which I always thought was a joke, stupid me.) It turns out that most yams are really Sweet Potatoes although yam-sweetpotatoes are also different from regular sweet pototes. The confusion is much more widespread than my own Wabash Valley inflicted confusion between mangos and green bell peppers. Yam sweet-potatoes are a good source of fiber, beta carotene and vitamin C if prepared fresh. True Mexican wild yam was used as a raw material for birth control pills and is still claimed to useful for medicinal purposes.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:45 PM PST - 16 comments

Need more stress? Tired of flying under the Golden Gate Bridge with Flight Simulator? Is the thrill gone with your favorite hack 'em up role playing game? Give up coffee, cigarettes, and heroin for new thrills by simulating "the government's dullest bureaucracy." You too can be an air traffic controller! from Wired
posted by ?! at 5:56 PM PST - 5 comments

Tom Ridge wants you to be ready. Kind of like Airtoons for the Homeland. I particularly like how Texas is the location of the radiation threat.
posted by MattS at 5:47 PM PST - 25 comments

There must be a better word for weird. Okay, so we've discussed this before (here, here, and here) but none of these posts really touch upon the thing I find most brilliant about Homestar Runner: its one of the most amusing, kid-safe, and utterly random humor sites I've ever encountered on the net [more inside and Flash is required for everything].
posted by WolfDaddy at 5:44 PM PST - 44 comments

Protato. India has developed a genetically modified potato that contains 30% more protein than your standard spud. The hope is to use the 'protato' to combat malnutrition. Needless to say, there are those who dissent from the GM spud being touted as a cure-all for world hunger.
posted by CoolHandPuke at 5:11 PM PST - 32 comments

Underlying the US drive to war is a thirst to open up new opportunities for surplus capital "In a series of packed lectures in Oxford, Professor David Harvey, one of the world's most distinguished geographers, has provided what may be the first comprehensive explanation of the US government's determination to go to war. His analysis suggests that it has little to do with Iraq, less to do with weapons of mass destruction and nothing to do with helping the oppressed. "
posted by thedailygrowl at 4:50 PM PST - 34 comments

Ethics, Shmethics! You Stole Someone's Umbrella, You Pompously Rationalizing Fink! Has anyone else taken Randy Cohen's ethics quiz and violently disagreed with his sneaky, say-nothing, keep-quiet approach? Silence (and therefore lying by omission) is a touchy subject, rabinically debated since records began... but still! [So I flunked 5... But they were all ethically unimpeachable, unimpeachable, you hear?! But, yeah, for now I'll sneakily keep quiet and say nothing about those I took exception to, the better to gauge anyone else's outrages...]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 4:42 PM PST - 71 comments

The Gaul of Chirac. With near total support for his positions in France, Chirac, thought-police style, set up as an obligation for the emerging half of the continent the unanimity at home that Liberation, the left-wing newspaper said over the weekend, "has something suffocating about it."
posted by The Jesse Helms at 2:18 PM PST - 48 comments

A Google boondoggle? Does Google deserve your nomination for Big Brother of the Year? Nine points from the previously mentioned folks at Google Watch. (via the Disinformation Newsletter)
posted by boost ventilator at 12:47 PM PST - 26 comments

A refreshing read With all the bad news and fear in the air lately, I found this article to be hopeful. I hope that merits a post.
posted by sparky at 12:28 PM PST - 34 comments

This article concerning the power of suggestion will be even more fascinating than my post yesterday about the brand new Wilco album. Psychologists have presented a paper documenting the previously underestimated capacity of the brain to manufacture memories based on planted suggestions. Interestingly, one of the experiments seems to have been inspired by the infamous democRATS political ad (discussed here) of the 2000 presidential campaign.
posted by 4easypayments at 11:40 AM PST - 31 comments

ATTENTION ALL GROWNUPS. "Your "inner child" has long been waiting for a chance to usurp control of your body and force it to perform certain actions. The time is now at hand. Read and follow the instructions below."
posted by Fat Elvis at 11:13 AM PST - 15 comments

The Great Hedge of India was over 1500 miles long in the mid-1800s, manned by 12,000 guards (for tax purposes), and totally forgotten until an Englishman spent three years tracking its history. A fascinating travel / history / detective story.
posted by LeLiLo at 11:03 AM PST - 16 comments

Personal history for sale! Further evidence that the line between the physical and internet worlds are melting. What aspect of our lives are not for sale?
posted by Birichini at 11:01 AM PST - 20 comments

There are those who play Ping-pong and those who live Ping-Pong. As for me, it was the first game I was ever able to beat my Pops at. But no matter how good you think you are, there is always someone ready to wax your ass. Printer-friendly version just for you y2karl!
posted by vito90 at 10:41 AM PST - 12 comments

Goes down easy... Lots of companies use sex to sell their products, but few as boldly as Flirt vodka. [via digital graphite via NSLog();]
posted by kirkaracha at 10:26 AM PST - 11 comments

French Muslims Influence Government Policy on Iraq This piece from an on-line Arab source helps us to understand the French reluctance to want a war with Iraq. And you thought it was only about French oil interests, but non.
posted by Postroad at 10:22 AM PST - 62 comments

ESPN Motion It's been years in the making, but I can finally say that the Internet has finally met TV, through the medium of sports. ESPN and MSN have introduced ESPN Motion. Along with their site redesign, the once static front page is now a video. Right? You think. Usually this stuff doesn't work, but it doesn't require streaming or waiting (I must concede though that I am on a *very* fast internet connection). Basically you have to register for espn.com and then download a 500 KB file and run the installation. After a few minutes, it works fine. I think the program keeps the video updated in a cache on your hdd but it would require more research.
Note: you are required to have Windows 98 or higher, a fast internet connection, and Windows Media Player.
posted by meanie at 10:12 AM PST - 12 comments

Peter Yarrow's daughter confronts the new police state. Notes from the peace rally in NYC last weekend. Is the next generation ready to stand up for its rights?
posted by anser at 9:15 AM PST - 59 comments

Reverse Speech. Seems like a load of hooey to me, but there are some pretty freaky things being said when you listen to it backwards. (via iconomy's wonderful web site)
posted by ashbury at 9:03 AM PST - 20 comments

vs. Spy is Back in the States: As a follow up to this thread, vs. Spy's semi-reckless trip around the world has ended. He got as far as Bogota. Was anyone else following this? Was this brave, utterly foolhardy, or somewhere in between?
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 8:25 AM PST - 4 comments

Online reputations. Anything to scoff at? Yeah, yeah. I found it at /. But what importance do we place on online reputations? This could mean anything (This could include your own personal web reputation all the way up to a corporation's "web-presence"). Just how important in affecting the world at large is the "Online Reputation" versus the viral spread of "small talk"?
posted by crasspastor at 2:37 AM PST - 25 comments

"Yes, I am looking for the Farm Bureau but I am not able to find it."
A disc jockey in Fresno, CA (where my own radio career ended 25 years ago: self-interest disclosure) who says "I don't vote. I don't care", pulls a stunt on an embattled state legislator with a Hustler sex doll (NSFW unless you work for Hustler) and it becomes a First Amendment Issue TM when officers of the California Highway Patrol order pictures of the stunt deleted from a digital camera.

Here's the radio station's spin on the story, complete with a glowing endorsement (but no direct link) for their photo recovery software.

The Legislator in question has not mentioned any of this on HIS website, but he is sponsoring an essay contest for 9th-12th-graders on the subject: "There Ought to Be a Law". (scroll down)

Blame Obscure Store for getting me started.
posted by wendell at 2:27 AM PST - 8 comments

More senseless killing, boys and girls: an Arson in a South Korean subway. "With 135 people injured, many seriously, and at least 90 people listed as missing, officials say they expect the death toll to rise much higher." This will, no doubt, help in stabilizing the region.
posted by antimarx at 2:19 AM PST - 10 comments

The 2003 Winter Music Conference is now one month away. During the conference you will be able to attend the main conference, the 2003 DanceStar USA awards show, the huge ULTRA 5 Music Festival, and countless other parties during the week. Everyone influential having anything to do with dance music will be there for 5 days of endless pool parties, late night clubbing, networking, and general debauchery. If you need to know what will be going on, you should already be on the Miami Master List, the definitive guide.
posted by cmicali at 9:38 PM PST - 12 comments

Weltschmertz got you down? "For the workers, the takeover has always been about achieving a living wage. The results have exceeded this goal. Once overheads have been met, wages are divided equally between all the workers: monthly pay now stands at 450 pesos..." This, and other stories of triumph are the focus of New Internationalist Magazine. A little bit of brightness to keep you going when it seems like everything is wrong.
posted by frykitty at 8:26 PM PST - 20 comments

Tony Oursler: video/installation artist [more inside]
posted by eddydamascene at 8:12 PM PST - 7 comments

Cast Members. NSFW
posted by crunchland at 8:10 PM PST - 11 comments

While you were out at a Peace Rally or reading your 'books' that somehow use words in combination to form 'sentences', us smart folks were watching the high culture extravaganza Joe Millionaire. Yes, I know you don't own a television, which is why Television without Pity is here to get you up to speed in case you're at the next dinner party with Nobel Prize laureates and all you can talk about is Iraq. [intelligent discussion inside]
posted by Stan Chin at 7:26 PM PST - 30 comments

The Moon's Mare Orientale is one of the largest impact basins in the solar system. It is nearly circular, 700 miles across and concentrically ringed like a bullseye. In short, it looks like a giant eye, one third of the diameter of the moon itself and yet, because it is on the moons far side, it's never visible from the Earths surface. [more]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:20 PM PST - 9 comments

Altered books use old books as the basis for new collage works. More infamously Ukranian-American artist Natalka Husar has been served a cease and desist letter by Harlequin for her oil paintings built on romance paperback book covers. (Currently part of the "illegal art" exhibition. The illegal art website has perhaps the funniest EULA ever written.) This is not all that new, the Salvador Dali museum has a couple of great examples of his work transforming cheesy prints of shepherds and sheep into surrealist drawing rooms (sorry, could not find an image online.)
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:01 PM PST - 4 comments

If you like movies, and you like to watch them on DVD, and appreciate in-depth, thoughtful analysis of various features on a particular DVD, then you need The DVD Journal. And nothing else.
posted by WolfDaddy at 4:23 PM PST - 22 comments

Oh no! Yoko to release a dance version of "Walking on Thin Ice" the track John Lennon was working on the night he died. It's been produced by The Pet Shop Boys and Danny Tenaglia. According to the article it's been a success in clubs. Has anyone heard it? Any good?
posted by feelinglistless at 4:12 PM PST - 17 comments

"They missed a good opportunity to keep quiet." Is it wise for France to make opposition to war against Saddam such a central tenet of their foreign policy? Opposing the war may be politically sound today, but this seems a bit heavy-handed, and perhaps short-sighted. Is "European solidarity" just a code phrase for "France and Germany get to call the shots"?
posted by Mark Doner at 3:59 PM PST - 76 comments

The Castles of Wales A very extensive site documenting castles, abbeys and the like in Wales. If you're fond of castles, be prepared to lose at least an hour.
posted by Mayor Curley at 3:57 PM PST - 14 comments

Korean Web Weekly The Korea WebWeekly is a non-partisan, non-profit news magazine dedicated to Korean issues. All news summary and editorials are contributed by volunteers. Start here: Korea Web Weekly Editor Interviewed. Other samples: How Many Nukes in North Korea's Arsenal?. Especially for Postroad!--Who Was Rhee Syngman? Korean History Online. Who is Kim Jong Il? Who Was Yo Wun Hyung? The Sacrificial Lamb of the Cold War - The Nationalists of Korea (It's not a flattering reflection of American polciy, that's for sure.) Young Sik Kim, Ph.D - the man behind Korean Web Weekly. A former spook, among other things here's his Korea Intelligence/Counter Intelligence But Wait! Click Now And We'll Add--At No Extra Cost!-- Paul Noll's Korean War Memoirs and his superb South Korean Flag, History, and Statistics. Bon Appétit!
posted by y2karl at 2:12 PM PST - 36 comments

19 inches of snow at Central Park and counting. This is now a top 5 snow storm in NYC history. In 1996 the accumulation was 24 inches.
posted by riffola at 11:54 AM PST - 78 comments

Bush's pledge to fight AIDS in Africa comes with some strings attached, it turns out. Bush is limiting the funds that clinics which perform abortions can receive. Is it moral to politicize an epidemic?
posted by hipnerd at 10:43 AM PST - 93 comments

"That's not gaming; that's just typing!" A time-waster to end all time-wasters, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I love it! [Just type the letters as they appear, Flash req.]
posted by Carlos Quevedo at 10:03 AM PST - 30 comments

"Why Nerds are Unpopular" is an essay by Paul Graham that looks at how being smarter than the average bear -- usually an advantage in "the real world" -- is a liability in the Lord of the Flies world of adolescence. It's a long read, but an engaging writeup of the high school pecking order, how the school structure encourages this behaviour, the freak/geek alliance and gives some hope to the current crop of high school nerds (my fellow dweebs, it does get better). Even though high school is something like twenty years in my past, I still winced when I read the essay. Were you one of the high school geeks? Are you one now?
posted by AccordionGuy at 9:37 AM PST - 61 comments

Looking for the right job? Or a new team member? Not so fast. You might like to read about others' experiences with the company. Shouldn't this site have been shut down already? Where can one complain if the company in question lists a bogus address?
posted by thatweirdguy2 at 8:51 AM PST - 19 comments

CNN transcript is smackin' good. On Friday the 14th of February CNN.com presented a transcript of Hans Blix's presentation to the U.N. Security Council concerning the progress of weapons inspections in Iraq. Comparison with other transcripts, notably that presented by the BBC , reveals that a substantial section of the presentation was omitted in the CNN version. The missing text includes descriptions of important instances of Iraqi government cooperation and presents a relatively favourable picture of inspectors' access to scientists. (via k5)
posted by the fire you left me at 8:22 AM PST - 53 comments

North Korea vows it will win a nuclear conflict with the US. I can't decide if these bizarre pronouncements from the North Korea are horrifyingly scary, or just truly nutty. For the time being, I think I'm going to go along with the Onion's point of view on this.
posted by psmealey at 7:58 AM PST - 47 comments

Conjestion charging hits london £5 to take a car into the central zone (pdf) between 7am and 6.30pm Mon - Fri. It's all the work of controversial mayor "Red" Ken Livingstone Opinion is split: for and against. A small majority of Londoners seem in favour of it - traffic in London now is as slow as the days of the horse and cart! Day one seems quiet, though it is the school holidays! Is this the answer?
posted by brettski at 2:25 AM PST - 39 comments

"But if the threat cannot be removed peacefully, please let us not fall for the delusion that it can be safely ignored." Speech by Prime Minister Tony Blair at Labour's local government, women's and youth conferences, SECC, Glasgow.
posted by hama7 at 1:56 AM PST - 68 comments

If you get the chance to sleep with the former bass guitarist from Guns N' Roses, but aren't sure if it'll be worth the trip to the free clinic two weeks later, Donna Anderson of Metal Sludge webzine has put together the following list of brief reviews of 228 of hair metal (among other genres)'s most wanted men. Read, commit to memory, then hit the Sunset Strip. Leave your dignity at home, but remember to bring some condoms.
posted by jonson at 12:52 AM PST - 22 comments

Campaign for Democracy and Human Rights in Iraq! Some hundred or so bloggers are sporting logos supporting democracy and human rights in Iraq, just twenty-four hours after a campaign was kicked-off by Dean's World blog publisher Dean Esmay. The campaign is supported by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, an activist umbrella group of pro-Democracy Iraqi organizations inside and outside of Iraq. It's a groundswell that will hopefully counter the anti-democratic and anti-Iraqi spirit of recent ANSWER demonstrations, and notable here because it's at this point strictly a blogworld phenomenon, but one that might actually have an effect in the real world. We'll see. Cyber-activism up until now has mainly been ineffective, and the feeling of many activists (cf. Barlow) is that it's more a distraction from real-world activism than an aid. Pro-democracy bloggers are a different breed from many traditional, trend-driven activists, and this might be the difference.
posted by BubbaDude at 11:20 PM PST - 131 comments

The worlds longest hockey game came to an end this afternoon after 80 hours of ice time. 39 players (all with ties to cancer through loved ones lost or afflicted) participated to raise money for pediatric cancer research. What lengths would you go to for your cause?
posted by Starchile at 11:12 PM PST - 7 comments

Louis Sullivan had been one of the most successful architects of the late nineteenth century, working at the forefront of early skyscraper design. But by the turn of the century, his distinctive style had fallen out of fashion, and his major commissions dried up. Sullivan took jobs where he could find them, and between 1908 and 1919 designed small banks in eight midwest towns. Tiny yet elegant, they are sometimes referred to as his "jewel boxes." See examples in Owatonna, Minnesota; Grinnell, Iowa; West Lafayette, Indiana; Sidney, Ohio; and Columbus, Wisconsin.
posted by Aaaugh! at 10:59 PM PST - 14 comments

A group of rich Democrats plans a full daily slate of liberal-oriented radio programming. The first major figure they're courting to do a show: Al Franken, who wrote a satirical book about a certain right-wing radio host a few years ago. Want to hear smart, funny, liberal radio right now? Tune into Harry Shearer's Le Show, available royalty-free to any station that will broadcast it, or online via RealAudio.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:15 PM PST - 52 comments

Smithsonian Folkways shows the way? (NYT link, blah blah) "The major music companies may fret over falling revenue, but one label saw its business jump 33 percent last year — thanks in part to the recordable compact discs that the industry says are hurting its sales." Smithsonian Folkways has been burning CD-Rs for customers ordering some of its obscure titles. Would this work on a larger scale? Why should any recording ever go out of print again?
posted by pmurray63 at 10:05 PM PST - 5 comments

Porn Doodles Obviously Not Safe For Work, nor does it do anything to raise the bar of Metafilter in any way. But hell with it, I enjoyed the Piggy Bank. I'm also drunk. via M&C
posted by Stan Chin at 7:13 PM PST - 20 comments

The Vatican's Pontifical Council for Culture releases a document on the surging interest in New Age thought (e.g., Zen Buddhism). They advise that Harry Potter is okay but that Deepak Chopra might be someone to be wary of. Evidently the Age of Aquarius isn't coming so that peace will guide the planets. Bummer. That might be nice.
posted by treywhit at 7:05 PM PST - 11 comments

Highlift Systems may have found a better location for their space elevator in Perth, Australia. Calm waters, few thunderstorms, not too far from the equator, international airport. (Slashdot discussion) I live in Perth, so I'm excited about the prospect, but our current premier may need a little prod.
posted by krisjohn at 5:04 PM PST - 8 comments

is the frank & fritzy show a fabulous work of fiction, or are these guys for real? a link to these apparent real life sopranos was posted way back in june 2001 but elicited just one comment & besides the number of episodes has since blooooomed. (requires real player or windows media player to listen in; or u can read the transcripts) ...so what do you make of these guys?
posted by n o i s e s at 4:30 PM PST - 2 comments

in another thread someone asked "What maniac are we creating right now?", reading this article i this morning - i asked myself the same question. [nytimes]

"The founder of Maon Farm, Yehoshefat Tor, says he still thinks the bombing was a good idea. ''The Torah says we should kill all the Arabs,'' he told me. ''Not just Arabs who maybe help terrorists. Everybody.''"
posted by specialk420 at 3:45 PM PST - 14 comments

War as national therapy- revisiting the Gulf War: (scroll down 5 paragraphs to "Powell and the Persian Gulf War") Some 100,000 retreating Iraqi troops were incinerated, blown to bits, etc. (Schwarzkopf's estimate) with unexpectedly light US casualties (383 from all causes). “Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic.“ said Major Bob Nugent, Army intelligence officer. But the stunning victory - and the ensuing US euphoria - were almost sabatoged by a Russian peace plan.... "The President's problem was how to say no to Gorbachev without appearing to throw away a chance for peace"(wrote Colin Powell in American Journey) “We have to have a war,” Bush told his inner circle of Secretary of State James Baker, national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and Powell" (narrates Bob Woodward)...."Fear of a peace deal at the Bush White House [wrote columnists Evans and Novak] had less to do with oil, Israel or Iraqi expansionism than with the bitter legacy of a lost war. 'This is the chance to get rid of the Vietnam Syndrome,' one senior aide told us." Peace threatened, but Colin Powell had a plan......
posted by troutfishing at 2:26 PM PST - 31 comments

Mark Twain on War and Imperialism. A collection of Twain's satirical writings on imperialism and the Philippine-American War, including his famous "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" and "The War Prayer" (the later was previously discussed here.)
posted by homunculus at 2:20 PM PST - 8 comments

Don't know how to cook? You might find Cooking for Losers helpful, with new tips and recipes every day. Today:

Take one flour tortilla from the fridge and warm it slightly in the microwave. Spread a bit of cream cheese on it. Spread a bit of spicy sweet mustard on it. Top with a few slices of your favorite lunchmeat - pastrami, ham, turkey; this recipe does not work well with tofu products. Roll and consume. May be cut into multiple little rolly-things if more food is desired.

