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March 2006 Archives
March 31
Lying in International Politics is a 2004 speech given by
John J. Mearsheimer which reminded me of yesterday's post on but controveral but well spoken
Michael Ignatieff. Mearsheimer argues that...
"...international lying takes four forms. Inter-state lying is where states lie to each other to gain strategic advantage. Fear-mongering is where foreign policy elites lie to their own public because they believe that the people do not recognize the seriousness of an external threat and they need to be motivated to deal with it. Nationalist myth-making is where elites tell lies about their state’s history to help foster a powerful sense of national identity among all segments of society. Anti-realist lying is where elites attempt to disguise brutal behavior carried out in pursuit of realist (or other) goals, because it conflicts with widely-accepted liberal norms." (more...)
(Mearsheimer has recently
been covered on mefi on a more controversial subject.)
posted by bhouston at 2:16 PM PST - 10 comments
The Endless Wait Is Over! After 15 years, Guns N’ Roses will finally release its nearly mythical album,
Chinese Democracy. Chuck Klosterman has the exclusive first review of the new record, which features a 14 minute "rap-rock anthem" called "Pound You (Good)," several songs that "make thinly veiled references to the architect who designed Rose's backyard topiary garden," and attacks on the media, including "the editors of
Vanity Fair, MTV personality Sway, numerous teenage bloggers, and the city hall reporter for the
Cincinnati Enquirer (who, curiously, has never written about pop music)." Rock on, Axl Rose. Rock on.
posted by pardonyou? at 1:19 PM PST - 39 comments
HERE COMES DR. TRAN! What? I'm not a doctor! HE'S A REAL DOCTOR!
I'm not a doctor! I'm only five years old! NOT ONLY IS HE A REAL DOCTOR, HE'S A DASHING SPECIAL AGENT WITH A PH.D. IN
KICKING YOUR ASS! Please go a-way! I haveta do chores! viaposted by loquacious at 12:32 PM PST - 34 comments
Elizabeth Spiers, of
Gawker fame, has a new site,
Dealbreaker, which bills itself as "an online business tabloid and Wall Street gossip blog." Content-free snark, with links to articles of interest to Wall Street fanboys? Oh, Elizabeth, you steal my heart. But, perhaps just mine.
posted by rush at 12:15 PM PST - 17 comments
FOVICKS - Friends Of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures - a photo essay on the concrete geometries of the Los Angeles River flood control channels.
[via inhabitat]posted by carter at 7:36 AM PST - 24 comments
Nomi I just discoed Nomi.
Here,
here and
here( that site is broke in way that I think is some sort of artistic statement. Or it could be just bad html.)
I was a teenager then and had never heard of him, but I'm strangely impressed. He's a bald Gary Numan, he's like the Cirque du Soleil playing bluegrass.
posted by nyxxxx at 12:00 AM PST - 34 comments
March 30
Michael Ignatieff, the candidate parachuted into Etobicoke by supporters who would see him as the next leader of the federal
Liberal Party of Canada, has just
given a speech outlining his vision for Canada, which is probably the forerunner to an official announcement about his candidacy. (Previously,
on MeFi.) If he runs, he will be up against
Martha Hall Findlay,
John Godfrey, and
Maurizio Bevilacqua who have all declared. Other contenders might well include
Stéphane Dion,
Joe Volpe, and hockey legend
Ken Dryden. Finally, the race appears to be hotting up.
posted by Zinger at 7:03 PM PST - 41 comments
It's Time To Get Back To The Basics In Missouri: "A year after Republicans took control of state government, conservative lawmakers are promoting a wide range of social legislation designed to rein in sex and unshackle the Bible."
One proposed bill, for example, would recognize a Christian God as the deity for most Missourians. Other bills deny alimony to ex-spouses who live with a boyfriend or girlfriend, ban all abortions, allow pharmacists, insurance companies, doctors and hospitals to deny treatment if the procedure or medication offends their moral values, and require sex education classes to teach that life begins at fertilization and that an unborn child has “sensory awareness” long before birth.
Rep. Cynthia Davis, Republican and sponsor of several bills, said conservatives are tired of an overly permissive society in which high school students are taught how to use condoms. "...
if the state starts paying for contraceptives we will have more babies than if we just teach people to not expect free prostitution from poor people. "
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:38 PM PST - 73 comments
Culture Catch is an online "magazine" featuring vid and podcasts of musicians such as Mark Kozelek, American Music Club, Les Paul and Tony Visconti. Plus: Todd McFarlane, Sir Richard Branson, Henry Rollins, Gisele, David Cronenberg and more.
posted by edlundart at 2:33 PM PST - 7 comments
Brian Eno and David Byrne released
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in 1981. It's a great album--and now it's available with a Creative Commons License. "
This is the first time complete and total access to original tracks with remix and sampling possibilities have been officially offered on line."
posted by dobbs at 1:36 PM PST - 44 comments
Insulating Bush Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address -- that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon -- might not be true, according to government records and interviews
posted by Postroad at 11:41 AM PST - 47 comments
The Internet Before its Time. Telidon was a novel "two-way TV" system that debuted in Canada in 1978. It used
NAPLPS, a basic vector-graphics protocol, for presentation and operated over a 1200 bps modem. It was never a commercial or technological success, but I was 10, it was 1981 and I was playing hangman...
ONLINE.
posted by GuyZero at 7:11 AM PST - 25 comments
Slips of the tongue are usually a result of the sound structure of an utterance. For example, saying 'Martin Luther Koong Junior', where the vowel in 'Koong' might be taken from either of the two flanking words.
Freudian slips are much rarer. Why then, are
these two people losing their jobs? [More inside]
posted by fcummins at 4:13 AM PST - 78 comments
March 29
Hardcore Gaming 101 has a e-newsletter, but the best things there are the loving introductions to dozens of classic games and game series, all either sadly forgotten or practically unknown to the Western World. Thrill to the serious action of
Compile shooters! Avoid the mocking gazes of friends, roomies and significant others while reading about venerable Konami cute-em-ups
Twinbee and
Parodius! Figure out why the hell so many Namco games have
Valkyrie in them! Try to keep a straight face when confronted with the likes of
Ganbare Goemon,
Phoenix Wright,
The Neverhood,
No One Can Stop Mr. Domino!!!,
Panic!,
Urban Yeti and
Segagaga, the Sega Simulator! Do, uh,
something along with the T&A delights of
Keio Flying Squadron,
Popful Mail and
Valis! All this and
much,
much,
much much more.
posted by JHarris at 9:22 PM PST - 26 comments
Taste's great! Less filling! So did "several former judges who served on the panel also voiced skepticism at a Senate hearing about the president's constitutional authority to order wiretapping on Americans without a court order" or did "FISA judges say Bush within law"? Just in case you doubted that different newspapers present news stories (even those with
official audio coverage available!) differently...
posted by twsf at 3:03 PM PST - 15 comments
Free bikes! BikeTown will give away 600 bicycles this year to residents of NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Dallas, Houston, LA, Chicago, Detroit, Boise, Baltimore, MD (
and the Gila River Indian Community in AZ).
BikeTown research has shown that, on average, its participants rode 10 miles per week, mostly for pleasure or exercise. But more than 40% rode for transportation purposes, happily trading their car and the cost of gasoline for a bike...posted by RockyChrysler at 2:43 PM PST - 16 comments
Arrested Development is officially over. A source close to the negotiations said that creator Mitch Hurwitz had decided after a lengthy period of debating an offer from Showtime that "Arrested Development reached its end, creatively, as a series."posted by empath at 2:04 PM PST - 58 comments
Who speaks for Jesus? Why are liberal churches ignored by the American media? Why is the religious right given so much play? Media Matters
gives credence to the claim that the religious right is overrepresented in the American media, and liberal religious leaders are excluded. I can't remember the last time I saw a liberal religious leader on American TV who wasn't Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 1:34 PM PST - 83 comments
A collection of bird skeletons (with 3d rotating skeleton goodness). The site also has tips on
cleaning your own, and
identifying those you might, uh, stumble across. Comparative pictures and anatomy of
orangutan, chimp, marmoset, and lemur skeletons.
Will's Skull Site, with close to 100 skulls and details (
Cougar!). The California Academy of Sciences
site on skulls, including this cool
animal-to-skull match tool.
Skeleton specimen tutorials from the Vetrinary Museum. The
Human Osteology pages. A
x-ray anatomy of the human skeleton. The
Human Skull module at CalState Chico.
And, you know, dragon physiology. And previously, the skeletal systems of cartoon characters.posted by OmieWise at 6:48 AM PST - 8 comments
Italian & German researchers have created a "neuro-chip" for linking computers with mammalian neurons (A
NewScientist,
LiveScience,
MSN). They added neuron gluing proteins to the chip to attract the sodium pores, and genetically modified the neurons to add more sodium pores.
In the short term, the work is expected to aid the pharmaceutical industry in testing the effects of drugs on neurons, assist basic research into the workings of the brain, and perhaps help treat neurological disorders. In the long term, numerous sci-fi technologies are slightly closers, such as computers with living components, useful brain implants, and Beowulf clusters of humans.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:52 AM PST - 15 comments
Quick change artists David and Dania, who got her start in the Moscow Circus, entertain crowds at NBA half-time shows by performing quick changes of clothing. They've performed on
numerous other shows around the world. You can even buy one of David's quick change
tophats... (!!!).
posted by saketini99 at 3:17 AM PST - 31 comments
March 28
Ukraine is divided on the issue of Russian: The Russian speaking population from the eastern part of the country has increasingly attempted to make Russian into an official language only, provoking bitter opposition from the Ukranian speaking majority in the western part. [More inside]
posted by gregb1007 at 8:41 PM PST - 13 comments
I'm embarassed for my mice to have to say this but ... Their testicles are HUGE, like almost as big as their heads. Good thing for humanity too, as mice testicles may provide a source of
stem cells free of the usual ethical
considerations.They may also hold the solutions to
transplant rejection and
infertility. Is there anything those fuzzy globes can't do?
posted by hindmost at 3:08 PM PST - 22 comments
Early in the morning on November 21, 1980, twelve men abandonded their oil rig on Lake Peigneur in Louisiana, suspecting that something was wrong. Little did they know they created a
SWIRLING VORTEX OF DOOM!posted by punkfloyd at 1:50 PM PST - 59 comments
Hnefatafl is an anglo-norse boardgame whose many variants are mentioned in the
sagas (wearing a helmet during play is entirely optional) . Chess superseded it during the rennaisance, but
Scholarly work has allowed the rules to be deduced in modern times, mainly on the basis of a 1732 diary account written by Linnaeus (he of the botanical naming system).
And now, thanks to the magic of the internet, you can play
online.
posted by apodo at 1:47 PM PST - 17 comments
My Dinner With Jack. "
Three years ago, I had dinner with now the now infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff (really). I sat down at his now infamous restaurant Signatures, he told me and amazing and wildly improbable story about how he made Red Scorpion and I never heard from him again."
[via mefi projects]posted by delmoi at 1:05 PM PST - 31 comments
Are Satanic messages hidden in Catholic art? According to the new documentary
Rape of the Soul [embedded Quicktime], the answer is, "so completely yes that you could shit." Featuring such experts as
Wilson Bryan Key and
Judith Reisman, this movie will literally, physically blow your brain apart by cutting little holes in classic art that might conceivably look like three sixes if you arrange them properly, or maybe finding a small patch of red and black that could look like a lumpy Devil head if you're looking for one and squinting. [
via]
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:56 AM PST - 64 comments
Easy Star Records, which previously released the underground hit reggae album
The Dub Side of the Moon, is nearing completion on a followup,
Radiodread, "a reggae re-vision of Radiohead’s OK Computer."
Listen to four tracks from Dub Side online (via flash). Don't miss the gurgling bong sound effects on "Money". Artists on Radiodread include
Toots Hibbert,
Citizen Cope,
Sugar Minott,
Junior Jazz,
Tamar-Kali,
Horace Andy,
Morgan Heritage,
Frankie Paul and
Kirsty Rock.
posted by fochsenhirt at 7:42 AM PST - 15 comments
Owls are rad. Sometimes they look kind of
metallic and scary, sometimes
wise, sometimes
puzzled, and sometimes like
skulls, (
Index); sometimes they
sound like dogs or pigs, sometimes they
sound like a little train, sometimes they
sound alarmed, (
Index of MP3s); sometimes you come across an
extensive gallery of Central and North American owls with
pictures,
ranges,
video, and even a description of
the '04-'05 Northern Owl Invasion; sometimes it's a
dynamic range map of Owls of the Western Hemisphere; sometimes it's the
OwlCam homepage with
downloadable owl movies, sometimes it's a
series of articles on all things owl; sometimes at
BiologyBase it's a printable
owl sighting lifelist, sometimes it's
Ruru, the morepork, New Zealand's native owl at
NZBirds. Or,
w0t! w0t!, it's
attracting barn owls and
building nest boxes at World Owl Trust.
Previous MeFi birding FPP.posted by OmieWise at 6:27 AM PST - 34 comments
March 27
Does copyright extend to the bit encoding sequences used in P2P applications? A case is made for the myriad paths bit encoding can take in the formation of MP3 files, the argument being therefore that said bit encoding sequences used in the formation of MP3 files are exempt from copyright law. Furthermore an application is offered to demonstrate the point.
But isn't bit encoding just another 'language' like French, German, Spanish and therefore a copyrightable adjunct to the authors/copyright owners work? (Even if there are myriad dialects.)posted by Muirwylde at 7:02 PM PST - 57 comments
Brotherly Love. "When a young Fort Lewis soldier returned from Iraq paralyzed from the upper chest down, it was his teenage brother who assumed the role of roommate and primary caretaker." The Seattle Times tells the story of Brandon and Blaine Powell.
Be sure to check out the
audio slideshow, which features Brandon speaking over photographer
Alan Berner's images.
posted by jeffmshaw at 6:32 PM PST - 13 comments
Curating the City A Flash exhibition exploring the past and present urban landscape of Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. A modest topic explored in depth - which is perhaps what makes it so fascinating. The site includes a
pdf guidebook, in case you want to check out the bricks-and-mortar version.
posted by carter at 1:16 PM PST - 8 comments
Wade in the Water In 2004,
Smithsonian Folklife Festival featured the maritime cultures of the Mid-Atlantic region, from Long Island to North Carolina. Now, this site gives a home on the web to the cultural documentation gathered for the festival --
music,
recipes,
stories and oral history,
an interactive map,
the occupational folklore and natural history of regional fisheries,
photos, video, and more. The material, ably compiled by folklorists and educators, creates a lasting and very accessible archive of festival highlights as well as an excellent overview of the distinct coastal culture of the Mid-Atlantic. Don't miss the great menhaden net-hauling chantey
Help Me to Raise 'Em (links to mp3).
posted by Miko at 12:50 PM PST - 7 comments
Engadget points out Sven König's
Scrambled Hackz, an
Ableton Live-like app that takes in sound samples, analyzes their spectrum, and builds a triggerable, interactive beatbox set upon which hilarious and remarkable
performances can be built. A GPLed package will be released soon.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:34 PM PST - 23 comments
A group of scientists have
announced that they have created cloned and genetically modified pigs that make their own omega-3 fatty acids. NPR
has more on the story, including an audio report from Joe Palca. There are apparently some naturally occuring pigs with their own omega-3 fatty acids, primarily a Spanish breed called Ibérico. Descended from native Iberian wild boar, black-footed Ibérico hogs are raised in specially maintained oak forests, and feed primarily on acorns.
