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May 2005 Archives
May 31
According to Stanley Fish
, "Students can't write clean English sentences because they are not being taught what sentences are." The solution: make them invent their own language.
After a generation that privileged content to the exclusion of form, is the pendulum swinging back the other way?
posted by myl at 4:30 PM PST - 134 comments
WSJ - "FedEx's newfound enthusiasm for a frontline role
in the war on terror shows how the relationship between business and
government has changed in the past few years. In some cases, these changes are blurring the division between private commerce and public law enforcement."
"FedEx... has granted customs inspectors access to the company's database of international shipments, which includes the name and address of a shipper, the package's origin and its final destination. The databases also include credit-card information and other payment details that the government is not entitled to solicit outside of a criminal investigation. "Our guys just love it," says one senior customs official overseeing inspections at international courier companies." [
UPS, nor even the
USPS will provide this much assistance to the DHS without a warrant.]
"Two years ago, after intense lobbying by
FedEx of the Tennessee state legislature, the company was permitted to create a 10-man,
state-recognized police force. FedEx police wear plain clothes and can investigate all types of crimes, request search warrants and make arrests on FedEx property."
posted by pwb503 at 3:40 PM PST - 39 comments
A game of double bluff
The UK and EU are keeping the poorer nations exactly where they want them: beholden to their patrons. (George Monbiot in the Guardian.) See also
Oxfam's critique of the Doha round of
WTO talks.
posted by adamvasco at 3:10 PM PST - 3 comments
Clear Channel launches pirate radio station. Though the DJ braodcast his desire to see the defeat of corporate radio, WOXY, whose signal was bled into by this two-faced entity, discovered that the IP for the station's domain pointed to Clear Channel Communications.
Clear Channel even went so far as to ask for
donations.
posted by Pinwheel at 10:35 AM PST - 40 comments
Paul Krugman and Daniel Okrent get into a pissing match.
In his
final column as New York Times ombudsman, Okrent stated that Krugman, the New York Times columnist, "has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults." The paper gave the two of them some webspace to discuss the matter. The
result is catty and entertaining, but the tone is certainly more vicious than I'd expected. They really don't seem to like each other very much.
posted by Tin Man at 9:43 AM PST - 70 comments
Last Saturday afternoon, protesters used Nashville's public
Musica statue (which features nine bronze nude dancing figures) as the
backdrop for a
protest against such disparate issues as abortion, strip clubs, and homosexuality. Calling themselves the
Pure Life Revolution, the group describes itself as "a prayer and repentance movement on behalf of purity, justice, righteousness. We are a moral outcry for society." [MI]
posted by ChrisTN at 7:17 AM PST - 34 comments
May 30
RIP
Oscar Brown Jr. Truly one of the greats, a legendary singer, songwriter, playwright, poet and civil rights activist, the world of jazz has lost a major member of the family.
posted by bluedaniel at 10:38 PM PST - 7 comments
We kept changing the name. First it was the Total Quintessence Stomach Pumpers. Then the Temporal Worth High Steppers. Then The Motherfucker Creek Babyrapers. That was just a joke name. He was Rinky-Dink Steve the Tin Horn and I was Fast Lightning Cumquat. He was Teddy Boy Forever and I was Wild Blue Yonder. It kept changing names. Then it was the Total Modal Rounders. Then when we were stoned on pot and someone else, Steve Close maybe, said Holy Modal Rounders by mistake. We kept putting out different names and wait until someone starts calling us that then. When we got to Holy Modal Rounders, everyone decided by accumulation that we were the Holy Modal Rounders. That's the practical way to get named.The Story Of The Holy Modal Rounders. In 1965, they used the psychedelic in a lyric and channeled Charlie Poole. From 1999, Green Man reviews their
Too Much Fun!--&
Ink 19's take as well. From No Depression comes
Bohemian Rhapsody and from Richie Unterberger here's
an interview with Peter Stampfel and the liner notes he wrote for the CD re-issue of cult classic
The Moray Eels Eat The Holy Modal Rounders. In a related bonus, here you can find
Charlie Poole singing
Moving Day, a great song which I first heard by the Rounders.
posted by y2karl at 9:16 PM PST - 19 comments
Strand's roving gaze
"My work grew out of a response, first, to trying to understand the new developments in painting; second, a desire to express certain feelings I had about New York where I lived; third...I wanted to see if I could photograph people without their being aware of the camera."
Three Roads Taken: The
Photographs of
Paul Strand.
more inside.
posted by matteo at 11:57 AM PST - 5 comments
An interesting interview
with
Varg Vikernes. Vikernes, as you may recall, is currently imprisoned for the 1993 murder of Øystein Aarseth (aka Euronymous), with whom he collaborated as bassist on Mayhem's incredible
De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas (cheesy vocals notwithstanding). It is also widely believed that he was responsible for the burning of
Norway's first stave church, which has since been
rebuilt. It is arguable whether Vikernes is most notable for the murder, the arson, his band
Burzum, his dedication to
Ásatrú, or perhaps his fanatical racism. While I find many of his opinions to be reprehensible, his obvious intelligence and the strength of his convictions make him a fascinating, if frequently repugnant, person.
The story of Vikernes and the
black metal scene he helped spawn is chronicled in
Lords of Chaos, which is a phenomenal read and is recommended even to those who are not interested in the music it focuses on.
posted by baphomet at 11:37 AM PST - 55 comments
If you're not Cheney's friend, be careful what you sell overseas
- While residing in Poland, British citizen Ali Manzarpour was arrested for the export of a
Berkut 360, a small kit plane manufactured in the United States, to Iran. The issues surrounding this application of American law overseas on foreign nationals notwithstanding, the US Department of Justice Attorney's office could not explain what sensitive technologies were in the plane, which could motivate the arrest. Coincidentally, Halliburton's use of a Cayman Islands subsidiary to
trade with Iran without restrictions remains
unresolved, and, with the help of the Department of State, the United States remains the
largest arms dealer in the world.
posted by AlexReynolds at 10:22 AM PST - 14 comments
Red State/Blue state France.
Les résultats département par département. Remarkable that the U.S. isn't the only country that's split down the geographic middle. No translation, but the picture speaks for itself.
posted by jfuller at 7:38 AM PST - 22 comments
"I am
Colonel Tom C. McKenney, You must know how to reach
Bobby Garwood. I directed an official mission to assassinate him behind enemy lines, because I believed what
they told me. Would you tell him that I will crawl on my hands and knees to beg his forgiveness?"
posted by drakepool at 7:35 AM PST - 22 comments
Capitalism and other kids stuff
Four UK based socialists produced this hour long documentary in which some of the problems of capitalism are presented in a simplified, kindergarten model. Tought provoking, incomplete but NOT derailing into bipartisan hate for a change ..an hour well spent IMHO.
You can also DL it with
Bittorrent program.. a good reason to install it (5 minutes ) and witness how a distributed cooperative program such as Bittorrent can do wonders.
posted by elpapacito at 7:02 AM PST - 25 comments
Sensacell
Modular Sensor Surface. Make sure to check out the Quicktime movie. You can turn your entire home into the Michael Jackson "Billie Jean" video!
posted by ColdChef at 6:38 AM PST - 7 comments
Rummage Through The Crevices
(Musical Curiosities, Obscurities and other Unearthed Treasures) is "a weekly community radio segment (Friday mornings, 2SER-FM, Sydney, Australia) devoted to offbeat and outsider music, less travelled paths of global pop, interesting re-issued treasures, music-sharing activists, notable and unusual online mp3 repositories, etc. This webloggy thing is its online companion."
posted by taz at 5:48 AM PST - 5 comments
Ultra scary puppets sing hymns of love
Via Boing Boing, the scariest tv show that I have ever seen in my life. The poor puppetry, the references to God, the organ sound it all comes together to burn into your brain. Children subjected to this will remember it forever. I think I may even have cold sweats about it in the night.
Its long but worth it. (Quicktime movie)
posted by ClanvidHorse at 2:59 AM PST - 56 comments
Soldiers of Christ
: "Have you ever switched your toothpaste brand, just for the fun of it?" Pastor Ted asks. Admit it, he insists. All the way home, you felt a "secret little thrill," as excited questions ran through your mind: "Will it make my teeth whiter? My breath fresher?" In this sharp article from Harpers Magazine,
Pastor Ted Haggard, head of
New Life Church and the
World Prayer Team, describes the delirious thrill of deciding upon which brand of worship is right for you. We also meet some of the members of his flock, including one lady with big, brown eyes, eyes with which she claims to have seen "gay sex demons." (A belief
more common than you might think.)
Who is this Pastor Ted, who speaks with the White House weekly? He writes books about "free market theology," he oversees the
World Prayer Center, and as head of the
National Association of Evangelicals, he leads the most powerful religious lobbying group in the United States.
posted by JHarris at 2:39 AM PST - 36 comments
Guerilla Girls...
behaving badly? “I don’t know whether this is the kind of thing that happens with any kind of group as time passes. All I know is that people are very upset and sad.”
posted by semmi at 12:00 AM PST - 34 comments
May 29
Exotic Spotter
"The beauty of an exotic is felt most when they are spotted on the streets, side-by-side with regular cars. . .Unfortunately, spotting an exotic is a rare occurrence. That's why this site brings together hundreds of exotic sightings from all over the world."
[via mediareport posting on metachat]
posted by MLIS at 7:24 PM PST - 46 comments
Poetry magazines.
This online resource has material from numerous poetry magazines published in the UK. There are lots of interesting poems available through a uniform interface. Also present are editorials and illustrations. Well worth a look.
posted by mokey at 2:02 PM PST - 6 comments
Chutney Music
:"For these people, Chutney was more than just
music (
.asf files), it was their life, it was their culture. For a people twice removed from their native land, Chutney was their connection to the traditions they might have otherwise never known." [
via]
posted by dhruva at 2:40 AM PST - 6 comments
Cool Keys Radio.
A true labor of electric piano love that will undoubtedly sate the taste of even the most ardent lover of the instrument.
posted by melissa may at 2:28 AM PST - 6 comments
May 28
RIP Eddie Albert.
As Mr. Kimball might have said, he was an
actor . Well, not really an actor, but a war hero. He was awarded a Bronze star...well, it wasn't really bronze, more like a...anyway, for his efforts at
Tarawa. But maybe he was more of an
environmentalist...oh, anyway, dig into some
hotscakes and remember Mr. Douglas.
posted by Oriole Adams at 1:34 PM PST - 20 comments
Think you're in full control of your computer?
Think again.
Intel has just quietly added one of the necessary components of Microsoft's (and the TCG/TCPA's)
DRM
technology, Palladium, to the PC platform. Some say this is a move against
rampant Chinese software piracy,
others think it's a power grab by the
content producers. Left unchecked, content and software producers will
have the final say in how you use your computer,
fair use be damned.
posted by id at 1:27 PM PST - 55 comments
Darknet Blog
- Interesting articles about what is shaping technology today, and how the industry is playing nice with the government to legislate drm into our lives.
posted by sourbrew at 12:01 PM PST - 4 comments
Dirty goings-on in the magic kingdom. (QuickTime)
Amateur movies shot by Disney's professional furries
in Disneyworld show what happens on the grounds while Mickey isn't looking.
"...Many of the videos, I found out, were created for unofficial annual character banquets, where screening funny skits is part of a tradition of subtle acts of subversion among the members of Disney’s undercompensated and overregulated workforce."
Probably sorta safe for work, but don't show it to Pooh aficionados.
[via Radar magazine via defamer]
posted by Silky Slim at 9:28 AM PST - 29 comments
How do you say "aunt"?
There was a
spirited thread a couple of years ago on the pop/soda/Coke division in our nation, but this survey is on the actual pronunciation of words. Ant? Ahnt? Aint? (My father used to say "bum" for "bomb" and "my-o-naiz" for "mayonnaise," and it drove me nuts. I also wondered why I didn't say it the same way.)
posted by ancientgower at 5:12 AM PST - 73 comments
The Crazy Frog / Axel F Song
(previously mentioned on the
Blue) is about to make history by being the first ringtone / pop music crossover to successfully invade the British charts. How successful? A little band named
Coldplay also have a new single out; as it stands,
Crazy Frog is outselling their effort by a factor of 4 to 1.
People, this is serious. Prepare for some major league irritation to descend upon us. The success of this single will only spawn a legion of imitators, and that can only lead to the dark side. As
Malcolm McLaren, ex Sex Pistols manager puts it: "Listen to this song and you can hear the death knell of the traditional music industry."
posted by LondonYank at 2:19 AM PST - 40 comments
Lust Films
is like a witty indie movie with full-on sex -- the hardcore video equivalent to Nerve, Fleshbot, and Sex in the City. Porn plots have never been so...watchable! Extremely NSFW, especially the trailers.
posted by NickDouglas at 1:07 AM PST - 33 comments
Scattered Leaves
In the early decades of the 20th century, a Cleveland book collector named
Otto Ege removed the pages from 50 medieval manuscript books, divided the pages among 40 boxes, and sold the boxes around the world. Now the University of Saskatchewan
plans to digitally
remake the book.
posted by dhruva at 12:18 AM PST - 32 comments
May 27
Orson Scott Card
on
The Riots of The Faithful:
So Newsweek prints an uncorroborated allegation about American interrogators flushing Qurans down the toilet in order to get fanatical Muslim prisoners to talk, and there's rioting and death all over the Muslim world. There are several lessons to be learned from this incident, some trivial, some quite important...