Share your own carefully hoarded recipes and be a guest loser.
posted by elgoose at 12:42 PM PST - 39 comments

Vietnam employs the Beggar Removal Hotline. To promote a more healthy tourist experience, Denang is employing a reward system for citizens who report vagrants and beggars.

Once they have been reported to the special telephone hotline, the people are taken to the centre where they have health checks and are classified according to need...healthy people are sent back to their home provinces, while those who have physical or mental illnesses are treated at the city's expense.

I feel strange saying this but I think the U.S. should adopt this system. I love beggars as much as the next guy, but cleaning up the streets and helping out the beggars...it's a win/win situation.
posted by gwong at 8:43 AM PST - 22 comments

The coolest Living Frenchman I can think of is Dominique de Villepin, the Ladies' man who swept the UN off its feet, Colin Powell's latest arch-nemesis (although they used to get along) who has, by speaking against the US war effort, seriously reduced the likelihood of a war against Iraq, and may have engineered great changes in the way that global problems are resolved. But the main link is to an interview that de Villepin conducted with the Times of India several months ago. And I'm asking: don't you wish that all politicians could speak so well, that all politicians had his intelligence, his education, his sensitivity, his understanding of global concerns, and just his ability to quote from an actual book and understand what it meant? And if they did, can you imagine the sort of world we could be living in now?
posted by chrisgregory at 5:49 AM PST - 74 comments

Radio-controlled robot snakes Made by Adobe engineer Gavin Miller. Pages haven't been updated in a while, but movies are way cool. Robo-snake as ringbearer. Once I get my hands on enough of these, none shall escape my wrath. None! via Geisha Asobi Blog
posted by planetkyoto at 4:37 AM PST - 10 comments

Google buys Blogger. Dan Gillmor has the scoop.
posted by ntk at 10:08 PM PST - 109 comments

How would you like to control the entire universe, both what goes within you and what happens with others? As you can imagine when you can knock down attackers from 10 feet away or heal someone dying from something just using your own energy- that is true personal power! Others are skeptical. I think I will hold on to my $19.99. The movies are entertaining, though.
posted by hockeyman at 9:57 PM PST - 19 comments

Live from New York "None of our little group were, as one of us put it, 'into the Mumia scene.' But really, most of the people around us today were like us: regular folks, average, thoughtful, middle- and working-class Americans fed up with a war-obsessed government that won't listen to the world or to its own citizens." With pictures of some cool signs that weren't shown on TV ("NY Loves Old Europe," "Draft the Bush Twins"). Any other eyewitness accounts of protests from anywhere in the world today?
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 8:46 PM PST - 152 comments

With the weighty world events, many of us are in dire need of a little levity. A double dose of comedienne Wanda Sykes and her prank calls might just do the trick...here are two audio clips -- Conjugal Visits and Tow Yard Complaint -- both are quite amusing, but not certainly NSFW. More info on Wanda. courtesy of Davezilla.
posted by madamjujujive at 6:45 PM PST - 16 comments

Get that MP3, and get the boot In a -IMHO- patetic effort to try to stop what can't be stopped, the RIAA and MPAA are urging companies to monitor their employee's downloading habits or face suing, damages, sanctions and what have you against them. In other words, inciting companies to treat their employees as potential criminals and dispose of them accordingly. While the risks of using P2P at work such as virii and leaking of private files do have a point, this is really about the RIAA/MPAA resorting to more desperate measures each time to try to stay afloat with their jaded business model, which will do nothing but accelerate their long-forecast demise in the "real" new economy.
posted by betobeto at 6:36 PM PST - 16 comments

US Plans Post Iraq Liberation Does this point to US Imperial ambitions, or is it what is needed if Saddam is ousted? How does this work with the Liberation of Iraq, and the Iraq Congress?
posted by npost at 5:09 PM PST - 18 comments

Wife Swapping Swingers Orgy Porgy Party: Married couples banging their way up the ladder, greedy for position and power, hungry for sex. (NSFW, also, rage-inducing VBScript pop-up) Ah, 8-Track Porn, sadly, no audio included. Explore the rest of 8-Track Heaven, including odd 8-track technology (check out the portable horse player), a gallery of players, the 8-track Hall Of Fame, and bootleg cart artwork. Do you still have any 8-tracks laying around? Wish you did? Don't worry, they still make them.
posted by Stan Chin at 5:06 PM PST - 15 comments

Should We Boycott German, French and Belgian Products? Or, if we're against the Bush administration's intention to liberate/invade Iraq, should we stock up on them? [More inside.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 4:21 PM PST - 42 comments

Is that a blot I see before me?

Actually, no. At least not a Rorschach blot... "Most people have heard of the Rorschach test (pronounced "raw-shock"), but few have ever seen a real Rorschach inkblot. The blots are kept secret. When you see an inkblot in a popular article on the test, it's a fake: it's an inkblot, but not one of the inkblots. There are only ten Rorschach inkblots." Viewing the information on this page will compromise administration of the Rorschach test, invalidating your answers, so if you want to take the test in the future, don't peek. The site creators, however, recommend that you don't take the controversial test, and provide an outline (literally) of the blots, including information regarding scoring, analysis, and expected or "normal" answers, as well as some "red-flag" responses. In other words, a Rorschach cheat-sheet. (more..)
posted by taz at 3:56 PM PST - 39 comments

A bug in the computer... here's a picture of the first one ever. [via Kevin Lynch via Tantek Çelik]
posted by kirkaracha at 2:41 PM PST - 6 comments

More Jet Fuel means higher prices for gassing your cars- The production of jet fuel has gone up. From what I've read when refining oil, you get a higher percentage of gasoline than jet fuel per barrel. Then why are the gasoline prices going up, as we are producing extra gasoline compared to jet fuel.
Some terms. What to do, bitch.
posted by thomcatspike at 1:11 PM PST - 10 comments

Unspeakable conversations (NYTimes) (printer friendly). Controversial ethicist Peter Singer (previously mentioned 1, 2, 3, 4) advocates the euthanasia of severely disabled infants. In the referenced article from the NYT magazine, attorney and disability rights advocate Harriet McBride Johnson describes a genteel encounter and debate with a man who may have had her killed. Aside from confronting the central issue (as we surely shall!), Ms. Johnson also describes the difficult balance between her impressions of Prof. Singer the man, her loathing of his ideas, and the enmity toward both from her colleagues at Not Dead Yet. Have you ever tried to reconcile feelings so charged?
posted by tss at 12:15 PM PST - 16 comments

Smokehammer Video Update Wonderful video clip and mp3 put together by some Warp Records video artists. George Dubya's "warped" rendition of the State of the Union is excellent. "Our first goal is to show utter contempt for the environment... For the first time we must offer every child in America 3 nuclear missles."
posted by meanie at 11:24 AM PST - 5 comments

"Give me your heart / Make it real / Or else forget about it." Baghdad snapshot action. The sounds of an actual chemical attack. A Republican, Ron Paul of Texas speaks his mind on C-SPAN. (RealPlayer). Feisty members of the Greatest Generation sass a Defense Department spokeswoman at a town meeting. Apartheid leader Pik Botha takes up the cause of nuclear disarmament.
posted by sheauga at 10:28 AM PST - 10 comments

oh, no .. not Grover. What many of us didn't see behind that brave exterior was a monster cowering in the face of his own insecurities, a monster so unsure of himself he wouldn't even watch his own performances, and a monster who ultimately allowed his own weaknesses to overcome him and nearly ruin his career. A genius, a tyrant, a womanizer or just a washed-up drunk? It's time to expose Grover- the monster behind the myth.
posted by Raindog at 5:52 AM PST - 12 comments

As Man Lay Dying, Witnesses Turned Away "D.C. police released a startling surveillance tape yesterday that shows a daylight killing at a Northeast Washington gas station and witnesses doing nothing to report the crime or tend to the victim as he lay bleeding on the concrete." Is this just a product of D.C.'s crime and chaos or signficant of a more callous nation?
posted by owillis at 5:15 AM PST - 46 comments

The peace movement that marches this day includes the extraordinary people of Peaceful Tomorrows, "an advocacy organization founded by family members of September Eleventh victims. Its mission is to seek effective nonviolent responses to terrorism, and identify a commonality with all people similarly affected by violence throughout the world. By conscientiously exploring peaceful options in our search for justice, we choose to spare additional innocent families the suffering that we have already experienced—as well as to break the endless cycle of violence and retaliation engendered by war."
posted by fold_and_mutilate at 2:52 AM PST - 26 comments

Ten Second Films "The Ten Second Films Competition. What can you do in ten seconds?"
posted by ginz at 2:27 AM PST - 10 comments

Web sites protest by going black. A little over 100 web sites have bandied together to go black on this international day of protest. Some with interesting art, some with personal notes and others with strong words. Are there other web protests going on that you've heard of? Links?
posted by DragonBoy at 12:37 AM PST - 16 comments

The Twelve Peace Prayers.
posted by thedailygrowl at 12:13 AM PST - 10 comments

"It Did It" is a beautiful and haunting short flick about depression. Peter Brinson artfully uses the Scientific Method to creatively document the effects of the drug Zoloft on his mood and his brain chemistry.
posted by VelvetHellvis at 8:25 PM PST - 70 comments

My Job Sucks! Another rotten day at the 'ole meatgrinder'? Well, I was thinking the same thing and came home frustrated, looking for a way to vent my... frustrations ... dammit.
posted by poopy at 6:48 PM PST - 4 comments

Opera Borks MSN Opera 7.0.1 geefes MSN zee Svedeesh Cheff treetment. Bork Bork Bork! (No offense is intended towards any Swedes who may be reading this.)
posted by brownpau at 6:18 PM PST - 27 comments

America, America: I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island. A poem from Saadi Youssef, published in this Saturday's Guardian (scroll down past Seamus Heaney):

Take what you do not have
and give us what we have.
Take the stripes of your flag
and give us the stars.
Take the Afghani Mujahideen beard
and give us Walt Whitman's beard filled with
butterflies.
Take Saddam Hussein
and give us Abraham Lincoln
or give us no one.

Saadi Youssef was born in 1934 near Basra, Iraq. He is considered to be among the greatest living Arab poets. Youssef has published 25 volumes of poetry, a book of short stories, a novel, four volumes of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. In addition to being imprisoned for his poetry and politics, he has won numerous literary awards and recognitions. He now lives in London. [more inside]
posted by jokeefe at 5:55 PM PST - 8 comments

Deformation of a polyethylene folio . Polymer thin film after electric field and reactive ion etching. Cat tongue. Mouse epididymis. Meet the latest winners in Nikon's annual "Small World" photomicrography contest. The gallery goes all the way back to 1977. A little reminder that beauty is everywhere.
posted by mediareport at 5:46 PM PST - 4 comments

Salon going down? Looks like it. According to this article, they may not make it past Feburary. Even with 47,300 paying subscribers, it still can't pay the bills. What's it take these days?
posted by Hackworth at 5:34 PM PST - 35 comments

See with your ears: the vOICe Sonification system. The vOICe Learning Edition translates arbitrary video images from a regular PC camera into sounds. [More inside.]
posted by Wet Spot at 5:09 PM PST - 2 comments

"Giant Robot attack!" as spoken by the kid every kid wanted to be, Johnny Sokko. If you haven't already seen "'Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot" aka "Giant Robot", go now and buy it on VHS or DVD.
posted by riffola at 3:20 PM PST - 7 comments

Going to anti-war protests this weekend? Become a photo stringer for the BBC! "The BBC is asking people attending Saturday's anti-war protests who are carrying new combination camera/cell phones to relay their pictures to its newsroom at (44) 7970 885089 or email them to yourpics@bbc.co.uk. The broadcaster said that it hopes to provide coverage of the demonstrations 'from a protester's perspective.' It is also accepting photos taken with digital cameras."
posted by me3dia at 3:07 PM PST - 29 comments

Pandorabots is a new site for building and hosting chat bots (HTML, not AIM) based on the Alicebot engine. They even have fee-based access to a bot. Interesting. I want to find out more about you.
posted by mathowie at 2:40 PM PST - 5 comments

Friday! Friday! Friday! Friday flash fun to end all Friday flash fun.
posted by crunchland at 2:31 PM PST - 4 comments

"Big Protests Planned in Europe" says the front (web) page of my "hometown" paper, the New York Times. Hey, guys, I have a scoop for you: I hear there might be a little something going on here in town, too... over at some place called the "United Nations." You might want to look into it. (Unless the authorities declare a fuchsia alert and shut the whole thing down...)
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:05 PM PST - 26 comments

Plushy Hip Hop video (Quicktime). A shark, a tiger, a turtle, and a beat. What's not to love?
posted by gwint at 1:50 PM PST - 12 comments

Three-Volume report on Enron released today Among the findings: "Enron paid zero federal income taxes from 1996 to 1999, despite reporting $2.3 billion in net income during the period" (from the linked article); executives took "1.4 billion" in compensation packages (SFGate has a piece on that.); and myriad details about the complicated machinations involved to pull this off (Mercury News). I am among the outraged though, frankly, I feel like they were just taking advantage of the system as it is was in place. If the economy hadn't tanked, this stuff might never have come out.
posted by amanda at 1:24 PM PST - 5 comments

"Stop talking about your fucking wedding."
...or, to paraphrase Boy George, "I'd rather have a good cuppa than a bad shag."
This year, celebrate or commiserate by sending an anti-valentine. Send it today, tomorrow, or any day you damn well please. This year, say it with bile.
posted by dash_slot- at 12:22 PM PST - 16 comments

Victorian Secrets of Washington, D.C.: haunting photos and thoughtful essays documenting one man's fight to draw attention to D.C.'s neglected architectural heritage: "This site won't be much of a beauty pagent because we 'll concentrate on buildings that are vacant, abandoned, deteriorated, distressed, or just plain at risk because they are standing in the path of development . . . if even one Victorian finds an angel because of our page, we'll consider it a thousand percent return on investment."
posted by ryanshepard at 12:00 PM PST - 13 comments

Dolly is dead. "The type of lung disease Dolly developed is most common in older sheep. And in January 2002, it was revealed that Dolly had developed arthritis prematurely. She was cloned using a cell taken from a healthy six-year-old sheep, and was born on 5 July 1996 at the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh, Scotland."
posted by 111 at 11:41 AM PST - 20 comments

A post about Rilke and Romantic Love, the gift to the Western World from The Ornament of The World, al-Andalus, the high civilization of Muslim Spain, via the troubadors, who gave us this Arabian meme as the noble concept of Courtly Love, with additional reference to Denis de Rougement's Love In The Western World, The Art Of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus and Abû Muhammad 'Alee ibn Ahmad ibn Sa'eed ibn Hazm's Tawq al-Hamâmah (The Ring of the Dove). So, there you have it: Rilke, quintessential poet of love, and The History of Romantic Love. Yeah... that's the ticket.!
posted by y2karl at 11:07 AM PST - 35 comments

What says love like video art? Enjoy these trés bizarre video "postcards", then send them to a significant other. Or don't. Whatever. I just looked at 'em, personally. They're great though. [Quicktime required.]
posted by condour75 at 11:00 AM PST - 1 comment

Valentine's Smoochies via nika!
posted by quonsar at 10:45 AM PST - 25 comments

That business plan for 'Re-Pet' may have to wait a bit longer yet.
posted by psmealey at 10:10 AM PST - 21 comments

A 'Superblog' for Business Geeks? The AlwaysOn Network, brainchild of Red Herring founder Tony "bloggers have shown us the value of truly participatory media sites, so we’re just going to bundle it up and polish it and commercialize it" Perkins, is inviting "the smartest chiefs, geeks, investors, boosters and wonks to come play in our spontaneous and uncensored arena"...and, oooooh, alleged celebrity bloggers. Will this be the /. for business geeks or just a case of more web recycling?
posted by boost ventilator at 10:10 AM PST - 11 comments