Until last September, however, no Spanish producer had been approved to export Ibérico products to the United States, and consumers may have to wait a few more months before they can get their hands on the
tasty pork. As the ham is sure to be in short supply, you can put down a $199 deposit now for a ham that will carry a final price tag of as much as $1000. If you're unable to wait for—or afford—the Spanish version, you can treat yourself now to the
Bacon of the Month Club, which serves up a different artisanal bacon each month. For more on raising hogs, read
James Buchan's account in the London Review of Books. And don't forget the bacon blogs: [
1] [
2] [
3] [
4] [
5].
posted by monju_bosatsu at 12:25 PM PST - 28 comments
Robert Jordan has amyloidosis, a rare blood disorder that is remarkably fatal. The link has all the info you need, including: "[amyloidosis is] a rare blood disease which affects only 8 people out of a million each year, and those 8 per million are divided among 22 distinct forms of amyloidosis" and "Untreated, it would eventually make my heart unable to function any longer and I would have a median life expectancy of one year from diagnosis."
posted by taumeson at 11:48 AM PST - 49 comments
The
Chapman Stick was developed by,
who else, Emmett Chapman in the early to mid 70's. One taps the strings rather than plucking and is closer to a piano than a guitar. Noted musians using the stick are Tony Levin (with Peter Gabriel, King Crimson) and
Greg Howard (The Dave Mathews Band). Then there's the
chick with a stick.
posted by sluglicker at 11:11 AM PST - 31 comments
John Vanderslice live, b-sides, and demos. Formerly of the band
MK Ultra, John Vanderslice, owner of the
Tiny Telephone analog recording studio in San Francisco, California, has become a respected record producer and solo artist. He recently produced
The Sunset Tree, the newest record by
The Mountain Goats, the musical vehicle of songwriter
John Darnielle. Darnielle is credited as a lyrical collaborator on Vanderslice's latest,
Pixel Revolt. John likes to put it all out there, offering up a meticulous Pixel Revolt
recording diary,
user's guide, and detailed album
credits. JV on
NPR.
Cooking with JV.
posted by ludwig_van at 7:47 AM PST - 20 comments
All Politics is Thymotic. "Let me tell you what men want. Let me tell you why some middle-age men wear the sports jerseys of semiliterate behemoths half their age while others customize their cars with so many speakers they sound like the hip-hop version of the San Francisco earthquake as they roll down the street.
Recognition. Men want others to recognize their significance. They want to feel important and part of something important." (NYT via
donkey o.d.)posted by ZenMasterThis at 5:27 AM PST - 36 comments
March 26
New York Times to release Bush/Blair memo tomorrow. The memo, which was
mentioned previously, but never publically disclosed, confirms that George W. Bush and Tony Blair were determined to invade Iraq, regardless of UN approval, and despite what both leaders told their citizens. More troubling, the memo also indicates that Bush may have conspired to assassinate Saddam Hussein, which appears to violate Sec. 5g of
Executive Order 11905, which states that "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." This executive order was considered
the law of the land even after 9/11, when Bob Barr proposed legislation
H.R. 19, which was never enacted into law.
posted by insomnia_lj at 11:04 PM PST - 74 comments
Cenotes (say-NO-tays), scattered across the Yucatan peninsula,
vary greatly in shape and size, but are often quite
beautiful in any case. Some cenotes were apparently used for ritual
human sacrifice by the Mayans, and some, say scientists, contain waterlife which may be helpful in
treating cancer. However, these cenotes and their connected ecosystems may be in danger if the rapid and largely unchecked
development of the
Maya Riviera continues.
posted by Stauf at 10:44 PM PST - 16 comments
Desmond Doss dies at 87. Desmond Doss, first conscientious objector to win a
Medal of Honor, was a Seventh Day Adventist who refused to carry a gun, eat meat, or work on Saturday. Under heavy Japanese fire, he lowered 75 wounded men to safety from the top of the Maeda Escarpment on Okinawa. That was only one of his
acts of heroism.
posted by forrest at 9:07 PM PST - 17 comments
In the great olfactory tradition of stinky protests caregivers across America are text mobilizing themselves into action: "APRIL 10 IS DIRTY DIAPER DAY. ALL POLISH, RUSSIAN, FILIPONO (sic) AND OTHER CAREGIVERS IN THE U.S. ARE URGED TO TAKE A DAY OFF IN SOLIDARITY WITH IMMIGRATION REFORMS. REMEMBER TAKE A DAY OFF ON APRIL 10, DIRTY DIAPER DAY. YOUR FUTURE "DEPENDS" ON IT! (
Entry #27 here). Yes, they are
incensed!
posted by azul at 1:20 PM PST - 69 comments
"
The Movie Timeline is the history of everything, taken from one simple premise - that everything you see in the movies is true..." For example, "November 6, 2012: The United States elects a female president (Back To The Future Part II)" [
via]
posted by feelinglistless at 1:19 PM PST - 18 comments
The night's event featured speakers Daniel C. Dennett, Matt Ridley, Sir John Krebs, Ian McEwan, and -- the man himself -- Richard Dawkins. It was, as you might suspect (based on the title), an event celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Dawkins'
seminal work.
If you didn't get a chance to attend, you can still read the full transcript or stream/download the audio of it in MP3 format (many thanks to Helena Cronin, founder/director of
Darwin@LSE, for hosting the file).
Thanks to
3QD for the link.
posted by Moody834 at 10:39 AM PST - 20 comments
It's still about the means of production, you see — but in the overdeveloped world, at least, it's not about the production of goods and services anymore. Today's virtual revolutionary is happy to leave all that to capitalists. The virtual revolutionary wants to control the production of meaning — representations of herself and her world as she wants them to seem. Or be. Or whatever.
That's all she asks.
Or, rather, takes.
Thomas de Zengotita welcomes the big world of the small screen. Peter Bogdanovich, instead,
still mourns that last picture show.
posted by matteo at 8:17 AM PST - 22 comments
This heart-wrenching 4 part story of the lives of some of the severely wounded US soldiers brought tears to my eyes - the descriptions of what these kids are enduring, the difficulties faced by their families, the courage they display under circumstances that would reduce most of us to useless blobs. These are the true costs of an illegal, immoral war. Truly tragic in scope.
posted by dbiedny at 7:22 AM PST - 44 comments
"It was the quickest way down." On August 16, 1960,
Joe Kittinger jumped from a helium balloon at
102,800 feet, over 19 miles up. After
free-falling for four and a half minutes and reaching 614 MPH,
almost breaking the sound barrier, he opened his parachute at 18,000 feet and
landed safe and sound after an almost 14 minute descent.
He set records for highest balloon ascent, highest parachute jump, longest freefall and fastest speed by a man through the atmosphere.
[more inside]"I didn't hear a sonic boom; I didn't even hear any whooshing or whistling of the wind. But when I flipped over and looked back at my balloon, it sure was an eerie sight--the sky was black as night but I was bathed in sunshine."
posted by kirkaracha at 1:02 AM PST - 48 comments
March 25
I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove "your software" that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this "hacking". I have no fear of the media, in fact I welcome this publicity.
posted by rxrfrx at 11:14 AM PST - 176 comments
Prisoners of their Bureaus--the Besieged Press of Baghdad What it's like to be a journalist in Iraq now--and especially relevant given
the current attacks on the media for not reporting all the good that's happening in Iraq--
...
an ever-widening gulf between official language and the reality of the actual situation in Baghdad. While official language is relentlessly upbeat, the already nightmarish reality has been getting worse with each passing day. ... the insurgent attacks on the US forces and Iraqi government and the sectarian fighting between Sunnis and Shiites have become destructive beyond what most journalists have been able to convey ... (NY Review of Books)
posted by amberglow at 10:18 AM PST - 35 comments
Freed and ungrateful? "Norman Kember, the freed peace activist, will arrive back in Britain today amid growing controversy over his failure publicly to thank the military forces who rescued him."
"Rescued British hostage Norman Kember yesterday
refused to fly home from Iraq in a RAF military jet." Kember is a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams:
Committed to reducing violence by "getting in the way".
This is not the first controversy regarding western hostages freed in Iraq.
Former kidnap victim Susanne Osthoff
kept parts of the ransom money:
"Politicians and the public were yesterday asking new questions about her ordeal. Many have lost patience with Miss Osthoff, a convert to Islam, since she declared her intention to return to Iraq and failed to thank them for their efforts to free her."
Former kidnap victim
Giuliana Sgrena was accused of
cooperating with her abductors.
posted by iviken at 12:51 AM PST - 59 comments
March 24
Sex sells NSFW NSFW NSFW!!! Not even safe for home use. This is porn. Pure and simple. 'Cept, it's also a clothing catalogue. Yes, this is an XXX "tab A in slot B" porno movie but with imbedded links to the clothes they've just removed. Get it? It's a clothing ad, but a porno movie. No, a porno movie that's also a clothing ad.
It's also WAY slow to load, but when it's loaded, it's...well, it's porn that's also a clothing catalogue. (sort of SoaP, but Sex selling Clothes.)
As someone else said, Abercrombie might want to look at this, and maybe Fredericks and VS. You too, if that sort of thing interests you, which it probably does.
I'm sure I could load this with all sorts of cultural memes regarding the sexualization of advertising, but I'll let their fingers do the talking.
posted by johngumbo at 11:00 PM PST - 59 comments
DotQuest Can you survive the deadly ghosts in this text adventure?
via languagehat's blog in an oblique fashion.posted by boo_radley at 3:59 PM PST - 24 comments
3 Years 3 Minutes. Every photograph this MeFi member has taken for the past three years, artfully set to music — over 11,000 images, each one there and gone in a flicker-flash.
May provoke seizures in the susceptible. [via
mefi projects]
posted by killdevil at 1:57 PM PST - 47 comments
NYTimes makes OB recommendations - I'm not sure what this is doing on the Times op-ed page. It purports to criticize obstetricians for recommending bed rest. It is more enlightening as a window into the doctor patient relationship. The doctor shared his doubts with the patient and she's still angry.
posted by DrAmy at 1:00 PM PST - 35 comments
The Literature Map. Type in an author, and it tells you who wrote similar stuff. Includes a nifty floaty effect. And you know, I never knew that Jane Austen and Socrates had so much
in common.
posted by JanetLand at 12:48 PM PST - 57 comments
The tradition of making
Japanese dolls, called ningyo—meaning human figure—goes back as far as 10,000 years to clay figures made during the Jomon period. The more recent rise in popularity, though, is most often traced to
Hina Matsuri--Girls' Day, or the Doll Festival, celebrated on March 3--originating during the Edo period. These
antique ningyo are highly sought after by
collectors, such as the American
expert Alan Pate, who has written a
number of articles on the subject. The modern Japanese doll culture, however, is anything but traditional. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the ningyo tradition was exported to make
toys for the West (
previously featured on MeFi), and has culminated in popular Barbie-type dolls such as
Superdollfie and
others. Contemporary artists have transformed the Japanese doll tradition into something else entirely:
Simon Yotsuya,
Ryo Yoshida,
Koitsukihime,
Yoko Ueno,
Mario A.,
Etsuko Miura, and
Kai Akemi. A number of these artists were featured in the
Dolls of Innocence exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Of course, notable artists outside Japan have worked with dolls before, including
Hans Bellmer, who inspired much of the artwork in
Innocence, the follow-up to Ghost in the Shell. Explore more:
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5].
[Several links are nsfw.]posted by monju_bosatsu at 10:55 AM PST - 11 comments
After a
Noel Mewton-Wood performance of
Hindemith's (.pdf) Ludus Tonalis, Dame
Myra Hess exclaimed: ‘The boy is truly remarkable, and
what shall he be like at 40-odd?’.
Glowing testimonials to his ‘genius’ (Sir Malcolm Sargent) from Beecham, Schnabel, Bliss, Hindemith and Britten were countered by indifference from the major record labels and concert managements. In 1953,
at the age of 31, the pianist, a shy young man susceptible to depression, committed suicide. Now, the
Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive of Middlesex University offers
a scan of the The London Evening News page with the report of Mewton-Wood's death. And here is
a mp3 page with some of his out-of-print work.
posted by matteo at 10:53 AM PST - 11 comments
Pot, boobies and panties in the Alabama Govenors Race Loretta Nall is running for govenor of Alabama on the Marijuana Party ticket and also trying to the the nomination from the Libertarian Party.
Her cleavage recently became an issue when a columnist for an Alabama newspaper got huffy because his newspaper ran a picture of her showing cleavage.
But that's not all. Ms. Nall was also denied permission to see her brother in jail because she wasn't wearing panties.
She tells all about it in her blog.
posted by nyxxxx at 8:24 AM PST - 50 comments
Google must know exactly what you're you're looking for,
right? Unfortunately, they limit the results of your query to 1000. If you're doing research on
crack whores, you'll get 2,800,000 results. If the page you want is at 14,673, you're out of luck. But there's still
hope for
finding what you need in this vast, uncharted web.
posted by sluglicker at 8:13 AM PST - 20 comments
Community photography projects abounded during the 1970's, but the most influential was the
Half Moon Community Workshop. Besides the workshop, this group also ran a gallery and a journal,
Camerawork that introduced many British photographers to a theoretical and politically engaged aesthetic practice.
Much of the theory espoused in Camerawork might seem naive or overly polemical for today's jaded post-Marxist intellect, but one thing that came out of the collective that does
stand the test of time is the work of
Jo Spence.posted by PeterMcDermott at 8:08 AM PST - 1 comments
A Dweller in Mesopotamia. Donald Maxwell was Official Artist to the Admiralty during World War I, and the end of the war found him in what was then called Mesopotamia (now Iraq); he compiled the sketches and paintings he did there into a book which Project Gutenberg has put online. I'm posting it for the frequently beautiful images, but the text is interesting too. He says Baghdad and Basra don't live up to the Westerner's romantic preconceptions ("The first general impression of Basra is that of an unending series of quays along a river not unlike the Thames at Tilbury"), but he also describes age-old scenes that are now gone for good. (Via
wood s lot, one of the few sites I visit every day.)
posted by languagehat at 7:12 AM PST - 9 comments
In
1938 the
British Balloon Command was established to protect cities and key targets such as industrial areas, ports,
landmarks and harbours.
Barrage balloons or "
Bulging Berthas" were
inflatable shiny
silver-painted
balloons, made of rubber-coated fabric, and filled with hydrogen gas used prevent low level attacks by enemy aircraft. The balloons flew anywhere from 500 feet to 10,000 feet. The 15 gauge flying wire that tethered them could clip the wings off a plane. They were also used at
sea and to cover
invasions.