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 6:28 PM PST - 103 comments
You got owned
... an entertaining study of life's little mishaps on video. Some you've seen, some you may not have. (wmv)
posted by crunchland at 5:18 PM PST - 33 comments
The mystery of the beeping house is haunting me. I've been following this thread on the "General Chit Chat" section of the TiVo Community for two weeks now and no one has been able to figure out WHAT is beeping in this
guy's house. We have the some of the greatest minds on the internet offering theories and so far nothing has panned out. He's pulled the power on the place. He's checked every smoke and CO2 detector... all to no avail. And this dude's house has been beeping every minute, every day, for ONE YEAR. His neighborhood had a blackout, and the beep persisted.
ONE YEAR!
It's gotten so absurd that at least 8 of the people in the discussion are planning to GO to the dude's house this weekend and annihilate the beep, once and for all. They've even bought "beep finding" equipment. They are the "beepbusters."
posted by neilkod at 4:03 PM PST - 58 comments
Two-thirds agreement, friend or foe?
Condoleezza Rice had an informal interview with an NPR reporter this week. During the talk the interviewer brought up U.S. pop culture. He stated that some of the reasons why Bin Laden attacked the U.S. was because of its (our) Pornographic culture, children being out of control, women having too much power. Condi seemed to only protest the complaint of women having too much power. What does she believe in? The way the question was responded to makes me unsettled more about this administration, as impossible as I thought this was possible. The portion is 3:35 minutes in.
posted by MrLint at 3:35 PM PST - 17 comments
Window Standpoint.
If you've ever wondered what international sound artists see and hear when they're at home, staring out of their pokey apartment windows and watching the world go by, then this is the site for you.
posted by nylon at 2:03 PM PST - 7 comments
(As any Mets geek might say when talking to Mike & the Mad Dog: First time [MeFi] poster, long time reader)Underestimating the Fog...No, not crochety ol'
McNamara's take on the situation in
Iraq. Rather, it's an astonishing (if only partial)
recanting [.pdf] by the patron saint of
statheads,
seamheads, and
rotogeeks everywhere,
Bill James. Like his namesake, James is a
radical empiricist, the Jedi master who defined
sabermetrics (his coinage) as "the search for
objective knowledge about
baseball."
Over the past several decades, James' influence has been enormous. After
Michael Lewis famously detailed the saber-success of Billy Beane's Oakland A's, Sabermetric-leaning analysts have made their way into the scouting ranks and GM's offices of a
growing number of major league ballclubs. From the halls of
academia [.pdf] to
newspapers and
Cable personalities, even the
NFL and
NBA are on board!
posted by ericbop at 10:01 AM PST - 22 comments
"And the 'Soldier Kicking Asshat of the Month' award goes to..."
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R - San Diego), Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who stripped a bipartisan-approved amendment out of the defense budget which would have given America's 1.1 million reservists the ability to pay $75 a month / $233 per family for healthcare insurance. Hunter claimed that the extra cost would blow the DoD's budget. The cost? About $770 million a year over five years... approximately .0018% of the yearly defense budget, or about 2/3rds the cost of a single stealth bomber.
posted by insomnia_lj at 8:41 AM PST - 31 comments
Your mother was right.
You can go blind from doing that. Federal health officials are examining rare reports of blindness among some men using the impotence drugs
Viagra and Cialis. Since it doesn't actually do anything,
Enzyte should still be safe.
posted by hipnerd at 8:33 AM PST - 20 comments
The U.S. removes the nuclear brakes
Under the cloak of secrecy imparted by use of military code names, the American administration has been taking a big - and dangerous - step that will lead to the transformation of the nuclear bomb into a legitimate weapon for waging war.
Ever since the terror attack of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has gradually done away with all the nuclear brakes that characterized American policy during the Cold War. No longer are nuclear bombs considered "the weapon of last resort." No longer is the nuclear bomb the ultimate means of deterrence against nuclear powers, which the United States would never be the first to employ.
In the era of a single, ruthless superpower, whose leadership intends to shape the world according to its own forceful world view, nuclear weapons have become a attractive instrument for waging wars, even against enemies that do not possess nuclear arms.
posted by mk1gti at 7:25 AM PST - 96 comments
AskGod.com
Forget Jeeves. For $25 a month, you can soon call a googling "angel" from your mobile phone with
questions. According to the
press release (pdf): "Soon, with the coming of Ask God, the prayers of all the data-starved will be answered
and the prophecy of information on-demand will be fulfilled." In a country caught in the grips of religious mania, is this smart marketing or tone deaf? And with the web increasingly on our phones already, who's going to pay for this?
posted by CunningLinguist at 4:45 AM PST - 87 comments
May 26
Micromovie awards 2005 -
the mission: produce a 90-second movie filmed entirely on a mobile phone (dubbing of better quality audio permitted). Dozens of films are available here for viewing.
Sponsored, or course, by a major phone manufacturer. Don't let that distract you from the cute little films, though)
posted by Jimbob at 7:31 PM PST - 3 comments
I just want to spread the immense joy of
Winamp TV, which is a route to all kinds of Filipino servers playing all your favourite copyrighted television material commercial-free 24/7 but it's OK because I'm not linking to those servers directly no sir.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 3:27 PM PST - 87 comments
Despite efforts to stop
phishing and
pharming, they have continued to become more pervasive. While some
tools,
organizations and
lawmakers are helping combat the problem, they have done little to curb these activities. Cellphones, Yahoo IM and AIM were all recently hit by new types of attacks. The AIM attack was more sophisticated than previous versions and combined phishing with a worm that installed software that allows the attacker to potentially take over the comprimised machine. To complicate problems further, a vast majority of these scams take place in locations that make it difficult if not impossible to prosecute the operators.
Because of this, I was delighted to read about
hackers that are defacing phishing sites. While this is not legal either, it was some what satisfying to find out these asshats were getting a taste of there own medicine. Do any of you think a penny should be wasted persuing these hackers? If not, what are the legal implications in allowing hackers to attack some sites and not others?
posted by Mr_Zero at 12:06 PM PST - 17 comments
MLB's All Porn Mustache Team
Cue: Funky bassline and Wa-Wa guitar.
Is it just me or does Jeff Kent's 'stache (bottom of the page in the honorable mentions section) look like more peach fuzz than manly man style?
Who did they miss?
posted by fenriq at 10:07 AM PST - 30 comments
Dracula Blogged:
Bram Stoker's vampire novel, published by its own calendar. According to the site description:
Individual pieces of the novel will appear on the calendar dates indicated in the text, starting with Jonathan Harker's May 3rd Bistriz journal entry, and finishing up with November 6 and the final Note.
Be sure to check the comments, which are full of interesting tidbits about the novel, Stoker, Transylvania and historical accuracy (or innacuracy, as the case may be).
posted by LeeJay at 12:04 AM PST - 14 comments
May 25
Nature starts a weblog about the flu pandemic.
Now the virus is in coastal cities on both sides of South America. It hit Europe two weeks ago, ripping through Paris in just 11 days. In the French capital alone, there were 2.5 million cases and 50,000 dead. That's par for the course — infection rate 25% and mortality 2%, similar to the 1918 pandemic. Extrapolate these numbers, and we're going to have over 30 million dead worldwide. In poor and densely populated countries like India, it could be worse.
Where's next, I asked. Based on passenger data — which had to be prised from the airlines — one epidemiologist was willing to make a guess. "Within two weeks, there." He traced his finger from San Diego to Los Angeles, up to San Francisco. Within another three to four weeks, it'll be the turn of the conurbations along the eastern seaboard.
It's fiction but it might become reality soon.
posted by kika at 8:02 PM PST - 38 comments
We really want you in the Army.
Not all citizen journalism happens in blogs, folks. A 15-year-old with a couple of cameras and a sister caught the Army willing to bend both laws and ethics in order to get him enlisted.
(Military recruitment previously discussed
here, as well as other places that I'm too lazy to search for).
posted by klangklangston at 12:43 PM PST - 45 comments
Unidentified Titan Object
Saturn's moon Titan shows an unusual bright spot that has scientists mystified. The spot, approximately the size and shape of West Virginia, is just southeast of the bright region called Xanadu and is visible to multiple instruments on the Cassini spacecraft.
posted by Diamornte at 12:26 PM PST - 32 comments
download your mind
Realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major career problem,' Pearson told The Observer. 'If you're rich enough then by 2050 it's feasible. If you're poor you'll probably have to wait until 2075 or 2080 when it's routine. We are very serious about it. That's how fast this technology is moving
posted by robbyrobs at 8:05 AM PST - 81 comments
A Spreading Treason
The vagaries of U.S. involvement in the Middle East were surely brought home to First Lady Laura Bush on her recent trip to Israel, on a tour of Jerusalem's holiest sites. At the Wailing Wall, where she placed a note in the Western Wall – as is the custom – she faced surly throngs of protesters shouting "Free Pollard Now!" The Pollardites also showed up earlier that morning, as Mrs. Bush paid a visit to the home of Israeli President Moshe Katsav: "Pollard, the people are with you!" they chanted.
posted by mk1gti at 7:43 AM PST - 23 comments
Rocker Jeff Baxter Moves and Shakes in National Security
• "Jeff Baxter played psychedelic music with Ultimate Spinach, jazz-rock with Steely Dan and funky pop with the Doobie Brothers. But in the last few years he has made an even bigger transition: Mr. Baxter, who goes by the nickname "Skunk," has become one of the national-security world's well-known counterterrorism experts."
posted by dhoyt at 7:31 AM PST - 27 comments
MeroMero Radio
If you are interested in Japanese culture and especially that jolly Japanese pop music, then you might enjoy this podcast radio program made in Sweden. Nine one-hour-sessions has been made so far and each one focuses on a special artist or theme, and includes (at times) interviews with the artists themselves. The show's in English.
The podcasts (ep. 7-9) in MP3 are available
here.
The radio programs (ep. 1-7) are also available
here for RealAudio Streaming.
posted by iwanttobuild at 12:36 AM PST - 4 comments
May 24
Action Squad – Urban Adventurers
"In a nutshell, Action Squad explores. This generally occurs late at night, to aid in avoiding other people, particularly those with badges and funny blue uniforms. We climb buildings, sneak into factories, crawl through all kinds of tunnels, spelunk old brewery caves, poke around abandoned buildings, and run across the rooftops."
Missions of the Action Squad are fully documented with descriptions, photographs (historical & intraoperative) and sometimes maps but always with a sense of wonder at the urban flotsam they enjoy exploring.
This is my particular favourite but poke around, there's a fair bit in this gem of a site worth exploring from the armchair.
[via]
posted by peacay at 8:45 PM PST - 27 comments
Promoting Freedom or Fueling Conflict?
U.S. Military Aid and Arms Transfers Since September 11--from the
World Policy Institute, a report on whether we put our money where our mouth is. Statements like
"Freedom will be the future of every nation and every people on Earth" might sound nice and even inspiring, but why is our own government funding overwhelmingly anti-democratic and abusive governments?
... When countries designated by the State Department’s Human Rights Report to have poor human rights records or serious patterns of abuse are factored in, 20 of the top 25 U.S. arms clients in the developing world in 2003 -- a full 80% -- were either undemocratic regimes or governments with records of major human rights abuses. ...
posted by amberglow at 7:02 PM PST - 51 comments
Christian Video Games set to make comeback?
Tired of destroying the same old cliched monsters, day in day out? Want to engross yourself in a more morally sound, Religious video game experience? Well if the Christian gaming community has their way, we'll soon all be playing them (or at least a few % of gamers):
"As believers in Christ, we pray that God will be glorified through our work and that each of us draw nearer to him as we develop and grow as a business," the Christian game company says
posted by 0bvious at 6:55 PM PST - 57 comments
The Handbook
- The left and the right hand, single hand, hand on face and head, hand on object, hand touching another hand ...
posted by none at 5:07 PM PST - 11 comments
The History of the Batmobile
"Batman first appeared in May of 1939 in Detective Comics #27, and although the first true Batmobile did not appear for another two years, it has become one of the Dark Knight's best known weapons." (
via)
posted by boymilo at 11:04 AM PST - 12 comments
Jim Abbott
probably shouldn't have been a professional athlete.
Born without a right hand, he defied the odds and grew up to be a major league pitcher. In 1991 he won 18 games for the Angels while posting a 2.89 ERA, in 1992 he pitched a no-hitter against Cleveland, and in 23 career at-bats, he amazingly got
two hits (while playing for the Brewers). But Abbott (
now a motivational speaker) wasn't the first handicapped professional baseball player.
Pete Gray lost his entire right arm in a childhood truck accident and, due to the shortage of major league players during WWII, became an outfielder with the St. Louis Browns. His fielding, naturally, was unorthodox:
After catching a fly ball, Gray would tuck his thinly padded glove under his stump, roll the ball across his chest, and throw, all in one fluid motion.
But if those guys don't impress you, then what about
Bert Shepard, who had his right leg amputated after his fighter plane crashed in Germany?
The gutsy left-hander from Dana, Indiana taught himself to walk and then to pitch with an artificial leg -- all within the confines of a POW camp in Germany. The length of his major league career consisted of pitching five innings in one game for the Washington Senators. Then of course there was
Lou Brissie, the only survivor of his WWII infantry unit, which was wiped out in battle. An exploding shell shattered Brissie's left leg, causing him to wear a brace during his pitching career.