Friday Flash Fun. Compelling animation, with a wonderful soundtrack. Warning for the light-sensitive - bright, flashing screen.
posted by essexjan at 9:47 AM PST - 18 comments

Practice your romantic moves and be ready for that special day. It may be Valentine's Day but everybody knows true love can only be found on Fat Tuesday. (18 days, people, 18 days!!) Here's some Friday...umm...Flash fun. (SFW I think -- but maybe I just haven't scored high enough yet.).
posted by danOstuporStar at 9:46 AM PST - 1 comment

Joe Connelly conked out, as the Beav might've put it. The "Leave it to Beaver" co-creator had many other credits to his name, but for my money, his most memorable achievement was creating TV's smarmiest character, Eddie Haskell.
posted by Oriole Adams at 9:37 AM PST - 7 comments

"At the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality we have been committed to time travel based research since 2005." Sure, it's probably just a poker-faced art project by the electronic Writing Research ensemble, but isn't it nicer to think of it as the life's work of the late Rosalind Brodsky (1970-2058), artist, musician, and Martian real estate agent?
posted by snarkout at 9:33 AM PST - 4 comments

The Valentine's Day EP. A quick pointer to some free-'n-legal mp3s with which to construct a mini-opera of lovin'. Alejandro Escovedo, Rosalie -- Aching song about distance and longing. Hem, Valentine's Day -- beautiful cover of the Springsteen tune. (Amazon, reg. req'd.) Soltero, Communist Love Song -- "If you're ever less than certain, I will be your Iron Curtain." This is a sentimental, downtempo set, but there's plenty out there for a heartbreak EP (or 50) as well. No doubt someone will post it -- and lots more free mp3s -- inside.
posted by blueshammer at 9:27 AM PST - 3 comments

Weird cycle lanes of Brighton (and Hove, actually). 'This website grew out of an article...claiming that some cycle lane up north was the shortest in Britain. What! I thought, we have many many much shorter lanes!!' Not so much a competition, more an amusing photolog of some of the more ridiculous attempts at creating cycle lanes in Brighton, UK...are they this bad in other cities around the world?
posted by i_cola at 9:18 AM PST - 19 comments

Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, Xray, Yankee and Zulu. Now I know my NATO phonetic ABCs, next time won't you sing with me?
posted by iconomy at 8:44 AM PST - 30 comments

These Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed
posted by Mwongozi at 7:49 AM PST - 23 comments

The New York Times published on Sunday a very favorable report on Ken Lay. In it, they argue that he was, at least in part, wrongly chastised for his role in the Enron affair. Apparently, we are to believe that the CEO didn't know what was going on inside the company he ran. After news of the report appeared in numerous U.S. media earlier this week, the BBC today counterattacks brutally (although perhaps not intentionally), describing some of the most ruthless Enron practices - like placing the combined total salary of the top 200 executives salary at one and a half times the company's total earnings (Lay's went from 15m to 164 mil in that period). My question is simple: just what is going on here?
posted by magullo at 7:35 AM PST - 9 comments

The Blackbird. I saw a documentary about the SR-71 Blackbird last night and I must admit I am fascinated by it. Not only is it sleek, beautiful and futuristic it's also fast as hell. Given its space-age appearance it is amazing to think that it first flew in 1964 and still nothing comes near in performance terms (that we know about!). Withdrawn from service in 1990 due to the expense of running it, it was used by Nasa for testing until recently. Nowadays your only chance of seeing one is in a museum, and if you're outside the US, the only place to go is the excellent Air Museum at RAF Duxford.
posted by jontyjago at 2:12 AM PST - 35 comments

Attention Men: Woo your love tonight by transforming yourself into a 19th Century Gentleman. Oh, who says civility is dead? Although your Maxim may tell you how to bring your mate into ecstacy during takeoff in an airplane restroom, perhaps it's time that we all take a hint from this Gentlemen's Guide to really well-bred Ladies. Then, sweep her off her feet by learning to dance at An American Ballroom Companion's Dance Instruction Manuals, which features plenty of videos for you to study. Ladies, do you yearn for more old-school gentlemen in your life? Would you swoon? Because I need a date tonight.
posted by Stan Chin at 12:23 AM PST - 11 comments

It's all about shareholder value. Steve Jobs has received tremendous positive press for only accepting one dollar per year as payment for his CEO services at Apple. How does he do it, you ask? Well, he supplements his income by a) being a billionaire, and b) renting out his corporate jet to Apple, at a cost of over 1.2 million dollars, over the past two years. Which is an exceptionally generous rental fee considering that Apple itself paid $90 million for the jet, which it bought for Jobs in May of 2001. This data was disclosed along in the most recent quarterly report in which Apple announced layoffs of 260 employees, none of whom were given a jet.
posted by jonson at 12:09 AM PST - 13 comments

Having a hard time with Valentine's Day? Things could be worse. (warning: not for the weak of stomach.)
posted by alms at 11:20 PM PST - 35 comments

"The United States Congress has stepped in to find nearly $300m in humanitarian and reconstruction funds for Afghanistan after the Bush administration failed to request any money in this latest budget."

So much for rebuilding Afghanistan.
posted by artifex at 10:14 PM PST - 52 comments

Bittersweet chocolate. "Of the $1.1 billion in boxed chocolates that Americans are expected to buy on Valentine's Day, very little will be untainted by the scourge of child labor. Although some who buy those bonbons will do so without knowing the sinister history of their purchases, others, like the chocolate makers, will have known for at least two years, if not longer, that cocoa beans imported from the Ivory Coast -- used to make nearly half the chocolate consumed in this country -- are harvested in large part by children, some as young as 9, and many of whom are considered slaves, trafficked from desperately poor countries like Mali and Burkina Faso."
posted by homunculus at 9:30 PM PST - 36 comments

The government's solution for ruling Iraq? Let the military do it. Looks like Iraq will be under the military rule of General Tommy Franks for at least two years. (This explains how members of the administration can threaten to cut other countries out of Iraqi oil deals in a future Iraq.) But how will the rest of the Islamic world react to a prolonged US military occupation of in excess of 50,000 troops, where the US would have to feed, supply, and rebuild an entire country?
posted by insomnia_lj at 8:16 PM PST - 46 comments

Something tells me that Iran's rulers don't like Valentine's Day It could be their ban of cards in Tehran. Their distake for western culture. Or the fact that Khomeini put the 'fatwa' on Rushdie on Valentine's Day 1989. All rational indications say that the current Ayatollah has no love for this holiday

Can a government that has to restrict their people from buying Valentine's Day cards last long before the people rise up to try to remove another oppressor?
posted by RobbieFal at 8:06 PM PST - 17 comments

Remember the 2002 Winter Olympics? This time last year, Apolo Ohno was making his Olympic debut as the wunderkind of short track speed skating. A year later, Apolo and the U.S. team were back in Salt Lake City, February 7-9, 2003 for ISU World Cup # 5. Here's an account from a hardcore short track fan who attended, which expresses the excitement of experiencing World Cup competition live. You can watch the competition this Saturday, February 15 on NBC at 2 p.m. EST.
posted by eclectica at 7:32 PM PST - 4 comments

"Your defense is as always to not panic." I have no way to evaluate this guy's credentials or the validity of his advice--the host site seems a bit wonky, to put it mildly--but he provides a pithy, duct-tape-free, and oddly comforting counterpoint to some of the official recommendations on surviving chemical, biological and nuclear attacks.
posted by Kat Allison at 5:13 PM PST - 27 comments

Ever wonder where that salmon steak on your plate came from? It turns out that it was either farmed or caught in the wild, and like everything else these days, the origins of salmon can spark a political debate. On one side are those how believe there are great costs in the farming of salmon, while others feel farming salmon is good for industry and the environment. "If you are what you eat, but don't know what you're eating, do you know who you are?" I cannot for the death of me remember where I heard this quote
posted by elwoodwiles at 3:48 PM PST - 32 comments

Neverland : The testimony that Michael Jackson paid between $15 and $40 million to suppress.
posted by lagado at 3:03 PM PST - 27 comments

I have a great deal of respect for everyone I know who's joined Teach for America and similar programs. Pretty much without exception, they're relatively well-off, upwardly mobile, Ivy League-educated young professionals who eschew a variety of far more lucrative and prestigious options to give something back, knowing that their choice will probably be endlessly trying and unrewarding. By and large, these folks leave college dedicated to the expectation that they can make a genuine difference somewhere. So when this idealism is crushed, who do we blame? (via Arts & Letters Daily)
posted by grrarrgh00 at 2:33 PM PST - 35 comments

AOL to offer blogging services. Ninety-nine per cent of bloggers won't make money," says Copeland."But when we've got 10 million bloggers a couple years from now, I'm confident that 100,000 of them will be uniquely valuable to advertisers."
posted by sixdifferentways at 2:02 PM PST - 30 comments

US Bureau of Indian Affairs 'misplaces' about $137 billion "...hundreds of thousands of Indians in the largest-ever class-action lawsuit against the government have put the cumulative total at $137.2 billion owed [royalties due from BIA leasing of Indian land for lucrative mineral, oil, logging, cattle grazing, and other concessions]....Sometimes the checks might arrive for hundreds or thousands of dollars, and sometimes those checks might only amount to pennies on the dollar. On Indian reservations, the problem has reached crisis levels; a check written out for a smaller amount than expected—or no check at all—can mean the difference between housing and homelessness. " ....but we don't have the money, I told you: it must have fallen out through that hole in my pants' pocket... Treaty, what treaty? Oh, that treaty....
posted by troutfishing at 12:35 PM PST - 9 comments

Peter Bagge produced a four page comic about his observations at various anti-war protests and how it only takes a few nuts to ruin an entire movement, or at least take the wind out of a rational person's sails.
posted by mathowie at 12:02 PM PST - 94 comments

Freedom of Information The Department of Defense has released a training video for teaching its staff how to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests. Oddly enough, we can't get a look at it because its classified. "It seems ironic, very ironic," says Mike Ravnitzky, a writer for American Lawyer magazine. Ravnitzky's request for the video was turned down twice, with the Defense Department citing the Freedom of Information Act's trade secret exemption. These government people are a laff riot.
posted by The Raven at 12:02 PM PST - 7 comments

Could he be right yet again? : Interview with Bob Prechter (and another one) If he is, we're all in for a world of hurt. In this three part interview, Elliott Wave International president Robert Prechter discusses his new book, “Conquer The Crash: How To Survive and Prosper in a Deflationary Depression.” During the 1980s, Bob Prechter won numerous awards for market timing as well as the United States Trading Championship, culminating in Financial News Network (now CNBC) granting him the title, "Guru of the Decade." In 1990-1991, he was elected and served as president of the nation-al Market Technicians Association in its 21st year. He has also published a seminal book on Elliott wave analysis titled, “Elliott Wave Principle – Key To Market Behavior,” three books on the major practitioners of wave analysis, and books on his own views in Prechter's Perspective and At the Crest of the Tidal Wave.
posted by muppetboy at 11:47 AM PST - 47 comments

Groovy German digital-retro. Not Friday, I know, but for website style-watchers a cool re-visting of teletext aesthetic and navigation.
posted by marvin at 10:35 AM PST - 5 comments

Most state tax systems are regressive. That's the thesis of "Who Pays: A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems In All 50 States" published by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The writers argue that states actually augment the effects of the Bush tax plan by replacing income taxes with sales and property taxes, a move that disproportionately hurts the poor and middle classes. Scroll down to the charts to see how your state matches up. (Link is PDF 653 KB, and is summarized at TomPaine.com. Via Talking Points Memo.)
posted by PrinceValium at 10:20 AM PST - 19 comments

There's been a lot of smack-talking in here lately. The Onion AV Club runs with that concept and asks various celebrities, "Who could you take in a fight?". So who could you take in a fight?
posted by patrickje at 10:19 AM PST - 55 comments

The Best Soda You Never Had: Inspired by Miguel's thread, I went in search of some links about exotic beverages - specifically, the carbonated ones - and many of my leads ended up back at this one place. Cel-ray, Jones' Bubble Gum, Stewarts' Orange Cream - all there, and plenty more... It always seemed to me that Mexican sodas tended to be far far more diverse than the standard cola / diet cola / lemon-lime / orange / root-beer selection you typically see anywhere in America. Unfortunately, they fail to mention my absolute favorite, which is Cuban, and is called Materva (scroll down about a third of the way).
posted by wanderingmind at 10:14 AM PST - 55 comments

Marcel Betrisey creates unique clocks and strange machine hybrids. Take, for example, his c.d. player integrated into an antique sewing machine, his rolling ball clock or his wonderfully silly amplifier that uses a tap for volume control. While I’m not exactly sure what some are for, I think what he says about his c.d. player with a rotary arm sums it up best: “I wanted simply to know if it were feasible, and the joy was great when it delivered the first note of Electric Ladyland.”
posted by snez at 9:48 AM PST - 5 comments

Ooo-la-la A cheese-eating surrender monkey bites back.
posted by skellum at 9:42 AM PST - 42 comments

Court Grants Blacks Special Sentencing Sentences for black offenders can be reduced or tailored to reflect the systemic racism that has historically plagued their community, the Ontario Court of Appeal has ruled. The 3-0 judgment came in a case involving Quinn Borde, a black gunman from Toronto's seedy Regent Park area. The 18-year-old admitted to firing a gun repeatedly into the air while being chased by a gang and pistol-whipping a rival later.
posted by orange swan at 9:05 AM PST - 15 comments

War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning. General George S. Patton famously said, "Compared to war all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, I do love it so!" Though Patton was a notoriously single-minded general, it is nonetheless the case that war gives meaning to many lives, a fact with which we have become familiar now that America is once again engaged in a military conflict. War is an enticing elixir. It gives us purpose, resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. With this generational iteration, is peace ever attainable?
posted by the fire you left me at 8:21 AM PST - 23 comments

Can I catch Gay if I watch the Oscars?
posted by vito90 at 8:10 AM PST - 24 comments

390,000 Jedi in Britain In a recent census 390,000 U.K. residents declared their faith in the Star Wars religion following an e-mail campaign that claimed 10,000 declared Jedites would make Jedi a 'legal and official religion.' So what happens now? Who will build the first Jedi church? (I reckon this says more about British attitutudes to form filling than attitutudes to religion).
posted by rolo at 7:02 AM PST - 21 comments

Latest musings from Laci Peterson's family: "He's just not around, he's not participating, he's not working together with us." Hmmm. Wonder why. That whole "Somebody hurt Laci. Scott's somebody. Therefore..." thing might have something to do with it. Even if you think he was involved, you've got to admit there's something creepy about accusing a guy of killing his wife and child simply because nobody else has shown up to take the blame.
posted by effugas at 6:30 AM PST - 30 comments

The Soul of a New Machine is the title of an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the recent proliferation of cyborgs in the humanities. Growing outside of science, and inspired by science fiction, cyborgs have invaded economics, anthropology, and even philosophy. Cyborgs are indeed taking over the academic world. NASA is interested, too. In fact, NASA's Cyborg Program was based on the research of Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline. More inside...
posted by chason at 5:18 AM PST - 14 comments

YOU CANNOT OVERKILL this story Everybody loves Clearchannel, it's true. Here's another reason, as an internal memo from some eager executive is leaked. He's just counting down the seconds until war begins and wants to make sure his affiliates are prepared. Here's a nice sample: "People who have never listened to our stations will be tuning in out of curiosity, desperation, panic and a hunger for information. RIGHT NOW, convert them to P-1's . . ."
posted by jeremias at 4:47 AM PST - 39 comments

So this is what is means to be hip. (NY TIMES link)

What ''The Preppie Handbook'' did for whale belts and synonyms for vomiting, ''The Hipster Handbook'' accomplishes for this generation's stylistic and linguistic signs and signifiers."

According to the book, "deck" means "cool", "tassel" is a girl, "bust a moby" means to dance, and a "frado" is an ugly guy who thinks he is good looking. Being a member of said generation myself, I can honestly say that I have never ever heard anyone speak this way. Maybe I'm just too "ishtar". Do you think the Hipster Handbook captures today's, um, deck kids accurately? What would your Hipster Handbook include?
posted by 4easypayments at 3:12 AM PST - 53 comments

Some would say that Holga never really died... Welcome to the surreal world of plastic photography. The run away champion site is DigitalSucks, though great galleries and daring feats of technical innovation are scattered across the net. I'm already looking to get my first Holga.
posted by kaibutsu at 2:07 AM PST - 11 comments

What is patriotism? Why is this war going ahead? One of a few questions being thrown around on War Debate, albeit not factual or profound. The site looks fairly new so you can post there to keep all the war jabber off MeFi.
posted by h0ney at 11:56 PM PST - 18 comments

NeoConservatism in a Nutshell! Lately I've been researching the NeoConservative movement and stumbled upon this European website which is by far the best overview I have encountered. Be sure to read the end called The Dangers for Europe. Here is a little tidbit - "What ought to be of concern to Europeans is the fact that Americans are being indoctinated into beliefs which many Europeans (particularly those who are old enough to remember the 1920's and 1930's) would characterise as extremely dangerous.... A country considers itself at war against an ill-defined foreign enemy who threaten its way of life. To protect itself against this enemy, civil liberties are abrogated, arrest and detention without trial are introduced and the state creates a secret police which can spy on citizens and foreigners alike. The state allies itself with big business to protect its way of life and promote national security. Public opinion is manipulated so that dissent from the "national purpose" becomes socially unacceptable. Those are the conditions which Europeans will recognise as the precursors of fascism. "
posted by thedailygrowl at 11:48 PM PST - 22 comments

"I prefer not to work in Canada. I prefer to work in my own country...There are better actors down here. That's why they have to import so many actors for their Canadian productions."

