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June 2003 Archives
June 30
"American Pie [the song] tells about the last decisive struggle between, Christian America and all the heathen armies of the world, who will be gathered on America's doorstep and according to the Bible, will invade America." "Could it be that "JESUS ACTUALLY FORETOLD THE ADVENT OF THE INTERNET?"
[Warning: cheesy MIDI music background]posted by kirkaracha at 1:05 PM PST - 21 comments
No, seriously, they score by touching the opponent in the Valid Target Area. The touches are monitored electronically via wires coming out of the fencers' backs, similar to the technology used to control Dan Rather.
-from
Dave Barry on Fencing in the
humor section of
Fencing Sucks.posted by Shane at 11:28 AM PST - 30 comments
The Optigan: OPTIcal orGAN. Long before synthesizers, ProTools, and Cubase, Mattel released a bizarre contraption called the 'Optigan' which operated by assigning each key to a track on an optical disc on which were recorded sounds of real instruments playing every individual note. This site is one guy's obsession with the instrument that may well be dead and forgotten if not for him. Check out
his mp3s of his own, reasonably successful, band based around the instrument, to see how it sounds.
posted by wackybrit at 8:58 AM PST - 18 comments
Larry Crump's Fireworks Pages. While searching for fireworks related sites, I came across this great site. I doubt you'll find a better resource for fireworks information. Mainly, I like looking at the
pretty pictures. As Larry puts it, "Fireworks are an art form that use the night sky as the canvas."
Sadly, Larry died exactly one year ago today. So, go check out his wonderful web site and maybe you can get some ideas for this weekend's July 4th celebration.
posted by fletchmuy at 8:49 AM PST - 7 comments
Searching MSN for the phrase "Linux" yields some pretty amusing (but yes, unsurprising) results. The first site seems moderately legit - Amazon stuff related to linux. The second one - MSN has a tech section about Linux? Not exactly. It doesn't really have much linux content at first glance. The third link is most amusing - see for yourself.
Comparatively, a
google search for "linux" yields much more useful results.
This makes me wonder: should ethics be taken into consideration on search engines? MS has every right to have whatever they want come up when you type in "linux" - but they are willfully contaminating search results, which makes one wonder what
other search terms Microsoft might want to rig the output of, and also, which they might have
overlooked...
posted by twiggy at 8:39 AM PST - 44 comments
Is Google God? "While you were sleeping after 9/11, not only has the process of technological integration continued, it has actually intensified — and this will have profound implications."
"...Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too." [NYTimes]
posted by jacknose at 8:07 AM PST - 23 comments
And God created Pele: Pele doesn't die. Pele will never die. Pele is going to go on for ever. But Edson is a normal person who is going to die one day, and the people forget that. Also of note: expensive photographs from
eyestorm.
posted by aladfar at 7:18 AM PST - 16 comments
The Group of Seven. Arguably Canada's most important artists, the Group of Seven "
popularized the concept of an art founded on the Canadian landscape, gave many Canadians a sense of national identity and enabled them to discover the beauty of their own country." Peruse an
art gallery and marvel at the beauty they portrayed.
(Mangled quote from the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery)
Equally important was
Emily Carr. While her style was similar to that of the Group of Seven, her interest in First Nations became her trademark. Some of her
paintings.
posted by ashbury at 7:18 AM PST - 9 comments
"The story really began in January 1953, when I suggested to Gordon that we might go on a cycling holiday together..." They covered 2,286 miles, slept in potting sheds, hay barns, and even a railway marshalling yard, and the whole trip cost them £24. Now, 50 years later, Roy Jenkin's daughter is planning to retrace/tread her father's path. Even if you're not into travelogues (
past or
present) the
photos of post-WWII Europe are worth a gander.
posted by shoepal at 6:59 AM PST - 5 comments
Why Must America Always Be The Greatest? Be it the greatest sham or show on earth; why is American nationalism and anti-nationalism always couched in hyperbole and a
childish hankering for being number 1, whether in the best or the worst senses?