The 6'4" southpaw went 16-11 in 1949 for the Athletics and helped himself by batting .267. So...who's your favorite handicapped ballplayer?
Eddie Gaedel?
posted by billysumday at 10:31 AM PST - 31 comments
Zombie attack
in
small-town NH. As I live nearby, I have begun the laborious task of barricading the doors and nailing boards across every window. My cats are furious with me. Oh, and this comment from my friend, who once had the accused zombie as a student: "Travis Saulnier was a student here. At the time of 6th grade, he was already over 6ft and looked well on his way to being the next
Leatherface. Not surprised."
posted by ktoad at 9:55 AM PST - 30 comments
Who caught Zacarias Moussaoui?
Clancy Prevost smiles at the absurdity of his story. We are just a few miles down the road from the Eagan flight school where, one month before the September 11th attacks, he tried to teach Zacarias Moussaoui how to fly a Boeing 747.
posted by Kwantsar at 6:38 AM PST - 9 comments
May 23
MS Paint like you've never seen it before.
Says the artist: "A drawing that I used mspaint to draw with a little photophop bluring [sic], it is more than 500 hours work." It seems he saw the picture in a calendar and wanted to make a digital painting out of it. Since he didn't know how to use any graphics program he decided MS Paint would have to do.
This is the amazing result.
[via
Boing Boing]
posted by LeeJay at 10:40 PM PST - 56 comments
CG Challenges
- the largest online art contests of their kind, where artists are challenged to create outstanding artworks based upon set themes, while working under restrictions. For CG students, an additional bonus is the view of the creation process.
posted by Gyan at 7:45 PM PST - 8 comments
Molluscan Glossary
Do mollusks have feet ? Build your own molluscan expressions -
"the fluviatile, equivalved ciliated mollusks of the circumboreal...." Get your fill of molluscan terminology now, before a Leviticus-based juggernaut bans your briny joy.
posted by troutfishing at 5:16 PM PST - 4 comments
VGMix
is a site that hosts MP3s made by video game afficionados who have remixed the tunes from their favorite video games, old and new alike. Check out the
releases page and try out a few songs. You can also
search for songs by a particular game system, genre, specific game, etc.
(Unfortunately, search seems broken for me right now, but it usually works!) The users generally provide extensive reviews that will help you sort out the great from the mediocre before downloading.
posted by knave at 3:22 PM PST - 11 comments
May 22
Leaving the left.
"I departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any point of view through silence, fear, or coercion." Keith Thompson
posted by semmi at 6:38 PM PST - 184 comments
Roadcasting
is an idea bandied about for ages: create ad-hoc low power FM networks that let you share the mp3 music you're hearing in your car with those driving around you. It's basically a blueprint for shared pirate radio as you drive, surfing the dial for a variety of music from nearby motorists. They've got
screenshots and
source code and it looks
just like the system imagined in Cory Doctorow's books. I can't wait to see where this project is headed. [via
unmediated]
posted by mathowie at 1:42 PM PST - 37 comments
It's exactly one week to
The Referendum. Will there be a Europe this year or won't there? The European Union was more France's project than anyone else's; if the French suddenly say Non there's going to be lots of polyglot arm-waving and excitement.
The media are all a-twitter, all the
European ministers are breathing heavily,
Libération, in the person of Jean Baudrillard, sees state fascism approaching
(but then Libération always sees fascism approaching, it's their gig.) My magic 8 ball points to
Oui. Oh wait, it changed its mind, now it says "reply hazy, ask again later."
posted by jfuller at 10:22 AM PST - 30 comments
Paul Ricoeur
dies. A sketch of his life's work can be found
here. (Warning, somewhat dense, NSF-sunday mornings).
Here's a little on phenomenology, Ricoeur's philosophical paradigm.
posted by blindsam at 6:07 AM PST - 6 comments
Rats fed GM corn develop abnormalities
A new study reveals that rats fed on a diet rich in genetically modified corn develop abnormalities to internal organs and changes to their blood, raising fears that human health could be affected by eating GM food.
posted by Lanark at 2:09 AM PST - 73 comments
May 21
WarIsReal
Amazing reading from a fellow millitary blogger who is currently undergoing some high stress as a result of
PTSD and is blogging his prescriptions and counseling sessions.
posted by JJBotter at 5:52 PM PST - 33 comments
The Simpsons as read by WGBH.
WFMU's Station Manager Ken discovers an extra audio track on the Simpsons that describes the visuals for blind people. He even provides a
21 MB, 23 minute MP3 of
a recent episode that is surprisingly listenable. Sure it's missing all the sex and drugs, but your iPod is a handy way to take the Simpsons with you. Are podcasts of TV show audio tracks next? Will we be listening to Family Guy and the Daily Show during our commutes?
posted by revgeorge at 10:15 AM PST - 22 comments
Bunny:
About 260 installments of a simple, and amusing (to my mind) web comic. Just a little something for the weekend if it is rainy where yer at.
posted by edgeways at 2:23 AM PST - 42 comments
May 20
How I Became a Black American
"I became a black American long before I acquired American citizenship. . . . I was not eager, upon my arrival to the United States, to assert a black American identity. My parents had taught me "better" than that. But I became a black American anyway. Before I freely embraced that identity it was ascribed to me. This ascription is part of a broader social practice wherein all of us are made intelligible via racial categorization."
posted by caddis at 5:59 PM PST - 81 comments
It's time to play "Friend or Foe"
--from RawStoryQ.
We’ve covered over the lettering on five newsphotos. We’ll give you four possible answers (2 friend, 2 foe). Look at the photo and then click on the link below the photo that matches what you think we’ve hidden in the picture. Really hard, and there's a lesson in there somewhere, too.
posted by amberglow at 4:46 PM PST - 27 comments
Italo Calvino's
Invisible Cities is so called because it asserts that what makes up a city is not so much its physical structure but the impression it imparts upon its visitors, the way its inhabitants move within, something unseen that hums between the cracks. This, however, has in no way dissuaded people from attempting to give form to his
works. One such example is the
Hotel Tressants, a building in Menorca, Spain containing 8 rooms named after and
inspired by various cities from the novel. Meanwhile, artists offer illustrations
1,2,3, installations
1,2,3,4,5, music
1,2,3,4,5,6 and
dance, hypertexts
1,2, computer
programs and
animations, even View-Master
slides, while intellectuals offer readings and commentary
1,2, lectures
1,2, and critical texts
1,2,3 sparked by the man and his writings. It has been dubbed "The
Calvino Effect". Do you know of any more?
posted by Lush at 2:28 PM PST - 37 comments
KRISTOFFERSON!!
Born in Texas to an Air Force General,
Kris Kristofferson was a Golden Gloves boxing champ who studied writing at
Pomona College. Graduating Phi Beta Kappa, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford (
students of Merton College later voted that the college should erect a statue of Kristofferson, naked astride a motorcycle of his choice, in Front Quad but funds were never made available) and had two
short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly. After Oxford, he joined the military where he trained as a Ranger and learned to fly helicopters. Turning down an invitation to teach at West Point, he packed his bags and left for Nashville, taking a job as a janitor at Columbia Records' recording studio and following his dream to be a songwriter. He flew helicopters to offshore oil rigs in his spare time, until he became too frustrated and,
as legend has it, got drunk, flew his helicopter onto Johnny Cash’s backyard, and handed him his demo tapes. A week later Cash sang Kris’ song “Sunday Morning Coming Down” on
The Johnny Cash Show, four months later it sat atop the country music charts, and later that year it won the CMA for best song of the year. (more inside)
posted by billysumday at 11:56 AM PST - 59 comments
Well today is the opening day of one of the most popular baseball
leagues in the county. A big part of the league is the
The Goldklang Group, (which is partly owned by Bill Murrary.) The president and owner of the
Saints is marketing genius
Mike Veeck, son of the late
Bill Veeck. Smell the hotdogs and taste the beer but not in that order. (More peanuts and Crackerjacks await inside)
posted by wheelieman at 11:05 AM PST - 14 comments
Cleveland bloggers are organizing
against a giant suburban-style shopping plaza called Steelyard Commons (to be built on the site of the city's historic steel factories), which will include an immense Wal-Mart at its core. After City Council passed legislation in February to prevent Wal-Mart from adding a grocery store (causing the Bensonville bullies to "pull out" and scuttle the project), the developer was aided and abetted
behind closed doors by Cleveland's mayor, Queen Jane. Despite the mayor's proclamation of "no public money" or tax abatements for the project, there's plenty of
evidence to the contrary.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 8:28 AM PST - 16 comments
May 19
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Dr. Vendyl Jones, the famed archaeologist, the inspiration for the “Indiana Jones” movie series, has spent most of his life searching for the Ark of the Covenant. The ark was the resting place of the Ten Commandments, given to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai, and was hidden just before the destruction of the First Temple. The Talmud says the Ark is hidden in a secret passage under the Temple Mount. Dr. Vendyl Jones says that the tunnel actually continues 18 miles southward, and that the Ark was brought through the tunnel to its current resting place in the Judean Desert. Apparently he is about to find it this summer.
posted by Coop at 6:57 PM PST - 67 comments
Yoga Death Match
- "I've just finished making a video about the similarities between the ancient Hindu art of spiritual discipline and the rather more modern art of online gaming."
{a short mov by Jim Monroe}
posted by dobbs at 6:41 PM PST - 12 comments
Half-Life 2 Panoramics -
"
Generally, before releasing games, publishers and developers give game portals some screenshots where you can see the graphic features of the in-development game, and perhaps some game action. I wanted to go further and highlight the architectural and photographic aspects of the game, which I'll demonstrate with QTVR images shot during game play, the first time (that I'm aware of) that this has been done."
Read the full article. (
via)
posted by lemonfridge at 5:32 PM PST - 34 comments
AutoBlogger
is a new tool that helps us busy bloggers by using our own content and a "sophisticated Artificial Intelligence algorithm" to automatically create and post content to a weblog.
posted by gen at 4:59 PM PST - 13 comments
Google Labs
announces a radical departure from the traditionally sparse Google home page -
Personalize Your Google Homepage!
Why?
It includes:
latest Gmail messages, headlines from Google News and other top news sources, weather forecasts, stock quotes, and movie showtimes, Quote of the Day and Word of the Day, driving directions from Google Maps.
Awesome.
posted by nervestaple at 3:55 PM PST - 75 comments
The Baburnama
Although
Andijan has lately been in the
news (NY Times, reg. required) as the site of riots against the US-backed government of
Uzbekistan, its lasting claim to fame is that of the birthplace of
Babur, the first Moghul Emperor.
Babur authored the
Baburnama, often credited as the first Muslim autobiography and an endlessly entertaining read. The book's bloody-mindedness (Amazon's statistically improbably phrases include
girth dagger,
Uncle the Khan, and
turn over the fortress) is leavened by a remarkably humane voice. A must.
posted by since1968 at 1:28 PM PST - 8 comments
Generals Offer Sober Outlook on Iraqi War
From the What Do These Guys Know Department: "American military commanders in Baghdad and Washington gave a sobering new assessment on Wednesday of the war in Iraq, adding to the mood of anxiety that prompted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to come to Baghdad last weekend to consult with the new government.
In interviews and briefings this week, some of the generals pulled back from recent suggestions, some by the same officers, that positive trends in Iraq could allow a major drawdown in the 138,000 American troops late this year or early in 2006. One officer suggested Wednesday that American military involvement could last "many years.""
posted by Postroad at 12:54 PM PST - 24 comments
Poop on Ryan Seacrest!
TV Squad has a story about a guy who is having a contest. Be the first to take a dump on Ryan Seacrest's walk of fame star and win $50. Personally I think it should be more cash, considering you could get arrested.
posted by braun_richard at 12:39 PM PST - 25 comments
Cornwall's Minack theatre.
Perched on the cliffs at the SouthWestern tip of the UK, the Minack offers the chance to see classic theatre with a spectacular natural backdrop. The open-air theatre was
originally conceived by Rowena Cade in the 1930s, and she was also personally responsible for much of the construction of the facilities that still exist. The pictures and 360 panoramas available
here should give you some idea of the place. A few more
here.
posted by biffa at 10:27 AM PST - 5 comments
The Queen of Sheba
was a
legendary beauty from the 10th century BC. She travelled to
see Israel's King Solomon, bearing his son, Menelik (said to have transported the
Ark of the Covenant to Auxum, Ethiopia), is mentioned in the Bible and Koran, is a
muse to
poets and artists through the ages and is "viewed as the embodiment of Divine Wisdom and a
foreteller of the cult of the Holy Cross". Little is known about her origins although stories are common through Persian, Ethiopian, Arabian & Israeli traditions.
Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia claimed direct descent from her. She is said to have possibly lived in
Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan or Somalia. But
recent archaeological work suggests she
may be from further away than the legends describe. via [much, much more here]
posted by peacay at 10:15 AM PST - 11 comments
Recent events have shown that media can kill. Sometimes it's couched as propaganda, and other times it's just bad reporting. But what happens when media breaks the public trust?
Is the New York Times Chickensh*t? According to one reporter from the New York Observer, the Times fell asleep in safeguarding the public interest over the sale of a major painting to the Wal-Mart heiress.
posted by Mme. Robot at 7:42 AM PST - 44 comments
Grokker.