Oscar winner Robert Duvall claimed Canadians don't make good actors following a Kevin Costner "runaway production" made in Calgary. He should know, having worked with Canadians and been involved with Canadian projects in the past (maybe he's secretly Canadian!). Could he have been referring to these folks? Or does he just lack the patience to coach Canadian's to speak American (NY Times reg. req'd)? Hopefully it's all just be an allergic reaction to tacky-female-cheese-pop-muzik...
posted by boost ventilator at 9:33 PM PST - 17 comments

DEA fails White House budget review. (PDF) Busy raiding the homes of disabled medical marijuana users, the DEA has been, in the words of the White House Office of Management and Budget, "unable to demonstrate its progress in reducing the availability of illegal drugs in the U.S." [via MPP]
posted by botono9 at 6:18 PM PST - 7 comments

powell flip flop [via rc3] on top of citing flimsy, plagiarized, out of date reports as evidence against iraq. powell cant make up his mind if osama is in cahoots with iraq. osamas statement appears to show support for the iraqi people -yet labels "Saddam's Baath party as "infidels." " are powell and the administration grasping at straws?
posted by specialk420 at 4:49 PM PST - 57 comments

It's not just for bullets anymore! previously discussed on MeFi here, I would like to reconsider "Depleted Uranium" (DU) in terms of its non-military uses. As ballast in the Columbia, the pieces of which were scattered across our country, for instance? Also in the ballast of many commercial airplanes, helicopters and ships. Should we really be using this stuff so lightly? I mean, just because it's twice as heavy as lead does that counterbalance the incredibly damaging long-term (half-life = how many billion years?) effects of DU burning and becoming a wind-borne inhalant? (Gulf Syndrome) To paraphrase Seinfeld, what's the deal with DU?
posted by zekinskia at 4:20 PM PST - 27 comments

"Hello, my name is Scott." He's Scott, he's 22, and he's worn a nametag for the past 833 days. Why? So that people will feel more inclined to talk to him. To break down social barriers. Surprisingly, it has worked. I'm sure many of us try to be friendly to strangers, but in some cultures these days you're almost sure to be rebuffed or ignored. That's how it is here in the UK. Are people open and friendly in your part of the world without needing gimmicks like a nametag?
posted by wackybrit at 4:06 PM PST - 39 comments

The Gallery of Regrettable Food: "Frizzle slices of cooked ham in hot butter, adding 1 1/2 teaspoons of drained prepared horseradish to each 2 tablespoons of butter or margarine. Add cheese." Advertisements, Strange recipes from "the golden age of butter", and just plain weird stuff. Also, I think this guy used to do my tech support. with thanks to Television Without Pity and cakeman
posted by anastasiav at 3:13 PM PST - 13 comments

The Best Food You Never Had: Reading Jake Adam York's juicy essay on the art of the barbecue, I was once again sadly reminded I've never had the pleasure of tasting real, Southern U.S. open-pit barbecue. I have no idea whether it's better in Texas, Kansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky or Georgia; whether pork is better than beef; smoked is tastier than plain... Then I realized there are quite a number of other delicious foods (like fresh abalone sashimi; Alaskan king crab cooked live; a clam-bake on the beach; real wasabi; smoked sablefish; fresh unsalted caviar; an oyster Po'Boy...) I've never tried. It's an interesting gastronomic category: something you've read about and heard about and probably drooled over, that you just know you'd love if only you had a chance to try it! So forgive my curiosity: what's the best food you've never had? [Main link via Arts and Letters Daily]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 2:40 PM PST - 95 comments

"There was one streaming radio site that I loved, but it's fallen on hard times." Back in June 2001, MeFi members discussed their favorite on-line radio broadcasts. Since then, the CARP ruling meant hard times for a lot of Internet broadcasts. Out of all the stations listed in the original thread, which ones have survived? Find out inside.
posted by webmutant at 12:54 PM PST - 41 comments

Happy Darwin Day! Darwin Day is February 12th, the date of birth of Charles Darwin in the year 1809, at Shrewsbury, England. On this date, and throughout the month, people from all over the world are honoring the life, work and influence of Charles Darwin with events and activities which celebrate humanity and the science in our lives. While you're celebrating you may want to see who has won awards in his name or perhaps buy a sticker or see if there's a darwinday event near you
posted by bitdamaged at 12:40 PM PST - 15 comments

If you jonesed for a beta capsule as a kid, and crossed your hands to zap monsters with the specium ray while playing outside, then this site is for you. Shoowatchi!
posted by ursus_comiter at 12:36 PM PST - 15 comments

The Traitor List. From the straw man while-u-wait department. Remove known sociopaths like Zacarias Moussaoui and Patch Adams from the mix and you get a pretty good list of celebrity activists, with a few politicians for good measure. Anyway, is this site a joke or not? Should actors stay out of politics? And is there something unAmerican about posting images in the right aspect ratio?
posted by condour75 at 11:26 AM PST - 38 comments

Thailand launches national "Bust-Boosting" campaign - "In an almost surreal scene, rows of women in shorts and T-shirts massaged and squeezed their breasts in front of the crowd of officials, media and onlookers on a busy Bangkok street....The health ministry said the idea was to show Thai women that there was another, more natural way, of boosting their breast size than plastic surgery. ...Cosmetic surgery is an extremely popular and lucrative business in Thailand....Bangkok is renowned for its inexpensive, but not always reliable, plastic surgeons." (via BBC) Here's a history of the slogan "We must, we must, we must increase our bust"
posted by troutfishing at 10:11 AM PST - 13 comments

Adopt A Bison. There are several handsome candidates for adoption at the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Oklahoma. Elsewhere, the 51 tribes of the InterTribal Bison Cooperative seek to restore the tatanka to their lands and way of life. And in North Dakota, the falling human population is creating more room for the bison to return to. Perhaps the time is right to restore the Great Plains.
posted by homunculus at 10:02 AM PST - 20 comments

Not all the pioneers who pushed west across the U.S. could afford a covered wagon. Between 1846 and 1869, some 300,000 people - mostly Mormons - pulled their belongings in handcarts over 1,000 miles over the Mormon Trail from Nauvoo, Illinois to Salt Lake City (and not everyone made it). Reenacting the trek has become popular – very popular.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:52 AM PST - 9 comments

How to survive any RPG - a 'one size fits all' guide to Role Playing Games. As anyone who has played the Final Fantasy series knows, RPGs are full of cliches. In my opinion, the best RPG I ever played was Chrono Trigger, (its referred two quite a bit in those two lists) and modern game such as Neverwinter Nights don't seem to hold my attention. Perhaps the way forward is to cross genres, mixing RPG with other games, such as First Person Shooters and Real Time Strategies.
posted by Orange Goblin at 9:19 AM PST - 36 comments

"American Idol" Star Bounced. Evan Marriott's brief career as an underwear model wasn't a problem. And "Joe Millionaire" contestant Sarah Kozer's starring role in dozens of bondage and fetish films also was of no concern to Fox Television. But the network has bounced an "American Idol" contestant because she once posed nude for an Internet porn site. Is this setting a double standard?
posted by Macboy at 8:29 AM PST - 56 comments

I Hate Music is a page devoted to scathing commentary on popular music and the musicians who make it. The author let's loose such gems as: Face it, every single note of music ever committed to paper, vinyl, CD, zeroes and ones sucks harder than Linda Lovelace in a sucking competition with a black hole. There is absolutely nothing going for music. It just plain sucks. (found here) Don't miss out on the very comprehensive archives.
posted by ashbury at 6:19 AM PST - 23 comments

Homeless Quints. When a white American has quints in America, companies fall all over themselves to provide money, goods, and services for this "miracle." When a dark-skinned Nigerian has quints in America, though, a somewhat harder time is in store. Citizenship concerns aside, the lack of humanitarian concern here is staggering.
posted by FormlessOne at 6:15 AM PST - 26 comments

                                   Labors Of Love
Here are some handmade pages, personal and corporate, on American Vernacular Music and more:

First, here's Long Time Coming, with three separate shrines to Dock Boggs, Pretty Boy Floyd and Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, worthy subjects all. I have no idea what the Eyeneer Records revenue model is or was but their American Music Archive, (Latest Update - August 20, 1999), albeit spotty, is still a must stop and see with pages on Charley Patton, Sleepy John Estes and Lucille Bogan, for example, and that's just the blues section. It's a very promising sounding site--and it's too bad they never finished it, but, on the other hand, thank god,they have not yet pulled the plug. Lea Gilmore's It's A Girl Thang's Historical Profiles has it goin' on with Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Big Maybelle and Georgia White for examples. Catherine Yronwode, of course, is a name well known here, as is her wondrous Lucky Mojo, cornucopica that it is. There, among much riches, is the extensive and authoritative Blues Lyrics and Hoodoo --but that's Not All ! »→ »→ »→
posted by y2karl at 1:56 AM PST - 21 comments

Doing some research on the submarine Thresher,I found a song written by Phil Ochs about the tragedy. I don't think it hit the charts like Gordon Lightfoots' song regarding the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. It then occurred to me that there probably will not be a song about the space shuttle Columbia. Why not?
posted by JohnR at 12:09 AM PST - 17 comments

Rabbit Proof Fence is a movie about Australia's "stolen generation," the 100,000 Aboriginal and "half-caste" children kidnapped between 1910 and 1970 and raised in institutions, as part of a policy to "breed out" their Aboriginal blood and integrate them into white society. The movie is the true story of three girls who ran away and walked 1500 miles back home. Molly, the oldest one, walked it again years later when they captured her and her children. Here's a teacher's guide (pdf) based on the gov't report about the stolen generation. (book by Molly's daughter Doris Pilkington, movie soundtrack by Peter Gabriel. It's getting a lot of press despite its low profile -- go support your local indie theater)
posted by fotzepolitic at 11:20 PM PST - 13 comments

Did the Feds bungle intelligence on the 1995 OKC Bombing? FBI officials feared that white separatists might lash out on April 19, 1995 -- the day McVeigh chose. They were so concerned that a month earlier they questioned a reformed white supremacist familiar with an earlier plot to bomb the Murrah federal building, the one McVeigh selected. Does this affect earlier theories on OKC? Does it make the current advisories more significant?
posted by subgenius at 10:00 PM PST - 6 comments

Selections from My Name is Blanket, © 2046 Blanket Jackson

"It was Geller who worked with my father to arrange for the design of the device which became known as the “Soul Harvester,” and who arranged for the shipments of orphans."

An excerpt from Michael Jackson's son's future autobiography.
posted by GriffX at 9:57 PM PST - 21 comments

Pazz & Jop 2002 - The Village Voice has tabulated the top albums and singles from 695 critics (and 10,2002 LPs). Some of the ballot-fillers even got a little personal. The usual essays are included. If your fav CD didn't make the cut, perhaps it made it onto the dean's list.
posted by boost ventilator at 7:53 PM PST - 28 comments

Could this be true? I've done all I know to do to see if it's a bogus claim, and I may be really naive, but... it is interesting. I'm curious to see if any of my fellow MeFi-ers can shed some light on it. It's supposedly an email from someone named Laurie who writes for Newsday and it expresses her impressions of the World Economic Forum quite candidly. Could it be real or am I a sucker?
posted by sparky at 7:42 PM PST - 154 comments

BAM! The Microwave Anisotropy Probe's long-awaited map of the afterglow of the big bang was released today, and all of a sudden, most of the uncertainty in the concordance model of cosmology has disappeared. We now know, to within 1%, that the universe is 13.7 billion years old. We now know that Hubble constant is 71, plus or minus 4. And though the results agreed stunningly well with the weird picture that cosmologists have about the nature of the cosmos, there was one surprise -- the first stars were born way before expected. Great day for science, and a likely future Nobel.
posted by ptermit at 4:30 PM PST - 25 comments

Pencil Carving For Experts. A mere four months after I posted this, I ran across this latest site of pencil carving wizardry, this time from Japan. Be sure to check out the gallery. The bar has been raised.
posted by jonson at 3:49 PM PST - 25 comments

Ted Rall says that college loans are killing America. I'm inclined to agree. At just $14,736, I'm on the lighter-side of college loan debt, but being a single father, I have a hard time making a dent. Ted makes some salient points about young adults who are struggling to make money in a recession. They don't work for the Peace Corps, they don't volunteer, etc. Even China criticizes America on our insistence that students endebt themselves to corporations just for education.(via fark)
posted by taumeson at 3:07 PM PST - 92 comments

The TV Guardian is a "cuss buster," removing all profanity from recordings that are shown on your TV. Finally, something to make my movies and TV more wholesome than Mary Lou Retton (you know your career as a gymnast is in the shitter can, when you're hawking these kinds of products).
posted by mathowie at 1:28 PM PST - 63 comments

Yesterday, the Province of Alberta launched an adoption web site for its foster care children. Detailed and often heartbreaking profiles of each child are available, including their background and behavioural problems (many, for example, suffer from fetal alcohol effect). But critics complain that too much information about the children is being made available, and that the site is reducing the children to the level of commodities. (Not the first adoption web site, but it's a first for a Canadian province, I think.)
posted by mcwetboy at 1:14 PM PST - 14 comments

This book was discussed last week, but in all the fuss about serial killers, we may have missed the extraordinary setting of the book: The 1893 World's Fair. The white city had some of the most beautiful architecture Chicago has ever seen, some of which still survives today. Of course, there are better remembered world's fairs, but the Chicago fair of 1893 is where the ferris wheel was invented, the pledge of allegiance was popularized, and PBR made its national debut.
posted by sodalinda at 12:57 PM PST - 17 comments

US government suggest that all homes should have a disaster kit, in case of terrorist attack.
posted by Beholder at 12:48 PM PST - 58 comments

Saturday's anti-war protest in NYC , planned by United for Peace & Justice and to be held along First Avenue in the area of the UN, has been denied a parade permit by the city, who offered a permit for a stationery demonstration instead, to take place several blocks away from the UN. This decision has been backed by US District Court Judge Barbara Jones, citing concern for "Homeland Security" and the importance of defending the UN against possible terror attacks.
posted by sarelicar at 12:28 PM PST - 57 comments

Path of a Pipeline: Oil, Empire, and Influence in the New Eurasia While so many of us talk about Iraq and war in terms of oil, it might prove useful to note what is going on close by. Not mentioned, however, in the article is the guess that China will have stupendous energy needs in the next decade, and what is taking place here will have an impact on their needs.
posted by Postroad at 11:23 AM PST - 2 comments

The 2003 International Snow Sculpture championships occured last week, with once again a Canadian team taking top honors. Unfortunately due to unseasonably warm weather this year's competition doesn't seem to be as impressive as the 2002 event. Of course, none of them come close to the undisputed master of snow art, Calvin.
posted by Stan Chin at 11:08 AM PST - 8 comments

Brain fingerprinting seems to have nothing to do with fingerprinting, but it's still ominous, a step toward a lot of sci-fi dystopias. Don't worry, they'll only use this against criminals and terrorists *cough*
posted by soyjoy at 11:06 AM PST - 10 comments

Songs Inspired by Literature. (found via quix's livejournal) A project to document songs inspired by a wide variety of literature, both modern and classic. Some were obvious or I already knew about (Iron Maiden's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, for one), but others were quite interesting.
posted by rich at 10:39 AM PST - 36 comments

Art meets science - a fascinating site linking art, maths, physics, astronomy and.... the London Underground!
posted by edh at 10:22 AM PST - 6 comments

It's A Dirty Post But Someone's Gotta Do It: The 2003 Razzie and Oscar nominations have been announced and all bets are on (though I couldn't find any online odds). Meanwhile, nominee Meryl Streep recently denounced the Academy Awards process as a "political campaign". Be that as it may, are they still fun to follow and predict?
posted by MiguelCardoso at 10:02 AM PST - 48 comments

This is odd It aint friday but it is freaky. Anyone know how this thing works?
posted by H. Roark at 9:20 AM PST - 22 comments

Hip-hop turntablism at Berklee College of Music? I think it's a great idea, although I'm not sure that this is really what their typical student is looking for. Though apparently the book is already quite popular.
posted by soplerfo at 8:43 AM PST - 87 comments

"Bastarda"! What is it? Well, silly, it's a style of Gothic script, of course, used chiefly in the 14th and 15th centuries and so-called because it combines characteristics of the Gothic cursive style with the more formal "textura". Why do I know this? Because I've been surfing the mighty-wonderful Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus. More...
posted by taz at 7:23 AM PST - 9 comments

Fido, Spot or Rover are mere nicknames for show dogs. This site explains the long show dog names, most popular names, and CNN's Jeanne Moos reports.
posted by Frank Grimes at 7:13 AM PST - 9 comments

You love it. Big fan of DARPA's Initiative on Countering Terrorism? Pick up a Total Information Awareness thong or lunchbox - but, you already knew that.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 6:47 AM PST - 10 comments

Is forcing a prisoner on death row to take antipsychotic medication to make him sane enough to execute cruel and unusual punishment? (NYT link) A federal appeals court ruled that officials in Arkansas can force a prisoner on death row to take antipsychotic medication to make him sane enough to execute. The problem is that the American Medical Association's ethical guidelines prohibits precisely that. To make the case more surreal, a representative of the Arkansas attorney general's office who argued for the state later said: "The ethical decisions involving doctors are difficult ones, but they are not ones for the courts". Does this mean that COs -Correction Officers- are to figure out for themselves which medication to administer? Do they also call the shots when deciding if the "waiting" patient is sane enough???
posted by magullo at 6:24 AM PST - 58 comments

"Interested in meeting my brother Jon, ladies? Due to the expected high demand, I will be forced to prescreen all e-mails received. Please send a nude photo of yourself, and a short explanation of why you think you would be a good match for my brother Jon, to me." A really swell brother wants a really swell girl to marry his brother Jon.
posted by iconomy at 5:05 AM PST - 22 comments

Photobloggies ~ vote for the best photoblogs on the web.
posted by crunchland at 2:40 AM PST - 15 comments

Is the currency that oil is denominated in the real reason for the Iraq War? "The Federal Reserve's greatest nightmare is that OPEC will switch its international transactions from a dollar standard to a euro standard. Iraq actually made this switch in Nov. 2000 (when the euro was worth around 80 cents), and has actually made off like a bandit considering the dollar's steady depreciation against the euro. (Note: the dollar declined 17% against the euro in 2002.)"
posted by thedailygrowl at 1:12 AM PST - 35 comments

RIP Mr Perfect Former WWE star "Mr Perfect" Curt Hennig was found dead yesterday at the age of 44, joining a long list of professional wrestlers to die at an unnaturally young age. It's no secret to participants and fans of the pro-wrestling industry that its performers live unusually stressful lives. With working schedules commonly encompassing upwards of 300 shows a year, their bodies take a constant beating that often leads to alcohol and painkiller dependency. Furthermore, despite the high-profile scandal of the mid-90s that eventually saw Vince McMahon acquitted of trafficking steroids to his employees, the abuse of performance-enhancing chemicals continues to be the rule rather than exception, driven by the endless quest for bigger and freakier physical size and proportions to wow audiences.
posted by plenty at 7:30 PM PST - 23 comments

As its old home lies dormant, John Sakamoto'sAnti-Hit List continues on in the pages of Toronto's Eye Weekly. Where else could you hear about The Flaming Lips covering Kylie, Ween singing for about Pizza Hut or quite possibly the best song title in ages.
posted by boost ventilator at 6:56 PM PST - 9 comments