Dinesh d'Souza's interesting list of ten reasons to celebrate why he's an
anti-anti-American, although passionate and partly persuasive, ultimately fails to convince because of this constant desire to make the U.S. great by artificially and ignorantly belittling or aggrandizing supposed competitors. Perhaps it's
not all a game and America is quite simply
an OK country, with a standard battery of qualities and shortcomings, like most OK countries in the world?
posted by MiguelCardoso at 3:02 AM PST - 59 comments
June 29
In China they have re-eductaion camps, to enlighten people in the way they should regard the Chinese government and state. In America, parents can send their children somewhere to be trained to adopt a more agreeable attitude, too. The World Wide Association of Speciality Programs runs camps all over the world, including one at Tranquility Bay in Jamaica where children are held against their will and subjected to a regime of behaviour and thought modification until they adopt the behaviour and thinking that the camp's administartion approves of. I found myself reading this detailed and lengthy account of the camp's practices and growing furious with rage at the brainwashing sanctioned by ignorant parents, who seem happy with their new obedient and adoring children. See what you think.
Part one.
Part two.
posted by Blue Stone at 12:53 PM PST - 27 comments
Scripting News is taking a break. "I'm shutting down Scripting News now, to give me some time to think, and to give you all a demo of what it would be like if it weren't here. These last few days have been really awful. You can't imagine what it's like to have so many people screaming at you. It's inhuman, especially considering that my health isn't that good. The only conclusion I can come to is that I shouldn't be doing this." That said, it looks like Dave is still making updates at
http://scriptingnews.userland.com/.
posted by mrbula at 12:39 PM PST - 48 comments
Images of medieval architecture. A great site put together by Alison Stones, Professor of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. There are two large gazetteers, one for
Britain, and one for
France. Besides photos, there are many plans, sketches and elevation drawings, which help to give an idea of the sheer scale of gothic cathedrals such as the cathedral of Saint-Étienne at
Bourges (scroll down for the human figures at the bottom).
posted by carter at 8:33 AM PST - 7 comments
Welcome to the Machine This article in the Washington Monthly describes a long term project of the Republican party to change the largely bipartisan nature of K street lobbying firms and install Republican thought leaders. In return for political benefits to the lobbyists clients, the lobbyists and their clients are expected to play nice with the Republicans on other issues. K Street has been a moderating influence against drastic change, as some constituent always objects. Under this new right-wing symbiotic relationship, individual interests are somewhat subordinated to the right-wing agenda. One of the more fascinating aspects is how it dramatically improves Republican fundraising; for instance:
"For years, conservatives have been pushing to divert part of Social Security into private investment accounts. Such a move, GOP operatives argued, would provide millions of new customers and potentially trillions of dollars to the mutual fund industry that would manage the private accounts. The profits earned would, of course, be shared with the GOP in the form of campaign contributions. In other words, by sluicing the funds collected by the federal government's largest social insurance program through businesses loyal to the GOP, the party would instantly convert the crown jewels of Democratic governance into a pillar of the new Republican machine. " Of course the whole premise of this system rests upon continued Republican control. If the Democrats can wrest back control of the House and Senate, or install another strong president some of these lobbyists and their constituents will likely find themselves closed out of the process. Oh what a lovely way to govern. (via
The Filibuster)
posted by caddis at 5:40 AM PST - 30 comments
June 28
Irony in a Nutshell. Not an O'Reilly publication, but you can use it to teach yourself Irony in 24 hours. For dummies. And a reference for the rest of us.
posted by weston at 9:34 PM PST - 27 comments
They sold everything from
Earthquake Pills (caution: not effective on Road Runners) to
Trick Balls (warning: explode on contact!). They may be the world's most diverse goods & services company, with the possible exception of Wal Mart. I speak, of course, of the fine folks at ACME, whose full catalog is finally available
online.