They were also effective against the V-1 flying bomb and back in the late 80s, at least one general thought they could still be used to
protect airfields.
posted by Smedleyman at 6:50 AM PST - 16 comments
March 23
Warning to chatroom users after libel award for man labelled a Nazi. "Mr Keith-Smith told the Guardian that he took action after a debate about the Iraq war in 2003 on a Yahoo! message board with about 100 members turned ugly. "She was very pro-Bush. Initially, she called me lard brain and I wasn't particularly concerned about that. Then she called me a Nazi," he said."
posted by gsb at 11:11 PM PST - 45 comments
Education for Death. (YouTubefilter.) Disney-produced
anti-Nazi cartoon short from 1943. Look for Hitler's Satanic horns. More weirdness from WWII: Warner Bros
Snafuperman, starring Pvt. Snafu (originally created by Dr. Seuss!), who also deals with
spies, all while jabbering away in a voice that sounds disconcertingly like that of a certain cwazy wabbit. From Archive. org -- Pvt. Snafu learns about
booby traps, in one case literally. Bugs himself joined the Air Force, and was faced with
gremlins for his trouble. Superman himself got in on the act, battling
Japoteurs. After all, during the War we were plenty worried about those canny
Japanese.
posted by Astro Zombie at 10:46 PM PST - 26 comments
I don't believe they'll give up on the bases and the oil. Nor will its successors, Republican or Democrat. So I think that's what we will be doing, staying forever. Unless the rest of us, outside the government, force change on the leadership of the Democrats as well as the Republicans, which will be difficult and take a long time.
From DailyKos comes an excellent series of interviews with
Daniel Ellsberg; leaker of The Pentagon Papers. Part 1:
The Pentagon Papers and the Overlooked 1968 Leaks, Part 2:
Judith Miller, the New York Times and Government-Controlled Press, Part 3:
The Cult of Secrecy in Government and Its Undermining of Democracy, Part 4:
Whistleblowing and Effective Activism, Part 5:
Iraq/Vietnam Parallels and Other Foreign Policy Fiascos and Part 6:
Bush, the Next 9/11 and the Approaching Police State.
posted by afu at 7:57 PM PST - 48 comments
Dancer Sues Movin' Out for breach of contract and sexual harassment she claims to have suffered during her run in the National Touring company of the Broadway hit. In an interesting move, the dancer,
Alice Alyse, has created a
lawsuit website to explain her side of the story. Perhaps she'll win, but will she ever work again?
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 6:29 PM PST - 29 comments
A conversation about the future is a 1 hr. 15 min. Time magazine podcast (mp3 file) of a panel discussion, featuring Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban, LA Times op-ed editor Andres Martinez, author Steven Johnson ("Everything Bad Is Good for You") and magazine writer Caitlin Flanagan.
posted by edlundart at 5:47 PM PST - 10 comments
The face of gaming. (via /.) A glance down memory lane to 20 years ago, when games looked and felt completely different. Were those old games really as great as our
memories tell us? Other than all of our graphical splendor, can we really say that games have had any real
new innovation?
posted by mystyk at 4:56 PM PST - 56 comments
Platinum Weird is a
mysterious band formed in 1973 (or '74, depending on the website) by future Eurythmic Dave Stewart and his "soulmate" Erin Grace. Tidbits from
various sources speak of underground parties with
celeb devotees, a lost
collaboration with George Harrison, and a sudden disappearance by Ms. Grace who was never seen again. Except it seems the whole thing is a to-be-released album on Interscope, created by Stewart and
Kara DioGuardi, a songwriter who pens tunes for top 40 artists.
posted by ktoad at 4:21 PM PST - 17 comments
"I am under censure for mentioning numbers...." "I am instructed NOT to use hard numbers when telling kids how old rocks are. I am supposed to say that these rocks are VERY VERY OLD... but I am NOT to say that these Ordovician rocks are thought to be about 300 million years old."
Essentially, they are not allowing Bob to teach a certain set of scientific data in order to protect their ability to provide students the good science curriculum they do teach. The directors... have heard from them more than enough times that teaching evolution would be "political suicide".
In Arkansas,
even supporters of teaching evolution feel they must
hide, obfuscate, and water-down evolution.posted by orthogonality at 2:45 PM PST - 111 comments
George Perry, a poor 19 year old farmer, set the world all-tackle record for large mouth bass in 1932, when he caught a 22 pound, 4 ounce bass in Montgomery Lake, Georgia.
It's a good story -- he was a poor farmer, he and his buddy only had one lure, it was during the Depression, and the fish was not caught for sport but for food. Furthermore, it was only weighed as an afterthought, after he was told that
Field and Stream had a big bass contest that paid a $75 prize. Amazingly, that record has stood for over 73 years. In the interim, sport fishing for bass has become widely popular around the world, a multi-billion dollar market served by its own
retail establishments,
tournament tour,
TV shows, corporate sponsorships, and legions of amateur fisher-men and -women, all trying to catch a bass bigger than the one George Perry caught back in 1932.
On Monday, after years of trying, a trio of San Diego fisherman hooked a 25 pound, 1 ounce fish that may have broken that record. (Includes picture of obscenely huge large mouth bass.) And they let it go, passing up potentially millions of dollars in endorsements.
And their decision to release the fish and not pursue the record is the real story here.posted by mosk at 12:27 PM PST - 24 comments
Rivers of Light Hypnotic night-time helicopter shots, floating over downtown LA offices and highways. From Grass Collective. Flash interface, so find your way to the fifth column from the left ('free downloads').
[Large (91MB, 146MB) zipped QT files - a smaller (12MB) sample here]posted by carter at 11:20 AM PST - 12 comments
Did Isaac Hayes really quit South Park?
Last night's show roasted Hayes for his irate
departure following the now-infamous Scientology episode (banned from the air in
Tom Cruise's litigious wake, full episode
here). In the latest episode, masters of subtlety Trey Parker and Matt Stone depict Chef as having fallen prey to an insidious cult, the "Super Adventure Club", subsequently killing him off in a manner that would make Kenny jealous. But today
FoxNews reports that Isaac Hayes has been in the hospital since Jan. 17th, following a stroke, and never issued a statement.
Apparently, the Scientology Center issued it "for" him. [
via] [previously discussed
here here and
here]
posted by mowglisambo at 11:15 AM PST - 81 comments
Remember back in the '90s when the GOP was still the party of fiscal conservatism, and the shiny new code word was "family values"? Well, they still believe in family values part:
Exhibit 1. Exhibit 2. Exhibit 3.posted by hwestiii at 11:05 AM PST - 31 comments
The big payback in Iraq. Last night on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, ROBERT LICHTER, President, Center for Media and Public Affairs put forth the following:
You know, Charlie Peter, a great Washington journalist, once said, "The message of Watergate was dig, dig, dig, but journalists thought the message was act tough." And so I think you're getting negative coverage that may be kind of compensatory criticism.
Should the news focus more on the
optimistic elements or is it reflecting
public opinion. Is "compensatory criticism" justified for what it might wrongly perceive as possible White House manipulation during the run up to the war?
posted by Skygazer at 10:10 AM PST - 22 comments
Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court held in a
5-3 decision (.pdf) that police may not search a home if any inhabitant of the home is present and objects to the search, even if another inhabitant consents. The Court drew what it acknowledged is a “fine line” – if a co-inhabitant is at the door and objects, the police can’t enter; but if the co-inhabitant is somewhere else – even in a nearby police car – and has no opportunity to object, then police don’t need his or her consent. Chief Justice Roberts issued his first written dissent, blasting the majority’s “random” and “arbitrary” rule and suggesting that the ability of police to respond to domestic violence threats could be compromised. The
zingers in the footnotes may reveal “strains behind the surface placidity and collegiality of the young Roberts court.”
posted by brain_drain at 10:00 AM PST - 88 comments
Firefox “causes” breakup... One man uses his fiance's computer to surf dating and swinger websites. He's careful to wipe his passwords etc. as he surfs - and then for good measure, de-installs Firefox.
The fiance then decides to install Firefox for the usual reasons, not knowing the above and happens to decides to edit the list of sites to never save passwords for. And comes across a list of said websites, and realises that he's still an active member of those websites.
Surely when you de-install a program, the uninstallation process should get rid of program-related data too, like in games? Although the geniuses at Firefox
manifestly disagree with this.
Other commenters also think the man was
in the right.
posted by badlydubbedboy at 8:21 AM PST - 61 comments
So we're at this bar and I'm like,
Jessica, your uptalk is totally annoying?, and she goes,
actually Stephanie, it's called HRT? and I'm like,
whatever, I heard it'll destroy your career? and she's all,
no way, even the President does it now? so I go, just forget it ok? and order another
Stooooohhhleee owwrindge and taaaahnick.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 8:06 AM PST - 158 comments
Digital Funnies: Comics Preservation by Jonathan Barli. Welcome to Digital Funnies, dedicated to preserving the history of this most neglected of art forms and reintroducing it to scholars and new readers alike. While several well-known titles such as Krazy Kat, Gasoline Alley, and Peanuts are being given their proper due in published form, there is still much of the rich history of comics and cartooning that will more than likely never see print again and worse, fade away with time. [Via Drawn!. And involved in this project is our very own Adam Kempa.]posted by soundofsuburbia at 3:36 AM PST - 9 comments
Dumb: The Game is an extremely addictive puzzle game, with the added addictiveness of a "world rankings" scoreboard to prove to the world just how smart you are. If you get stuck, the
forums contain a LOT of hints. [More inside]
posted by antifuse at 1:55 AM PST - 23 comments
March 22
"These are just slush funds for conservative interest groups" --The Compassion Capital Fund ($148 million of our money), and the Community-Based Abstinence Education grant program ($391.7 million of our money)--just 2 of many new programs.
...The distribution of new money to conservative organizations is a small part of an estimated flood of $2 billion a year in federal grants to religious and religiously affiliated organizations.--except it's only to organizations who have policies that agree with Bush and the GOP agenda on social issues, and not about need.
posted by amberglow at 10:26 PM PST - 61 comments
The Modern Marvels Invent Now Challenge named 25 finalists (selected from over 4,000 entries) in a competition to find the greatest invention of 2006. The winner will be named during
History Channel's Great Inventions Week (May 24-27th), but you won't have to wait to check out the finalists.
MAKE: Blog briefly profiled each invention in a series of posts this week:
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3,
Part 4, and
Part 5. The inventions will also be on exhibit at the
California Science Center in Los Angeles (April 7-15th), the
Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago (April 20-30th), the
Museum of Science in Boston (May 5-14th) and
Vanderbilt Hall in Grand
Central Terminal in New York City (May 22-27th), and finally, the
National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, OH (through August 2006).
posted by paulychamp at 8:47 PM PST - 10 comments
Howdy, neighbor! A direct detection of a
brown dwarf only 12.7 light years away
(practically next door in interstellar terms) adds another substellar object to the list of those relatively close by. While not quite the
closest such object yet detected, it’s notable for being pinpointed with a combination of ground-based
adaptive optics and
Simultaneous Differential Imaging, a special set of filters designed to subtract out starlight while leaving the light from substellar objects. This could be an important milestone in the ongoing quest to
directly detect extrasolar planets, as opposed to finding their traces indirectly via methods such as
stellar wobble or gravitational microlensing. Direct detection, among other things, makes it much easier to
analyze planetary atmospheres for traces of life. An object that could be as small as 9 Jupiter masses, less than 13 light years away, is a heck of a good step forward, especially considering that the very first indirect detections of extrasolar planets
weren't made until the 1990’s, and I recall serious arguments being made in the 1980’s that they did not, in fact, exist.
posted by kyrademon at 7:53 PM PST - 8 comments
Panda's Thumb reports elementary music teacher
Tresa Wagonner was put on paid administrative leave by the superintendent of schools in Bennett, Colorado. Her offense? Playing a 12-minute clip from the thirty-year-old children's series
"Who's Afraid of Opera?" for her classroom. The series features legendary soprano Joan Sutherland and some cute little hand-puppets who alternate elementary explanations of the libretti with vocal performances of selections from the operas featured. Apparently, Ms. Wagonner's selected episode,
Gounod’s Faust, angered fundamentalist Bennettians, already on the warpath over
Waggoner's musical choices for last year's Christmas pageant.
posted by VMC at 6:30 PM PST - 38 comments
The Great Stalacpipe Organ. This unique, one-of-a-kind
instrument was invented in 1954 by Mr. Leland W. Sprinkle of Springfield, Virginia, a mathematician and electronic scientist at the Pentagon. He began his monumental 3 year project by searching the
vast chambers of the caverns selecting stalactites to precisely match a musical scale. Electronic mallets were wired throughout the caverns and connected to a large four-manual console. When a key is depressed, a tone occurs as the rubber-tipped plunger strikes the stalactite tuned to
concert pitch. (scroll down for mp3).
posted by Astro Zombie at 4:58 PM PST - 24 comments
Things we already knew: Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. ... A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity. The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests.posted by caddis at 3:19 PM PST - 29 comments
A
carillon is a musical instrument that is played by a performer striking a keyboard which causes clappers to strike bells. The
bells are the stars of the instrument: they are constructed in foundries, made of bronze, and
tuned by shaving the insides of the bells until a perfect harmonic sequence is attained. The largest bell, weighing in at over six and a half tons, is located at the
Kirk-In-The-Hills Presbyterian Church in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Here are some samples of what one
sounds like. Music performed on the
Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Carillon in Chicago.
posted by DeepFriedTwinkies at 2:40 PM PST - 26 comments
“It was only natural that one day I should decide to toss my
film into a dank corner of my garden. After a hot, humid summer, I came to gather up the
film(Embedded Quicktime), which over the course of the summer I'd entirely forgotten. The
colors remained very pure and intense, but had departed from their previous form. Indeed, they were laying themselves down upon the old action film to form veritable mosaics of
color, remarkably like the stained glass of church windows. This was a really pleasurable experience.” –
Jurgen Reble,
on his artposted by jrb223 at 2:33 PM PST - 7 comments
Al 'Blind Owl' Wilson was one of the more interesting characters on the 60's music scene. A contemporary (and fellow traveler) of
John Fahey, and student of blues history and with Bob Hite, the founder of seminal 60's blues-rockers
Canned Heat (
youtube video of Wilson and the Heat featuring the Owl on vocals) . A painfully introverted man who suffered from depression and addiction throughout his life, Wilson had a light touch and lack of histrionics uncommon among his blues-revival contemporaries. He died by his own hand at 27.
Blind-owl.net is a loving and comprehensive tribute, featuring many rare
interviews and
photos.
posted by jonmc at 11:51 AM PST - 11 comments
He has
cavorted naked with Charlotte Rampling [this is VERY NSFW] and
covered himself in caviar for Marc Jacobs, but
Jürgen Teller thinks "fashion is a wank".
Teller's first solo show in Paris is entitled "Nurnberg", it consists of
a sequence of images (annoying Flash site, sorry) taken at the infamous
Zeppelintribune parade ground,
site of Nazi propaganda rallies, which was designed by Hitler's favourite builder, Albert Speer. Over several months,
Teller (.pdf) has photographed the monument, the podium and the steep, ruthless steps, all of which have been left to decay. Or not. "It wasn't really maintained, but if there was a broken step, or a smashed wall, it would be mysteriously replaced with a new one."