It's powered by Yahoo! search, but the results are presented in a very different way, a visual map [
example]. There's a few tools to refine the output. It's different, a bit slower than a "normal" search and requires a bit of patience. There's an affiliated weblog, with an entry explaining their philosophy, "
Moving Beyond the Algorithm."
posted by gsb at 4:19 AM PST - 31 comments
May 18
GeoBloggers
The natural extension of Google and Flickr so that
personalized maps are created of geotagged photos. Add "geo:lat=xx.xxxx", "geo:lon=xx.xxxx" and "geotagged" to your Flickr tags and they go into the system. The possibilities are pretty wide open.
Ain't technology grand?
posted by fenriq at 9:39 PM PST - 20 comments
Elections in Iran
Iran Scan is an English-language blog covering the election in Iran. One of my favorite lines... "As the Iranian elections begin to look more and more like California's recent gubernatorial elections, one wonders whether these elections will similarly be more about the candidates persona as opposed to their policy."
posted by halekon at 8:38 PM PST - 7 comments
Movie review of the month.
Anthony Lane writes in the New Yorker, "No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in “Gremlins” when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender."
posted by mert at 7:52 PM PST - 116 comments
Meet Priscilla Owen,
2-time nominee for the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, Senate nuclear option trigger, and "activist judge" who White House Counsel Gonzales himself criticized
...for "an unconscionable act of judicial activism" in seeking to restrict a minor's right to an abortion. ...
This PDF from People for the American Way goes case-by-case to paint a damning picture:
It focuses not only on the evidence from Justice Owen’s dissenting opinions that she is a right wing judicial activist, but also on the fact that this conclusion is established by the criticism often leveled at her by her conservative colleagues on the Court, particularly including Alberto Gonzales. Indeed, during the relatively brief time that they served together on the Court, Gonzales wrote or joined numerous opinions sharply criticizing opinions written or joined by Owen. This report also addresses Justice Owen’s failure at her confirmation hearing to dispel the serious concerns that had been raised about her record. For the reasons we discuss below, the Judiciary Committee made the correct decision in refusing to confirm Priscilla Owen to the Fifth Circuit. It should make the same decision again.
posted by amberglow at 4:21 PM PST - 30 comments
Your Knife Sucks
- "The only difference between your knife and my knife is my knife's in my hand and your knife's in your pocket."
{Real Video ram} {via Kottke via Clive}
posted by dobbs at 3:37 PM PST - 91 comments
Two new pieces from the
San Diego Union-Tribune chronicle the dire conditions in North Korea,
the last worst place on Earth: "The suffering of the North Korean people does not benefit from the drama that attends well-publicized human rights crises such as Iraq and Darfur. Even when hunger and starvation killed as many as 2 million North Koreans in the mid-1990s, the world took little notice. And the greater toll is the continuing long-term day-to-day grinding down of the hearts, minds and souls of all North Korean people."
posted by jenleigh at 2:15 PM PST - 21 comments
Armenian Genocide Plagues Ankara 90 Years On
This weekend, Armenians commemorated the 90th anniversary of the genocide of 1915. But Turkey has yet to recognize the crime -- the first genocide of the 20th century. By refusing to use the word "genocide," Turkey could complicate its efforts to join the European Union.
posted by Postroad at 12:36 PM PST - 11 comments
Plogress.com
is a new project to provide current information on what Senators and Representatives are currently doing in Congress. It consists of a separate blog--with feeds--for each US Senator and Representative, listing bills that he or she is sponsor of or cosponsor. Plans are in the works to add votes and committee activities.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 8:06 AM PST - 20 comments
Stories from a prison in South Korea,
told by an English teacher imprisoned for teaching without a license. Punishment: deportation. But if a prisoner can't collect wages due, then the prisoner can't buy a plane ticket and stays jailed, where the prisoner can't make money, until such time as the prisoner can afford a plane ticket, ad infinitum.
Part one. "The massive Mongolian sings beautifully. A sad falsetto—I imagine it to be about missing a faraway homeland of vast, green pastures, endless fertile grasslands, deserts and broad skies."
Part two. "He should really go to a hospital outside of the detention center, but…he would have to pay for any medical treatment outside.…If he spends any money on medical bills he would have less money for buying his airplane ticket home. So he must go untreated."
posted by Mo Nickels at 7:35 AM PST - 16 comments
How to destroy an American soldier.
Imagine you're a Marine, just two months back from your first tour of duty in Iraq. Imagine you've gone through
a hellish experience that left you
isolated, profoundly depressed, and
struggling with addiction. The Marine Corps
knows you have an untreated mental disorder, but you're still supposed to go back to Iraq next year for a second tour of duty. Now imagine that you have just discovered you may have to go back to Iraq again this year, too.
"If I do get chosen that'll mean by 2007 (assuming I'm still alive ha ha) I'll have made 3 fucking trips to that country. Which in return will end up making me a bitter angry salty fucker. . . If I have to go I'm gonna fuck some shit up . . . your whole mentality just shifts cause of that fear. I wish you all who don't have to deal with a life like that could jump into my head for a second you'd wanna go fucking nuts too! ha ha ha ha
LET'S GO EAT SOME BABIES AND SHOOT SOME ROO'S"
posted by insomnia_lj at 12:45 AM PST - 120 comments
May 17
Air Force Seeks Bush's Approval for Space Arms
(nytimes.com).
The US Air Force seeks to develop several frightening weapons,including one called "Rods from God," which would fire metal rods at a target from the edge of space, striking with the force of a small nuclear weapon.
With a presidential directive expected in the weeks to come, what consequences could an approval have on the global community?
posted by Tlahtolli at 9:28 PM PST - 53 comments
Dick "Two Ton" Baker
is a Chicago legend who had a long career in radio, records, and children's television. He was
a child prodigy,
a beloved radio host, and
looked upon with favor by none other than Duke Ellington. He also made some
really terrifically funny music. Check out mp3 versions of
"I Like Stinky Cheese," "Civilization" (a hit for Danny Kaye), the classic
"I'm a Little Weenie," and many others, all sung in Two Ton's terrifically expressive baritone.
Go easy on this site's bandwidth, though.
Check out also the
collection of press clippings and articles about Two Ton, a lovingly compiled
discography (.PDF), and then, because you know you want 'em,
buy some CDs of the great man's music.
Oh, and did I mention that it's Two Ton's voice you hear on the classic piece of Cold War "let's make nuclear annihilation palatable to the kiddies!" Americana "Duck and Cover"? Well, it is!
posted by Dr. Wu at 8:25 PM PST - 7 comments
Is he or isn't he?
Slashdot member claims to be an Apple employee and posts detailed commentary on Apple's strategy and product plans, including information about unreleased products. He speaks with authority and seems to know what he's talking about. Apple does not sue Slashdot or fire any of its employees. Slashdot members debate the implications.
posted by alms at 5:18 PM PST - 29 comments
Best laid schemes?
Back in 1945 the
Bruce Plan [click on images for video footage] was a radical proposal to knock down, and then rebuild, the Victorian centre of the city of Glasgow. The city’s
slums* would be cleared;
new towns* would be established; Glasgow would rise again, triumphant, once again the second city of the
Empire*. In
1971*, there were grand visions of the Glasgow of the future; the Glasgow of tomorrow would be a bright, shining new city, and the
Clyde* would once again be something to be proud of. A fascinating film archive of the
Glasgow of the 20th century.
*All links contain embedded video goodness.
posted by Len at 5:03 PM PST - 13 comments
A high school senior
has been denied valedictorian status because she wasn't enrolled in the high school on the 20th day of her junior year. Why? Because she was in a treatment center receiving help for anorexia. Only in Texas...
posted by C17H19NO3 at 4:43 PM PST - 94 comments
US 'backed illegal Iraqi oil deals'
The United States administration turned a blind eye to extensive sanctions-busting in the prewar sale of Iraqi oil, according to a new Senate investigation.
A report released last night by Democratic staff on a Senate investigations committee presents documentary evidence that the Bush administration was made aware of illegal oil sales and kickbacks paid to the Saddam Hussein regime but did nothing to stop them.
The scale of the shipments involved dwarfs those previously alleged by the Senate committee against UN staff and European politicians like the British MP, George Galloway, and the former French minister, Charles Pasqua.
posted by Postroad at 5:55 AM PST - 124 comments
May 16
Chomskytorrents.org
provides a gathering place for torrents with progressive and radical content. As for now, it preserves a special place for the work of American dissident Noam Chomsky.
posted by crunchland at 10:18 PM PST - 99 comments
The Bluth's will be back -- Fox
order's another full season of "Arrested Development."
posted by JPowers at 10:33 AM PST - 70 comments
"I am an American, so that is why I make films about America.
America is sitting on our world, I am making films that have to do with America (because) 60% of my life is America. So I am in fact an American, but I can't go there to vote, I can't change anything. We are a nation under influence and under a very bad influence… because Mr. Bush is an asshole and doing very idiotic things."
Lars Von Trier introduces his new film at the
Cannes Film Festival:
«Manderlay» picks up where «
Dogville» left off, with the character originated by Nicole Kidman -- now played by Bryce Dallas Howard --
stumbling onto
a plantation that time forgot, where slavery still operates in the 1930s.
The film (5 MB .pdf file, official pressbook) ends, as Dogville did, with David Bowie’s Young Americans played over a photomontage of images that range from a Ku Klux Klan meeting to the Rodney King beating, George Bush at prayer and Martin Luther King at his final rest, American soldiers in Vietnam and the Gulf, the Twin Towers. More inside.
posted by matteo at 10:30 AM PST - 69 comments
Radley Balko fisks the DEA's Karen Tandy
'So which is it? Are doctors a "very small part of the problem," or are they "the primary sources of diverted pharmaceuticals available on the illicit market?" ...I guess it depends on whether the agency is trumpeting its victories to Congress, or defending its tactics from critics in newspaper op-eds.'
posted by Kwantsar at 8:07 AM PST - 34 comments
"Defending America's Most Vulnerable" - a new
bill, introduced in the
House by the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee,
Sensenbrenner (R-WI). Among other provisions, 10-year mandatory minimum sentence for a first-time conviction of distributing a small amount of marijuana to a person under 18 years of age; virtually every drug crime
committed in urban areas subject to "drug free zone" penalties that carries a five-year mandatory minimum sentence; a 2-year sentence for those who witness or learn about drug distribution near colleges and do not report it to authorities within 24 hours and do not provide full assistance investigating, apprehending, and prosecuting the offender.
posted by daksya at 7:18 AM PST - 45 comments
May 15
Le Sigh
- ShunTv joins the ranks. I found this through metafilter users.... would like to lament shun with metafilter users. As MPAA expands into
prosecuting tv viewers.
posted by sourbrew at 6:54 PM PST - 46 comments
Hippocamp Ruins Pet Sounds:
A group of internet-based electronic musicians are celebrating the
anniversary of the release of the classic Beach Boys album ‘Pet Sounds’ by
remixing it for the 21st Century. The album, titled ‘Hippocamp Ruins Pet
Sounds’, comes from contributors to acclaimed net label Hippocamp.net. Each
track from the original album has been reconstructed by a different artist,
creating an album as diverse and inventive as the original.
(Torrent
Here)
I've been listening to this all morning. It's fantastic. Get it while you can?
posted by cathodeheart at 4:17 PM PST - 36 comments
Circuit Bending
: The art of taking (usually consumer-grade children's toys) electronics and short circuiting them for
audio effects previously not intended by the manufacturer.
The simple
directions are to probe around the insides of a
vivisected toy to find the connections that cause distortion, repitition, pitch change etc.
After that all you have to do is solder
wires to an on/off switch, dial or button.
Maybe a little like the
Frankenstein monster projects like this can be pretty inexpensive. All you need is a bunch of wires, switchs, knobs and a soldering iron. Not to mention hours of trial and error.
Any subjects for experimentation can be found at your local thrift store. Too lazy to shop around for
victims? Trouble findng switches for under 5$ each? You can always
buy one ready-made.
posted by Napierzaza at 9:48 AM PST - 17 comments
Earthly Empires:
How evangelical churches are borrowing from the business playbook - "The triumph of evangelical Christianity is profoundly reshaping many aspects of American politics and society... This year, the 16.4 million-member Southern Baptist Convention plans to 'plant' 1,800 new churches using by-the-book niche-marketing tactics. 'We have cowboy churches for people working on ranches, country music churches, even several motorcycle churches aimed at bikers', says Martin King, a spokesman for the Southern Baptists' North American Mission Board... Many of today's evangelicals hope to expand their clout even further. They're also gaining by taking their views into Corporate America. Exhibit A:
the recent clash at software giant Microsoft."
posted by kliuless at 9:46 AM PST - 35 comments
Rebecca's Revival.
Rebecca Protten, born a slave in 1718, gained her freedom and joined a group of proselytizers from the
Moravian Church. She embarked on an itinerant mission, preaching to hundreds of the enslaved Africans of St. Thomas, West Indies. Weathering persecution from hostile planters, Protten and other black preachers created the earliest African Protestant congregation in the Americas. University of Florida historian
Jon Sensbach has written a
book about Protten's life -- the interracial marriage, the trial on charges of blasphemy and inciting of slaves, the travels to Germany and West Africa. Later in her life, after she moved to Germany, Rebecca was ordained as a deaconess: "a former slave now administered Communion and practiced other claims to spiritual authority over white women, including European aristocrats." More inside.
posted by matteo at 9:46 AM PST - 4 comments
Class Mobility within America
- The mythology surrounding
Horatio Alger is a powerful force within American culture: the idea that anyone can pull oneself up by the bootstraps to become financially successful.