Go, now, read! Don't make me use my
Ultimatum Dispatcher!
posted by jonson at 3:31 PM PST - 20 comments
Gallery of Fluid Dynamics. 'One of the most attractive features of fluid mechanics is the beauty of the flows one encounters. Whether one is observing vortex streets, the potential flow around an airfoil or body, shock refraction or diffraction, or waves breaking on a beach the aesthetic appeal of fluid mechanics is impossible to deny. '
posted by plep at 12:40 PM PST - 6 comments
The Mullet - Bollywood Style!! Ah, the mullet. Absolut Films tells of the birth of this maligned sartorial trend in "Mulit", a tongue-in-cheek branded content piece with '70s Bollywood flair. Both a :60 trailer and feature, "Mulit" is a musical love story about a man, a woman and an unfinished haircut that transcends class structures, fashion trends and predilections for bad hair. Without such roots, phrases like the 'short-long', 'hockey hair' and 'work in front, party in back' would be meaningless and '80s rock would still be searching for a signature style.
posted by turbanhead at 12:06 PM PST - 9 comments
No Brainer - I've eaten a lot of Tofu in my day and was concerned about "brain-shrink". Then I found about this, and stopped worrying -
Is your brain really necessary? Apparently
not:
"...The student in question was academically bright, had a reported IQ of 126 and was expected to graduate. When he was examined by CAT-scan, however, Lorber discovered that he had virtually no brain at all." I'm hungry...where's that tofu?...posted by troutfishing at 10:00 AM PST - 48 comments
June 27
Something to think about while you plan your weekend . . . Mmmmmm, Canadian beer:
Sleeman - Annoying Flash site, great music.
Labatt - annoying pop up ad with a fantastic idea.
Molson - another annoying pop-up, but it's The Stone's! Click on Don Cherry for some fashion. And who can forget about
The Rant? Then there's the mother of beer sites,
Beer.com, featuring
beer,
sex,
music,
fun and
free. Admit it, nothing compares to beer, especially Canadian beer.
posted by ashbury at 5:25 PM PST - 33 comments
Pot doesn't cause permanent brain damage? According to this University of California at San Diego study, no it doesn't even though other illegal drugs, even alcohol, can cause brain damage.
"...marijuana has only a marginally harmful long-term effect on learning and memory."posted by Ron at 3:41 PM PST - 33 comments
Is soy safe? As an ardent herbivore, I was pretty shocked to learn that tofu can
shrink your brain.
In a major ongoing study involving 3,734 elderly Japanese-American men, those who ate the most tofu during midlife had up to 2.4 times the risk of later developing Alzheimer's disease. [...] higher midlife tofu consumption was also associated with low brain weight.
(
a dissenting opinion)
Could it be that little ole bean, found in over half of the food on supermarket shelves, is bad for you? [more inside]
posted by mcsweetie at 2:25 PM PST - 37 comments
Must not click ... must not click ... oh hell. ".. marry the infinite porn resources of the Net to the endlessness of male sexual desire, underpin it with consumer culture, and men can end up practically frigging themselves to death." Sean Thomas in the UK Spectator 'fesses up to
porn addiction. It's a real, new and hidden problem which landed him in hospital. What to do?
posted by grahamwell at 1:53 PM PST - 60 comments
< earshot >
Live improvisation with digital audio. Play, loop and compose with multiple sound file formats, including:
wav, aif, aiff, aifc, mov, au, mid, mp3, swa, mpg, mpeg, snd... Found while Googlifying for links to the currently tanked Johnny Spencer's
'vanity site' directed towards fans of Black popular music c1940's to 1970's. I have not a clue as to the what or why of it but thought the teeming geeky horde might. Provided for your consumer testing.
posted by y2karl at 12:34 PM PST - 6 comments
How Not To Be A Summer Law Clerk, Or: the guy who sent the incredibly stupid and self-incriminating e-mail to all the associates in his firm. (I find this especially amusing since I am writing this from the law firm where I am a summer clerk. Now
I'll
probably get busted too!)
posted by adrober at 12:14 PM PST - 19 comments
Giving Credit where credit is due. For your Friday browsing pleasure, may I present the staff at NPR's CarTalk. Enjoy!