Teller's photographs show the delicate weeds, flowers and lichen [NSFW] that have grown up around the stone blocks. "In Germany, there is a saying about letting the grass grow over things, meaning that events will eventually be forgotten".
posted by matteo at 11:31 AM PST - 19 comments
The Secret Agent - whilst talk has gone on
for many a year about things like 'bubbles' and 'bursting' on the topic of real estate, never before has it been seriously considered that regular offer-withholding, mortgage-falsifying, and price-gouging to the tune of £50,000 by real estate agents might be affecting the housing market altogether. I challenge metafilter to make the links, and see who's first on that merry conspiracy theory bandwagon. And why is it that people who work with selling or developing buildings are just, well,
evil?
posted by jrengreen at 3:18 AM PST - 65 comments
The Fourth Amendment provides, in part, that "...no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause." The Supreme Court has issued its (yet another) 8-0
opinion, authored by Justice Scalia in the case of
United States v. Grubbs, overturning the Ninth Circuit
decision. Justice Souter filed a
concurring opinion.
Grubbs deals with the question of anticipatory warrants, and it is the first time that the Court has addressed the practice. It appears that under this ruling, preemptive warrants can issue without existing probable cause, but merely on the supposition that probable cause will exist in the future.
Some legal scholars had
anticipated that at least the
more conservative members of the Court would rule against anticipatory warrants. After all, under
Blackstone's analysis of the common law rule that contributed to the Fourth Amendment, as noted by Professor Orin Kerr in the
NYU Journal of Law and Liberty symposium on the subject, warrants "issue" when they are signed by the judge, and not when the precedent condition occurs. Professor Chris Slobogin
disagrees. Kerr has posted a preliminary
analysis of the decision on his new
blawg. The case has
previously been
discussed by the smart people over at the
Volokh Conspiracy.
posted by Pontius Pilate at 2:39 AM PST - 45 comments
March 21
Star Trek Kid? One man video reconstruction of First Contact, the scene in which Alfre Woodard quotes Moby Dick at Picard. Interesting choice. YouTube link.
posted by feelinglistless at 1:58 PM PST - 45 comments
"The make him into something he wasn't." Today, on the 200th anniversary of his birth, a national holiday, Mexico both honors and reconsiders Benito Juarez (Wikipedia:
Eng/
Span): "
Mexico's
Lincoln," the nation's first indigenous president, who served two
terms in the 1860s and 1870s. The capital city's
airport, a
border city of 1.1M,
universities, and streets and monuments in just
about every town are
named after Juarez, widely considered a national hero. Politicians left and right invoke his name, especially this year as Mexico prepares to elect a new president in July. For many in the Latin American left, he's a regional icon in the vein of Simon Bolivar and Ernesto "Che" Guevara; Havana unveiled a
bust (Span) of him last year. He's held up as a defender of the poor and the indigenous and an opponent to free trade. Today, however, some historians say
he was neither. For those who read Spanish, a leading Mexican (right-of-center) newspaper,
El Universal, also touches on the topic in
"Juarez, a controversial icon."posted by donpedro at 1:37 PM PST - 5 comments
Everyone in
the blue and
the green loves
David Burns.
His landmark (and most often recommended) book, "Feeling Good" is available in
Small,
Medium, and you can even
Supersize it, complete with exercises, questionnaires and expanded section on medications for depression.
"Feeling Good" is a great book, but
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is good for lots of stuff besides
depression.
Like dating, relationship or shyness issues. Solutions that do not involve
John Gray,
Dr. Phil,
Dr. Laura, or heck, even
the song "Doctor Doctor" from the Thompson Twins.
No worries, because Dr. Burns
has a book for that too, and it rocks. It will get you off the couch, and
get you out and smooching in no time.
There are
others out there also working with CBT to help you make your life all it can be.
posted by willmize at 11:17 AM PST - 19 comments
Superbad. I'd forgotten what an evil time-waster this site is.
OK, maybe you haven't. Yes, it's a double. But it's an OLD double.posted by dersins at 11:04 AM PST - 37 comments
Sputnik for the digital g-g-g-generation? No, thats probably hyperbole. But despite yankee plans for a
$100 Laptop for Every Kid, those dang Chinese have gone ahead and created a €123 (that's Euros, son) Personal Computer,
the YSR-639.
As a perfect nightmare for Gates, Jobs and Barrett all it runs a version of linux (ok, that was probably everybody's guess) on a processor I had never heard of before: the
Godson CPU. The company espouses an unusual amount of populist rhetoric, the kind that I thought had been eliminated in now-capitalist China, claiming this a computer for all. Basically, they aim to end the Digital Divide--in China, anyway. Check out the video at
CEBITvideo.com (
Google Video. [
VIA]
posted by illovich at 7:46 AM PST - 64 comments
Nectivorous!!! Those that eat nectar:
hummingbirds,
honeyeaters,
miners,
honeycreepers,
spinebills,
wattlebirds,
friarbirds,
lorikeets,
warblers,
some
parrots,
and of course
some bats!!!
Many plants are adapted to such
creatures!
posted by beerbajay at 4:29 AM PST - 18 comments
March 20
Democratic presidential candidate rails against US imperialism. "The platform . . . condemns the experiment in imperialism as an inexcusable blunder, which has involved us in enormous expense, brought us weakness instead of strength, and laid our nation open to the charge of abandoning the fundamental principles of a republic."
A prominent American author who
initially supported the conflict, changed his mind, calling it
"a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater.” The US is “the kind of World Power . . . that a prairie-dog village is . . .
it is the duty of our Government to stand sentinel, with solemn mien, and lifted nose, and curved paws, on top of our little World-Power mound.”
posted by insomnia_lj at 7:24 PM PST - 25 comments
Google Idol is perfect for people who want to embarrass themselves in front of large audiences, but couldn't make it onto the
American,
Arab,
Australian,
Brazilian,
Canadian,
Czech,
Danish,
Dutch,
Finish,
French,
German,
Icelandic,
Indian,
Iraqi?,
Malaysian,
New Zealander,
Norwegian,
Polish,
Portuguese,
Russian,
Singaporean,
South African, or
Swedish incarnations of the show. There's also, of course,
YouTube Idol.
posted by scottreynen at 6:20 PM PST - 21 comments
The Beauty Academy of Kabul is Liz Mermin's documentary about hairdressers from America teaching young women in Afghanistan how to beautify themselves. Could female self-expression and vanity be an impetus for more pervasive cultural transformation? In a related development, Nike has designed a
sporty hijab for use by Somali volleyball players. Whether it's an improvement over
traditional variations is debatable.
posted by mert at 3:21 PM PST - 11 comments
The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll New York Magazine's Mark Jacobson has an excellent write up on the 9-11 theories and the conspiracy theorists out for the truth. From the March 27 issue. I recommend passing it on to your friends because it raises real questions while not sounding batshit insane at all. It all boils down to whether you believe in LIHOP or MIHOP. One page link
here.posted by daHIFI at 1:31 PM PST - 223 comments
Conversation is an art. "Hume suggested that politeness was not, in fact, "natural to the human mind," but "presumption and arrogance" were. Society depends on artifice. Conversation is an art."
"American conversation now prides itself on angry authenticity or on being kind and "nonjudgmental"; it is meant to be "natural" and full of "self-expression." This does not make for great conversation or a vital political life."
posted by semmi at 11:19 AM PST - 21 comments
Self-portrait: A portrait an artist makes using himself or herself as its subject, typically drawn or painted from a reflection in a mirror.
There are many
famous painted self portraits, but now that everyone has a digital camera, more and more photographic self portaits are popping up
everywhere. Whether you think of it as
vanity,
narcissism,
self-invovlment, or just art, it is hard to deny that there are a lot of
interesting and
well-composed shots out there. Sure, there are plenty of
arm-
length camera angles, but there is also work being done with
black and white images,
hands and
feet, and,
of course,
eyes.
Even photoshop is used
sometimes. People are still
speculating on what exactly all these pictures mean, but I think it is clear that from
totally innocent to
intensely personal to
NSFW, self portraits are here to stay.
posted by nuclear_soup at 9:53 AM PST - 14 comments
Beatlemaniac It took Alan W. Pollack 10 years to pick apart every Beatles song and describe in detail the mechanics behind the music.
posted by minkll at 2:23 AM PST - 36 comments
March 19
Aero Warriors: Battling at super speedways on Sunday to sell cars on Monday. In 1969 only showroom stock cars were permitted in NASCAR sanctioned events. This meant in order to compete a car had to be produced and available through dealers in minimum quantities. Only minor changes for racing were allowed. And in 1969 Ford and Chrysler were locked in a Battle Royale to win races. To this end both produced cars designed to dominate on the 1+ mile speedways. For Chrysler: the Dodge Charger 500, Dodge Charger Daytona, and Plymouth Road Runner Superbird. For Ford: the
Ford Torino Talladega and
Mercury Cyclone Spoiler II. Aero Warriors is the story and history of these street legal, 200mph (320kph) capable, wildly winged cars from the Chrysler side of the line.
posted by Mitheral at 9:18 PM PST - 16 comments
Today SCOTUS will
hear a case to decide the scope of what can and cannot be patented.
At the heart of this case lies the decision about whether a patent can validly include a step of ‘correlating a test result’ that arguably monopolises a basic scientific relationship used in medical treatment ‘such that any doctor necessarily infringes the patent merely
by thinking about the relationship after looking at a test result.’ If as expected the court uses this as an opportunity to reign in the scope of what can be patented this will surely be a victory for common sense.
posted by bap98189 at 4:02 PM PST - 18 comments
La Fuga - "The Escape" - can be found inside an old bank in Madrid. A "live immersive gaming" experience, its players try to "escape" equipped only with a networked PDA and their wits. Think of it as a cross between the
Tactile Dome and
The Game, with a bit of
Myst and a dash of
Cube mixed in.
posted by TunnelArmr at 9:25 AM PST - 17 comments
Want the real "Real Thing", plenty of people know to look for the yellow cap and stock up on some
passover Coke. But unsanctioned by the corporation,
Mexican Coke is now showing up in the USA, in the old fashioned glass bottles.
posted by 445supermag at 8:24 AM PST - 62 comments
March 18
Elizabeth Báthory is hot. I'd do her. The thing is she holds the world record (according to
GWR) for being the most prolific serial killer in history. Supposedly, she may have
tortured and killed as many as 2000 young girls, which probably makes her bi or lesbian (not that there's anything wrong with that). Some say she is the
real inspiration for Bram Stoker's
Dracula.
posted by sluglicker at 4:39 PM PST - 62 comments
Cost of Iraq war may exceed $1 trillion dollars. That number is hard to comprehend. To get a grip on it, observe that the CIA says the average annual purchasing power of Iraqi citizens is
$3,400, and there are
about 7,500,000 males between 15-65 years old in Iraq. Divide this out, and it turns out that by the time we're "done" with Iraq, we could have hired each and every man in Iraq and paid them their average annual income for 39 years. Yup - we could have hired every man in Iraq for their entire career. In the past, when great pharaohs hired thousands (let alone millions) of men for decades, he'd have some
big damned pyramids or something to show for it.
posted by gregor-e at 2:08 PM PST - 96 comments
The Border Film Project. "For three months last summer, three filmmakers with ties to Arizona passed out hundreds of disposable cameras to two groups: [...] undocumented immigrants on the perilous journey to enter the United States and Minuteman volunteers determined to stop them."
[article] [previously]posted by milquetoast at 11:44 AM PST - 20 comments
2-inch books (flash) is a delightful exhibit of tiny hand-crafted books. The
2005 winners (pdf) of the Miniature Book Society's annual competition offers a sampling of little books that have been published. Tiny tomes have been delighting readers and collectors
for 4,000 years. If these tiny treasures intrigue you, perhaps you'd like to collect your own
vintage or
contemporary library.
posted by madamjujujive at 10:44 AM PST - 11 comments
March 17
8 X 10 glossies of a bygone era. Stacks of professionally taken promotional photos of early 1970s performers (mostly from the cocktail lounge circuit, it appears) were found in an alley and rescued. You can almost hear the tinkly piano music in the background as you look at these hopeful showbiz faces. (via
Sharpeworld)
posted by Oriole Adams at 9:39 PM PST - 59 comments
Bad Caps. A site dedicated to the faulty capacitors present in even highly-rated manufacturers' boards. There's a
forum with individual boards dedicated to identifying specific boards with faulty caps.
posted by cellphone at 8:29 PM PST - 17 comments
Usability Exchange -- a testing service determining site accessibility for disabled users. They're only in the UK now, but it seems like a great idea.
Organisations set up their tests online and submit them directly to disabled testers in our database. Testers are then free to complete these tests in their own time, earning money for each test they complete. As tests are completed by users, organisations can view test results, web page logs and other information in real time. More here at BBC, including some concerns.posted by amberglow at 7:26 PM PST - 17 comments
I thought my pugs were awesome, but that was back before I found out about Jesus. No, not our lord & savior, silly, the REAL Jesus, Jesus the Pug. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of him?
He’s been in a
number of
famous events over the
years.
posted by jonson at 7:23 PM PST - 19 comments
The number of patient
fatalities in
mifepristone abortions is estimated at 1 in 200,000
1, about double the rate for suction-aspiration abortions of comparable terms, and about equal to the combined early and late term fatality rates for vacuum aspiration abortion.
2 (
source) (
via)
[More inside]posted by sequential at 7:01 PM PST - 30 comments
The Israel Lobby. Writing the London Review of Books, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Harvard University's Stephen Walt argue that American foreign policy in the Middle East has been diverted from the national interest by a powerful domestic Jewish lobby:
[T]he thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical. The article is an edited version of a longer
working paper (pdf). While the authors focus on the potency of the Jewish lobby, including organizations such as
AIPAC and the
Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, they also point to the role of evangelical Christians who believe that Israel's existence is a necessary precondition of the Second Coming, a group whose importance has been remarked upon
elsewhere.
posted by Dasein at 4:23 PM PST - 145 comments
Must-haves for your coffee table, lavatory reading, or just killing time on the subway:
The Nutritional Benefits of Nose Picking;
Perfecting the Art of Fart Projection (NEVER be blamed again!);
How to Murder a Complete Stranger (and get away with it) [paging scarabic]. These and other eyebrow-raising books can be yours, assuming you already have a book that you can put these dustjackets on.
FlapArt: The Alternative Book Cover.
posted by Gator at 1:54 PM PST - 17 comments
That big .45 jumped in Big Milam's hand. The youth turned to catch that big, expanding bullet at his right ear. He dropped. In
Money, Mississippi on August 24, 1955, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant abducted 14-year-old
Emmet "Bobo" Till, tortured him, shot him in the head, and dumped his body in the river for
whistling at a white woman. Emmett's mother insisted on an open-casket funeral so people could see what had happened to her son. On September 15, 1955,
Jet magazine published
photos [NSFW] of Emmett's corpse, which brought the case national attention and
helped ignite the
civil rights movement. On September 23, 1955, an all-white jury
acquitted Bryant and Milam after deliberating for about an hour. Milam and Bryant confessed in a January 24 , 1966,
Look magazine article. Milam died in 1980 and Bryant died in 1990. After
reopening the case in 2004 based on
new evidence that more people may have been involved, the Justice Department
closed the case today without filing any new charges.