Huge surprise: The Doors suck without Jim Morrison. "Whatever you might think of Robbie Krieger and Ray Manzarek, just don't call them "The Doors." link and title via jasonbuckley.com
posted by GriffX at 6:51 PM PST - 25 comments

Calling the Mefi decoding police: What the hell is this all about? [may be NSFW]
posted by Carlos Quevedo at 5:52 PM PST - 57 comments

Damn the torpedoes! The Australian Battle Group is a R/C model warship combat club, with emphasis on combat. Great care and devotion is given to design and historical accuracy, and then they shoot holes in each other with working cannon.
posted by steef at 4:34 PM PST - 13 comments

Just how plausable is time travel? Could you go back in time and kill your own grandfather?. Would you want to? Time travel is a popular subject for films, but do the writers work out exactly what is happening? Current opinion seems to be that time travel is only possible to the future, and is only one way, by travelling at near light speed. However despite this, time machines seem to already be on sale.
posted by Orange Goblin at 4:09 PM PST - 53 comments

An enduring fad in Finland. For a few years now, musicians in Finland have coopted Humppa, traditional polka-style music, and given it a punk sensibility. Eläkeläiset, the focus of the above link, are the most popular Humppa band. The most fun for folks who don't speak Finnish (like me) are covers of songs with which we're familiar like "Viva Las Vegas" ("Humppaleka") and "London Calling" ("Vanhamiljonäärihumppa"). Even after the novelty wears off, Finnish is oddly beautiful even when it's shouted over an accordion. There are plenty of samples for download on the site.
posted by Mayor Curley at 4:08 PM PST - 13 comments

Early Happy Valentine's wishes from the Bush Administration; warm wishes in these troubled times.
posted by xmutex at 1:57 PM PST - 24 comments

Palestine as metaphor. Is "linkage" of the Palestine/Israel situation to a wider peace in the Middle East valid? Some say yes, some say no. But it seems clear that most (except the Palestinians and Israelis themselves) view the situation more as a metaphor for wider Arab/Western relations rather than as a conflict between two peoples. I approach this post with fear and trembling.
posted by mrmanley at 10:28 AM PST - 18 comments

Seats...On the Green Monster? It seems that the Boston Red Sox have finalized the plan to make changes to one of Major League Baseball's most famous curiosities, the Green Monster - if not *the* most famous, as this article suggests. The stadium has the lowest amount of available seating, and is definitely, in the realm of the other stadiums in major markets, out of date. But it has a classic sort of feel to it. Here are some of the proposed plans for this and other changes to the stadium. I can't wait to see if someone falls off the back of the 'Monster trying to catch a homerun ball.
posted by djspicerack at 10:23 AM PST - 21 comments

Brainwashed? Moi? Does this make you uncomfortable too? Imagine it was The Wall Street Journal's or The Daily Telegraph's logo stamped on your forehead instead of The Guardian's. Or all three. We are what we read, but perhaps wide reading is a thing of the past. Beneath the po-mo jokiness, crude branding seems to have reached the normally label-resistant Left. This is particularly true in the case of The Guardian, the indispensable journal of reference for British students and teachers. How many of us nowadays make a point of reading at least two politically divergent newspapers?
posted by MiguelCardoso at 9:42 AM PST - 57 comments

Dude, You're Under Arrest Ben "Dell Dude" Curtis, was arrested in New York last night on charges of criminal possession of marijuana. Thanks to The Smoking Gun we now have something to make us laugh on a Monday.
posted by mkelley at 9:40 AM PST - 32 comments

Celebrity Caricature in America. The website of a 1998 exhibition at the (US) National Portrait Gallery. Via the National Portrait Gallery's online exhibitions, where there are even more fine things.
posted by plep at 8:36 AM PST - 6 comments

Oklahoma's state senator has made a prolific move for all of humanity He wants to require Oklahoma barbacue restaurants to offer napkins. Yes, seriously.

No confirmation if he was paid off by the napkin lobby.
posted by RobbieFal at 8:16 AM PST - 23 comments

The King of Stonehenge found in a 4,000-year-old grave near Stonehenge may have been from Switzerland and involved in its construction. It is the richest Bronze Age burial found in Britain "off the scale". ...it is fascinating to think that someone from abroad – probably modern day Switzerland – could well have played an important part in the construction of Britain’s most famous archaeological site.”
posted by stbalbach at 7:53 AM PST - 16 comments

The Cricket World Cup is turning into a political mess as England boycott Zimbabwe and New Zealand's players refuse to play in Kenya. Meanwhile, Cricket legend, and Pakistani politician, Imran Khan wonders if UK involvement in a war on Iraq should lead to a sporting boycott of England. We've had sporting sanctions on South Africa, Olympic boycotts in 1980 and 1984 - should we ever mix politics and sport?
posted by brettski at 7:25 AM PST - 14 comments

Digital Needle is a virtual gramophone open source program that converts scanned--yes, scanned--vinyl records into audio.
posted by brittney at 12:24 AM PST - 16 comments

These two blogs were created by the "peers" of gay, lesbian, bi, and straight kids in Kentucky who have been struggling for their right to a safe space.

They had a sponsor, Kaye King, who is an English teacher and a certified counselor. They did research and learned that there were 1,200 such clubs nationally. Tyler McClelland, a senior, says they just wanted a supportive group, where no one whispered "queer" behind their backs.

Bill O'Reilly has called the ACLU terrorists for taking on the case, which is currently in federal court.
posted by djacobs at 9:11 PM PST - 47 comments

On top of being a teenager, on top of surviving cancer, on top of losing a leg to that cancer, 13-year-old Lacey Henderson, formerly of East Denver's Hill Middle School, had to suffer death threats and epithets because of her condition. This is just sick.
posted by donkeyschlong at 7:38 PM PST - 55 comments

Learn and compare your MP3 listening habits (via Waxy)
posted by oissubke at 6:33 PM PST - 35 comments

bzzzpeek - a fun site with kids from around the world imitating animals and vehicles in an exercise of onomatopoeia. Similar to a post last year, this version adds sounds from native speakers and some cute visuals, making for a neat toy. MeFi moms & dads take note - submissions from kids age 2 to 7 are invited. flash and sound alert!
posted by madamjujujive at 3:19 PM PST - 15 comments

Dell plans to stop offering floppy drives as standard equipment in its high-end Dimension 8250 series. Based on consumer response, that move may signal the end of the floppy. Remember when this was a bold move for Apple? Will the PC world accept the demise of sneaker-net?
posted by mr_crash_davis at 12:11 PM PST - 63 comments

Playing Doctors And Nurses Often Requires Loving Patients. Not to mention a high level of kitsch-resistance. Here's a delightful collection of nurse-obsessed penny-dreadfuls from the engaging Tiny Pinneapple weblog, complete with covers and zippy, erotocally charged made-to-order blurbs: "It was fortunate that Portugal had always held a strong attraction for Nigel Baxter, for otherwise she might not have agreed to her uncle Evan's request that she give up her vacation plans in order to take on a case there. Evan Baxter was one of David Wycherly's doctors, and since Mr. Wycherly had suffered a leg fracture while vacationing at his home in Estoril, Dr. Baxter felt that Nigel could care for him and at the same time fulfill her wish to see Portugal."
posted by MiguelCardoso at 9:25 AM PST - 5 comments

Today marks the first time in 84 years that citizens of Pennsylvania are allowed to buy alcohol on a Sunday. Of course, it's only at state-approved stores, and only in selected suburbs.
posted by mathowie at 8:32 AM PST - 74 comments

What Cost Life? An article that argues that the board of inquiry into the space shuttle's disaster consists mostly of members of the Industrial/Military comples rather than science people to study a science failure. Sort of like setting up a self-study to see why your organization is not doing well. You sure are not going to get approvalfrom the top people if you find them to be at fault. Whatever happened to Truman's famous "the buck stops here." We have kept in place the heads of CIA and NSA and FBI after 9/11, thus not providing much reassurance that there would be important changes to prevent further debacles of the type that took place.
posted by Postroad at 8:26 AM PST - 12 comments

Chasmosaurus, Giant Stag and Dire Wolf, Diatryma, Albertosaurus and an early Portuguese blogger--allow me to get a little Mesozoic, Creataceous and Pleistocene upon your ass with this cool archive of vintage Czechoslovakian prehistoric art: I found 11 pages of thumbnails for 258 large scan jpegs of Znedek Burian's work on the websites of the Petrs Hejna of Prague, the Czech Republic. Znedek Burian, as you will remember from my previous Vintage Dinosaur Art Archives thread, was state of the art in the 1950s. 258 scans of Znedek Burian is find enough to merit a post--But Wait! There's More! → → →
posted by y2karl at 1:39 AM PST - 13 comments

Live CDs, immediately after the concert. Many times after I've seen a great show, I've wished I could have a recording of the evening. Now, using CD Burners hooked up to the sound boards, ClearChannel is beta testing a program that would make soundboard quality concert CD's available to audience members immediately after a show ended. I'm torn; it's a great idea, but it's ClearChannel... I want to like it... but I want to hate it, too...
posted by jonson at 11:33 PM PST - 25 comments

You take a toy car, and hold it in such a way so that it looks like it's a real car parked between other real cars, or driving in traffic with real cars. Then you take a picture of it. That's the sublimely simple concept of Parking Spots.
posted by iconomy at 7:50 PM PST - 28 comments

My hero is... found in a series of essays. Maybe we can learn from the lives of each other's heroes. Somewhere is a mention of yours. Where? (Comic and game characters, gyros and other sandwiches need not apply.)
posted by ?! at 6:58 PM PST - 7 comments

"My child is safer at an organized cockfight than she is at a Lobo basketball game" was one of the comments overheard as New Mexico decided to be one of the two states to allow cockfighting. Reasons to keep cockfighting: Watching the bloody sport causes less emotional stress on children than a college basketball game and It's "part of the state's hispanic culture"
Obviously, the opposition to this mounts, but with Oklahoma and Oregon unable to send the roosters to pasture, is Cockfighting destined to remain on the fringes of America?
posted by RobbieFal at 3:55 PM PST - 27 comments

Cells obtained from the well-preserved legs of a mammoth found last summer in Russia's far-northern Yakutia region are "conditionally alive" and could provide the DNA needed to resurrect the long-extinct tuskers.
posted by stbalbach at 2:41 PM PST - 36 comments

The principality of Liechtenstein has thought of an innovative way of rasing tourism revenue: Rent the whole country! Liechtenstein, established by the Holy Roman Empire in 1719 and sovereign since 1806, is among the smallest nations on the planet. It boasts a population around 33,000 living in a nation around 0.9 times the size of Washington DC. Check out the Liechtensteinian homepage. (in German)
posted by elwoodwiles at 2:20 PM PST - 11 comments

Which country poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003? Isn't Time Magazine typically read by real conservative types? I took the informal survey, with about 348,000 other respondents and was surprised by the percentages.
posted by giantkicks at 10:33 AM PST - 48 comments

John Higgins - Mayor of Amherst and famous race car-driving dingo expert - was born and grew up in Scotland. His online shop sells all kinds of Scottish clothing. As a self-taught artist in drawing and watercoloring, John Higgins illustrated the children's book "Handsome Me." Puppeteer. Linux fanatic. Admitted crier. Known as the "Wizard of Wishaw," in Hong Kong they worship him as a god, but the only thing he ever wanted to be in life was a chef. Send a message to John Higgins. He recently quit his job and stays at home all day playing the sitar. His neighbors are concerned. He may just be the most sarcastic man on Earth, having turned himself in after viewing a marijuana = terrorism commercial.
posted by son_of_minya at 9:55 AM PST - 11 comments

White Stripes capture their 'Elephant'? World famous radio DJ John Peel has been told to stop playing songs from the new White Stripes album, 'Elephant'. Apparently, he was 'interfering with the global marketing strategy by continuing to play the record'. A scheme which involves giving people who aren't fans of the band copies of the album five months before it comes out. The result? It's on Kazaa already, and DJs who love the band can't play the record. There's also some mp3s ( <- note that a link to one there) of Peel talking about the ban.
posted by tapeguy at 8:33 AM PST - 23 comments

Some interesting Q & A with Roger Ebert in the National Post regarding commercials in movie theatres. We assume that the only sure fire way to get your message across would be to walk out and demand your money back, but a theatre manager is quoted as saying Everything else is secondary to making sure all commercials are running -- including customer complaints. Yes, but for how long? And why does it seem that so few people are annoyed by this?
posted by quietfish at 6:36 AM PST - 96 comments

Now that we can Create a Hit Single in less than 2 minutes thanks to Microsoft, more & more people start worrying about music and its destiny. In UK, the 23 years old (and Xtina fan, 'I can't wait till she's number one' he says) Wes Butters takes over the great Radio 1 institution 'the Chart show'. (the guardian article) Can this mean the end of quality music shows? (Nah... Just a beginning downfall.)
posted by Sijeka at 5:57 AM PST - 17 comments

The Modern Antiquarian. Quirky, funny and joyous guide to the folklore and folkloric sites of Britain. There is a weblog too - read about Carmarthenshire standing stones or adventures in Cornwall.
posted by plep at 5:34 AM PST - 4 comments

John Hurt: Although it was not John (wrong sex anyway) who through a gentle voice and pleasant demeanor (yet he had this about him too) served as my primary impetus to play the guitar, it was nevertheless he, and others who played like him - but mainly he who provided me with my first technical model (emotional model to some extent also) for playing the guitar. He was the first I heard who played in the three-finger, non-choking, "picking" style, and he was one of the best. He was in his quiet way, a very great man, and I deeply mourn our loss of him.          John Fahey

                                Mississippi John Hurt

"I just make it sound like I think it ought to"                              (more →)
posted by y2karl at 1:15 AM PST - 41 comments

The Mother of All Maritime Links. Feeling a little landlocked? From "Pirates" (over twenty links) to "Weather & Tides," from plain old "History" to "Music" and beyond, this site is one of the more comprehensive available.
posted by datawrangler at 7:38 PM PST - 5 comments

Pseudonyms. Bibliography of pseudonym dictionaries. Noms de guerre, noms de plume.. Authors with ten or more pseudonyms. Noms de guerre of Palestinian leaders. Declarations of pseudonyms in the US Catalog of Copyright Entries (Renewals). The Brontë Pseudonyms. [Topic suggested by La Grande Rousse].
posted by Mo Nickels at 6:12 PM PST - 11 comments

Phantom Cosmonauts On November 28, 1960, a morse code transmission reading "SOS to the whole world" from an orbiting spaceship was picked up by the Judica-Cordiglia brothers with their home-made radio tracking station in San Maurizio Canavese, Italy. Sometime between February 2-4, they picked up telemetry of a dying cosmonauts heartbeat and breathing. Yuri Gagarin, the universally acknowledged first man in space, did not make his flight until April 12, 1961. These brothers claimed that they intercepted radio transmissions of other secret flights as well. Were there secret Soviet spaceflights that ended in the death of Cosmonauts? Most tend to disagree, and offer an excellent debunking. I started reading about this several weeks before the Columbia, but it now has a new poignancy. I agree that it is exceedingly unlikely that these alleged flights took, but the claims of these brothers, mingled with various other rumor and various Soviet urban legends, (along with the fact of Russian/Soviet general secrecy about most everything,) create an alternate history that is exceedingly disturbing.
posted by Snyder at 5:12 PM PST - 18 comments

The first cracks in the foundations of Colin Powell's "Case for War" speech are beginning to be uncovered by a Cambridge professor. Some of the information taken from an "up to date" British intelligence dossier was apparently plagiarized and dramatically spun from a California graduate student's paper, describing the Iraqi regime during the 1990s. Will it make any difference in U.S. public opinion if the Powell speech is debunked? Will the widening gap between U.S. and global opinion further weaken the UN?
posted by zekinskia at 4:35 PM PST - 40 comments

If you thought the Patriot Act was bad... It looks like it's going to get worse. Center for Public Integrity has the full text (pdf) for the "Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003". Lowlights include a "DNA database on 'suspected terrorists'" as well as pretrial detention for "suspected terrorists" without bail. There's more. (via The Scoop)
posted by owillis at 3:37 PM PST - 45 comments

The play's the thing... From a flyer at a demonstration, earlier today: On March 3, 2003. Groups all over the world will perform readings of Aristophanes' anti-war play Lysistrata to show Bush and the world that war is not the only option. The list of performances is quite impressive. Pro-peace? Get involved!
posted by condour75 at 3:35 PM PST - 22 comments

Come and Be Black for Me. A gentle but pointed personal essay on Black History month. "I am glad February is almost over. It's during this month that everyone is looking for me - or rather, anyone who can come and be black for them."
posted by RJ Reynolds at 2:55 PM PST - 5 comments

I just discovered the answer to a question I asked here. Apparently, the police can get a DNA sample from a suspect without the suspect's knowledge or consent. The police probably had a warrant, but the article doesn't say.
posted by titboy at 2:39 PM PST - 7 comments

Björk's music videos (some NSFW) are among the best. Her directors are the cream of the industry, and draw affecting ideas from her music. Here's the latest one, and here's my favorite.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 1:37 PM PST - 47 comments

now available! As someone who loved T1 & T2 this looks like mostly a rehash of those two. What's your take?
posted by milnak at 1:17 PM PST - 31 comments

Hey you, XYZ! Look at your zipper -- was it made by Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha, or YKK? Probably. With seven million zippers produced every day at YKK America's National Manufacturing Center in Macon, Georgia, alone, it's no wonder that the zipper on whatever you're wearing right now is a YKK...or is it?
[a bit more inside]
posted by DakotaPaul at 1:07 PM PST - 28 comments

The decadence of American democracy is the subject of Daniel Ellsberg’s memoir. In 1971, as a disillusioned Pentagon staffer, he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. As usual for London Review of Books, it’s a long-ish essay but para 17 alone is a breathtaking confession of top brass arrogance. Link to the second half of essay at foot of page or here.
posted by skellum at 12:31 PM PST - 12 comments

Wine, Chicago, and Bob. Sounds like a dangerous combination, but fortunately the GUI Gallery keeps 'em separated for your safety. Via my good friend wysinger.com
posted by WolfDaddy at 12:29 PM PST - 3 comments

The US Department of Education - Or Not?
A link or two for those who don't own a television. Or a Michael Jackson CD.
Reaction to federal initiatives like No Child Left Behind (which is directed purely at education, and has been discussed here before ) and Head Start (which has a social component, and has not (I think)) is starting to filter in.
Should the Federal Government worry about disparities in educational expenditures? Should it worry about how services are delivered?
posted by 314/ at 12:13 PM PST - 4 comments

heather champ is looking to get moby to submit a shot himself to the mirror project by her fortieth birthday. now moby's taken shots of himself in several reflective surfaces before and he even keeps a weblog - so he's pretty much the mirror project's target audience. as of today, there's only eighty.one days left for heather's dream to become a reality. spread the word and make one gal's dream a reality.
posted by boogah at 11:38 AM PST - 34 comments

Not your average athlete He walked away from pro football glory to serve his nation, and he's loving every minute of it.
posted by oissubke at 11:36 AM PST - 49 comments

In an article called "The Sociobiological Conceit", Gene Callahan says darwinism is logically flawed and inherently self-contradictory: "if moral ideas are simply an 'illusion' fostered on us by our genes then so are all of our other ideas – including the ideas of sociobiology!". Callahan, fyi, belongs to the ultra-libertarian circles of the Mises Institute and LewRockwell. Would any of the evolutionists among us care to politely refute him?
posted by 111 at 11:16 AM PST - 20 comments

Soda Jerks Flash fun for a Friday afternoon. Couple of funny cartoons, the most recent a spoof of Joe Millionaire.
posted by billman at 11:16 AM PST - 3 comments

the message board messageboard
(friday amusement - all text but maybe nsfw if they can read your screen)
a sock-puppet show of numerous odd stories. witness harold tucker's hallucinations in the cornfield, olivia's search for sterling bridgeport, and give sympathy to wally simmons tragedy with internet procured sperm pills or tyler grubb's suicidal bout with alcohol. lots of other strange sad and hilarious stuff there too. a fine lampoon on truth or identity as it's represented in forums or metafilter itself ...i mean, we're all real people right?
posted by Peter H at 10:33 AM PST - 3 comments

"We decided not to run it..."
In the surreal world that is today's media, Colin Powell has no opposition. None. There is no alternative view. None. In this Kafkaesque place, Reps. DeFazio and Paul didn't conduct a press conference yesterday. Nor did they introduce legislation that counters George Bush and Colin Powell's world view...a world view, mind you, that the world doesn't share.