The Conclusive, Definitive, Official Dewey, Cheetham, & Howe Staff List
In the good old days, we had an engineer and a rotary telephone with a couple of buttons on it. We pressed a button and--BINGO-- someone was on the air. Of course, it was usually a wrong number...but that's the price you pay for simplicity.
Now look at the mess we're in! Thousands of people on the staff...all trying to do less work than us. What a revoltin' development this is. Look at all these employees!
But despite our huge payroll--we're always hiring. So if you know of someone who may be worthy to join our crack(ed) staff, send his/her/its name and potential position to the Car Talk Plaza Personnel Department via e-mail to Dewey, Cheetham and Howe. posted by nofundy at 10:38 AM PST - 10 comments
Even with
frequently-discussed endorsements, the Democrats have a lot to worry about financially: staffers for George W. Bush's re-election campaign are making a "conservative estimate" that
Bush will spend an average of $426,640 every single day from now until November 2004 on his re-election campaign. Bush will be promoting his visions of (among other things) fiscal conservatism by spending more money each day for the next 16 months than over 99% of the American population earns annually. Campaign spokesman Montgomery Brewster could not be reached for comment.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 9:00 AM PST - 45 comments
Baysian spam filter for outlook. Installation was a snap, and it works so well, it's surreal. I'd heard a lot of good things about Baysian spam filters. but this was beyond belief. The damn thing actualy detected legitimate mails that I had accidentaly thrown away!
more gushing insideposted by delmoi at 8:01 AM PST - 43 comments
Love sushi? Love race cars? Wish there was some way to combine the two?
Supaa Sushi Races.
Like
Wacky Races, but with joy of driving sushi.
Flash, possibly NSFW if you think a cartoon woman with her top off would be a bit much.posted by Katemonkey at 7:27 AM PST - 7 comments
"If people want to know about it, they should know I won the contest." On the day of the historic Supreme Court decision, New Jersey's Democratic Party embarrasses itself big time, as the Sussex County party chairman wants a candidate for State Senate to quit the race because he "entered a photo contest in New York City that featured nudity".
What the AP story says: The candidate, semi-famous for being the runner-up on 'Reality' Game Show
The Mole and one of "People Magazine's 50 Most Eligible Bachelors", really
is named
Jim Morrison (TVTome database embarrassment)
What the AP story didn't say: (local newspaper story) Morrison is openly gay, it was a "prettiest penis contest", and it was
made public more than two years ago. And the party chair's real problem with Morrison is
his winning the primary as a 'write-in' (scroll down to "Legislature '03")
Now what
bothers me about this guy is that when he was on "Mole", his occupation was "helicopter pilot", and now he's "a partner in his parents' law firm". Now that's "family values"...
posted by wendell at 3:58 AM PST - 14 comments
Greed May Not Be Good, But It Sure Comes Easy And Feels Lovely, Thank You Very Much: Just how
greedy are you? Lately I've been rereading
Rabelais's outrageous, politically incorrect, magnificently written
Everyman's edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel, in Thomas Urquhart's and Peter Anthony Motteux's no less magnificent
translation [
pdf file]. Everything in this 16th Century book seems to address us and challenge us to be - how shall I put it? -
up to it. It's rolicking; bawdy; irresistible. Too much is
not enough, indeed. Just how valuable is excess of all sorts? Very, I'd say. And this century presents unique opportunities for overdoing it in the most delightful way, wot, wot?
posted by MiguelCardoso at 2:18 AM PST - 13 comments
June 26
CNN reports that Strom Thurmond died about an ago,
this time for real. The South Carolina senator first served as state senator in 1933, went on to become governor in 1947, and won his Senate seat in 1954. In the last years of his term, the recently-retired Senator was barely functional, unable to so much as wield a gavel. Thurmond will likely be remembered for leading the opposition to civil rights for blacks in the mid-20th century. Strom Thurmond was 100 years old.