[more inside]posted by kirkaracha at 1:30 PM PST - 19 comments
Slavomir Rawicz was a Polish calvary officer, who was imprisoned by the Soviets and eventually taken to a prison in Siberia. With 7 companions, including one mysterious american, he escaped and journeyed to the south, crossing Mongolia, the Gobi Desert and Tibet before making it to British India. Or at least this is what he claims in his book "
The Long Walk." Nobody has ever found
evidence that he was ever in russia or that any of his
companions ever existed. Oh and he also claims to have seen
Yetis.posted by afu at 12:58 PM PST - 21 comments
We talked about "
Snakes On A Plane" last summer, but since the thread is closed and this trailer really deserves to be seen...
Here you go. [youtube] For those of you yet unaware, prepare yourself for my nomination for "worst movie ever."
posted by pwb503 at 11:43 AM PST - 185 comments
Drawball is a large, circular, online space for anonymous artists to draw whatever they like. Equally as interesting as the art itself is the opportunity to watch the various
online groups interacting with each other. Your ink supply is limited, so careful application is rewarded, perhaps even with a well of unlimited ink tied to your IP address. The
hall of fame is a great chance to see the best pictures archived and to see exactly how they were drawn, stroke by stroke.
posted by ktoad at 8:41 AM PST - 37 comments
March 16
Name Tom's Tumor. Tom Lunt has a
brain tumor. It’s a benign tumor and not life-threatening; the symptoms are "merely strange." Turn his misfortune to your personal gain by winning the contest and taking home the tumor.
posted by ba at 2:32 PM PST - 21 comments
Despotism. In 1946,
Encyclopedia Britannica and
Harold Lasswell produced an educational film about the nature of Despotism. Calls to mind contemporary examples of despotism, and (in view of Lasswell's own views on the subject) raises some interesting questions about the uses and misuses of persuasion and propaganda.
Film link via the
Prelinger Archive, previously discussed
here).
posted by washburn at 1:40 PM PST - 8 comments
Feedwhip monitors web pages and emails you when they change. This is handy for keeping tabs on a site without an RSS feed.
posted by turbodog at 11:16 AM PST - 16 comments
to my left is a youngish software developer from Yokohama, incandescent with rage. To my right is the finance officer of a major games publisher. Worryingly, he is tapping sums into a pocket calculator and shaking his head...
It shouldn't have been a surprise (
...) but yesterday's
announcement (pdf) from Sony has
crushed 14 year-olds of all ages. The
Playstation 3 is shaping up as a great
IT Disaster. The 'Times' man in Tokyo -
Leo Lewis -
elaborates, muses on being a games geek in Akihabara (with cash and a proper job) and explains the delights of
"beer flavored alcohol", just what we need to drown our sorrows.
posted by grahamwell at 5:08 AM PST - 61 comments
March 15
Today, about 17,000 American medical students and almost as many foreign trained doctors learn what types of doctors they will be. Yes, it’s
Match Day. Ok, while most people probably could care less about this post, it presents an intriguing look into the
forces (i.e. how the ratio between specialists and generalists arises and to note: more specialists equals more procedures and costlier health care) that shape American health care today.
And, it represents the strange culmination of years of study (at least 8+ years after high school) that many students take just to leave it up to a
strange algorithm that is under a
anti-trust lawsuit as they wake up one day in March and learn where they will be spending the next (at least) three years of their life. Also, if you see a recent graduate of an
"ADORE+P" residency -- Anesthesiology, Dermatology, Orthopedics/Optho, Radiology, ENT/Emergency Room medicine (plus, of course, Plastic surgery) -- (the professions that work great hours and make the most money) -- congratulate her or him on being the best (statistically) of the crop.
posted by narebuc at 9:49 PM PST - 33 comments
Matthew Barney, of
The Cremaster Cycle fame, has a new film coming out. Starring Bjork and Barney himself, along with a largely Japanese cast,
Drawing Restraint 9.
"The film concerns the theme of self-imposed limitation and continues Matthew Barney's interest in religious rite, this time focusing on Shinto."
"The core idea of Drawing Restraint 9 is the relationship between self-imposed resistance and creativity, a theme it symbolically tracks through the construction and transformation of a vast sculpture of liquid Vaseline, called “The Field”, which is molded, poured, bisected and reformed on the deck of the ship over the course of the film."
Uh huh. If you liked the beautiful weirdness that was TCC, check out the
trailer {embedded QT}.
posted by zardoz at 8:05 PM PST - 28 comments
National Hurricane Center and the Likelihood of Hurricanes. In December 2003 the NHC predicted a 68% chance of a major (Category 3-4-5) hurricane hitting the US, in fact there were three major hits on the US (Charlie, Ivan, and Jeanne). In December 2004 the NHC predicted a 69% chance of a major hurricane, in fact there were four major hists (Dennis, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma). The odds of that happening are about 0.9% (see link for math), or "statistically very significant evidence" the NHC predictions are understated.
Forecast for 2006: 81% chance of a major hurricane.
posted by stbalbach at 6:40 PM PST - 34 comments
It's 1968. Hippies are everywhere, and they're reading underground comics. Your name is
Joe Simon. You want to create a mainstream comic book with a hippie as a hero. What do you come up with?
Brother Power the
Geek.
It only lasted two issues. Of course, it did a little better than the
Black Bomber, a white bigot who sometimes turned into an African-American superhero. That comic was
never printed.
posted by Astro Zombie at 1:13 PM PST - 12 comments
It was his EVIL TWIN! Remember
Claud Allen, the bush administration domestic pollicy assistant who got busted for shoplifting? Turns out it might have been his twin brother.
Jean Schmidt (R-OH, best known for calling John Murtha a coward) may be using the same excuse for calling College Republicans "Little Hitlers" in the 1980s
posted by delmoi at 8:49 AM PST - 43 comments
Maureen Stapleton has died. A fat teenager with dreams of stardom moves to the big city, loses a lot of the weight but becomes a hard drinker and hard smoker, takes
acting lessons, and then gets lucky in classic Hollywood style: a big actress turns down a choice role in a
Tennessee Williams play and Stapleton gets the part. But it was talent, not luck, that won her the
Tony. This was the start of a long and honored acting career in which she also won Oscars and an Emmy. And yet you're thinking, "Archie's wife?"
posted by pracowity at 7:44 AM PST - 30 comments
itulip.com has returned. Back in the go-go days when Internet stocks ruled the world, iTulip was one of a very few voices warning about the Nasdaq bubble and the likely fallout. (
Prudent Bear was another.) As bad as things got, the overall financial bubble never really popped, it just shifted into debt and real estate after furious slashing of interest rates and money-printing by the Fed. Financial manias are terrible; their unraveling has been compared with economic nuclear weapons. (cf:
The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble [amazon book link] and the
Dutch Tulip Mania.) The only good solution to a bubble is not to have one in the first place. [more inside]
posted by Malor at 6:46 AM PST - 13 comments
ARTnatomy: Anatomical Basis of Facial Expression Learning Tool. See how all the different muscles in your face work. Flash interface; via
Drawn!posted by Gator at 4:50 AM PST - 10 comments
March 14
Freeline Skates [embedded video] make skateboards. One for each foot. As I watched these videos my brain was trying to put a regular board where it expected to see one.
posted by tellurian at 8:24 PM PST - 27 comments
The Vinyl Enthusiast. The Poet. The Dinner Guest. The Bass Player. The Showman. The Search Party. The Grandfather. The Tourist. ...
The Regulars.posted by dobbs at 4:22 PM PST - 21 comments
The "Axe Murder Incident" On Wednesday 18 August 1976 at 1040 hours in the morning, a United Nations Command (UNC) work force of five Korean Service Corps (KSC) personnel accompanied by and UNC security force...started to prune a large tree in the vicinity of UNC Check Point #3...Lieutenant Pak then shouted "MI KUN UL CHU KI GI CHA." Translated, it means, "Kill the U.S. Aggressors."; the UNC security force was attacked by a superior force of 30 KPA guards wielding pick handles, knives, clubs, and axes.
posted by Postroad at 3:17 PM PST - 20 comments
I guess it had to happen eventually, but
an iPod Film Festival has launched. You can watch them online (sans iPod) or offline (mit iPod!), and they've got indie and student films as well as music videos, all formated for the new players. The music videos are surprisingly good.
posted by mathowie at 2:15 PM PST - 9 comments
Abu Ghraib, continued. A new cache of disturbing images and videos from the original interrogations, with commentary from Salon. [Definitely NSFW, or for Earth, for that matter.]
posted by digaman at 12:59 PM PST - 48 comments
Earth-friendly evangelicals have been in the news a
lot lately. Are they related to the
Crunchy Cons (or
Green cons?!?)? Maybe they're all just afraid of the wrath of
grandma...[first link requires nyt account, or a library card]
posted by ericbop at 12:27 PM PST - 3 comments
Comment is free It will incorporate all the regular Guardian and Observer main commentators, many blogging for the first time, who will be joined by a host of outside contributors - politicians, academics, writers, scientists, activists and of course existing bloggers to debate, argue and occasionally agree on the issues of the day.posted by srboisvert at 11:04 AM PST - 11 comments
Safety of In-Flight Cell Phone Use Airlines are currently preparing to allow use of cell phones for in-flight calling. A Carnegie-Mellon study raises interesting questions about potential interference with critical avionics.
posted by docpops at 10:09 AM PST - 43 comments
Venezuela gets a controversal new flag and seal. In the
words of Chavez:
"The white horse is now liberated, free, vigorous, trotting toward the left, representing the return of Bolivar and his dream. Long live the fatherland!" Of course, national flag controversies are nothing new, for example, in
Iraq, the
Confederate States,
Macedonia, and
Canada. If you want to stay current, there is
Flagwire, a site devoted only to flag news, and the extremely cool
flag identifier, for those times when you don't know which country you are in.
posted by blahblahblah at 8:41 AM PST - 56 comments
Purim in Jerusalem: An exhibit of photographs by the late Yankl Conzen, currently on display at
The Jewish Theological Seminary (NYC) in recognition of the Jewish festival of
Purim (March 13-14, 2006), which features 45 works from the late 1990s depicting children from Jerusalem's Orthodox
Me'ah She'arim neighborhood dressed for
Purim celebrations:
"
Conzen's photographs offer an unflinching look at children in military and police uniforms, princess outfits, masks, and more traditional roles like Esther and Mordecai. Others mimic their elders with fake beards, long black coats, and wide-brimmed hats. Some are smiling, but many appear troubled. In effect, they serve as a microcosm of childhood itself, with its rapid emotional swings among fear, sadness, and happiness."
posted by naxosaxur at 8:04 AM PST - 16 comments
In the UK, people are sending
100 million SMS messages with their mobile phone every day, at prices that are far higher than you would expect. Now, some people have started an
online campaign to try and influence the mobile phone operators to drop their prices.
(more SMS statistics)posted by SharQ at 6:21 AM PST - 56 comments
New hope for blind hamsters. According to the Guardian, scientists at MIT have repaired brain damage and restored eyesight to rodents using nanotechnology. In the study, minute particles were injected into damaged parts of the brain, and subsequently arranged themselves into a "scaffold" gel throughout the damaged area. The scaffold allowed severed nerves to regrow and form new connections. 75% of test animals' injuries were improved with the new technique. (The article did not note if the test subjects offered any resistance to the therapeutic measures.)
posted by rob511 at 2:36 AM PST - 18 comments
March 13
Why Rush Limbaugh prefers radio. Back in 1990 Rush Limbaugh guest-hosted a talk show in front of a live audience. The audience did not agree with him and tore him to pieces. His facial expressions are priceless. Watch the video at
The Panopticist.
posted by Termite at 10:29 PM PST - 55 comments
Can a young kid sing the
Queen of the Night's aira, stay in tune and hit the notes? This one should probably steer clear of opera fans carrying sharp knives until he passes puberty.
posted by BlueMetal at 9:48 PM PST - 27 comments
The history of emotions has yielded substantial studies on love, anger, fear, grief, jealousy, and many other discrete emotions. However, there is no particular study of cheerfulness, a rather moderate emotion, which, for reasons that I will discuss further, has remained unnoticeable to the scholarly eye. Based on much of the historical literature on emotions, some primary sources and some other areas of cultural history, I outline here the social use and conceptualization of cheerfulness over the last three centuries. I argue that, in the modern age, cheerfulness rose in value and became the most favored emotion for experience and display; as such, it was individually sought and socially encouraged until it became the main emotional norm of twentieth-century America.
From Good Cheer to "Drive-By Smiling": A Social History of CheerfulnessAnd the
Taxonomy of Emotion Terms there is of interest on its own.
posted by y2karl at 9:06 PM PST - 10 comments
Dr. Ross tells the Democrats to stop bending over. Clooney: " ... [I]t drives me crazy to hear all these Democrats saying, 'We were misled.' It makes me want to shout, 'Fuck you, you weren't misled. You were afraid of being called unpatriotic.' Bottom line: it's not merely our right to question our government, it's our duty."
posted by WCityMike at 8:56 PM PST - 60 comments
The Earth is Not Moving. From the foreword: "The second [goal] is to establish a real understanding of how the theory which says that the Earth turns on an axis and orbits the sun has triumphed in spite of having no evidence whatsoever to support it." The explanation of
why tides can't possibly be due to the Moon's gravity is particularly enlightening. As Wikipedia's page on
modern geocentrism points out, General Relativity says that all frames of reference are equally valid, so at least some of these people aren't
completely wrong. Will the return of geocentrism be the next step after creationism? When do we get to burn witches again?
First link [via].posted by Malor at 8:29 PM PST - 36 comments
Mascots helping Mascots High schools across America have witnessed the devastation brought about by several recent natural disasters, such as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. An outpouring of sympathy and concern, and a desire to help, have come forth from high schools wanting to assist those in need. To enable schools to help other schools, the National Federation of State High School Associations has initiated a fundraising program called the Mascot Adoption Program.
posted by ColdChef at 8:07 PM PST - 3 comments
Eighty years ago,
William Mulholland completed his final project:
the St. Francis Dam, which converted San Francisquito Canyon--about 5 miles northeast of what is now
Santa Clarita, California--into a 38,000 acre-foot reservoir for Los Angeles/Owens River aqueduct water.
You're probably familiar with
Mulholland's name --he designed and built the
Los Angeles Aqueduct and the beginning of the
system with which Los Angeles is supplied water from the Central Valley--and as a gesture of gratitude, the city named
its most scenic highway in his honor. Mulholland, the
California Water Wars, the aqueduct, and the dam were also referenced and alluded to extensively in Roman Polanski's
Chinatown.
But
the man who helped build an immense metropolis by bringing water to the desert has only a
small fountain as a memorial to his legacy.