Does corporate media serve the interests of the people and democracy or the elites and profit? Did you hear about this bill? Do you think this is an important story that deserved media coverage?
posted by nofundy at 10:09 AM PST - 45 comments

Psychotherapy and an Arrow Key Workout Armwrestle with Sigmund Freud, the greatest "it's all related to sex and your childhood" minds ever to walk the earth. Friday Flash.
posted by gramcracker at 9:37 AM PST - 5 comments

Bush will raise the national terror threat level today from yellow to orange (CNN). This means little to us here in NYC where we've already been at orange. (At least that's what I've heard, although orange looks like a brownish color on my TV screen and a sort of muddy green on my computer monitor.) What, if anything, will your town, city, state, company, family do in response to this heightened threat level?
posted by jellybuzz at 8:54 AM PST - 58 comments

Baby, It's Cold Outside: Perhaps it's unethical - well, it's certainly incestuous - to draw your attention to one of madamjujujive's great links on quonsar's brilliant Meepzorp blog ("Where, thank the Lord, it is always Friday" - Christian Science Monitor, 18.12.76). But what about linking two? Bouncing Baby and Gulp are two great Flash pieces that address the question of nurture; motherhood; the oral nature of pleasure; the ontology of fuzzy gratification; the metaphysics of the transition from womb to nipple and other meretricious bullshit justifications for fun.
posted by Carlos Quevedo at 8:52 AM PST - 3 comments

Martian Law: From the Cato Institute comes this paper exploring the best choices for law on the red planet when colonization occurs.

Mars is a case of what political theorists would call a perfect state of nature. No one lives on Mars. No one currently has legal title to any part of Mars. On what basis then can Mars be exploited by individuals or consortia?

Of course, Kim Stanley Robinson has already explored this subject in his ground-breaking Martian trilogy.
posted by jdroth at 8:48 AM PST - 10 comments

Michael feels betrayed and I'm kind of with him on this one. I thought I would just check in on the Jackson special for a few minutes, but I stuck around, mainly because I literally could not believe what I was seeing. What I was waiting for never actually happened: some concession that what was being exploited was not so much a celebrity as someone who is mentally ill. The interviewer's questions (often repeated emphatically for shock value) and Barbara Walters' snarky commercial-break comments seemed a bit on the cruel side when discussing someone who has so little grounding in reality. I can understand the concern about children, Jackson's and others; there is clearly a cycle of abuse (though clearly unintended on Jackson's part), and it is something legal authorities should address; however, I would question opening those issues up on television and trying to assign Jackson motives he is clearly not mature enough, sexually or otherwise, to comprehend, not to mention their own exploitation of the children for ratings.
posted by troybob at 8:42 AM PST - 67 comments

A Vanity Fair advice writer thinks you shouldn't learn Spanish. Unless of course you want to talk to the Help. Got word of this in one of those darn petition emails this morning...anyone have a copy available to confirm this? Maybe they thought Latinos wouldn't read this issue? except...Oh yeah, Salma Hayek is on the cover.
posted by th3ph17 at 8:22 AM PST - 38 comments

Wembley Stadium - Arguably the most famous sports ground in the world, host of the 1966 World Cup final and the 1948 Olympics is being rebuilt. Today the famous twin towers go under the wrecking ball. You can see it all on webcam. Sad end to one of our sporting treasures.
posted by brettski at 8:00 AM PST - 11 comments

What's wrong with these pictures? I thought I knew at least a little bit about art until I took this quiz. That, plus the blurb about spider-goats (eew!) makes me think that maybe decaf isn't strong enough to kick-start my brain this Friday morning.
posted by Oriole Adams at 5:48 AM PST - 22 comments

Bush orders guidelines for cyber-war Is it my old age that makes me wonder what else might be in this secret directive as regards computers and the Net? "First set of rules for attacking enemy computers studied." Perhaps you support the president or you are the enemy (recall: you are with us or against us)....
posted by Postroad at 5:27 AM PST - 7 comments

Gifts & Blessings. The textile arts of Madagascar.
posted by plep at 5:15 AM PST - 10 comments

Stones in My Pathway - in the tradition of Alan Lomax, Bill Steber is a photojournalist who is documenting Mississippi blues culture. His work includes an array of photos, music clips and interviews capturing the environment that spawned the music, spanning "juke joints, cotton farming, sacred music, rural church services, river baptisms, folk religion and superstition, life on Parchman penitentiary, hill country African fife and drum music, and diverse regional blues styles." A beautiful site and jewel of a find for blues buffs. via Portage
posted by madamjujujive at 5:09 AM PST - 15 comments

Cosmic bolt probed in shuttle disaster - Scientists poring over 'infrasonic' sound waves Federal scientists are looking for evidence that a bolt of electricity in the upper atmosphere might have doomed the space shuttle Columbia as it streaked over California, The Chronicle has learned.
posted by y2karl at 12:32 AM PST - 29 comments

The Powell is sent in order to carry the water: I find Japanese "Engrish" websites unfunny and stupidly patronizing but this blog is potential poetry - Surrealist poetry. Whether it was machine-translated or drafted using Breton's, Ionesco's or Burroughs' techniques, it's splendidly memorable: Rather than "I am sad" we need "mush truth". All it needs is some artful, e.e.cummings-like arranging on the page to be transformed into art. [Via Linkfilter].
posted by MiguelCardoso at 10:55 PM PST - 25 comments

N.C. Congressman OK with the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII What is even scarier is this man is the head of a Homeland Security subcommittee. This is without question as repelling, hurtful and unfit to come out of US leader as Trent Lott's comments but somehow I do not believe this will get as much press nor condemnation. It is really chilling to wonder how many others on the committees and the Bush administration hold this or similar attitudes. It makes you wonder how far would they go in the name of Homeland Security if they thought they could get away with it.
posted by GreenDragon at 9:58 PM PST - 28 comments

Handy tips for those new to the bomb threat call in line. This "FAQ" from the LAPD's website is actually a checklist of things novice police phone operators are instructed to ask anyone calling in to leave a bomb threat. Useful information being collected includes tone of caller's voice (raspy? pleasant?), background noise (party atmosphere?) and important personal data about the soon to be bomber (what is your name? what is your address?). Sleep soundly, Los Angeles, your days of random explosions are a thing of the past.
posted by jonson at 9:35 PM PST - 11 comments

Armed Services Editions. Printed in the millions, publishing incredibly diverse authors and subjects, now semivaluable. What (besides this tiny project) are our servicemen reading today? This is the closest thing I can find, and it’s linkless and referenceless.
posted by interrobang at 9:30 PM PST - 6 comments

Albumen photographs: history, science, preservation and gallery.
posted by hama7 at 9:25 PM PST - 11 comments

Iraq - Its infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation (pdf) is Downing Street's recently released intelligence dossier regarding Iraq, mentioned during Colin Powell's UN speech. Fair enough maybe, but they copied it pretty much wholesale from here (authored by a postgraduate student from California), without even as much as a thank you. More info here (channel4.com) and here (bbc.co.uk).
posted by toby\flat2 at 8:56 PM PST - 17 comments

Our stalwart ally ... Albania? When there is much to be concerned about with America's relations with other nations, it's a relief to see that America and Albania can work together militarily after they spent 45 years aligned against the US. What a difference a few decades could make in foreign relations.
posted by RobbieFal at 8:34 PM PST - 7 comments

A short, creepy yarn, and easily dismissed... "The loss of the Columbia space shuttle is suffused with symbols begging for attention. Columbia is named, in part, after Christopher Columbus and symbolically points to the very discovery of the American nation. Strangely, on the threshold of America's preemptive invasion of Iraq to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction, the shuttle's hold contained the first Israeli astronaut who in 1981 himself participated in a preemptive attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor to eliminate its capacity for developing weapons of mass destruction. An uncanny echo, but certainly not the only one...As we are on the precipice of a war with Iraq, the whole Arab world screams that it is not Iraq but America's relationship with Israel and the Palestinian crisis that is the root cause of all Arab anti-American sentiment and certainly all terrorism. Suddenly the Columbia crashes with an Israeli astronaut over George Bush's home state as debris rains down on "Palestine, Texas."
posted by troutfishing at 7:48 PM PST - 50 comments

Strangely compelling. YELLOWTAIL is an interactive software system for the gestural creation and performance of real-time abstract animation. Yellowtail repeats a user's strokes end-over-end, enabling simultaneous specification of a line's shape and quality of movement. Each line repeats according to its own period, producing an ever-changing and responsive display of lively, worm-like textures. If you like the Java version, you can download the full screen version with sound.
posted by Wet Spot at 7:12 PM PST - 11 comments

I'm a celebrity dammit, why wont you pay attention to what I'm telling you! It's bad enough I have to pay $10 to watch your lousy movie and hear your crappy music, just don't tell me how to think.
posted by beatnik808 at 2:39 PM PST - 66 comments

Peter David, Writer of Stuff (bibliography) appears to have a blog. With a Buffy/Angel commentary as today's post, no less.
posted by Cyrano at 2:17 PM PST - 8 comments

Everybody Hates Us. Michael Spencer notes that evangelical Christians are almost universally disliked. Are there good reasons? "We are loathed, caricatured, avoided and disliked because we often deserve it."
posted by aaronshaf at 2:16 PM PST - 112 comments

Striking, panoramic photo collages of the ruins of U.S. and Canadian concentration camps used to isolate Japanese-Americans during WWII. Masumi Hayashi's rich site also features documents, personal stories and Shockwave interview clips, a discussion board and data on each camp. And, yes, this post was inspired by U.S. Congressman Howard Coble's recent comment.
posted by mediareport at 1:43 PM PST - 34 comments

The Power of Art? This interesting article becomes extremely clever if you think about some of the basic history of "Guernica". Little-known artist Picasso (see '37 for initial ideas, '45 for completed painting) was commissioned to paint it after the horrific slaughters of the Spanish Civil War. “...Picasso's tour de force would become one of this century's most unsettling indictments of war.” (more inside)
posted by valval22 at 12:59 PM PST - 11 comments

A frequent point of opposition to the war on drugs is that of taxation. The argument goes like this: If the prohibition on illegal drugs ended, the government would see a surplus like no other (and pay for treatment, enforcement, etc). The folks in Kansas have a strange hybrid option: keep them illegal, but ask that drug dealers report taxes on their profits. Their FAQ lists the details and the a rate sheet (pdf) is available. Drug dealers not following suit can be busted as tax evaders, in addition to selling drugs. Novel approach or silly idea?
posted by mathowie at 12:53 PM PST - 38 comments

Twiggy, Queen of Mod "As the first teenager to become a supermodel, her impact was instant and international.".
posted by konolia at 12:51 PM PST - 9 comments

Hard time gets harder. New York City has banned smoking in all workplaces, and apparently that includes jails. Do you have the right to smoke in jail? A prison full of convicts all having nicotine withdrawl at the same time can't be a good thing.
posted by quibx at 12:36 PM PST - 25 comments

"In the last 13 years I have kept everything you have sent in close to heart and in safe keeping. I now hope to open these files again and share more of the creations given to us by you, the Dead Heads". The keeper of the Dead Files has put online hundreds of emails and newsletters and exuberantly colored and illustrated envelopes and letters from the fans of the Grateful Dead. There are, as you'd expect, many drawings of skeletons and American Beauty roses, but you certainly don't have to be a fan to appreciate all the handiwork, personality, and creativity that went into these. I like the irregularity of the hand drawn lettering. {via coudal}.
posted by iconomy at 12:21 PM PST - 11 comments

"Feminism" isn't the problem , it's Woman's Super Ego that's the problem. "...there comes a time in every relationship when a woman has to be tender and empathetic. If she can't or won't do that, it doesn't matter if she has the face of Helen of Troy with George Eliot's mind."
posted by vito90 at 10:21 AM PST - 55 comments

Despite the FBI's best efforts, the spy only passed public domain information to North Korea In Graham Greene's hilarious "Our Man in Havana", a salesman-unlikely-turned-spy passes vacuum-cleaner blueprints as plans of a nuclear plant to his superiors at MI6. Turns an American of Korean origin has been doing pretty much the same with North Korea and thus cannot be charged with espionage. One can only hope that the current bullish attitude of North Korea is all based on the info passed by this guy (who, BTW, sold it for cash).
posted by magullo at 10:13 AM PST - 8 comments

Is the U.S. suffocating reform in Iran? "'Despite sporadic verbal concern with the condition of human rights in Iran, the U.S. is protecting and providing clandestine support to the right-wing conservatives in Iran,' says Sayed Ali Asghar Gharavi, a member of the banned but tolerated Iran Freedom Movement (IFM), the country’s leading opposition party. 'The U.S. government in no way favors the coming to power of the reformist groups in Iran and is secretly supporting the religious conservatives.' Government insiders in Iran allege that the deal, first proffered by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, is simple: If the hard-liners quietly support the United States in Iraq, Washington will quietly support them. U.S. State Department officials declined to comment." It seems unlikely that the Bush administration would side with the mullahs, but considering the U.S.'s troubled history with Iranian democracy, it's not inconceivable. Perhaps this is why Michael Ledeen's cries of alarm aren't being heeded.
posted by homunculus at 9:50 AM PST - 25 comments

E-terrorism over-rated. Journalist Brian McWilliams exposes the media whoring of fellow "reporter" Dan Verton and "security intelligence" company mi2g. He shows just how easy it is to fake a "terrorist" organization online and finally gives some exposure to the amount of FUD that gets spread around by some reporters and a lot of comp. sec companies simply to make money. Though I don't think Verton gets it:

"Although the hoax this week taught me a valuable lesson about the nature of information on the Internet, it's less clear that McWilliams' scheme has done anything to advance the understanding of cyberterrorism."