Surprising research by statistician
Miles Corak shows that Americans have no more income mobility than Europeans — contradicting cultural presumptions of egalitarianism — and even less than Scandinavian countries, despite their heavy taxation. Marketing slowly meets
reality in the American Dream...
posted by AlexReynolds at 7:13 AM PST - 83 comments
Blogs are bad, essays good.
Yet another priesthood is taking defensive action, this time essayists. In this piece, the author argues, without much thought or precision, that the throughtful, precise essay is much, much better than those dirty blogs. With apologies to Bill Maher, NEW RULE: If you think Matt Drudge is a blogger and cite him as such, you've already lost the argument.
posted by baltimore at 6:06 AM PST - 20 comments
Elections BC (Source: CBC) is having a tough time keeping up with all the bloggers "
publishing partisan messages during the current election campaign.". Under current law they are asking all bloggers to register as advertisers, while also going on record as being open to changing the law.
posted by futureproof at 12:36 AM PST - 14 comments
May 14
Spengler of the Asia Times.
Right-headed, wrong-headed, at times off-headed, but always interesting. You can spend a lot of time wading through the archives. The fellow, anonymous for whatever reason, has written on
US/China trade,
Ratzinger as a dark age theologian, the
American empire , how
Europe might be re-Christianized,
US vs Islam,
religion vs philosphy,
Tolkien vs Wagner,
internet stocks , and
anti-semitism. A bit of something for everyone.
Also runs a lively little
forum.
posted by IndigoJones at 11:00 AM PST - 20 comments
The Science of Gender Science. A debate by Pinker vs. Spelke on the research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of bias, discrimination and innate and acquired difference between the sexes. (via Edge)
posted by semmi at 8:48 AM PST - 25 comments
The
NYC Midnight Run is happening
right now! Today, dozens of teams are hard at work writing, scripting, recording, and editing a film which must be complete twentifour hours from the time they were given the subject and genre. But we in Greater New York are
not alone. There are 24 hour film festivals
cropping up all over.
Why?
(Disclosure: Though I will be participating in the festival, I am not in any way an organizer or affiliated with the organization itself. This should be viewed as the equivalent of someone who uses a search engine pointing out a cool point about search engines).
posted by Eideteker at 5:43 AM PST - 12 comments
"Whoever controls Highway 19 controls the Highlands,
and whoever controls the Highlands controls Vietnam."
The French learned this lesson when Groupement Mobile 100, a brigade-sized mobile security column was slaughtered by the Viet Minh in an
epic fight (pdf) on this road in 1954.
Thirteen years later, with the Americans deploying deeper and deeper into the Central Highlands to flush out the NVA from their remote upland base camps, the 100 miles of road between the coastal port of Qui Nhon and the US cantonments near Pleiku became "Ambush Alley", until the
Guntruck was devised to counter the ambush parties head-on.
(more inside)
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 5:12 AM PST - 22 comments
May 13
Do You Live Near a Brothel?
It turns out that I do, and they're at Sacramento State's Art Department, the local office of NOW, and the Sacramento Film Commission, among others. Dubya, as it turns out,
lives near a bunch of them as well, including the Center for Public Integrity and the local branch of the DC Public Library.
You can find out the houses of ill repute near you, too, by simply entering your zip code and the word "brothels" in the Google Maps search box. It's supposed to be returning destinations for that type of local business. Oops.
Google has no comment.
posted by robhuddles at 8:01 PM PST - 52 comments
Planning a vacation or going on a business trip this summer? Why not try one of the world's
most dangerous destinations for the trip of a lifetime? Just make sure you have
Worldcue® PRO loaded on your laptop and fill out some
forms and you'll be ready for
death departure.
posted by Guerilla at 12:42 PM PST - 2 comments
"Family Values, My Ass!"
That article in the Lexington Herald-Leader inspired me to look up the
Nation article it referred to. Now I'm beginning to see why many women won't go to "evangelical Christian" MDs: this guy Hager (previously brought up on MetaFilter
in 2003, in fact
twice, and then again in
2004) is strongly anti-abortion -- so pro-conception that he tried to keep the
"morning-after pill" known as
"Plan B" away from women -- but he's apparently pro-
sodomy and pro-
rape.
It almost sounds like
fiction.
posted by davy at 8:46 AM PST - 86 comments
After an American car company
recreates its legendary
1960's Ferrari-beating race car, the first $150,000 2005 production car
sells at a charity event for $400,000 over sticker price, (to a
Microsoft-enriched individual, of course) and many months later, dealers are still asking up to
$200,000 over sticker, or at least
$150,000 over sticker. The "experts" at Edmunds say the car is selling for
about $100,000 over sticker (seeing their "True Market Value" requires a few clicks from this page), and the widespread belief is that these
admittedly amazing cars are virtually impossible to find and all selling for at least $100,000 over sticker.
But using publicly available data, including completed eBay auctions and
public documents, this
non-commercial site shows the truth to be very different than the hype.
posted by escorter at 7:46 AM PST - 32 comments
"Joseph McCarthy must be smiling admirably in Hades"
-- British MP George Galloway, on Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) We've previously discussed Galloway
here, but I thought that pan had flashed and I'd never hear his name again. This is transAtlantic Politifilter for your Friday Morning. (via Minneapolis Star-Tribune, it may ask for reg.)
posted by indiebass at 7:14 AM PST - 50 comments
May 12
The number of children with flattened heads
(aka positional plagiocephaly) is on the rise. The cause? "
Back to Sleep," the government program that urged parents to prevent
SIDS by putting their babies to sleep on their backs.
The condition can be treated through surgery, the use of an
orthotic helmet, or just letting the kid be, in the hopes of growing out of it.
According to
this article, though, the medical establishment has been less than willing to acknowledge the problem and deal with it proactively.
posted by greatgefilte at 6:37 PM PST - 39 comments
David Lynch's secret movie (site with annoying, loud sound, sorry)
"It's about a woman in trouble, and it's a mystery, and that's about all I want to say about it". Titled "INLAND EMPIRE" (all caps, though Lynch doesn't explain why), it stars Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, Jeremy Irons.
Lynch has shot much of his latest film in Poland, after making friends with the organizers of the Camerimage festival in Lodz. He's now back shooting in and around Los Angeles. Even at this relatively advanced stage of production, Lynch is cagey about when it will be finished. It was shot entirely in DV: "I started working in DV for my Web site, and I fell in love with the medium. For me, there's no way back to film. I'm done with it".
posted by matteo at 2:10 PM PST - 36 comments
May 13, 1985: Police drop bomb on occupied Philadelphia rowhouse.
On the morning of May 13, 1985, police commissioner Gregore Sambor spoke thusly through a bullhorn: "Attention MOVE, this is America!" A furious 90 minutes gun battle ensued, in which police fired an estimated 1,000 rounds. After a long stalemate, the decision was made to drop a bomb from a borrowed Pennsylvania State Police helicopter. The bomb did not dislodge the rooftop bunker as it was designed to do. instead, it started a fire that killed 11 people, including five children and destroyed 61 row homes leaving 250 people homeless.
posted by fixedgear at 1:55 PM PST - 33 comments
Bicycle enthusiast Brano Meres constructed this
bike frame from bamboo. I'm not sure how well it would hold up, but it looks pretty sweet.
[via coolhunting]
posted by btwillig at 1:09 PM PST - 15 comments
The God Light
was previously discussed
here. Once known as the Angel Light, it has been modified and now cures cancer, parkinsons, fibrocystic disease etc. As a side-effect of its healing powers, the device no longer allows one to see through walls.
posted by jb5dogs at 11:45 AM PST - 35 comments
What your Congress is doing while you sleep...
Tacking riders on to military spending bills is nothing new and an easy way to get legislation passed. With the recently passed Real ID Act, however, post-9/11 America takes a decidely fascist left turn:
§102(c)
"No court shall have jurisdiction to hear any cause or claim arising from any action undertaken, or any decision made, by the Secretary of Homeland Security, or order compensatory, declaratory, injunctive, equitable, or any other relief for damage alleged to arise from any such action or decision."
This new legislation dramatically — if quietly — usurps the separation of powers established over 200 years ago, and the
consequences are absolutely chilling, allowing the Department of Homeland Security to commit any criminal behavior it sees fit, without having to answer to existing state and federal laws. All the way from checking IDs on request, to detaining political undesirables, to South American-style "disappearances". And where are our
so-called liberal media outlets to report on this amazing and unprecedented transfer of power?
posted by AlexReynolds at 9:21 AM PST - 117 comments
Goodbye, DC Bullet. Hello, DC Spin.
Branding is very important for business, even when that business is comic books. So this week, DC Comics
announced their first
new logo in
29 years. Why?
Ask DC's President Paul Levitz:
"The hope always, for a brand like ours, is that somehow you can have a logo that somehow acknowledges all the wonderful things that have happened in the past, and looks forward with a sense of 'We’re as cool as tomorrow.'" Compelling, but
Senior VP and Creative Director Richard Bruning has a more practical explanation:
"[A]s we moved into other areas, and got into things like manufacturing toys or action figures or statues, the physical construction of the bullet, the little hairlines that are built around all the letter shapes, made it very difficult to reproduce on any other medium or form than large and on paper." Another good point ... but can a spinning baby blue swoosh really replace that classic
Milton Glaser logo?
posted by grabbingsand at 7:04 AM PST - 33 comments
Missing workers? Darth has them.
"Next Thursday, the Force will be with Obi Wan Kenobi and Yoda — the North American work force, that is. Worker absenteeism on the Thursday and Friday opening of Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith could cost U.S. employers a whopping $627-million (U.S.) in the two days, according to one report." Are you going to be playing
hooky from work to go see the film? If so, don't bother with
phony excuses, get a
fail-safe May 19th excuse note!
posted by debralee at 4:22 AM PST - 66 comments
A video clip
(direct link: approx 10 MB WMV, streaming) of two clever performers on stage, aired on a Netherlands television channel.
posted by hypersloth at 3:25 AM PST - 51 comments
May 11
Understanding elections beyond the red and blue axis.
Since 1987, the Pew Research center has been conducting a political survey that divides voters into various
typologies based on core beliefs-- upbeats and disaffected, enterprisers and bystanders -- and tracking political opinions and votes. The
biggest trends have been the rise of disadvantaged pro-government conservatives and the shift of the middle to the right. Fortunately, there is a
survey that will determine your type. Where does the typical MeFi visitor fit?
(Hint from the typology: "Liberals- Affluent and highly secular...ideologically consistent on social issues, foreign policy and the role of government..nearly four-in-10 cite the Internet as their main source of news.")
posted by blahblahblah at 10:02 PM PST - 41 comments
Be afraid: The national threat-alert level today is yellow or "
elevated," with "significant risk of terrorist attacks," says the Department of Homeland Security. In fact, the alert level has been elevated since December of 2003, when it was raised from orange. During the election season, the Fox News network flashed the terror alert level in their "crawl" as if there was breaking news -- the sort of thing that prompted some liberal
wags to ridicule the entire system. Now former DHS secretary Tom Ridge says that
the Bush administration was "really aggressive" about raising the threat-alert level during his tenure, even when the agency felt that the intelligence didn't warrant it.
posted by digaman at 8:49 PM PST - 24 comments
UAL (United Airlines)
dumps four pension plans[optional audio interview with Businessweek expert] ; bankruptcy court authorizes shifting of USD 5 billions (allegedly largest pension default in U.S. history) in pension obligations to the
Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. As a result the burden of private failure and incompetency will be shared by all taxpayers (whose taxes finance PBGC which is already operating on a
23 Billion deficit) and by beneficiaries of the pension plans who
will see their pension severely cut : pilots from 100K to 30K pensions but also less privileged workers will be hit. For instance Mrs Tamuk, spokeswoman from
Association of Flight Attendants said her pension will be reduced from $1,700 a month to $800 a month.
posted by elpapacito at 5:33 PM PST - 94 comments
Home From Iraq:
photojournalist Molly
Bingham was
detained
in 2003 by Iraqi security forces and held in Abu Ghraib prison from March
25 to April 2, 2003. Eighteen days after her release, she returned to Iraq to
pursue stories for The New York Times, The Guardian of London and others. Taking
a short break during the summer of 2003, Bingham had the idea of working on a
story to explore
who
was
involved
in the
nascent
resistance
that was becoming
apparent
throughout
Iraq.
In August 2003, Bingham returned with British journalist
Steve
Connors and spent the next 10 months reporting the story of the Iraqi resistance.
Her account was published in Vanity Fair magazine in July 2004; Connors shot a
documentary film on the subject. This experience has led Bingham to seriously
question the values and responsibilities of the press.
posted by stenseng at 12:11 PM PST - 65 comments
Hell House:
The Ghosts of Maryland
Many say the place is
haunted. Others used talk of
satanic altars or drug labs hidden within the cavernous old building. And... people sacrificing goats?