Three minutes before midnight, on March 12, 1928...posted by fandango_matt at 2:12 PM PST - 20 comments
Why I am getting out of the Marines As I sit here I am still shaking. I can't take much more of this shit. I am a Marine Pilot. Not that it means anything anymore. Today was another safety stand down put on by the mother fuckers in DOSS. Why? Cause another one of my friends is dead and gone. Why? Cause he flew his shit into the water that's why. Why'd he do that? Cause the mother fuckers that "be" i.e. the boys at the top have lost their fucking minds and can't say no.
posted by stenseng at 12:15 PM PST - 54 comments
Amanda Lear is one of the greatest enigmatic personalities to emerge from the 70's. Known in equal measures for her disco hits (such as
Enigma,
Queen of Chinatown, and
Follow Me WARNING, youtube link) and her affairs with David Bowie, Brian Ferry of Roxy Music (and thus appearing on their
For Your Pleasure album cover) and Salvador Dali. Her past was
hazy at best. The most debated aspect of her past (so prevalent as to be mentioned even in
reviews of her paintings is what sex she was born (One popular telling of the rumor even claimed it was
Dali who paid for her surgery to become a woman). Her more recent, very private life took a tragic turn in 2000 when her home in France burned down killing her husband, the equally interesting
Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villele. [MI]posted by piratebowling at 12:14 PM PST - 17 comments
"SEARCHSCAPES: MANHATTAN" is an attempt to create a tridimensional map of Manhattan, using existing data from the web.
The objective is to compare the city's "physical spaces" and "information spaces"
posted by signal at 6:28 AM PST - 8 comments
A Sour Grapes Rant: "The people connected with Brokeback Mountain, including me, hoped that, having been nominated for eight Academy awards, it would get Best Picture... We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture... Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver." -- E. Annie Proulx unleashes in
The Guardian.
posted by docgonzo at 4:24 AM PST - 154 comments
The Site of Reversible Destiny is an "experience park" conceived on the theme of encountering the unexpected. By guiding visitors through various unexpected experiences as they walk through its component areas, the Site offers them opportunities to rethink their physical and spiritual orientation to the world. [
via]
posted by dhruva at 12:20 AM PST - 14 comments
March 12
Which Way Adventure, a weird-ass choose-your-own-adventure-type "game" with several different endings and some manticores.
A few scenes are not safe for work. The other game on the site,
Hunter of Vampires, is completely different in that it's cute, it appears to have a point, and it has a gizmo to toggle the sound off. (Both in Flash.)
posted by Gator at 9:22 PM PST - 26 comments
Missing Pages. This is a 24 minute short shot entirely with a digital still camera. The first seven minutes are
available online (quicktime link). It was derived from 40,000 digital still images by Jerome Oliver in a method (that looks cool) that he calls fotomation.
posted by filmgeek at 2:08 PM PST - 29 comments
War: Canadian-style A special report by 2 journalists embedded with Alpha Company of the First Princess Patricia's Light Infantry Battle Group puts human faces to the peacekeeping effort in Afghanistan. It's good to know that our troops stationed there will soon have a
taste of home.
posted by phoenixc at 10:00 AM PST - 28 comments
Keep Vid is an excellent web based utility for downloading web video from many of the most popular sites (iFilm, google video, YouTube & a ton of others) to your hard drive.
posted by jonson at 9:58 AM PST - 6 comments
Internet blows CIA cover The identities of thousands of Central Intelligence Agency employees, many of them operating under cover, have been available to anyone looking for the right information in public records searches. Only problem: The CIA was kind of surprised to find this out.
(Site may require registration for some. Use BugMeNot.)posted by emelenjr at 5:34 AM PST - 41 comments
March 11
"To dream of eating pancakes, denotes that you will have excellent success in all enterprises undertaken at this time." "To dream of lard, signifies a rise in fortune will soon gratify you." "Dairy is a good dream both to the married and unmarried." "To dream of seeing your thigh smooth and white, denotes unusual good luck and pleasure." "To dream of noodles, denotes an abnormal appetite and desires. There is little good in this dream." "To dream of seeing a marmot, denotes that sly enemies are approaching you in the shape of fair women." --
What's in a Dream?
A Scientific and Practical Interpretation of Dreams by Gustavus Hindman Miller, published in 1901.
posted by Gator at 9:06 PM PST - 24 comments
EMP's are not just for
war, there are some everyday
practical uses too such as instantaneous, non-recoverable destruction of data on your home or business pc. Good to know if you're a soon-to-be indicted politician.
posted by sluglicker at 7:44 PM PST - 8 comments
It turns out, in the PC game business,
no copy protection doesn't mean everyone pirates your game. This makes
some people angry. From the article:
"For example, we were quite disturbed to discover that the company that makes Starforce provided a working URL to a list of pirated GalCiv II torrents. I'm not sure whether what they did was illegal or not, but it's troubling nevertheless and was totally unnecessary."
via diggposted by graventy at 6:16 PM PST - 25 comments
The seller called 'em polkadots. "When I got the dress, my eyes about popped out of my head. These were NOT creamy white polkadots. My mind raced. This was a novelty print, yes, but not of balloons or cheerfully wriggling tadpoles. There's no way…could it be!? Could the 1950's designer Mark-Robbins been so devious as to devise a blue dress covered—literally covered—in…"
posted by Mo Nickels at 4:10 PM PST - 16 comments
Tim Hortons is once more running it's
Roll Up The
Rim To Win contest where each cup of coffee is a potential prize winner. This week
controversy
hit when a 10 year old found a cup in the trash. Unable to roll the rim she asked a 12 year old friend for help and they discovered the cup was a winner. Now
comes the
dispute over who actually
won [quicktime] the
SUV. An added twist is the man demanding a
DNA test to prove the cup is his. I love the smell of lawsuits in the morning.
posted by cm at 1:10 PM PST - 55 comments
The Riot of Spring. Théâtre
Champs-Elysées, Paris, May 29, 1913. Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Proust, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy are among those present at the premiere of
The Rite of Spring (the score is
here), written by
Igor Stravinsky and choreographed by the great Russian dancer
Vaslav Nijinsky.
The music and the choreography shocked the audience with its daring modernism, ripping up the rulebook of classical ballet with its heavy, savage movements. Many in the audience promptly booed, then yelled, insulting the performers and each other. Then fistfights broke out. The police was summoned, but was unable to stop an
all-out riot.
Now
the BBC has made a TV movie about that night. More inside.
posted by matteo at 8:38 AM PST - 27 comments
Turbo Tanks is a vector graphics based Flash game where you control one tank vs another from a top down view, using ammunition that ricochets a lot. Each tank can sustain ten hits from live ammo, and each level has shifting obstacles (the "buildings" in the way for the ammo to bounce off of) so a good strategy is to catch your opponent in a heavy collision alley and unleash your entire weapon stock at once). Massive nerds will be reminded of Armor Attack for the Vectrex.
posted by jonson at 7:47 AM PST - 35 comments
March 10
"
Desktop Earth 2.0 is a wallpaper generator for Windows. It runs whenever you're logged on and updates your wallpaper with an accurate representation of the Earth as it would be seen from space at that precise moment."
The images are
fantastic. Oh, and it's free.
(See similar - via digg).posted by purephase at 7:37 PM PST - 56 comments
Democracy comes to the English Channel as the island of
Sark, the last
feudal government in Europe,
is switching to a semi-democratic system. Previously, only the 40 landowners, out of a population of 500, could vote, and the
island was ultimately ruled by a lord, the Seigneur. Though the "serfs"
were quite happy with the arrangement, the winds of change arrived in the form of the
enigmatic billionaire Barclay twins and the European Court of Human Rights. One old Norman law that still remains, however, is the "
Clameur de Haro" where any person can demand the immediate end of any action that infringes their rights by yelling "Haro, Haro, Haro" and reciting the Lord's Prayer in French.
posted by blahblahblah at 12:14 PM PST - 58 comments
The Road to Guantanamo , the latest film by prolific UK director Michael Winterbottom, details the experiences of the
Tipton Three (previously discussed
here), a trio of British Muslims who stumbled into US custody in Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 and ended up spending two years in Gitmo. The film tells a powerful if
somewhat one-sided story of naivety, incompetence and rank injustice.
Last night the film was shown on Britain's Channel 4 to an
estimated 1.6 million viewers, and it was the talk of the Berlin Film Festival a couple of weeks ago. In a bizarre twist, on their return from attending the premiere of the film in Berlin, the Tipton Three and the actors who played them were
arrested and interrogated about terrorism links. Luckily for them, this time their captivity was measured in hours, not years.
posted by LondonYank at 8:58 AM PST - 23 comments
Megaman Vs. Ghosts and Goblins Megaman's trapped in the fiendishly difficult world of Ghosts and Goblins in this fan made flash game.
The game's instructions don't mention that once the game is loaded, you need to click on START, then tap enter a few times to get things rolling. posted by boo_radley at 7:19 AM PST - 23 comments
Cityscape. (Flash game) Build a city with 18 available components. The order in which those components are employed determines how they'll interact and how far the city will develop. There's one correct order that will score the full amount of points. (
via)
posted by Melinika at 7:10 AM PST - 22 comments
The Original Rhinestone Cowboy. "I was laying on my bedside just as lonesome as I could be. I was by myself and so lonesome the tears just come in my eyes. I was so lonesome I prayed and said: 'Lord, give me something to make me happy' Now, you won't believe this, but the Lord told me to make an outfit. I went downtown and bought me a suit and became Rhinestone, and I ain't had one moment of lonesomeness since."
posted by Sticherbeast at 5:38 AM PST - 3 comments
'Shane's still alive?" That MacGowan is still standing, albeit not for long periods and not without help, is part of the reason the public is still fascinated with the group, which has reconvened for a brief US tour -- the Pogues' first stateside shows since 1989.
(BugMeNot)posted by PenguinBukkake at 3:56 AM PST - 54 comments
March 9
Miguel Tinker Salas is the Arango Professor in Latin American History at
Pomona College, a
political historian and sometime commentator on
U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. On Tuesday, an FBI/LA County Sherrifs Office Joint Terrorism Task Force
came calling during Tinker Salas's office hours. "After identifying themselves, they proceeded to ask about my relation to Venezuela, the government, the community, my scholarship, my politics...After they departed, the three or four students who were outside my office informed me that these individuals had asked them about my background, my classes, what I taught, my politics and they even wrote down the cartoons that are on my door."
posted by BT at 9:46 PM PST - 47 comments
Roe v. Wade for Men? "The laws that protect men and women from being forced into parenthood are highly discriminatory. Women are protected by abortion and abandonment laws. But when men are lied to about birth control or fertility, paternity and child support laws can disrupt their education and force upon them a future of distress associated with the unwanted child, support payments, the stigma of illegitimacy and a gut wrenching anguish that most people can't imagine." Or so says
The National Center For Men who filed a lawsuit today to give men the same reproductive rights as women.
posted by Heminator at 10:36 AM PST - 378 comments
Nighthaunts www.nighthaunts.org.uk
I have come across “London website of the week” on TimeOut magazine. I really like the idea of writer Sukhdev Sandhu hanging out with London nightworkers and writing up a journal.
I’ve always felt fascinated about what is going on in the city at night, whilst (almost) everybody is sleeping. We should be able to find out as journal unfolds …
Great recognition to people who work at night in order to keep the city going, and we often forget about …
posted by Brainstormer at 8:45 AM PST - 5 comments
Robert Oppenheimer agonized over building the A-bomb. Alfred Nobel got queasy about creating dynamite. Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called "
monolithic insanity."
posted by PenDevil at 7:24 AM PST - 47 comments
Excellent music video for an interesting cover version of Radiohead's Just (originally off of
The Bends) by British musician Mark Ronson. Song is done in a more 1960's
Stax-Volt Records style, using gratuitous horn samples; video is shot on the streets of an English city (I believe London, but am not sure) and features animated graffiti coming to life & dancing to the song, as well as a cameo by the tiled creations of
Invader. First link goes to a page about the song, with video download links in wmv & qt at the bottom.
Still no answer as to what that guy was saying in the original version of the video, sadly. posted by jonson at 7:01 AM PST - 32 comments
Mention nude art, get suspended. 25-year veteran art teacher Pete Panse recommended several ways for his ninth grade advanced art students to improve their skills, one of which included nude life figure drawing sessions at other art schools. For this, the Middletown, NY School District Board of Education suspended him, pending hearings in which he may be fired. They'll be after our bathroom mirrors next.
[via DC Art News]posted by brownpau at 6:55 AM PST - 78 comments
March 8
"Real unemployment right now -- figured the way that the average person thinks of unemployment, meaning figured the way it was estimated back during the Great Depression -- is running about 12%. Real CPI right now is running at about 8%. And the real GDP probably is in contraction." Bill Fleckenstein, writing at MSN Money, provides a
summary of an interview with economist John Williams on government number crunching. The full interview, with Kate Welling can be found
here (PDF link) . More from John Williams at
Shadow Stats.
posted by Zinger at 7:04 PM PST - 64 comments
Jack is looking for love, specifically someone who shares his love of chowder and his desire to wait out the apocalypse in a bunker. He
sings,
he
dances, and he's one of the world's top five
camouflagists.posted by cilantro at 12:42 PM PST - 30 comments
Download Flash Video. This site makes it easy to download all of the You Tube, Google Video and iFilm content that has been appearing on the front page. Ideal if you can't view them at work and your home connection is arthritic. Similiar functionality can be provided for Google and You Tube by a greasemonky
script. The downloaded file is in .FLV format which can be viewed with
VLC or
FLV Player. .FLV can be converted to other formats with
TVC once you have it on your system.
posted by Mitheral at 12:16 PM PST - 18 comments
Itchana Tchones resembles-but-is-legally-distinct-from a certain beloved adventurer whom you may remember from a certain series of
copyrighted movies. The
first few games in which he stars are in French (and a little on the primitive side), but the gameplay is simple enough: Arrow keys to move, jump, and duck, spacebar to attack with the whip. The latest game in the series,
Alien Wars, can be played in English. Lovely squishy little blood spurts, among other things, when death ensues. (Flash.)
posted by Gator at 11:12 AM PST - 7 comments
A history of computer character sets in Japan JIS X 0208 (originally JIS C 6226) of 1978 was the first JIS character set to include kanji. It specified 6,335 kanji, arranged by frequency into two levels ... Many bizarre mistakes were made in transcribing names, resulting in several new kanji coming into existance.posted by delmoi at 7:31 AM PST - 14 comments
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are a band that, less than a year ago, were making music without the help of a record label, pressing CDs themselves and selling them at concerts and on the Internet. Then the following happened:
June 9: Dan Bierne writes about the band on his MP3 blog,
June 14: Pitchfork Media posts a review of the song "In This Home On Ice",
June 15: Blogger Gothamist posts an interview with the band,
June 20: Blogger Stereogum announces the band's show at the Knitting Factory,
June 21: Gothamist reports that David Bowie was in the audience at the Knitting Factory show, and
June 22: Pitchfork posts one of a slew of reviews of Clap's first album.