Um...yeah Dan. He showed just how half-assed a job some people do in actually verifying sources and Internet-based information. Kudos to your anti-FUD efforts, Brian.
posted by bkdelong at 9:25 AM PST - 8 comments

"Architecture is the only art that moulds the world directly ... Nobody in the 20th century grasped this more firmly than Speer's patron and employer, Adolf Hitler." Albert Speer was the man Hitler picked to mould his future empire, starting with its capital, Berlin, that would have been rechristened Germania. In an ironic twist of fate, Albert Speer's son, also named Albert Speer and also an architect, is currently in the running to radically rebuilt Beijing.
posted by costas at 8:48 AM PST - 8 comments

In the autumn of 1999 Donald Knuth gave a series of lectures at MIT on God and Computers. You can watch[realplayer] and listen[mp3] to them here (Warning: this is over ten hours of material).
posted by wobh at 7:10 AM PST - 14 comments

"Since Terry has been with us our productivity has gone up 46%" Here's hoping our company doesn't resort to recruiting Mr Tate - otherwise I'll have to remember to fill up the coffee jug. (Windows Media, requires sound)
posted by ralawrence at 6:40 AM PST - 29 comments

In other news, the Washington Post is reporting that The Fairly Odd Parents on Nick is "the next SpongeBob." Film at 11 (no, I mean film at 9 pm on Fridays, 7:30 pm on Saturdays, Sat and Sun at 10 am, and Sundays at 3). I could have told you that.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 5:24 AM PST - 19 comments

Which Breakfast Club character are you? No, it's not another online quiz. It's an article on a project done by a social researcher, asking 900 high school sophomores to choose which Breakfast Club character they were most like. Following up 16 years later, their associations played out to a high degree as they grew older. So which were you, Jock, Princess, Brain, Basket Case or Criminal? Did your self-image in high school have lasting effects on your life?
posted by JParker at 12:09 AM PST - 45 comments

As an update to a difficult earlier thread, "Ripper" or Brandon Vedas has a new memorial site dedicated to "the education and prevention of future tragedies", and is up thanks in part to the work of his brother.
posted by mathowie at 11:21 PM PST - 37 comments

Terry Jones of Monty Python fame attempts to apply the Bush administration policy to his own neighborhood.
posted by thedailygrowl at 9:31 PM PST - 54 comments

First, it is well to remark two things: the first is that love ought to be put more in deeds than in words. The Spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola. . We begin by quieting ourselves. Become aware of God's goodness, the gifts of life and love. Be thankful. Recall that without faith, the eye of love, the human world seems too evil for God to be good, for a good God to exist. There ya go, the bars up and now you cant touch it. Some pictorial help here.a preface here.Sound too obscure for you ?see here for their modern day application.
posted by sgt.serenity at 9:24 PM PST - 15 comments

Tweedledum and Tweedledee: Two great essays from very opposite sides of the barricades, but embodying the same healthy bloody-mindedness: reverent Roger Scruton, English, conservative and monarchist ,on the Right, and irreverent Glen Newey, Scottish, socialist and republican, on the Left. The differences are plain to see. But it's the similarities, I think, that point to the enduring strength of the British political spirit.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 9:08 PM PST - 9 comments

When network technicians think about sex. It isn't pretty. The storage capacity of sperm, the bandwidth (burst capacity) of an orgasms, latency of data transmission, and viable segment length.
posted by srboisvert at 7:16 PM PST - 7 comments

Welcome to the European Railway Picture Gallery. The monthly archive is a nice place to begin.
posted by four panels at 6:16 PM PST - 12 comments

In his 1947 letter to the General Assembly of the United Nations Albert Einstein wrote of 'enhancing the moral authority of the UN' and portrayed the United Nations as a "transitional system toward the final goal, which is the establishment of a supranational authority". Is the United Nations the depository of the moral authority of the international community? Some say no. Is there really such a thing as moral authority or is it one of those intangibles that, as a Supreme Court justice once said about obscenity, we cannot define, but we know it when we see it? Could a "one world government" work and would it really produce "moral authority" ? (More Inside)
posted by Mack Twain at 3:58 PM PST - 42 comments

Well known for speaking the truth about governments and getting pressured for it [7th paragraph from the top], Alain Labrousse recently published his Dictionnaire géopolitique des drogues [Geopolitical Dictionary of Drugs]. I don't think it's been translated in English yet, but all his previous works have, so I'm sure an English version is on the way. His latest book is being well received by everyone who's interested in "open source" information about drugs, particularly how the various national economies profit from them. A recent review [in French], cites one example of twisted international relations concerning drugs [my translation]: Europe speaks no evil about activities in Morocco, the most important source of cannabis in the world, or in Turkey, where scores of laboratories transform afghan opium into heroin, simply because these two countries provide a frontline of resistance to radical Islam. In North America, in Mexico, the United States tolerated for 70 years the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional - PRI), even though its leaders supported, and even chose mexican drug cartels. Geostrategic interests outweigh the most basic needs of the war against drugs.
posted by titboy at 3:45 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity in words of four letters or less
posted by Mwongozi at 2:37 PM PST - 30 comments

Hey, did you see Romenesko today? Now it really is Romenesko. The blog that everybody calls "Romenesko" has just officially changed its name due to a rather silly threat of a lawsuit from MediaNews Group. Poynter president James Naughton explains, "The gist of the law firm's concern seems to be that eliminating the space between the words Media and News might prompt the unsophisticated, raffish crowd who tune in to Poynter Online to think it was Dean Singleton in his pajamas pecking away at the keyboard in Romenesko's Evanston apartment." So, from here on out, it's just plain old "Romenesko."
posted by soyjoy at 2:33 PM PST - 8 comments

Why articulate people make bad colleagues Nick Denton, proprietor of various websites, sometime columnist for Management Today, and supposed intelligent person has come up with this gem in his weblog: "But I've been interviewing software engineers, and find myself prejudiced against those that talk fluently. . . . Either they were born persuasive, and so they've always been able to get away with it; or else they've always broken promises, so they've had to learn how to explain away their failures." For the most part, I think he's wrong, but I can see where he's coming from. Should articulate people be banned from time-sensitive positions?
posted by gkostolny at 2:31 PM PST - 40 comments

Almost unbelievably, the way being charted to revive the economy is to reinflate the bubble When you're on a permanent war footing, it's worth being reminded, stupid, that it's all about the economy. A lengthy piece.
posted by skellum at 2:11 PM PST - 23 comments

kevin mitnick, the famed hacker who was released recently from jail has granted Slashdot an interview in which he debunks many of the myths about him. He provides some insights into the ethics of the journalists that profitted from his case.
posted by Raichle at 1:47 PM PST - 2 comments

Japanese create "invisible" cloak. Well, not really. Technically, just a two sided cloak, the front of which is a projector, and the back of which is a camera. Only works, one would imagine, if you're looking at a person straight on, and even then it would help if you were partially blind, or at the very least, raised in the wilderness & easily fooled by modern technology.
posted by jonson at 1:14 PM PST - 55 comments

The Chuck Hagel voting machine ownership story gets even scarier. In today's Best of the Blogs, Jerry Bowles reveals more bizarre details about the Chuck Hagel/voting machine story, including the fact that the majority ownership stake in the voting machine company that counted Senator Hagel's upset victory in 1996 (and his reelection in 2002) is held by a man long associated with the radical organization Christian Reconstruction, which believes in overturning democracy and replacing it with a Christian theocracy. This is really weird and frightening stuff, if it checks out.
posted by mitsu at 1:14 PM PST - 11 comments

Look and Read offers storylines, songs, video clips and my first introduction to Wordy from this classic BBC School series. As someone who grew up on Sesame Street and Schoolhouse Rock, I found it interesting to see the British equivalent. Plus, it's good campy fun.
posted by snez at 1:10 PM PST - 4 comments

Lana Clarkson, gunned down in Phil Spector's home, was the star of B movies like Barbarian Queen and Barbarian Queen 2, and also made appearances on classic television shows such as the A-Team, Knight Rider, Three's Company and of course, The Love Boat.
posted by car_bomb at 11:39 AM PST - 17 comments

Powell's address to the UN. In a direct, long and rich presentation, Colin Powell has laid the cards on the table, and presented what's likely to be our most explicit case for war. While it's difficult to separate the larger issue of War on Iraq from just this presentation, I'm interested in other takes on Powell's speech. Anything substantially new? Truly irrefutable? Strong enough to justify immediate action? Does this have more heft coming from Powell (considering he's more trusted than Bush on this issue), or is he acting as a mouthpiece? Or, to be succinct, did Colin change anyone's mind? At the very least, he satisfied my need to know more about why our administration is acting so urgently.
posted by kokogiak at 10:44 AM PST - 224 comments

Oxford University is looking to take advantage of distributed computing to find a cure for smallpox. Much like SETI@Home, the Smallpox Protection Project and Oxford's effort to cure cancer rely on individual computer users to download and run screensaver software to crunch numbers in an effort to speed up processing of large amounts of data. How will this kind of initiative impact science in the future? Can we, by volunteering our processors, be part of the quest for a cure?
posted by greengrl at 10:00 AM PST - 19 comments

From the always excellent Sharpeworld comes a true gem: her father's comedy duo's site, Coyle and Sharpe. Harking back to another era (1960's San Francisco), the site features images, articles, and videos, but the hidden audio tracks of man-on-the-street bits are not to be missed. They have all the innocence of Candid Camera, but are quite a bit funnier.
posted by mathowie at 9:52 AM PST - 8 comments

Ashleigh Brilliant's Pot-Shots are sometimes fun, sometimes depressing, but almost always interesting.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:06 AM PST - 5 comments

U.S. admin using future shares of Iraqi oil to build anti-Iraq coalition. Nation building just doesn't get any better than this.
posted by magullo at 7:58 AM PST - 51 comments

The denizens of Fark are having a crisis of conscience after one of their members died in a car accident. There are only a few holdouts against the outpouring of sympathy from the biliously sarcastic community. "Farkers, seriously - where's your irreverence?" asked Labberdasher. "Not one 'he should have gone for a Darwin award' ... ?"
posted by rcade at 5:31 AM PST - 60 comments

"I am fascinated by stories and myths of the double, the doppelganger, and the alchemist's artificial man: the homunculus. According to certain medieval texts, the Jewish golem can only be brought to life during its maker's state of ecstasy. The word ecstasy means literally 'to be beside oneself'." [last link realplayer]
posted by hama7 at 5:13 AM PST - 15 comments

Yugoslavia chapter closed: The Archduke, the Maverick Communist, and the War Criminal. After a storied, and often violent, 20th century, the (nearly) all-encompassing Balkan federation is no more, and what remains may not survive. Even in the shadow of a violent breakup, though, some former republics are moving on, though others remain a concern.

The roots of the region, of course, lie much deeper.
posted by apostasy at 1:27 AM PST - 9 comments

Consumer Power! Not only can you register to join dozens of pending or proposed class action lawsuits, but you can try to convince an attorney to start a new one just for you. A welcome alternative to the Better Business Bureau or a sign of the approaching demise of Western civilization?
posted by boltman at 11:09 PM PST - 1 comment

Drug War Roundup V. "It's the most horrible mistake I've ever made," says a juror who helped convict Ed "Guru of Ganja" Rosenthal of marijuana production. The judge in Ed's case didn't consider him a flight risk, but may have after reading "The Drug War Refugees" (reg. req.), about Americans fleeing to Canada. The entire drug trade is approximately "the size of the Spanish economy and about 8 percent of world trade." And, of course, is responsible for hippo migration to Columbia.
posted by raaka at 10:19 PM PST - 22 comments

The IBM 1403 Printer (1964) playing music. This may change your life.
posted by the fire you left me at 8:19 PM PST - 23 comments

Admired from a distance, the almost mythical Audi A3 may come stateside Toyota and Hyundai have had great success as of late with the much maligned hatchback auto design here in the United States. Even Volkswagen's international best-selling Golf saw a double-digit sales spurt in 2002 in a country that looks down on hatchbacks. Now it appears that Audi North America is looking to bring over the wonderful next generation A3 to our side of the pond. Why has the hatch been so scorned (Chevette?) and would you be interested in one - or, why not?
posted by tgrundke at 6:09 PM PST - 56 comments

"If you want to win the election," he finally said, "just control the machines." "Nebraska has a just-passed law that prohibits government-employee election workers from looking at the ballots, even in a recount. The only machines permitted to count votes in Nebraska, he said, are those made and programmed by the corporation formerly run by Hagel.... When Bev Harris and The Hill's Alexander Bolton pressed the Chief Counsel and Director of the Senate Ethics Committee, the man responsible for ensuring that FEC disclosures are complete, asking him why he'd not questioned [Nebraska Republican Chuck] Hagel's 1995, 1996, and 2001 failures to disclose the details of his ownership in the company that owned the voting machine company when he ran for the Senate, the Director reportedly met with Hagel's office on Friday, January 25, 2003 and Monday, January 27, 2003. After the second meeting, on the afternoon of January 27th, the Director of the Senate Ethics Committee resigned his job. "
The facts, ma'am. Just the facts.
posted by dash_slot- at 5:22 PM PST - 23 comments

CNN Wins Ratings for Shuttle Coverage Despite the absence of chief anchor Aaron Brown, CNN scored a significant ratings victory over rival Fox News Channel on Saturday when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated Reading that immediately reminds me of what I hate about the news media. One can only imagine how they are salivating over the pending Iraq situation.
posted by a3matrix at 4:42 PM PST - 17 comments

Is Fox News Giving "Aid & Comfort" to Saddam? Contributing money to the regime they hate so much - without disclosing it - seems to go against the grain of the flag-waving network. I don't think Barbara Streisand ever contributed any money to Baghdad... (via Electrolite)
posted by owillis at 4:00 PM PST - 41 comments

Ireland to ban smoking in pubs. The room ... spinning ... reality ... falling away....
posted by Pretty_Generic at 2:43 PM PST - 89 comments

Not just selfcentered, but warmongers too. SUV owners are more likely the the general populous to support the war in Iraq (60%). When small SUVs are eliminated, the figure jumps to (80%). Probably not a causal relationship, but interesting none the less.
posted by delmoi at 1:15 PM PST - 36 comments

Are Teachers Overpaid? Tamim Ansary poses and attempts to answer this question in a thoughtful column, full of interesting links to delve deeper into the issue. Bottom line, teachers are overpaid...that is, if you want lower taxes, school funding will be cut and teacher salaries will go down. How does that bumper sticker go again, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" ?
posted by msacheson at 12:59 PM PST - 45 comments

What if Saddam does have these weapons of mass-destruction? Hussein's senior bodyguard has fled to Israel with details of Iraq's secret arsenal. His revelations have supported US President George W. Bush's claim there is enough evidence from UN inspectors to justify going to war.
posted by Macboy at 11:45 AM PST - 48 comments

DJ Borg Carson Daly (nyt link, registration required) hosts a weekly nationwide Clear Channel radio show called "Carson Daly Most Requested". Tastes differ in different markets so the show is tailored to local markets by counting down the top ten most requested songs in each market. How then does Clear Channel then simultaneously broadcast different lists with different between song patter but with the same host? Easy. They've created a Carson Daly voice database and their technicians construct his intros and background by assembling voice snippets. (via ArsTechnica)
posted by TimeFactor at 11:34 AM PST - 21 comments

The two finalists for the WTC site have reportedly been chosen. The Think design and the Daniel Libeskind submission. I just hope its the 'high funded' Think version. (Although I'm also sruprised (in a good way) that it actually made it through ... considering it doesn't replace the missing office space)
posted by MintSauce at 11:22 AM PST - 21 comments

Yesterday's post about Buddy Holly, spurred me to look deeper into the pop charts back when American Pie was in the top 40. I was fairly amazed at the list of songs charting that week. We've got Horse With No Name, Heart of Gold, Mother and Child Reunion with artists like Harry Chapin, Roberta Flack and Nilsson. Sure, there's some pop pabulum, but I was blown away at the litany of performers whose very personal songs, and not very pop themes, were all be charting together. When compared to today's chart, it makes you wonder - what happened to the pop performer as an artist? Is there room for a unique artistic voice in today's pop?
posted by pejamo at 10:52 AM PST - 36 comments

Celestia is the most beautiful toy. It's a free (open source) simulator of the universe, including breathtaking models of known planets. Watch Jupiter rise over Io or follow the course of a solar eclipse. [more inside]
posted by grahamwell at 10:23 AM PST - 21 comments

Baked Apple. "PowerBook G4 cooked at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. The machine still booted, video and all..." [details at MacFixIt; no permalink]
posted by kirkaracha at 9:45 AM PST - 22 comments

Cushy Sex! Give the kitchen table, the work-out bench and your exhausted sofa pillows a rest: invest in some plush, velveteen adult Lego(ver). Forget rock/scissors/paper; go wedge/ramp/cube/stage! Yeah! Forego childish things; dust off the old Kama Sutra! For how often can you improve your sex life without risking your neck? Or at least throwing your back? [Not safe for work but seems very safe indeed for aprés-work. Colours admittedly awful. Movies instructive yet hilarious (the guy specially). Via Bifurcated Rivets.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 9:16 AM PST - 16 comments

The Gun Industry Sins Exposed? (nyt - registration required)

But Mr. Ricker, who has been working for more than two decades in the gun industry, including a stint as a lawyer for the N.R.A., said the gun makers had long known that "the diversion of firearms from legal channels of commerce to the black market" takes place "principally at the distributor/dealer level."
(print friendly version)
posted by lilboo at 8:47 AM PST - 19 comments

Space Rescue. Since the 1960's engineers have been thinking about bail-outs and rescue of stranded space crews. From Project MOOSE and the Paracone of the 1960's, the 'Rescue Ball' of the early shuttle flights to the recently canceled (and perhaps soon to be revived) X-38 and even the Alpha Lifeboat based on left over Soviet space hardware.
posted by Jos Bleau at 8:39 AM PST - 1 comment

ARGH! Even Punxsutawney Phil is not immune to effing product placements! "Phil may be as cute as a Beanie Baby but when he predicts in his Groundhogese there is no maybe." And, shocker, lookit the banner on the top of the page.
posted by crunchland at 7:35 AM PST - 12 comments

Fascist Websites for Children! Concerned that your children might not be getting the guidance that they need in their quest to grow up to be healthy and productive citizens of the Homeland? Worry no more! Hint, it's funny! (via sixdifferentways).
posted by Ufez Jones at 7:18 AM PST - 13 comments

A Heartbreaking National Tragedy
It happened one morning, on your drive to work, or while channel surfing on your 400-channel cable-satellite or whatever-mind-numbing-media outlet you feed the desires lurking in your mental cage. The Heartbreaking National Tragedy.
So sudden. So devastating. No one saw it coming. And who could believe it happened? "Honey, did you hear? It's devastating!" Even the Dr. Pill show is interrupted. Little Cousin (the incestuous child of Big Brother) comes on with pancake-makeup face and shellacked hair carefully arranged to hide his receding hairline....
posted by Mwongozi at 6:09 AM PST - 44 comments

It's a bird, it's a plane, It's....Major Power! Celina Utilities has come up with a comic book superhero whose job it is to keep the power flowing. His arch enemy? Squirrels. Those little tree rats are jumping on his power lines and making life generally difficult for the rest of us. And he's not happy. There are some little comic strips on this page, and a link to the artist, Dan Davis, who has a decent resume himself. Via the Wall Street Journal
posted by djspicerack at 5:10 AM PST - 7 comments

Volkswagon Successfully Tests Its First Hydrogen Fuel Car. "The Volkswagen Bora HY.POWER prototype, which does not use a reformer, obtains its energy from on-board hydrogen to create a hydrogen fuel cell-fuel cells generate electricity through a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen. Fuel cells that use hydrogen offer zero emissions and fuel cells that use gas with reformers offer near-zero emissions" Is this the future we were promised? Either way, Drivers Wanted.
posted by Keyser Soze at 3:41 AM PST - 20 comments

There is a conspiracy theory that has been making the rounds on the net for quite some time now. In it, the actor Elijah Wood (Frodo) and Dominic Monaghan (Merry) are a gay couple that have been together since the filming of The Lord of the Rings. And they want to come out...but contracts and a whole lot of money at stake are keeping them in. So what do they do? Start testing the waters by infiltrating a gay gossip site called Data Lounge. Test the waters. Get media attention brought to them so they can out themselves as smoothly as possible and not get in trouble. Going on for some time now, the saga is up to thread 14 and shows no sign of slowing down. There are cryptic posts, shoutouts through clothing, PR beardings, interviews, sheep, photographs, insiders and trolls. And the strangest thing of all is that some of the proof is strangely compelling. Examples of all this and the "proofs" can be found here.

So after looking at many of the "facts", do you think it possible that two young actors might be trying to test the waters to come out in a novel fashion? And more importantly this all raises the question; do you think mainstream America (and the world in general) is ready to accept young openly gay men in cinema as leading men? Or is it career suicide?
posted by Windigo at 12:15 AM PST - 54 comments

In what might be a preview of Secretary of State Powell's address to the United Nations tomorrow, Jeffrey Goldberg takes a look at how the Intelligence Community is re-thinking it's analysis of the Iraq/al-Qaeda connection.

