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February 2003 Archives
February 28
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 - 49 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
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
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 - 31 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
February 27
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
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
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
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
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.composted 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 - 130 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
February 26
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 - 45 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 - 36 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 - 12 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
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 - 129 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
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 - 57 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
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
February 25
"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
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
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
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 - 17 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
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
February 24
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
Fast for George W. Bush. "If you are willing to fast at least one day a month primarily for George W. Bush's holiness (and other areas, such as bipartisan work among the Democrats and Republicans, Wisdom in his work, wisdom for his cabinet, healing for our nation, etc. ... but primarily holiness) then we encourage you to sign up and join us [...] Our goal is to have 1,000 people fasting for the President each day. That will greatly encourage him and keep him accountable when the Evil One seeks to sidetrack him from his commitment to the Lord. "
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 10:08 PM PST - 92 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
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 - 40 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 boingboingposted by elwoodwiles at 2:23 PM PST - 30 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 - 90 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
February 23
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
Parts of Bible ruled hate speech in Canada. Frankly, I've always found it odd how easily the gay and lesbian community lives with what can best be described as thinly-veiled death threats like in this ad.
"If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."posted by skallas at 7:17 PM PST - 34 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 - 19 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 - 16 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 - 127 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
February 22
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 - 240 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
"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 - 10 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
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
February 21
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 - 39 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
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
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
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
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 - 27 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
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
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 comments
February 20
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
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
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 - 22 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
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
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
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
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
February 19
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 - 88 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 - 41 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
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
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
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 - 39 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 - 111 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
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 - 86 comments
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
February 18
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 Presurferposted by madamjujujive at 9:31 PM PST - 10 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 Wiredposted by ?! at 5:56 PM PST - 5 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
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 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
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 - 13 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
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
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
February 17
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 - 21 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
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
"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
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
"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 - 69 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
February 16
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 - 137 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&Cposted by Stan Chin at 7:13 PM PST - 20 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
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
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 - 75 comments
February 15
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 - 154 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
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
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
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
February 14
"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 - 71 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
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
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 - 30 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 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 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
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
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
February 13
"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
"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 quoteposted 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
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
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
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
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
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 - 22 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
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
February 12
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
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 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
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 youposted by bitdamaged at 12:40 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
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 LoveHere 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
February 11
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
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 - 155 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
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 - 94 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
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
"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
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
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
February 10
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 - 24 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
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 - 58 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 - 34 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
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 - 17 comments
February 9
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 - 48 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
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
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
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
February 8
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 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
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
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
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
February 7
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
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 Portageposted 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
February 6
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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 - 20 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
February 5
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
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
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 - 9 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 - 41 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
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 - 227 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
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
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
February 4
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
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
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 - 46 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 - 22 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
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
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
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 Journalposted 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
February 3
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
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 22posted 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
February 2
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
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
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
February 1
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
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
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
![London at night [1M jpg]](http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/images/EO/highres/ISS006/ISS006-E-22939.JPG){kind=link}