posted by waldo at 7:52 PM PST - 97 comments
The "Goodie Box" at Amazon is $9.99. It has a $10.00 rebate. No word on what's in it or when to expect it. Order it find out I guess, then send in your
rebate and get your money back. Any guesses? A Mystery box for $4 shipping cost is intriguing enough for me to try it. I have mine on order, anyone else?
posted by Dome-O-Rama at 5:29 PM PST - 41 comments
The Windshield Killer: Chante Mallard's Timeline of Shame details what this woman did on the evening leading up to her high speed hit and attempted run when she was on drugs, had been drinking and hit a 37 year old homeless man named
Gregory Biggs on the highway. After he lodged in her windshield, she tried to pull him out but couldn't. Instead she drove home, parked the car in the garage and let him bleed to death over the next two hours.
Why didn't she call the police or a doctor? She was too scared (read that, too wasted). Instead she had her boyfriend and cousin come and dump the body in a nearby park.
Today she was found guilty in 50 minutes by the jury.posted by fenriq at 4:45 PM PST - 47 comments
I am STUNNED by this story, highlighting recent comments by a former Japanese cabinet member. In a discussion about the declining number of children in Japan, Seiichi Ota of the Liberal Democratic Party said that
gang-rape is a sign of virility, and that its perpetrators are "close to normal."
posted by hammurderer at 4:22 PM PST - 88 comments
Would you prefer this to being patted down? A scanner the government is testing for airport screening reveals much more than meets the eye to be comfortable for most passengers.
The agency hopes to modify the machines with an electronic fig leaf - programming that fuzzes out sensitive body parts or distorts the body so it does not appear so, well, graphic.
posted by orange swan at 12:29 PM PST - 38 comments
Back when beer was good. "The stubby beer bottle was used by the Canadian breweries between 1961 and 1986, replacing the old long neck beer bottle. The stubby was a very sturdy bottle and could be refilled numerous times.
In 1983 Carling O'Keefe Breweries began bottling Miller in a US style private mould bottle and soon after the other breweries also switched over to their own private mould bottles. Most of these bottles were then discontinued after a few years because of the cost and replaced with a common long neck beer bottle, but the stubby was abandoned."
posted by monkeymike at 11:08 AM PST - 41 comments
Want to serve your country, but you're not exactly up for being a marine? If you know an instrument well, then not to worry...join "The President's Own", the official USMC band! Unlike other USMC bands that are put together from Marine Corps regulars, musicians in the President's Own are enlisted specifically for playing in the band (MOS 9811).
You have all the rank, privileges, pay, and snappy uniforms as a Staff Sergeant upon entry, and you can even work yourself up to
colonel! You get all the benefits, like seeing the world and free haircuts, provided you meet height and weight requirements, and can meet certain physical criteria (try marching for 10 hours a day)....and NO BOOT CAMP...that's right...they're the only unit in the Armed Forces that doesn't require any military training before joining. And of course, one the coolest things about the Marine Corps band, is that you follow in the footsteps of
John Philip Sousa, who enlisted when he was friggin 13.
posted by taumeson at 8:20 AM PST - 19 comments
In 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... 1... 1... 1... "In this footage obtained exclusively by The Memory Hole, watch as the President of the United States sits and does nothing after learning that his country is under attack." Andrew Card whispers about plane #2, POTUS remains engrossed in book. (Warning: Quicktime, little kids reading slowly in unison for five long minutes.)
posted by emelenjr at 4:49 AM PST - 144 comments
The Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. "I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth,--you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead."