Now, they've been named to dozens of
critics 'best of' lists,
they're playing Conan and Letterman, and are about to embark on a new tour. Why choose today to post an article about a band blowing up written in November you ask? Because
their tour kicks off tonight at the 9:30 club in DC, and you can
listen to it live.
posted by ND¢ at 6:44 AM PST - 140 comments
March 7
Bumwine.com: "Call them bum wines, street wines, fortified wines, wino wines, or twist-cap wines. Whatever you call these beverages for the economical drunkard, this page explores the top five. So curl up on a heating duct and enjoy..." I stumbled (sober, honestly) across Bumwine.com while researching the right beverage to enliven a fictional description of lewd drunkenness in an email to a friend. It's an informative, sometimes humorous, reference site--historical and otherwise--to the world of inexpensive wines with useful links to other sites and articles, like
this one (including a tutorial) from the
Michigan Daily.posted by josephtate at 11:39 PM PST - 52 comments
Farmadeliphication (fahr'muh'deli'fi'kay'shun), n. 1. The process of turning all of Philadelphia's vacant and abandoned lots into urban farms. n. 2. An entry in the
UrbanVoids international design competition to redo Philadelphia's inner city.
posted by stbalbach at 7:21 PM PST - 19 comments
50% of all product returns are due to poor design. Well color me surprised, kids. It seems as though we always take for granted the products we use on a regular basis. But most things I use just plain suck due to the design and resultant user experience. How often do you find yourself fighting with your mobile phone, DVD player, 80-button AV receiver and 15 component TV systems? Which products are paragons of good design, and which should be thrown away with the dishwater? What's the most infuriating product you've ever used? My choices for bad design: BMW's iDrive. Good design: iPod.
posted by tgrundke at 12:43 PM PST - 137 comments
Pixoh is a new online simple image editor in the vein of
PXN8. Pixoh, however, allows quick image import and export from
Flickr or upload any other webpage via
bookmarklet. At the moment, only the most basic of editing tools are available, but the creators - in the spirit of Web2.0 openness - promise new
features based on
user votes.
Effect for MeFi? Oversized inline images won't know what hit 'em.posted by youarenothere at 12:21 PM PST - 7 comments
Sports Illustrated has an excerpt from the upcoming book
Game of Shadows. The book claims to have detailed evidence of heavy drug use by Barry Bonds. Tom Verducci of SI (who has a Hall of Fame vote) has suggested this will keep him out of the Hall and is damning as the
Dowd Report, which lead to a lifetime ban for Pete Rose. Would this provide any kind of closure to the steroid era? If Bonds does not sue, is that as good as an admission? And although his motives can be considered dubious, did Jose Canseco end up becoming a savior of baseball?
posted by dig_duggler at 12:18 PM PST - 78 comments
CSN has been called the Clear Channel of the low power FM's. One of the many broadcasting arms of
Calvary Chapel. It owns and operates over 400 stations. Apparently its board, consisting of two members, is about to
self destruct. But the story doesn't end there. Its president is being accused of
sexual harassment and is also being accused of defaulting on a
million dollar loan. The loan came from Calvary Chapel founder and Pastor,
Chuck Smith, who has a
history with the guy. CSN's president wants the board dissolved but that could be a problem. By
some accounts, next in line to head the board is one Pastor Skip Heltzig, who seems to be involved in a bit of a scandal of his
own. Church defenders say the troubles are private matters,
critics say the movement has a history of covering
things up. (Some links are .pdf)
posted by wyldeboi at 11:50 AM PST - 4 comments
Prof. Daniel Dennett's (New York University, Philosophy) new book
Breaking the Spell appears to have frightened its
NYT book reviewer,
Leon Wieseltier (The New Republic, Literary Editor). Wieselter claims "The question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question", and promptly proceeds to demonstrate that he himself knows nothing about philosophy.
Dennett responds.
Prof. Brian Leiter (University of Texas, Philosophy)
responds that "'The view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical' is not a 'superstition' but a reasonable methodological posture to adopt based on the actual evidence, that is, based on the actual expanding success of the sciences . . . during the last hundred years."
b l o g
s s and
serious reviews.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:10 AM PST - 142 comments
Democracy Now! Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now!" has been featured in many Metafilter posts over the years but I didn't find any direct links to the main site recently. Daily video webcasts are available and the program is also heard on many Pacifica stations. Today's reports :
posted by notmtwain at 11:00 AM PST - 40 comments
Blackstar to orbit? Aviation Week & Space Technology reports in its most recent issue that a two-stage-to-orbit system may have been declared operational during the 1990s. The Blackstar system appears to have heritage from three other
X-Planes, the
X-20 Dynasoar, the
XB-70 Valkyrie, and the
X-30 National Aerospace Plane. [Related MeFi
post] [
via]
posted by Fat Guy at 7:59 AM PST - 32 comments
New Jersey Assemblyman
Peter Biondi didn't like that
he and his
friends are getting
flamed on the news portal NJ.com by people named, inter alia, "frenchtoast2." So he introduced a
bill, and that bill would require "operators of interactive computer services" to make members' real names available upon demand, and allow content providers to be sued for contributory defamation. And he saw that this was
good. And that was the first day.
posted by Saucy Intruder at 7:56 AM PST - 35 comments
Malian bluesman and
Ry Cooder collaborator Ali Farka Touré has
died at age 66 (or maybe 67). Through his music, and especially his collaborative projects with Western musicians, Touré convincingly made the case that the rhythms and melodies of the Delta blues came straight from Mali and neighboring countries.
posted by kcds at 6:33 AM PST - 33 comments
March 6
70 private cars, 50 000 kilos of flowers, 3000 candles, 65 000 yards of fabric. Those are just a few of the figures
from the wedding of New York playboy and (wait for it) hotel heir
Vikram Chatwal to model
Priya Sachdev. Last year,
Lakshmi Mittal (the world's third-richest man, according to Forbes) spent over $60 million for his daughter Vanisha's wedding.
What kind of wedding does $60 million buy? A song-and-dance by
Aishwarya Rai, among other Bollywood luminaries; ceremonies at the Tuileries and Versailles; and top chefs and designers at your beck and call. In 2004, the Sahara Group's
Subrata Roy built three mock palaces on the edge of a lake in Uttar Pradesh;
his sons' double wedding had 11 000 guests. Mr. Roy's company
paid for the weddings of 101 couples (numbers ending in '1' are considered auspicious) who couldn't afford to get married, and also fed 140 000 poor people across the country (all as part of the festivities).
All of this sound like idle gossip? The wedding business is
huge in India; it's a $10bn business (and growing at 25% annually), and the demand for gold wedding jewelry, according to analysts, "helped lift the metal's price to a 25-year high last month."
Appliance retailers offer discounts during weddings season; there are personal loans available for weddings; and there's even an entire mall devoted to weddings.
As the Christian Science Monitor
notes, the minimum a middle-class Indian family will spend on a wedding is $34 000. (The average American wedding? $26 327.) And who makes up the Indian middle class? "Those making $4,545 to $23,000 a year."
More on Indian wedding traditions
here.
posted by anjamu at 8:57 PM PST - 58 comments
waxy.org vows to fight Bill Cosby's lawyers and continue to provide hosting to
House of Cosbys despite receiving a
cease & desist letter [PDF]. Andy Baio, founder of waxy.org, discusses this in the
NY Times and provides updates on his site. As
previously posted, Bill Cosby's lawyers were successful in getting the creators of
House of Cosbys to stop hosting and making new episodes of their parody series.
It appears that threatening letters and lawsuits will continue to be filed against internet parody sites as celebrities try to protect what they view as their copyright, according to the
Wall Street Journal.
posted by Mijo Bijo at 3:49 PM PST - 33 comments
All I have to do is change my name to Peyton, motivate my girlfriend to marry me and have a baby, and hey presto! young Peyton will receive a six-figure scholarship to
Brighton College in England, explains the BBC because the college can't fulfil the bequest by former pupil Derek Wakehurst Peyton. Brighton
looks a nice place so roll up all Peytons, the college principal is spreading "the net wider to the United States, Australia and beyond." Second thoughts ... maybe simpler for me simply to motivate her to change her name ...
posted by Schroder at 11:23 AM PST - 11 comments
Camille Paglia: WHAT went wrong at Harvard? "Over the past 40 years, there has been a radical expansion of administrative bureaucracies on American college campuses that has distorted the budget and turned education toward consumerism, a checkbook alliance with parents who are being bled dry by grotesquely exorbitant tuitions."
posted by semmi at 10:41 AM PST - 46 comments
Tom Parker
writes that "State supreme courts may decline to follow bad U.S. Supreme Court precedents.... faithful adherence to the judicial oath requires resistance to [U.S. Supreme Court] activism...." Parker hopes that a lower court's decision against precedent might prevail, either because the U.S. Supreme Court's membership may have changed since the precedent was decided, or just by jamming the docket, "[b]ecause the U.S. Supreme Court can accept only a handful of the petitions it receives...."
So who is this Tom Parker who advocates a
massive resistance to Federal Supremacy? A fringe nut? A southern succesionist? Why, he's just an
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama.posted by orthogonality at 10:26 AM PST - 42 comments
Today is Jingzhe (驚蟄). Legend has it that on the day when insects and hibernating animals are awakening and the demon white tiger starts to seek its prey, the petty person would also start to offend others by making rude remarks. Therefore it is advisable to honor the white tiger with sacrifices and beat the petty person on this day.From CXB:
In the days of yore, the petty person you hated so much was beaten up for some good time by the professional beaters (about HK$50 per fix) with Chinese cloth shoes vigorously. But what a sad fact for your nemesis! These beaters these days use high heels, which in my opinion is ten times deadlier than cloth shoes.posted by rxrfrx at 8:17 AM PST - 15 comments
Arounder has an ongoing collection of high-quality full screen Quicktime VR panoramas of European cities, focusing on famous artistic and cultural landmarks (in
Rome,
Florence,
Köln,
Barcelona,
Cyprus), with interactive maps and travel information. A collaboration with national tourist offices by Swiss company
Vrway Communication, which also publishes
Vrmag, a bi-monthly review of panorama photography, and the
FullscreenQTVR directory in collaboration with the well-known
panoramas.dk (previously mentioned on metafilter: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).posted by funambulist at 4:07 AM PST - 5 comments
Muslim heritage is an intriguing and rather pretty website detailing contributions of a thousand years. Make sure to see the
timelineand
events sections. Their new "
weblog" seems to be shaping up to be interesting too, have a rummage.
posted by Mossy at 3:43 AM PST - 60 comments
March 5
Celebrate March 20th Women have a special day set aside: Valentine's Day. Now a new holiday being promulgated for Men to show love and devotion from their significant others.
[nsfw]
posted by Postroad at 5:54 PM PST - 39 comments
An engaging presentation given by bald marketing dude
Seth Godin to the Google people on February 28. Godin goes over his usual themes, Permission Marketing, Ideas as virus, marketing as stories, etc. He also claims that technology without marketing can’t win in the marketplace. 48 minutes on Google Video
posted by growabrain at 4:05 PM PST - 46 comments
Red Rain of Kerala "A red rain phenomenon occurred in Kerala, the place where I live, during July-September 2001. The characteristics of this phenomenon were very strange. Conventional explanations appeared totally inadequate to account for this phenomenon." Could this red dust be evidence of comet-borne life?
Moreposted by John of Michigan at 3:52 PM PST - 19 comments
There was a time when his scowling, oversized visage, his battered black fedora, and his long black coat, were as familiar to horror fans as such characters as Frankenstein and Dracula. This character, who appeared in three films, was called
"The Brute Man" or "The Creeper."
Only that terrifying face wasn't a mask or a creation of makeup. It was an actual face, a product of a condition called
agromegaly. And The Creeper never planned to be an actor at all, he was simply decorated war veteran-turned-
Tampa reporter who had shown up one day to cover a film. The movie's director noticed him and recommended he move to Hollywood and pursue a career as a character actor.
He was
Rondo Hatton.
posted by Astro Zombie at 2:46 PM PST - 18 comments
"Damn, Natalie, you a crazy chick!" (video) Natalie Portman, rapper and riot grrl? Maybe Lazy Sunday (
video;
mefi post) wasn't a freak occurence after all. Personally, I had expected the
Lonely Planet guys to end up a one-hit wonder, but in my book they've (at least) moved up a notch to talented one-trick pony. Another very well-done digital short that should be seen by a lot more people than SNL's dismal ratings will allow.
posted by Sinner at 10:46 AM PST - 99 comments
Trolley-spotting : Dedicated to developing a system of classification that allows stray shopping carts to be identified based on the situations in which they are found.
posted by boo_radley at 9:36 AM PST - 12 comments
Corysucks.com is an index of Cory Doctorow’s posts to Boing Boing ranked according to how much they suck. [not via boing boing]
posted by srboisvert at 4:09 AM PST - 135 comments
March 4
"If ever a company needed a marketing department, it's New Choice, whose Original Flavor Round Crackers take the cake for stating the obvious. Points should be awarded for attempts to woo health-conscious consumers with facts about added DHA ("prevents heart attack, enhances eye sight"), but there's no two ways to look at Round Crackers: It's a badly executed Ritz rip-off." So sayeth the wits at the
Onion A.V. Club, who scour the nation's dollar stores for food products to evaluate in their sporadic feature "
Dining for a Dollar." Round crackers too boring? You might prefer
Freakin' Nuts (tagline: Is it a chip? Is it a nut? Yes!),
Thick Mints, or maybe just a handful of
Balls. Their annual
Cheap Toy Roundup is just as good;
last year's featured products such as Preeminent Car ($1), Stretchy Body Bits ($1.19), and a DVD titled
Clothes That Went to a Party ($2). Perhaps the all-time best, though, is the
Mini Wooden Furniture: Table: a "plain, unadorned wooden table." ($1)
posted by anjamu at 11:40 PM PST - 12 comments
Ascaris lumbricoides. According to estimates, about 1.5 billion people--about a quarter of the earth's population--are hosts to the
Ascaris lumbricoides parasitic worm. Ascaris worms can grow to be 18 inches in length, and use their host's windpipe and esophagus to migrate between the small intestine and the lungs. A single human host may support dozen of large worms, which can be contracted by contact with fecal matter, animals, or undercooked pork. Under some circumstances (the worms dislike anesthesia, for example) one or more worms may exit from the mouth (
a horrifying image), or the anus (
one of the most disgusting images I have ever seen, and not safe for work, obviously). Here,
the removal of a worm is caught on video (Realplayer).
Too disgusting to post? Almost. But 1.5 billion people have got these in their bodies right now. That's what's grosser than gross.
posted by washburn at 10:06 PM PST - 96 comments
Trappist Ale.
(warning, music on first link.) The six Belgian breweries
Achel (little English),
Chimay,
Orval,
Rochefort (unofficial site),
Westmalle (no English), and
Westvleteren, along with the Dutch brewery
De Konigshoeven/
La Trappe (first is English link to monastery, second is non-English brewery site.) are the only recognized producers of
Trappist beers, although
the latter was only recently granted the appellation after several years without it. Ranging from the relatively commercial and large-scale operations of
Chimay and
La Trappe to the other extreme of
Westvleteren, who want to live quietly and
don't want their beer distributed, these beers are considered some of the
best in the world.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 9:30 PM PST - 38 comments
Honda's
last TV ad was a treat for Rube Goldberg fans everywhere. Their
latest (9.4MB zipped H.264 video) is an excellent demonstration of the human voice as an instrument.
posted by Mwongozi at 3:56 PM PST - 22 comments
I first read "Ask the Dust" in 1971 when I was doing research for "Chinatown". I was concerned about the way people really sounded when they talked, and I was dissatisfied with everything else I had read that was written during the '30s. I wanted the real thing, as Henry James would say. When I picked up Fante's "Ask the Dust," I just knew that was the way those kids talked to each other—the rhythms, cadences, racism.