Well, not really. These are just rumors surrounding the old St. Mary's College in Ilchester, stories passed around among teenagers from all over the region. The students have a different name for the old seminary too: "
Hell House."
posted by Shanachie at 11:36 AM PST - 12 comments
M. Scott Peck: I'm a prophet, not a saint
M. Scott Peck, author of the ultimate self-help manual, has Parkinson’s and his wife of 43 years has walked out. Interesting profile of M. Scott Peck, the best-selling self-help author who preached self-discipline and delayed gratification despite being a smoker, a drinker, and an adulterer.
Via Bookslut. (Possibly nsfw drawing of nude woman.)
posted by callmejay at 11:11 AM PST - 18 comments
Jim Campbell, artist, works with extremely low resolution LED images. Try the ”Ambiguous icons”, some of them animated. I can't explain why this attracts me, but I've posted some pics inside.
posted by Termite at 10:59 AM PST - 12 comments
How To Get Ahead.
"In this, the high summer of the great conservative revolt, no one, whatever his past political aberrations, can remain unaffected. I am not. Accordingly, I am here offering, also in a great conservative tradition, advice and counsel to the young—advice and counsel on how to get ahead in an ideologically restructured world. I propose to tell you, graduates of the class of
[...], how now to proceed if you wish the acclaim and goodwill as well as the income of your fellow men. The advice I offer I do not find wholly acceptable for myself. But that too is in a great tradition of advice to the young".
John Kenneth Galbraith, from an Address to the Yale Graduating Class, 1979.
(more inside)
posted by matteo at 10:44 AM PST - 16 comments
Five years ago, Robert Lilly, a distinguished American sociologist, prepared a book based on military archives. Taken by Force is a study of the rapes committed by American soldiers in Europe between 1942 and 1945. He submitted his manuscript in 2001. But after September 11, its US publisher suppressed it, and it first appeared in 2003 in a French translation. We know from Anthony Beevor about the sexual violence unleashed by the Red Army, but we prefer not to know about mass rape committed by American and British troops. Lilly suggests a minimum of 10,000 American rapes. Contemporaries described a much wider scale of unpunished sex crime. Time Magazine reported in September 1945: "Our own army and the British army along with ours have done their share of looting and raping ... we too are considered an army of rapists." An Ethical Blank Cheque... So,
How Good Was The Good War ? And from the Eastern Front:
Uncensored Memories From Alfredo Perez's Political Theory Daily Review
posted by y2karl at 8:59 AM PST - 104 comments
The Hidden Messages in Water?
Masaru Emoto claims that water has the ability "to absorb, hold, and even retransmit human feelings and emotions. Using high-speed photography, he found that crystals formed in frozen water reveal changes when specific, concentrated thoughts are directed toward it. Music, visual images, words written on paper, and photographs also have an impact on the crystal structure." The theory may be
suspect, but the
photos are beautiful.
posted by taz at 1:51 AM PST - 115 comments
May 10
Synergy
is a fantastic little bit of open source software that allows two or more networked computers (Mac, Windows, Linux, or any combination) to share a mouse and keyboard (and clipboard!). It's perfect for the iBook you've got next to your Dell Box, or the Win/Linux duo you've got at work. The mouse cursor simply slides from one screen to the other. Neat! Free!
posted by scarabic at 11:53 PM PST - 23 comments
Marines recall
faulty body armor. In yet another blow to the struggle to supply soldiers with adequate armor, 5,277 defective vests were recalled today from troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In response to the armor shortages,
new Oklahoma legislation would create "Patriot Plates," a $35 license plate of which $20 would go to supply body armor for Oklahoma soldiers.
Soldiers have been lacking this armor for months now. According to an April
GAO report: (PDF)
Because of the shortages, many individuals bought body armor with personal funds. The Congressional Budget Office estimated (1) that as many as 10,000 personnel purchased vests, (2) as many as 20,000 purchased plates with personal funds, and (3) the total cost to reimburse them would be $16 million in 2005. (P. 78)
Another continuing problem is a lack of adequately armored HMMWVs. "Current HMMWVs are protected only by canvas tops and have no additional armor protection." (P. 122) In this case, for protection from ambushes and roadside bombs, an add-on armor kit is required. However, "as of September 2004, the Army supplied 8,771 of the 13,872 Add-on Armor kits required by CENTCOM but still needed 5,101 additional kits to meet all requirements." (P. 121)
Attacks on vehicles have accounted for as many as 40 percent of the 1,037 deaths attributed to hostile action.
But at least we can sleep soundly knowing that manufacturers are seeing
record profits from all of this.
posted by ScottMorris at 5:17 PM PST - 31 comments
The Still Unsolved Stoffel Affair: How Is Known – but Not Who or Why
Iraqi guerrillas calling themselves Rafidan – the Political Committee of the Mujahideen Central Command – have recently woken up and begun releasing a series of communiqués claiming to shed new light on the still unsolved deaths on December 8, 2004, of two Americans, Dale C. Stoffel, 43, whom they describe as “a CIA shadow manager in Iraq, close friend of George Bush,” and his associate Joseph J. Wemple, also 43.
posted by Postroad at 12:53 PM PST - 8 comments
All Ur Pics R Belong 2 Us?
Over the last three weeks there's been a
storm of protest after
Thomas Knoll (of Adobe Photoshop fame) revealed that Nikon are encrypting the White Balance data (used to ensure correct colour) in the
RAW files generated by their
latest cameras and that Adobe are unwilling to break the encryption in their
Camera RAW software thanks to fears they could be prosecuted under the DCMA. Whilst
others appear to have no
such worries, many are calling for the camera manufacturers to
document their proprietary formats so images will not be lost over time. So have Nikon just taken a shot of
their own foot?
posted by arc at 11:59 AM PST - 23 comments
Meet
Deborah Hobbs. Having lived in direct disregard for North Carolina general statute
14-184 for years, she is only now beginning to feel the heat. The law prohibits unmarried couples from lewdly and lasciviously associating, bedding and cohabiting together. The law is catching up with her thanks to her former boss, Sheriff Carson Smith, who told her to get married, move out or find another job. In Sherriff Smith's defence though, he
does try to avoid hiring people who openly live together, but says he doesn't send out deputies to enforce the law. Of course, this archaic law rarely gets inforced; between 1997 and 2004
only three dozen charges were filed in the state.
posted by jikel_morten at 10:48 AM PST - 72 comments
LA Deputies: 100+ rounds, two wounded.
After firing nearly 120 rounds, some Los Angeles County Sherriff's Department deputies manage to wound the driver of an SUV they'd been pursuing, one of their own number, and punch lots of 9mm holes in a Compton neighborhood. Report says no weapon in the suspect's vehicle.
posted by alumshubby at 10:39 AM PST - 50 comments
The Found Footage Festival
is a live comedy event and screening featuring odd and hilarious clips from videotapes found at thrift stores and garage sales and in warehouses and dumpsters throughout the country. [note: quicktime, profanity, accidental mutilation, bad advertising, burger joint rap music, mullets] main page
posted by crunchland at 7:30 AM PST - 21 comments
The Pill - 45 years ago this month, the contraceptive pill was approved by the FDA for U.S. public release, a watershed point for women, providing
a prescription for equality. However, it was illegal for single women to use the pill until the 1972 Supreme Court decision of
Eisenstadt v. Baird. Ex-boxer
Bill Baird was an unlikely contraceptive crusader. His efforts earned imprisonment, death threats, and the enmity of many feminists. He
continues his crusade today because, unfortunately, the right to contraceptives is still
not a freedom we can take for granted.
- more -
posted by madamjujujive at 5:05 AM PST - 46 comments
Did Frank Zappa invent the iTunes music store?
from zappa.com:
"Every major record company has vaults full of (and perpetual rights to) great recording by major artists in many categories which might still provide enjoyment to music consumers if they were made available in the right way. MUSIC CONSUMERS LIKE TO CONSUME MUSIC . . . NOT PIECES OF VINYL WRAPPED IN PIECES OF CARDBOARD."
posted by Silky Slim at 3:36 AM PST - 29 comments
Junk Science.
George Monbiot has a critical look at some the claims put forward by
"climate change" deniers. There's lots of interesting refutation, with some amusement: "But there was still one mystery to clear up. While Bellamy’s source claimed that 55% of 625 glaciers are advancing, Bellamy claimed that 555 of them – or 89% – are advancing. This figure appears to exist nowhere else. But on the standard English keyboard, 5 and % occupy the same key. If you try to hit %, but fail to press shift, you get 555, instead of 55%. This is the only explanation I can produce for his figure. When I challenged him, he admitted that there had been “a glitch of the electronics”."
posted by gsb at 2:14 AM PST - 35 comments
A cool idea, and a fun allegory:
Bird and butterfly collages made with old bank notes (two pages, horizontal scrolling). Click the images to view larger versions and see the notes that were used (scroll down).
More here without the note source info.
posted by taz at 12:44 AM PST - 4 comments
Mirecle33 (mir-i-kel) Creativity Patch: What Creatives Crave
"It's totally here. Our progressive times allow you to sport a patch on your body to maintain your hormone levels, curb your appetite(s), and cover your boo-boos. Now, thanks to Dunmire Labs, there's no good reason you can't have a slow, steady stream of creativity delivered into your system through the Mirecle33 Creativity Patch. Try the Mirecle33 Creativity Patch today and see how much it 'miraculously' improves your creative output!"
posted by azul at 12:12 AM PST - 5 comments
May 9
A heap of MP3 interviews from JJJ -- Australian radio. Artists include Caribou
*, McLusky
*, Antony and the Johnsons
*, The Arcade Fire
*, Architecture in Helsinki
*, Bright Eyes
*, The Decemberists
*, Sharon Jones
*, Black Mountain
*, TV On the Radio
*, Black Keys
*, Black Dice
*, Mercury Rev
*, The Dears
*, Four Tet
*, Fiery Furnaces
*, Jolie Holland
*, and many more.
* MP3 song of the artist -- not interview!
posted by dobbs at 11:18 PM PST - 15 comments
Alien planet
"The drama takes place on Darwin IV, a fictional planet 6.5 light-years from Earth, with two suns and 60 percent gravity. Having identified Darwin as a world that could support life, Earth sends a pilot mission consisting of the mothership and three probes." Discovery channel feature, Flash heavy site, via
Pharyngula.
posted by dhruva at 10:41 PM PST - 20 comments
If it comes to civil war, the disintegration of Iraq will be extremely bloody. "The breakup of Iraq would be nearly as bad as the breakup of India in 1947," says David Mack, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state with wide experience in the Arab world. "The Kurds can't count on us to come in and save their bacon. Do they think we are going to mount an air bridge on their behalf?" Israel might support the Kurds, but Iran would intervene heavily in support of the Shiites with men, arms and money, while Arab countries would back their fellow Sunnis. "You'd see Jordan, Saudi Arabia, even Egypt intervening with everything they've got -- tanks, heavy weapons, lots of money, even troops," says White, the former State Department official. The Quagmire
posted by y2karl at 9:35 PM PST - 112 comments
De-Animator
[flash, creepy] — You are Herbert West. You have a revolver. Destroy your unholy creations before they give you a fate worse than death.
posted by neckro23 at 4:19 PM PST - 32 comments
Senator
James
Jeffords (I-VT) has decided not to run for re-election in 2006 and Bernie Sanders will run for the Senate seat. Major General
Martha Rainville (adjutant general of the Vermont Army National Guard) is thinking of making a run as a Republican.
posted by C17H19NO3 at 2:53 PM PST - 19 comments
The Uses of Canaries--and what canaries need to do
--
...Why go to all that trouble when we have reduced the homosexual, himself, to nothing more than a body part? Remove the homo -- he's just a diseased body part, after all -- and the problem is solved.
Of course there will always be those so pathologically sex-panicked that they have to rely on their Think Pieces to get their pornography fix. Not worth worrying about, generally. But when United States Senators start in with the Depravity Fillip, and the DF starts showing up in the campaign literature of various groups... well, you want to keep your eye on that sort of thing. You maybe want to start thinking about that famous canary in the mine-shaft. ...
posted by amberglow at 1:15 PM PST - 51 comments
Articles of Faith
"By inviting articles that covered different sides of disputed issues,
Father Reese helped make
America Magazine a forum for intelligent discussion of questions facing the Catholic Church and the country today."
Thomas J.
Reese's policy -- to present both sides of the discussion -- apparentlly "did not sit well with Vatican authorities".
Reese, a Jesuit and a political scientist, had made a point of publishing both sides of the debate on a range of subjects, some of them quite delicate for a Catholic magazine -- gay priests, stem-cell research, the responsibility of Catholic politicians confronting laws on abortion and same-sex unions and a Vatican document (the
Dominus Iesus declaration) which outlined the idea that divine truth is most fully revealed in Christianity and the Catholic Church in particular.
Reese, who had described last month the Vatican as behaving like the cranky owner of a good restaurant, resigned yesterday as editor of the magazine. More inside.
posted by matteo at 12:51 PM PST - 17 comments
Every now and again, a story or scandal falls off the newswire that reminds you good guys and bad guys don't happen in real life. The fantastic
original expose and
ongoing coverage of the Dick Dasen case in Montana is one of them. The testimony of dozens or hundreds of women Dick Dasen, a wealthy Christian pillar-of-the-community businessman type, has paid for sex (or sometimes nothing at all) over several years are bringing the Flathead Valley meth scene to light, and thanks to what I personally think is some excellent local reporting by
the New West, you can read along as it happens.
posted by saysthis at 11:11 AM PST - 38 comments
Move Over Darwin!
Do you believe God belongs in government?