Excerpt:
James Woolsey, who served as President Clinton's first C.I.A. director, said that it is now illogical to doubt the notion that Saddam collaborates with Islamist terrorism, and that he would provide chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda. "At Salman Pak"-a training camp near Baghdad-"we know there were Islamist terrorists training to hijack airplanes in groups of four or five with short knives," Woolsey told me. "I mean, hello? If we had seen after December 7, 1941, a fake American battleship in a lake in northern Italy, and a group of Asian pilots training there, would we have said, 'Well, you can't prove that they were Japanese'?"
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 11:53 PM PST - 69 comments

Looking for a nursery theme? Try the John Lennon Collection & John Lennon Musical Parade. These products are based on his drawings of stylized animals. Imagine what Yoko Ono and the Lennon Estate come up with next.
posted by riffola at 11:42 PM PST - 13 comments

Brion Gysin - He played a powerful role in the work of William Burroughs, he sought to destroy language, and he may have killed Kurt Cobain, so why doesn't anybody know who he is?
posted by cachilders at 10:49 PM PST - 9 comments

Motorists (Mom's and Dad's driving their own kids to schools) ignored little girls lying on street in blood after fatal hit-and-run !!! (Palo Alto, California)

Tom Malzbender can forgive the Palo Alto teenager Megan Joelle Coughran (18-year-old Palo Alto High School senior and a church's day care worker) who allegedly struck and killed his 6-year-old daughter and injured another girl before his eyes, then drove off....

What Malzbender can't forgive are the two motorists behind the hit-and-run driver Tuesday morning, the ones he watched drive past two bloody, injured girls by the side of a narrow road near his house.
"That is (messed) up," Malzbender said. "Who knows. Maybe I could have put Amy in the back of one of their cars and taken her to the emergency room."

1. Now, what the hell is wrong with these people ? (if you ask me they all deserve a long long jail time)
2. Why people don't pay attention when they drive ? (especially when you see pedestrians or cyclists !)
3. Latest Hit-and-run (or kill-and-ignore) accidents in the Bay Area Jan 28th, Jan 23rd, Jan 15th, Oct 30th, Oct 22
posted by bureaustyle at 10:30 PM PST - 39 comments

Fire in the Sky.
Perhaps you saw moonwalk veteran astronaut Buzz Aldrin attempt on NBC to read a poem he received in e-mail Saturday, and falter in tears. It was actually lyrics to the Jordin Kare song "Fire in the Sky," a tribute to manned space exploration:
Prometheus, they say, brought God's fire down to man.
And we've caught it, tamed it, trained it since our history began.
Now we're going back to heaven just to look him in the eye,
and there's a thunder 'cross the land, and a fire in the sky
[via Space.com]
posted by Tubes at 9:32 PM PST - 7 comments

Shortly after Jack The Ripper retired, a man named Henry Holmes moved to Chicago. Using insurance fraud money, in 1892 he built an elaborate mansion with over 60 rooms. This mansion, which became known as The Murder Castle, was perhaps the first extraordinary building in a city that has become known for its architecture, from Frank Lloyd Wright to the Sears tower. In his home, which he ran as a hotel for the unfortunate traveler, Holmes murderd & disposed of as many as 200 victims over the course of the next four years... (more inside)
posted by jonson at 9:15 PM PST - 26 comments

Sure, they died for their country, but who's counting?! ABC has a webpage for US personnel who have died during the war on terror, but it shows only 41 have casualties. Admittedly, they have yet to update their webpage after the latest casualties, but even if they did, they would still be wrong. CNN recently said that 47 US personnel have died in Operation Enduring Freedom. That number too is wrong.

To tell the truth, I couldn't find a single story on any major news website that lists all of the US personnel who have died in operation Enduring Freedom, but these sites appear to be the closest. Neither are fully accurate, however.

A beer on me to the first person who can tell me exactly how many US personnel have died (post 9/11) as a part of Operation Enduring Freedom. Search the web. Find the names. Compare lists. Extra points to anyone who can offer up some compelling reasons why our media overlords can't keep score. Do we want to know these people's names? Does it matter?!
posted by insomnia_lj at 6:08 PM PST - 50 comments

Smokin' Dave is the real deal, gents. Smoking like a rusty chainsaw while pulling his Zebra up to the A&P on the corner of Royal and St. Peter in the French Quarter. Holding forth to a drunken Japanese businessman. Smokin' Dave is so macho, he sneers in his sleep.
posted by son_of_minya at 4:10 PM PST - 7 comments

The inventor of the term blog is giving up his verb. "I've gotta do something else with this site," says Peter Merholz, who began one of the first 25 weblogs in May 1998. "More essays. No blogging."
posted by rcade at 3:52 PM PST - 25 comments

Please ignore the painting behind the curtain. In a move that mirrors the covering of the bare-breasted Spirit of Justice statue at the Justice Department last January, the U.N. installed a curtain to hide Picasso's anti-war masterpiece Guernica last week.
posted by MegoSteve at 3:44 PM PST - 38 comments

Courtney's "spread" in the upcoming Q Magazine really proves that she has a knack for publicity. Page two is here and here's the third page. NSFW. Not safe for anywhere, really.
posted by aeiou at 3:40 PM PST - 79 comments

RentMyChest.com , through an arrangement with Geek Stud Magazine, offers "bustomers" the opportunity to advertise on Chris Perillo's chest for the low, low price of $20.00. Arrangements may be made for a female chest for just $2000. Operators standing by!!!
[via Doc.]
posted by me3dia at 2:30 PM PST - 8 comments

The Day the Music Died ...It was February 3, 1959 that Buddy Holley, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper were killed in a plane crash. You need look no further to find one of the true icons of rock and roll than Buddy Holley. Originally scheduled to fly, Waylon Jennings gave his seat to an ailing Big Bopper. When Holly learned that Jennings wasn't going to fly, he said, "Well, I hope your old bus freezes up." Jennings responded, "Well, I hope your plane crashes." This friendly banter of friends would haunt Jennings for years. And can anyone really decipher Don McLeans' "American Pie"? More.
posted by Mack Twain at 2:12 PM PST - 23 comments

Royalties Reunited allows artists to collect the royalties from British radio stations, pub jukeboxes, restaurants, gyms and linedancing clubs that "their people" have forgotten to claim. DJ Shadow is there - that's a little money. Nobukazu Takemura is there - that's less money. But the one that surprises me appears after a search for "stupid" - a rather famous actress has failed to collect for her Christmas #1 megahit. I believe we're talking about a lot of money. Are you going to tell her or should I?
posted by Pretty_Generic at 1:34 PM PST - 4 comments

Phil Spector arrested, booked for investigation of murder. via Drudge
posted by 111 at 12:37 PM PST - 31 comments

Voices from the Trading Post. You know, you can get a job anywhere, but this is not just a place to make a living. This is a way of life. Life on the Navajo reservation in the 19th and 20th century, in the words of the traders themselves (text and sound).
posted by gottabefunky at 11:57 AM PST - 3 comments

How much money would it take for you to kill a puppy with your bare hands? (Quicktime.)
posted by tweebiscuit at 11:25 AM PST - 102 comments

Tour Egypt. "Egypt is an exciting country, both for its antiquities, and modern high culture. Tour Egypt is an Egypt guide with over 10,000 pages of information about every aspect of travel, ancient and modern Egypt." Two of my favorite links are the Hieroglyph Converter and Ikhernofret's Description of the Osiris Passion Play at Abydos. The current feature is about the Monastery of Jeremiah at Saqqara . Actually, quite a nice resource.
posted by Joey Michaels at 11:15 AM PST - 5 comments

Confronting Empire

"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

Arundhati Roy in her inimitable style speaking at Life After Capitalism at the World Social Forum, 2003, Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 27, 2003, organised by Znet.
posted by nofundy at 11:04 AM PST - 53 comments

Shuttle "Achille's Hell" According to this article, Shuttle has one. Curiously it's in the area in which that piece of insulation hit during launch.Were the astronauts warned ? Did they do some space walk to see what was wrong ? I would stop my car to go out and see if I heard a loud "thump" coming from somewhere.
posted by elpapacito at 11:04 AM PST - 38 comments

it's getting hot in here... in miniature.
posted by grabbingsand at 10:57 AM PST - 10 comments

It's kind of weird how people in East Texas seem to have to "pose" with the debris, like it's a dead deer or a fishing trophy...
posted by sparky at 10:12 AM PST - 53 comments

Godspeed, Dr. Kalpana Chawla. But how will India replace a girl like you? In Karnal, India, where this fallen Columbia astronaut was born, it is rarer -- and more dangerous -- to be a female fetus than a real live girl space shuttle jock. Statistics suggest that the state has taken the cruel art of sex selection, in which female fetuses are aborted, to new heights. Among children under 6, it has 820 girls for every 1,000 boys according to the 2001 census. (NY Times link)
posted by jellybuzz at 9:47 AM PST - 19 comments

ladies gents and babies, the 2003 sxsw web awards finalists have been announced
posted by Peter H at 9:21 AM PST - 15 comments

Live from Ballpoint Stadium, it's Iron Scribe.
posted by staggernation at 8:57 AM PST - 3 comments

3 Feb '03 Word of the Day: Blog. Pronunciation: [blahg] Definition 1: A clipping of "weblog," blog is internet jargon for what is basically an online journal or diary. Yes, blogs are going mainstream. Will businesses discover uses for blogs & blog software? Will (mobile-phone) "moblogging" catch on? This link says ...the first Web logs consisted largely of links to sites on the Internet that the author found interesting. Early bloggers were presurfing the Web for people, in a sense [sound familiar?]. About 1999, as free software came on the scene -- making it easy to create Web logs -- the content began to shift. Blogs became more personal, less link-driven. But what is a blog to you? And what is the future of the "blogosphere"?
posted by Shane at 7:34 AM PST - 25 comments

american taliban perhaps utah could do some sort of exchange with out of work minders in kandahar? nytimes link
posted by specialk420 at 6:41 AM PST - 44 comments

Anti-war and the Internet John Perry Barlow of the EFF talks about online activism and anti-war feeling: "Actually I'm discouraged with the role of the Internet in the antiwar movement. Because so far what I see happening is that cyberspace is a great place for everybody to declaim. There are a million virtual streetcorners with a million lonely pamphleteers on them, all of them decrying the war and not actually coming together in any organized fashion to oppose it." Easy to read this as referring to blogs. People shout and scream in their journals, but where is the organised anti-war effort? Is the great hope and potential of the Internet to connect people and create movements floundering when it comes to one of the most serious issues facing us today?
posted by humuhumu at 4:02 AM PST - 30 comments

Quanto putas mihi stare hoc conclave ? That's "How many prostitutes does it take to change a lightbulb?" in Latin. No, actually it's "How much do you think I paid for this apartment?". Here's hoping, in the wake of the BBC's superb The Roman Way series, written and presented by David Aaranovich, that good old Latin is on its way back, albeit in an Internet, soundbitey way. Those intending to smuggle some into MetaFilter should definitely start here. The owner, for instance, might find Ne ponatur in mea vicinitate useful - "Not in my backyard". And Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione - "I'm not interested in your dopey religious cult" should prove popular in the God threads. Vale!
posted by MiguelCardoso at 2:30 AM PST - 26 comments

Signs of the coming apocalypse Does Morrissey have a (gasp) Girlfriend? I have heard this rumor from a drunken blonde at a party and i call on the power of meta to solve it! tame link here..smiths link here..comeback review here..an order from the great man here.
posted by sgt.serenity at 1:41 AM PST - 42 comments

Perhaps after the Challenger tragedy Nasa will rethink Project Prometheus.
posted by thedailygrowl at 12:04 AM PST - 23 comments

History of Applause: What compels us to clap in appreciation? Theories abound. The earliest clapping is found in percussive instruments of ancient Egypt (jpg), while the Bible has us clap in joy, as well as derision. Emperor Nero so craved it he would pay freelancers to applaud his atrocious singing. Applause has even influenced classical compositions.

But, in the age of the pre-planned encore, do we still mean it?
posted by apostasy at 10:37 PM PST - 17 comments

Letters - Friday Flash fun. Test your typing skills against a continuous torrent of random letters. Very well made. Globe Terrestre - for those moments when you just can't decide what world map projection is the best.
posted by lazy-ville at 8:57 PM PST - 9 comments

The Geometry Center: Center for the Computation and Visualization of Geometric Structures [more]
posted by hama7 at 7:57 PM PST - 2 comments

My Creepy Valentine - ok, so some people find Valentine's Day somewhat creepy - not everyone likes a holiday that has a weapon wielding angel as a mascot. Not everyone warms to the cloyingly cute commercialism. Some people prefer that their romance has a bit more edge (not work safe!). And even for true romantics, the best of intentions can run amuck (flash). But if you do plan to celebrate, you'll have to act soon.
posted by madamjujujive at 6:51 PM PST - 29 comments

Is this the most non-PC TV show ever? As we become more and more desensitised to humour that makes fun of those less fortunate than ourselves, where do we draw the line?
posted by dg at 6:37 PM PST - 18 comments

5...4...3...2...1...Goodbye, Columbia "There is something noteworthy a rocket can do that the shuttle cannot. A rocket can be permitted to fail." Gregg Easterbrook's 1980 Washington Monthly cover story looks into the Columbia's beginnings, the hazards he saw in the shuttle, and its weaknesses compared to rockets.

Once you get into space, you check to see if any tiles are damaged. If enough are, you have a choice between Plan A and Plan B. Plan A is hope they can get a rescue shuttle up in time. Plan B is burn up coming back.

[via Slate]
posted by kirkaracha at 6:02 PM PST - 32 comments

After Hours Backstage at the Puppet Theater, A Japanese Abominable Snowman, The Famous Samurai: Miyamoto Musashi, Incomparable Woman Warrior and Gingerly Avoiding A Fishy Mess--images from from The Library of Congress's The Floating World of Ukiyo-e: Shadows, Dreams, and Substance . Also, may I present UKIYO-E - The Pictures of the Floating World.

Floating World, you ask?
posted by y2karl at 4:37 PM PST - 16 comments

Beating the Nostradamus followers to the punch!
Century I - 55 :
Soubz l'opposite climat Babylonique
Grande sera de sang effusion
Que terre & mer, air, Ciel sera inique
Sectes, faim, regnes, pestes, confusion


In a climate opposed to the Babylonians,
Blood will flow in a large flood,
From ground, sea, and air, injustice shall reign
Sects, famine, kings, plagues, confusion.

posted by insomnia_lj at 3:52 PM PST - 23 comments

It seems that there is some disconnection between the foreign policies of the American administration and the beliefs of a significant part of the population. In many countries, direct action is seen as a normal response. Will that happen here? Or here?
posted by Nicolae Carpathia at 3:23 PM PST - 18 comments

So, why hasn't the Shuttle been replaced? Because it hasn't been easy. In the late 80's and early '90s, the cold-war-fantasy-cum-shuttle-replacement was the X-30 National Aerospace Plane (NASP) that was supposed to take off and land like a plane flying on super-fast Scramjet engines that, alas, were never really successful... In the late '90s, the New Economy, space-exploration-on-VC-money shuttle replacement was the X-33 VentureStar program which was eventually cancelled, after a long and turbulent history. The X-33/VentureStar was one of the most technologically daring machines ever built --albeit too daring. I cannot mention the X-33 without mentioning the ingenious-but-untested linear aerospike engine that was going to take it to orbit. If the US is now (again) considering a Shuttle replacement, maybe the Delta Clipper is worth a second look. The DC-X was a competitor for the X-33 program that was eventually scrapped, for technological and other reasons. At least the Russians and Europeans liked it so much better than the other New Shuttle options that they copied it.
posted by costas at 9:30 AM PST - 35 comments

History of Iraq from the Denver Post. "President Bush speaks of the need to 'defend civilization'.. Then I point out the irony of defending civilization against the cradle of civilization".
posted by stbalbach at 8:55 AM PST - 31 comments

Delta 2003 Yesterday the 1953 floods were commemorated in the Netherlands and a day earlier in the UK. What happened in 1953?
posted by ginz at 4:29 AM PST - 5 comments

Teenage Girls Not Getting Enough Meat... At least, not according to the American Beef Industry, which concoted this laughably ridiculous "lifestyle" site to appeal to god knows who, ostensibly focused on teen girl issues (prom? dating?), but with a thinly veiled meaty agenda beneath it all. Bonus points for the horrifically Avrilesque domain name. Marketing. It's what's for dinner.
posted by jonson at 11:24 PM PST - 59 comments

Best. Episodes. Ever. Though I think they're wrong about the worst. In honor of the upcoming 300th episode of the Simpsons, Entertainment Weekly looks back at the 25 best episodes and 1 worst. May the arguments, and uneeded meme generation, begin.
posted by eyeballkid at 10:53 PM PST - 128 comments

A letter to the President. From one thing to another, so much for which to be accountable.
posted by the fire you left me at 6:58 PM PST - 46 comments

The year of the Ram!... or black sheep... or goat Dating since 2600 BC, the Chinese calendar is a lunar system of dating that goes in 12 year cycles. It is commonly seen on the place mats of your favorite Chinese eatery. Each year in the cycle is assigned a different animal, mine being the great, "clever to the point of genius" (i always remember that part) monkey - which happens to be next year. Any one make resolutions for this holiday? I wish I knew more about this but apparently there are traditional ceremonies for it. A little advice for the year ahead.
posted by phylum sinter at 6:36 AM PST - 9 comments

Houston we have a problem! At 9:00am EST communication was lost with space shuttle Columbia. The touch down should have been occurred at 9:16am.
posted by MzB at 6:23 AM PST - 441 comments

Pyongyang's crosshairs on US Capital "A propaganda poster released by North Korea depicts the country's struggle with the United States over the North's nuclear program." - poster shows North Korean soldier with large shells looking at Capital building crumbling from a large explosion. (NYT)
posted by troutfishing at 6:04 AM PST - 27 comments

The Classic Radio Gallery: Wooden radios, speakers, and more.
posted by hama7 at 5:38 AM PST - 10 comments

If it tastes good, eat it? Food scientists have discovered that AMP, " a naturally occurring substance ..... found in a wide range of natural foods - including breast milk" can be used to make bad tasting food taste good. Will it save humanity from the "unholy trinity" of sugar, salt, and fat, or are we all tumor meat as soon as this stuff gets some traction?
posted by BGM at 12:16 AM PST - 29 comments