Robert Towne on
adapting John Fante's novel
for the big screen. More inside.
posted by matteo at 11:14 AM PST - 17 comments
About ten hours (over the course of two days) and exactly two bloodshot eyes later, it was complete. I had 100 letters to 100 different companies — stuffed, sealed, stamped, and ready to go. I put all 100 letters into the mail on Friday, February 24, 2006 at 9 AM. Now all that was left to do was sit back and wait for a response (or two?)
viaposted by Kwantsar at 8:54 AM PST - 62 comments
The Natural World is yours to play with now
courtesy of the BBC, but only if you live in the UK!
The BBC have released their wildlife archives as part of the
Creative Archive Licence, including unseen clips from the new
Planet Earth series.
Unfortunately, it's only available to those who live in the UK because
"the member organisations who supply the content are funded with public money to serve the UK population."posted by Nugget at 4:50 AM PST - 35 comments
A 'startup school' was hosted by net guru
Paul Graham in late fall in Boston last year, which brought together a few hundred would-be Web 2.0 success stories to hear advice from previous success stories, players in the tech industry, and even a few pieces of legend.
The Presentations page contains links and slideshows for each presenter, and you get to hear (mp3) from an excellent cross-section of some of the modern web's most influential tinkerers.
posted by spiderwire at 3:17 AM PST - 19 comments
The Day Las Vegas Shook What were
you doing at 11:45am on May 4, 1988? If you were a resident of southern Nevada, you'd remember. That was the day rocket fuel factory
PEPCON was wiped off the map in a series of 7 explosions, two of which measured 3.0 and 3.5 on the Richter scale.
The explosions sent shockwaves across the valley, taking with it marshmellow cream from the marshmellow factory next door, denting garage doors miles away, and shattering damn near every window in Henderson. As the valley's 500,000 residents stood outside wondering what caused the explosion and the
massive plume of smoke, many speculated the Russians had inexplicably attacked Henderson. Miraculously, only two people died. PEPCON never operated another day in Nevada and moved to Utah.
posted by b_thinky at 3:16 AM PST - 37 comments
Is this Zebra Chair Too Realistic? "We prefer to get our chicken cutlets cut up and packaged neatly so as not to have to look at the poultry as something that once walked the earth. Ditto with beef. We love a good leather chair, but again anything too realistic (think “cow print”) can give us the heebie-geebies..." Folks at Apartment Therapy ponder this piece of
purrniture.
posted by azul at 3:00 AM PST - 17 comments
Kid Radd is a sprite comic. Wait, don't roll your eyes and start work on that snarky comment. It is, actually,
good. It tells the light-hearted and philosophical tale of a self-aware video game sprite. Original art, and bits of animation. Read, watch, enjoy.
posted by TwelveTwo at 1:17 AM PST - 20 comments
March 3
Podbop. Completely stupid name. Not a bad idea. Enter your city, and it will come back with MP3 links and podcasts from bands soon to play in your town, in a "try before you buy tickets" kind of way. Works quite well for the
US, other countries
look like they need updating.
posted by Jimbob at 8:48 PM PST - 18 comments
Operation Photo Rescue:
In an effort to help the residents of Pass Christian, MS in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, photojournalist Becky Sell and photo editor Dave Ellis have embarked on a mission to recover the photos and memories that would be lost to the storm. Read about it
from Day 1, or hear about
the backstory.
posted by tozturk at 4:11 PM PST - 7 comments
"Why Jon Stewart Isn't Funny" (Boston Globe) In an op-ed in the Boston Globe, Michael Kalin, a "2005 Harvard College graduate" isn't predicting that Stewart will bomb on Sunday night's Oscar show. Instead, "Stewart's ever-increasing popularity among young viewers directly correlates with the declining influence of progressive thought in America. Coincidence? I think not." He blames Jon Stewart for turning tomorrow's leader away from potential careers in politics. His evidence, "Meet Joshua Goldberg, a
fictional composite of the typical apostle of 'The Daily Show" who goes to work on Wall Street instead of pursuing a
job in inner-city teaching like Kalin did, as he told CBS.
"Although Stewart's comedic shticks [sic] may thus earn him some laughs Sunday at the Oscars, his routine will certainly not match the impact of his greatest irony: Jon Stewart undermines any remaining earnestness that liberals in America might still possess."
This left me speechless. In my personal experience, Jon Stewart has dramatically increased my own children's interest in politics.
posted by notmtwain at 2:15 PM PST - 154 comments
Sometimes I wonder why I spend
The lonely night dreaming of a song
The melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you
When our love was new
And each kiss an inspiration
But that was long ago
And now my consolation
Is in the star dust of a song...
Lucy is holding a saxophone. It turns out, as she informs friend Ethel Mertz, she's an amateur musician. Who knew? Lucy then blows into the mouthpiece and produces a few dyspeptic squawks. "It kind of sounds like 'Star Dust,' " says Ethel, diplomatically. "Yeah," Lucy responds, "everything I play sounds like 'Star Dust.' "
The story of
'a song about a song about love' (elaborated within)
posted by y2karl at 1:31 PM PST - 44 comments
There's an excellent
two part dialog between
Bill Simmons and
Malcolm Gladwell on ESPN's Page 2 this week. The two cover a wide variety of topics such as writing, how a kid with no TV from the middle of nowhere in Canada can be a sports fan, the NFL, the economics of sports, and everyone's favorite NBA GM Isiah Thomas.
posted by togdon at 11:45 AM PST - 13 comments
Betcha didn't know: "While the extreme branch of heavy-metal music known as death metal is defined in part by often-vile lyrics about violence, catastrophic destruction, nihilism, anarchy and paranoia, its singing style is associated with a beloved goggle-eyed, fuzzy blue puppet."
The
Wall Street Journal considers
death metal and
Sesame Street in an article I'm sure
Lester Bangs would have enjoyed.
posted by scratch at 9:56 AM PST - 27 comments
Riyadh International Book Fair. "Last night I went to a panel on cultural diversity, and I have enjoyed a very good discussion. The panel was done the Saudi style, with the only female speaker Dr. Khairia Al-Saggaf talking from another room, where we could not see her but only listen to her voice."
"Shiites were the subject of a hot debate at the end of the panel, when Dr. Khaled Al-Dakheel said that Shiites are part of us. This was the point where the panel went out of control. Before Al-Dakheel was able to complete that sentence, a Sheikh from the first row interrupted and told Dr. Al-Dakheel that Shiites are not Muslims, and that he has to say this."
posted by semmi at 9:20 AM PST - 27 comments
Not safe for work: "
Vulva Original: Authentically natural vaginal flavour." (Flash interface; much gratuitous nudity.)
posted by Gator at 8:44 AM PST - 31 comments
Buck O'Neil, 94, was a
star player for the Kansas City Monarchs, of the
The Negro Leagues, the first black coach hired by
Major League Baseball, one of the founders and current Board Chairman of
The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, a scout, who signed such stars as
Ernie Banks, and
Lou Brock, was
denied his last chance to enter baseball's
Hall of Fame this week. Considered by many to be the unofficial " Ambassador of Baseball", Buck was most diplomatic in his response, saying:
"Shed no tears for Buck," he says. "No, no. Ol' God's been good to me. You can see that, don't you? If I'm a Hall of Famer for you, that's all I need. Just keep loving ol' Buck."
", and
" You think about this,' he said. "Here I am, the grandson of a slave. And here the whole world was excited about whether I was going into the Hall of Fame or not. We've come a long ways. Before, we never even thought about anything like that. America, you've really grown and you're still growing."
Keith Olbermann is outraged...I am just sad.
posted by lobstah at 5:17 AM PST - 37 comments
The Mercy Seat. Described in the book of Exodus, the throne of mercy has quite a variety of meanings. Some contemporary Christians are interested in "
reconstructing" an image based on Egyptian and Phoenician culture. In Judaism, the
kisei rachamim is part of the narrative of Yom Kippur, as God moves from the seat of justice to the seat of compassion. In medieval Europe, and especially in Germany, the
Gnadenstuhl was a perfect
representation of the trinity, combining the cruxification, God the Father, and the Holy Spirit (usually a bird), into one image of mournful compassion. Nick Cave used the idea of the mercy seat as the frame for
a song about murder, sin, capital punishment, and atonement/redemption, which was later covered by Johnny Cash (
mp3 clip). The chair of mercy is even visually alluded to Jodorowsky's
Montana Sacra, aka
Holy Mountain.
(Which have been inspired in part by the Ascended Masters of Mount Shasta, but that's technically another story - the bizarro California cultists story.)posted by jann at 12:32 AM PST - 25 comments
March 2
Emory University study describes the Millenial Generation An interesting comparison of Gen Xers and the so-called Millenial Generation, born since 1982, from Emory University. The M.Gen kids apparently want to do good, as long as there is a clear structure and leadership that tells them how and what to do . . . oh, and don't question the leaders. Really. Why would you?
posted by pt68 at 7:34 PM PST - 67 comments
From
Foreign Policy,
Patriarchy's Big Comeback. Maybe you didn't believe it had been away. But
Societies that are today the most secular and the most generous with their underfunded welfare states will be the most prone to religious revivals and a rebirth of the patriarchal family. The absolute population of Europe and Japan may fall dramatically, but the remaining population will, by a process similar to survival of the fittest, be adapted to a new environment in which no one can rely on government to replace the family, and in which a patriarchal God commands family members to suppress their individualism and submit to father.posted by jfuller at 4:23 PM PST - 58 comments
Sex in an online game? It's about time.
Naughty America: The Game is the first of its kind: A massively multiplayer online world that allows players to do what they've always wanted to: be naughty. Check out the
trailer.
All links NSFW. Site contains cartoon nudity. Oh, Flash and crappy music abound. You have been warned.posted by purephase at 11:17 AM PST - 58 comments
via BBC Ground-based astronomy could be impossible in 40 years because of pollution from aircraft exhaust trails and climate change, an expert says.
posted by goldism at 9:41 AM PST - 17 comments
Deal or no
Deal?
Warning: Third link goes to not-much-fun-without-real-money-at-stake NBC corporate game. Interesting to watch the offers change, though.posted by gilgamix at 8:19 AM PST - 38 comments
The Order Of The Stick is a great "hifi-lofi" webcomic from
Rich Burlew about the meta-adventures of an adventuring party in the D&D world. Lots of inside humor to go along with broad appeal. It's been running for over 2 years, so there are close to 300 episodes to rummage through.
posted by mkultra at 6:12 AM PST - 43 comments
'In all of rock history, there can be few stranger stories than that of
Yahowa 13',
formed in 1969 in Los Angeles by a middle-aged beatnik called Jim Baker, who believed himself a god and went by the nickname of
Father Yod. Yod became a guru of sorts for a group called the
Source Family. Based around the group of disciples, Yahowa 13 made
almost a dozen limited-circulation LPs (slightly nsfw cover art), most within the course of just a couple of years. 'Yahowa 13's most successful artistic statement was 1974's
Penetration: An Aquarian Symphony... At the end of 1974, the Source Family moved to Hawaii. On August 25, 1975, Yod went hang-gliding for the first time and was mortally injured upon landing, dying after about nine hours. His disciples scattered within two years after his passing.' See also:
2002 interview with band members.
posted by MetaMonkey at 2:41 AM PST - 30 comments
March 1
$1000 reward to anyone who can produce a published case of “repressed memory” (in fiction or non-fiction) prior to 1800. I figure this is something someone here on MetaFilter could dig up.
posted by mulligan at 9:56 PM PST - 21 comments
The Other Christian Activists "Any Christian who believes that homosexuality is a more important issue than justice for the poor just hasn't read his Bible straight." - David Hilfiker
"If you are waiting for a religious left to emerge to offset the power of the religious right, it may already be in your own neighborhood at a local church or synagogue." - Ira Chernus
posted by quonsar at 7:32 PM PST - 33 comments
Quiz
#1 is about survival.
#2 is about movies. #1 is a little weird (with its answers) and #2 has no answers! Drove me nuts.
posted by snsranch at 5:42 PM PST - 42 comments
The McPassion Get your free crown of thorns with every meal!
We're all going to hell but hey, with a vinegar sponge drink to keep us going and a handy game of Pin the Noose on Judas, the trip's gonna be a lot more fun..
A short comedy from
Benjamin Hershleder and
Rik Swartzwelder, but get it quick cause it won't be around forever!
posted by Nugget at 2:41 PM PST - 7 comments
Jeb Bush Asked to Explain Cruise Ship Deal The post below on impeachment of
Pres. Bush might also consider how the abuses seem to be a family affair: A top House Democrat released e-mails Tuesday detailing Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's role in pushing a $236 million federal contract for Carnival Cruise Lines to house Hurricane Katrina victims.
posted by Postroad at 1:07 PM PST - 20 comments
An act of civil obedience. Kids with cameras drive the speed limit en masse, thereby blocking traffic and raising questions not only about the difference between de facto and de jure speed limits, but also about how incredibly pissed I'd be had I been behind them.
[via]posted by Sticherbeast at 12:30 PM PST - 155 comments
9dots. En quelques mots, 9dots est un dispositif visuel et sonore qui vous permet d'éditer une séquence de 8 images sur lesquelles vous pouvez afficher ou masquer des points. Chaque image de la séquence est construite sur une grille de 3 points de haut par 3 points de large.posted by monju_bosatsu at 10:09 AM PST - 35 comments
John Coltrane. Thelonious Monk. Hank Mobley. Lennie Tristano. Blue Note. Impulse. Riverside... In other words: jazz. Now three fans in Japan -- a country that has always appreciated America's gift to music even more than the US itself -- have created
The Jazz Discography Project, a bare-bones, open-source, astonishingly exhaustive database of the hippest sounds on the planet. For aficionados, just reading an ASCII entry for long out-of-print stuff like
A Message from Garcia, featuring a young and then-unknown musician named Bill Evans who would later
reinvent his instrument, is thrilling.
posted by digaman at 8:33 AM PST - 28 comments
Random Rules , a new[ish] feature of
the Onion: A.V. Club. They ask a rocker/writer/comedian/whatever to set their MP3 player to "shuffle" and comment on the first few tracks that come up. This probably could have been very
boring, but it actually ended up kind of interesting. See
Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse call Belle and Sebastian a “one-fuckin'-trick pony”. Enjoy
David Cross waxing poetic about R.E.M.’s
Murmur. From the main link, read the description of the raw sexual chemistry that existed between David Berman of the Silver Jews and the actress that played Ginger on Gilligan's Island.
posted by ND¢ at 6:01 AM PST - 137 comments
If the high scores are to be believed, there are at least 400 (random) levels in
Domino Pressure. The object: Figure out which domino is the one which, when tipped, will knock over all the other dominoes before squishing the tomato. For every domino you leave standing, you lose precious seconds to complete the next level. The secret seems to be to work your way backwards from the tomato; you can skip up to three levels.
posted by Gator at 5:43 AM PST - 36 comments
![cavorted naked with Charlotte Rampling [this is VERY NSFW]](http://www.kunsthallewien.at/downloads/presse/Teller/09)Louis%20XV%20no.%203.jpg){kind=link}