Do you believe President Bush is doing The Lord's Work?
If so, then show your love for God & the USA!
posted by nofundy at 10:39 AM PST - 67 comments
Whole: A Documentary
Currently airing on the
Sundance Channel, Whole is a documentary about
people who either have or want to become
voluntary amputees (concept previously discussed
here.) Director Melody Gilbert examines the condition and its implications in interviews with doctors, amputees and "wannabes" like Baz, who froze his own leg with dry ice to make himself feel whole. Gilbert also directed the
documentary about even crazier people: people who want to get married at the Mall of America.
posted by dios at 9:41 AM PST - 43 comments
Greg's Digital Portfolio
Here's the way to make everybody unhappy with their own life. With Photoshop and other imaging tools, the advertising industry has implanted images of such impossible perfection that the things we encounter in our lives seem somehow tawdry and inqdequate.
Greg is a "digital pre-press" artist that manipulates images to make them prettier, smoother, and more appealing--he makes the imperfect look perfect. On one hand, I am in awe of the command he has of his craft. But just as waxed apples make real apples seem uhealthy and crappy, what do such images of digitally mediated reality do for our relationship with the real world?
posted by curtm at 9:25 AM PST - 41 comments
In
30 years of going to Cannes, Roger Ebert has witnessed Francis Ford Coppola suffering from post-Apocolypse insanity and learned Jerry Lewis's secret for preventing riots--but the most interesting character he ever met there was a loudmouthed, fast-talking Texan named Silver Dollar Baxter with an uncanny gift for bluffing...
posted by yankeefog at 9:08 AM PST - 5 comments
Tired of your friends and family telling you to get a girlfriend? With an
Imaginary Girlfriend, you can carry on a completely fictitious, yet authentic looking relationship with the girl of your choice.*
* By "choice," I mean "Erica."
posted by Saucy Intruder at 8:09 AM PST - 37 comments
World statistics as they happen.
Fascinating info. Be sure to check out lightning strikes and CO2 emissions. How many more people are there in the world today? (it surprised me). Nice to know bicycle production outpaces automobile production.
posted by zardoz at 5:49 AM PST - 12 comments
May 8
"Expertise is a very good thing, but it is not the same thing as sound judgment regarding strategy and policy.
George W. Bush has more insight, because of his knowledge of human beings and his sense of history, about the motive force, the craving for freedom and participation in self-rule, than do many of the language experts and history experts and culture experts." -- From a fascinating profile of Douglas Feith, undersecretary of Defense, and one of the main architects of the
war in Iraq. From the
New Yorker.
posted by digaman at 12:50 PM PST - 64 comments
Sri Lankan Maids Pay Dearly for Perilous Jobs Overseas
The teacher held up an electric cake mixer and told the class of wide-eyed women before her to clean it properly. If it smells, "Mama," as the aspiring maids were instructed to call their female employers, "will be angry and she will hammer and beat you."
Sriyantha Walpola for The New York Times
More than a million Sri Lankans - roughly 1 in every 19 citizens - now work abroad, and nearly 600,000 are housemaids.
Sriyantha Walpola for The New York Times
Some maids being trained in Kegalla, Sri Lanka, will find brutal work conditions in the Middle East.
"This is where you go wrong," the teacher continued. "That is how Mama beats you and burns you - when you do anything wrong."
posted by kmtharakan at 7:39 AM PST - 27 comments
May 7
KXLY News 4
Mayor Jim West of Spokane Washington has been accused of sexual abuse of a male child. Mayor West announced in the local Spokesman Review newpaper that he plans on staying on as Mayor.
posted by Ignition at 8:59 PM PST - 43 comments
AT&T Text to Spech
put out by AT&T labs is interesting to play around with. Select your language and accent and then go wild. You can even translate if you select the right accent.
posted by tozturk at 7:18 PM PST - 34 comments
Smell The Brimstone
--
Have you ever asked yourself, "Self, what if the folks at JibJab made another political cartoon, but before doing so were to remove their souls, morals, intellect, decency, and common sense?"--
Good as You's review of this little flash piece, from the GodHatesFags crew (Phelps). I think it's so poorly done and insane, it's actually funny, but NSFW and offensive.
posted by amberglow at 3:43 PM PST - 75 comments
California Dreaming: A True Story of Computers, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll (Reg. req'd)
Engineers can be so cute. In the early 1960's, Myron Stolaroff, an employee of the tape recorder manufacturer Ampex, decided to prove the value of consuming LSD. So he set up the International Foundation for Advanced Study and went about his project in classic methodical fashion.
But John Markoff, a senior writer for The New York Times who covers technology, makes a convincing case that for the swarming ubergeeks assembling in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960's, approaching drugs as they might any other potentially helpful tool or device - from a soldering iron to a computer chip - was only natural. The goals were broad in the 60's: the world would be remade, the natural order of things reconfigured, human potential amplified to infinity. Anything that could help was to be cherished, studied and improved.
Judging by the record presented in
What the Dormouse Said, it is indisputable that many of the engineers and programmers who contributed to the birth of personal computing were fans of LSD, draft resisters, commune sympathizers and, to put it bluntly, long-haired hippie freaks.
posted by gleenyc at 1:40 PM PST - 32 comments
Leaked BBC Memo
from 2002 shows that Bush asked UK to find some justification for going to war with Iraq. Despite a "WMD capability [that] was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran". The memo says they need "a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would help with the legal justification for the use of force."
In other words, all those people who said the US/UK were just making it up to go to war were right. Anyone surprised this isn't getting any US news coverage?
posted by Brockstar at 10:08 AM PST - 93 comments
Vote For The Worst
American Idol contestant and be a foot solider against cornball programming. In the battle between an Internet movement and television producers, so far
the rouge site has the lead. But as we get closer to the show's finale, can the contrarians keep the
worst contestants in the mix?
posted by herc at 9:19 AM PST - 23 comments
Mike Doughty's got a good blog.
You may well already know Doughty, the genius from Soul Coughing. His blog is updated regularly, it seems, and features some nice photographs. He seems to have a new record coming out soon, which is very good news for fans of his bizarrely excellent music.
posted by mokey at 7:16 AM PST - 29 comments
HySpace!
Dodongo's Interests:
General: NOT SMOKE
Music: NOT THE SMOKING PIPES
Movies: NOT CHEECH AND CHONG'S UP IN SMOKE
Books: Dodongo... not read much... BUT HEY IF TITLE OF BOOK IS HAVING THE WORD SMOKE, DODONGO PROBABLY NOT LIKE VERY MUCH, SEE WHERE DODONGO WITH GOING IS YOU?
posted by StopMakingSense at 2:20 AM PST - 39 comments
May 6
Total chaos, no way to see the race, not even the track...nobody cares. Big lines at the outdoor betting windows, then stand back to watch winning numbers flash on the big board, like a giant bingo game.
Old blacks arguing about bets; "Hold on there, I'll handle this" (waving pint of whiskey, fistful of dollar bills); girl riding piggyback, T-shirt says, "Stolen from Fort Lauderdale Jail." Thousands of teen-agers, group singing "Let the Sun Shine In," ten soldiers guarding the American flag and a huge fat drunk wearing a blue football jersey (No. 80) reeling around with quart of beer in hand.
No booze sold out here, too dangerous...no bathrooms either. Muscle Beach...Woodstock...many cops with riot sticks, but no sign of a riot. Far across the track the clubhouse looks like a postcard from the Kentucky Derby.
posted by airguitar at 4:10 PM PST - 25 comments
How "Real ID" Act will affect you
[CNET]
Starting three years from now, if you live or work in the United States, you'll need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments, or take advantage of nearly any government service.
posted by dand at 1:28 PM PST - 94 comments
Islamic finance
--doing business according to
Shari'a. ...Pious Muslims are not allowed to invest in industries that have ties to tobacco, alcohol, weapons, pornography or pork products. Since the law prohibits banks from charging or paying interest, Noriba and other Islamic Financial Institutions (ifis) instead make money by using a system based on the sharing of capital gains or losses.
But even with post-Sept. 11 suspicions that Islamic banks may fund terrorist organizations, demand for the services of ifis is on the rise from the towers of Bahrain to the streets of London. Indeed, they represent one of banking's hottest sectors. ...
more here
Socially-conscious investing of a different sort?
posted by amberglow at 1:07 PM PST - 15 comments
Who is the real Bob Saget?
• "In comedy circles, there’s a famous Saget story about the night his first daughter was born. After a very difficult birth, during which Sherri Saget and her baby almost died, a friend showed up to find Mr. Saget looking utterly destroyed, unshaven, unrecognizable, but holding his newborn.
Oh my God, Bob, she’s beautiful, the friend said.
For a dollar, you can finger her, Mr. Saget replied." Saget guests in the
upcoming Aristocrats documentary discussed
here.
posted by dhoyt at 12:03 PM PST - 55 comments
Call the SOBs.
Having a hard time remembering the toll-free number for the US Capitol Switchboard? Forget no more...it's 877-SOB-U-SOB. Honestly.
posted by diastematic at 10:00 AM PST - 12 comments
Col. David Hackworth, who billed himself as America's most decorated living soldier (he had eight Purple Hearts and ten Silver Stars), died in Mexico
this week at age 74. Hackworth saw combat in World War II (having joined the Army at 15), Korea, and Vietnam; in 1967 he and
Gen. Samuel Marshall wrote the
Vietnam Primer, a "lessons learned" document prepared for the Army to explain how
not to fight a guerilla war. In 1971, after years in-country, Hackworth turned publically against the war, telling ABC News that it could not be won and moving to Australia, where his anti-nuclear efforts earned him a United Nations Medal for Peace. Hackworth was a distinguished war correspondent, a self-appointed advocate for the average soldier who used
his website as a soapbox, a best-selling
author, a critic of American tactics in the Iraq War, and possibly the only figure respected by both
WorldNetDaily and
Common Dreams.
posted by snarkout at 9:34 AM PST - 33 comments
From the followup department:
Global dimming?
It stopped.
"We see the dimming is no longer there," said Dr. Martin Wild, a climatologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the lead author of one of three papers analyzing sunlight that appear in today's issue of the journal Science. "If anything, there is a brightening."
As always, use bugmenot to bypass registration.
posted by darukaru at 8:54 AM PST - 9 comments
Honest With Me: Musical Stories on Bob Dylan
"KEXP [Seattle] presents a series of stories on the musical life of Bob Dylan. Told by Dylan’s friends, scholars and fans, 'Honest With Me' features firsthand accounts from Joan Baez, Al Kooper, Izzy Young and the Band’s Robbie Robertson." And they're all pretty great, even if you've heard some of the stories a hundred times.
posted by ericost at 8:45 AM PST - 8 comments
Highlight of the election coverage:
George Galloway is the leader of
Respect and won a historic and unexpected victory against the Blairite Oona King, on an anti-war ticket. He was then interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, an increasingly controversial interviewer well known for asking questions absurd numbers of times until they get answered - a technique which arguably backfires here. You might want to watch Galloway's
acceptance speech first.
[Windows Media. My two cents: Paxman is an egregious cock, more interested in getting his eternally righteous indignation across than any issues.]
posted by Pretty_Generic at 6:18 AM PST - 75 comments
42.
I had always wondered why Jim Henson did
The Muppet Show in England, after years of successful collaboration with
The Children's Television Network in NYC. As a then 9-year old, I felt a kind of betrayal that I couldn't exactly put my finger on. As some little punk kid, what did I know about the financing of entertainment?This analysis of The Jim Henson Co. as a globe-trotting band of gypsies goes a long way to explain the oddness of
The Muppet Show and the change in tone that resulted when the puppets moved from
Sesame Street to Lew Grade's London soundstages.
posted by vhsiv at 4:20 AM PST - 26 comments
The International Children's Digital Library
has over 600 illustrated children's books entirely viewable online. Included are the amazing 1900 illustrated edition of "A is for Apple", and the 1885 color illustrated "Baseball ABC". Also online are the 1905 and 1916 editions of the illustrated "Alice in Wonderland".
Searchable, with books representing 28 languages, including English, Japanese, Farsi, Niuean, Yiddish, Khmer, Tongan, German, Arabic .... (though most contemporary, copyrighted western books are, of course, not here).
posted by R. Mutt at 4:18 AM PST - 12 comments
The Khronos Projector
interactive art installation allows users to send parts of a filmed projection forwards or backwards in time. Neat temporal waving follows.
posted by peacay at 3:50 AM PST - 6 comments
May 5
No Longer Lonely -- Online Dating For the Mentally Ill
Membership is reserved solely for those with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, personality disorder, post-traumatic disorder, or disassociative disorder, or eating disorder. If you ARE unsure if you qualify please contact the webmaster.
Some groovy benefits they tout:
* Never have to worry again about disclosure of your condition
* No need to hide those pill bottles
* Never again have to explain your erratic work experience
* No more stigma-induced disappointments
* Finding someone who can really understand your struggles and accomplishments
Since
JDate is not
just for Jews any more, perhaps (despite the requests not to) there will be a run on this site for those aren't part of the mental illness community.
I'm sure all of us have an ex that we might politely term "mentally ill"- we could find more like 'em on a site like this, or avoid 'em in future if we knew they were dating amongst themselves? Maybe there should be an
enabler category?
My 2nd FPP and my 2nd about unusual online dating. I don't know why that is.
posted by stevil at 5:44 PM PST - 22 comments
Subsystence.net
A virtual cornucopia of thought-provoking writing, art, and music - subsystence is one of my favorite e-zines. Now in its fifth issue, with outstanding features such as a series of paintings by Chicago artist Nick Butcher and music by Detalles.
posted by chrisege at 4:12 PM PST - 2 comments
WHOOO....
How Stuff works tackles a biggie....its all about lightsabers!
"The big advantage of using a lightsaber, of course, is that you can both cut and toast the bagel in one stroke."
via
/.
posted by ShawnString at 2:20 PM PST - 29 comments
Turtles, monks, money, and magic
"Secretary of State for the Ministry of Cults and Religions, Chhorn Iem, said he had lost count of the number of fraudulent monks and gods that came to his ministry's attention....Police said the turtle was confiscated from the elderly woman, whom they did not name, and taken into protective custody....The monk was released with a caution" - A monk and an old woman tussle over a magic turtle.
posted by troutfishing at 1:47 PM PST - 10 comments
Psephologists rejoice!
The Guardian will be blogging the UK election as it happens, and there's already some comments and links to other online discussions. As the UK polls close at 10:00 pm, this means that early results and exit polls will be in late afternoon for US poll-watchers.
posted by carter at 11:41 AM PST - 223 comments
"Unintelligible at any speed."
No, not Ralph Nader mumbling, but the lyrics to "
Louie Louie," in the FBI's humble assessment more than 40 years ago. Nevertheless, this week a Michigan school superintendent
banned a middle school marching band from playing the song... even without anyone singing the lyrics.
posted by twsf at 10:27 AM PST - 47 comments
Guggenheim lecture on
John Baldessari in his own words:
"People shaking hands, you know: congratulating each other, what have you in a standard shot. I really always found them objectionable and then I realized that these were people making decisions about my life while I was in my studio so there was a kind of uneasiness on my part and one day after carrying these photographs around I had some circular price stickers and I put them on their faces. And I really felt that leveled the playing field somehow."
posted by Mme. Robot at 8:52 AM PST - 9 comments
1.7 million deaths in the U.S. and 180-360 million dead globally.
That's the estimate of the impact of the next
influenza pandemic from Michael Osterholm,
published in today's
New England Journal of Medicine. He warns that almost every public health response to the inevitable emergence of pandemic influenza A strain is unplanned or inadequate: A vaccine would take minimum six months (and millions of fertilized chicken eggs); there are no plans to setup and staff the temporary isolation wards or replace dead health-care workers; nor are there detailed plans for handling the number of dead bodies. Given the deeply interconnected nature of the global economy a pandemic would be impossible to stop and wreak havoc in every nation. "Frankly the crisis could for all we know have started last night in some village in Southeast Asia,"
said Dr. Paul Gully, Canada's deputy chief public health officer. "We don't have any time to waste and even if we did have some time, the kinds of things we need to do will take years. Right now, the best we can do is try to survive it. We need a Manhattan Project yesterday."
posted by docgonzo at 7:38 AM PST - 75 comments
Paul Shirley's blog
returns for the NBA playoffs. Shirley is the last player in the depth chart on the potential NBA champion Phoenix Suns. As ESPN's Bill Simmons
wrote about his
original blog, "we could finally have an answer to the question, 'What would it be like if one our friends
was an NBA player and sent us e-mails about his life every few days?'"
posted by casu marzu at 7:17 AM PST - 10 comments
May 4
I can't find any major news outlets mentioning that
today is the 35th anniversary of the Kent State killings, when national guardsmen troops fired a fusillade of live bullets at unarmed students protesting the invasion of Cambodia. Not everyone has forgotten. A new
documentary, "Fire in the Heartland: A History of Dissent at Kent State University 1960-1980" was screened on campus today.
posted by tizzie at 6:34 PM PST - 23 comments
May 3
The Filibuster and Fortas
The republicans have been saying for weeks (or is it months?) that the "nuclear option" is justified because democrats did the unprecedented and
threatened to filibuster judicial nominees. For weeks (or is it months?) many journalists and bloggers and average folks like myself have accepted the premise of this argument, while disaggreeing with its conclusion.
Trouble is, it's just not true. (And there's
video too, if I you want it...) Here's the wiki on
Abe Fortas, a man I personally knew too little about before this. A man who resigned from the Supreme Court in scandal. He was also the same man who picked up
Gideon's Trumpet.
posted by jann at 10:05 PM PST - 11 comments
Cellphedia is a
thesis project created by Limor Garcia (NYU). It's a cell phone application that allows to send and receive encyclopedia-type inquiries through Text messaging. A user will be able to get all the information they need – from “how old is the queen of England?” to “how many miles is the Brooklyn Bridge?” – through a real-time social network, while walking in the street.
posted by stbalbach at 9:21 PM PST - 6 comments
The women's petition against coffee
"the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish
Liquor called COFFEE, which Riffling Nature
of her Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical
Moisture, has so Eunucht our Husbands, and Crippled
our more kind Gallants, that they are become as Impotent,
as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that
unhappy Berry is said to be brought." (
via)
posted by dhruva at 7:23 PM PST - 43 comments
Page 35 - a Da Vinci scholar finds himself the victim of a dastardly murder
(the fourth of his kind to do so). Before he dies, he leaves a message in his own blood on his own body for our hero to find, leading our protagonist (and his heroine, complete with "flashing green eyes" and cleverly hidden links to previously wronged goddess figures) on a quest to find an explosive secret that could shake the foundations of the Catholic Church. Paintings, puzzles, keys that aren't keys, safe-deposit boxes in Zurich, stalking assassins and parchments that should be linen abound. Sound familiar?
You bet your
sweet bippy it
does.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 5:29 PM PST - 41 comments
The Vepsa
are a distinct ethnic people who live in the Russian territory of Karelia, on the border with Finland. They are also scattered throughout the Leningrad and Vologda regions of Russia. Before many were assimiliated to Russian, the Vepsa spoke their own distinct variant of Finno-Ugric. [See more inside]
posted by gregb1007 at 3:57 PM PST - 14 comments
Joe Valentine has Two Mommies
--
..."It's no different than having a mother and father," he said. "These are the two women who raised me, and they are wonderful people. It's just not a big deal to me. Why should it be?"
In an enlightened world, it shouldn't. But major league baseball is to enlightenment what Pauly Shore is to career longevity. ...
Meet the
Cincinnati Reds relief pitcher--
"...a baseball player who was raised by two wonderful, loving mothers. How can anyone criticize that?"
posted by amberglow at 11:22 AM PST - 41 comments
Being the tale of a lad, and his quest for a beard.
I've got visible vellus hair on my back (I got a couple of mirrors and checked). I've got shoulder hair. I've got bizarre hair high up on my cheeks. I've got some chest hair. I've got increased @#%$ hair (growing farther upward than it used to).
I had no idea some guys took facial hair this seriously. And then, while I was "combing" Metafilter for a duplicate post, I found
this.
posted by malaprohibita at 10:41 AM PST - 9 comments
Are evolution's advocates giving fire to creationists?
So says
Michael Ruse, "philosopher of biology (especially Darwinism)", who claims that outspoken evolutionists (e.g.
Richard Dawkins) should do more to make evolution compatible with religion, rather than touting it as a worldview of its own.
Tell that to
Nosson Slifkin (NYTimes, login required), an Orthodox rabbi whose books were banned by a number of eminent rabbis for "seek[ing] to reconcile, rather than to contrast, sacred texts with modern knowledge of the natural world."
That said, will those like Slifkin and
Rev. Dr. Arthur Peacocke be able to make a difference, or will they be ignored and scorned?
posted by greatgefilte at 10:29 AM PST - 82 comments
May 2
BookFactory
At BookFactory we understand the importance of documenting your work, research and inventions. Through innovation and technology we provide the highest quality books at economical prices without requiring large runs. We specialize in making
custom Laboratory Notebooks, Engineering Notebooks, Journals, and Log Books with custom page designs, company logos, book numbers, and more, for less than you pay today.
posted by ColdChef at 5:15 PM PST - 16 comments
Apparently, what it boils down to is this: V-day is "empowering" while
P-day is "subversive," "harrassing," or just plain wrong. More
tales of PC run amok, this time from Roger Williams University in Providence, RI.
[warning: the P-Day link is NSFW, if it's NSFW to look at a mascot costume of a penis.]
posted by LilBucner at 10:19 AM PST - 159 comments
NASA is
funding a research project that looks into a new and much faster way of getting astronauts to
Mars.
posted by C17H19NO3 at 8:13 AM PST - 24 comments
Student Attacks Against Teachers: The Revolution of 1966
At the Middle School attached to Beijing Teacher's College, Yu Ruifen, a female biology teacher, was knocked to the ground and beaten in her office. In broad daylight, she was dragged by her legs through the front door and down the steps, her head bumping against the cement; a barrel of boiling water was poured on her. Though she died after approximately two hours of torture, it did not satisfy the students. All other teachers in the "ox-ghost and snake-demon team" were forced to stand around Yu's corpse and take turns beating her.
posted by Kwantsar at 6:52 AM PST - 41 comments
The Ultimate Beer Bong.
"The basic idea, simultaneously tap two beer sources being either a sankey Keg, or a 5-gallon party ball, push it with a replenishing air compressor to either a faucet, or up to a 4-gallon upper holding tank with four hoses leading off into four mouths racing to finish their hose."
Something in the deep core of my hindbrain went all tingly when I saw this. They go on:
"I have submitted this device as 'The largest Beer funnel in the world' to Guinness World Records, and is currently under review. I am also awaiting a call from the Idaho Alcohol Beverage Control to ascertain this device's legality."
posted by gsb at 6:08 AM PST - 23 comments
"I'm a sucker for serial killers."
- Teller (of Penn and Teller) wrote something way back in 1994 about Jeffrey Dahmer that is still interesting, though short, after all this time.
"One day when he was driving home, Dahmer gave a lift to a hitchhiker. I've done that. He saw beauty and wanted it in his power, utterly, as only a well-placed blow to the head can deliver. OK, I confess, I've wanted that as well -- but I chose not to pick up a sawed-off baseball bat and make my wish come true. That's why I can drive to the beach whenever I feel like it, while Dahmer has to live in a prison and talk to Stone Phillips. "
posted by soulhuntre at 5:04 AM PST - 28 comments
May 1
Damning leak for Blair / Bush!
A leaked transcript of a senior British government meeting indicates that the Bush administration viewed war with Iraq as
"inevitable" as of July 2002, even though the rationale for war was
"thin" and that
"Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran." It further states that the desire to bring about regime change was
"not a legal base for military action", and that the only legitimate reason to declare war was with UNSCOM approval. Most disturbingly, it indicates that there were
"strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change."
posted by insomnia_lj at 1:21 PM PST - 139 comments
Naughty, Naughty
I read these Wonkette excerpts of Laura Bush's speech at the WH correspondence dinner last night and I thought it was satire. But I just saw the tape and it's for real:
"I am married to the President of the United States and here is our typical evening. Nine o'clock, Mr. Excitement here is sound asleep, and I am watching Desperate Housewives. With Lynne Cheney. Ladies and gentleman, I am a desperate housewife. I mean if those women on that show think they're desperate, they ought to be with George. One night after George went to bed, Lynne Cheney, Condi Rice, Karen Hughes and I went to Chippendales....I won't tell you what happened, but Lynne's Secret Service code name is now Dollar Bill."
posted by Postroad at 12:13 PM PST - 88 comments
Sure, you could defend the country, but Houston needs a good defense even more!
Say, do you want to shirk your commitment to the armed forces but flat-out desertion is
too controversial? Become a pro athlete instead! West Point is revising its rules to stipulate that student athletes who join professional sports teams can avoid active duty. The taxpayer-funded military academy will now allow student athletes to reduce their active duty time if faced with the unbearable burden of being offered multi-million dollar pro contracts.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 10:23 AM PST - 33 comments
Interesting followup on this
story previously posted here concerning the killing
of an italian senior intelligence agent by U.S. Forces during an hostage rescue mission (a.k.a. the Sgregna Case). Yesterday the italian public received
this PDF file containing an extremely detailed U.S. military report on the alleged accident. Many lines in the report were "blacked out" as the author probably considered them unclassified, yet sensible information (like the name who the guy who shot the car). It turns out the author don't know jack about
pdf and
here is the unblackened report[DOC Format] in all its details, most probably exposed by some computer savy guy in italian media.
posted by elpapacito at 9:35 AM PST - 49 comments
Runaway bride pulls kidnapping hoax
-- She was "scared and concerned about her impending marriage and decided she needed some time alone," Albuquerque Police Chief Ray Schultz said. "She's obviously very concerned about the stress that she's been through, the stress that's been placed on her family."
posted by NickDouglas at 7:05 AM PST - 59 comments
Mysterious Mr. Moto.
Severo Moto Nsa, Equatorial Guinea's exiled opposition leader reappeared in Madrid yesterday, after a strange episode in which he first was
presumed abducted (or worse), and then, from an undisclosed location in Croatia, had accused the Spanish government of trying to
kill him. He already made international headlines last year, with the
most bizarre, incompetent coup attempt in a while.
Not that the
dictator he's trying to topple is a nice character (even if his predecessor and uncle,
Francisco Macías Nguema, was even worse).
And, of course, there's
oil involved. Lots of it.
posted by Skeptic at 3:07 AM PST - 11 comments