Black Elk speaks.
posted by fold_and_mutilate at 3:50 AM PST - 8 comments
June 25
The Albuquerque Bosque is on fire. Bosque is spanish for woods that grow along a river bank and these woods are within feet of homes of Albuquerque,
New Mexico residents. The bosque is along the Rio Grande river that runs through
the state's largest city and includes a
nature
center and towering cottonwood trees that are over 100's of years old. Yesterday
and tonight over 1000 acres are going up like a match. The Rio Grande bosque is
a state treasure (with a
national
wild refuge ). We now have
seven
fires in New Mexico. Albuquerque is losing a natural treasure tonight... very sad to hear this may be arson.
posted by jabo at 10:46 PM PST - 13 comments
Google Toolbar 2.0 I can't live without my Google toolbar for IE on the PC (
Safari's built-in Google-search, while less functional, takes care of me on the Mac). This new version of the Google toolbar features popup blocking, autofill, and a "blog this" button. What other browser toolbars/gizmos make life easier for Joe Websurfer?
posted by jdroth at 8:45 PM PST - 32 comments
Nuke components found in Baghdad back yard. U.S. officials say it is no smoking gun but investigators point out that there is no way they would ever have found these components buried in a barrel in a back yard under a rose garden for 12 years unless someone such as this Iraqi scientist came forward.
posted by Ron at 8:33 PM PST - 44 comments
Spent my lunch hour today in the company of
Tate Liverpool and more particularly
the Janet Cardiff installation Forty Part Motet: "Using (a) piece of secular music as a starting point and working with four male voices (bass, baritone, alto and tenor) and child sopranos, Cardiff has replaced each voice with an audio speaker. The speakers are set at an average head height and spaced in such a way that viewers can listen to different voices and experience different combinations and harmonies as they progress through the work." It's an example of art as experience, the viewer (or in this case listener's) perception of the work as important as the thing itself. [more]
posted by feelinglistless at 3:06 PM PST - 6 comments
German propaganda. "
Who is Adolf Hitler? The man from the people, for the people! The German front soldier who risked his life in 48 battles for Germany!
What does Adolf Hitler want? Freedom and food for every decent working German! The gallows for profiteers, black marketeers and exploiters, regardless of religious faith or race!
Why is Adolf Hitler not allowed to speak? Because he is ruthless in uncovering the rulers of the German economy, the international bank Jews their lackeys, the Democrats, Marxists, Jesuits and Free Masons! Because he wants to free the workers from the domination of race! Working Germans! Demand the lifting of the illegal ban on his speaking!"
posted by the fire you left me at 1:57 PM PST - 24 comments
Railway hotels. To go with
yesterday's post, today I bring you the hotel's that were built alongside the railway.
Some of the gradients were so acute that when the train ascended or descended, the table settings and food flew in all directions. The weight of the cars added to the problem, as they were too much for the locomotives of the day, and the cars had to be left at the beginning of the railway's path up the mountain passes. Obviously passengers needed to be fed so a solution had to be found as soon as possible. Have you been to any of these hotels, and if so, what was your impression? Do you have any favorite hotels?
posted by ashbury at 11:03 AM PST - 7 comments
Sheer Nuttiness... According to the Washington Post, the RIAA is following up on the
successful suit to force Verizon to identify four file traders, with a series of mass-lawsuits targeting potentially hundreds of file traders. With 57 million active file traders in the P2P networks alone, this is the beginning of an ugly new future.
posted by jonson at 10:50 AM PST - 68 comments
Saranda's Story. 'My name is Saranda and I am 13 years old. I moved to Liverpool from Kosovo three years ago ... '
posted by plep at 10:47 AM PST - 5 comments
Dancing dog, schmancing dog.
Walking dogs is where it's at (you'll see).
A dog tale deserving of a 'standing' ovation. I still say, dogs rule! [video link under the last image on the left]posted by Witty at 9:38 AM PST - 11 comments
It's Summer Camp Time! Looking at summer camps to send your
brats beloved children to for a week personal sanity at home? Look no further! Here it is!
Students will discover the deception of evolution, the importance of purity and morals in a free society, and the pagan connection to the radical environmental movement. Your teen will learn the importance of prayer and action. Most importantly, students will learn that in order to restore America, we must return America to Christ.
Now get out of here and go sign your little tykes up today! It's the patriotic and Christian thing to do. And don't forget the camp needs volunteers.
posted by nofundy at 7:40 AM PST - 54 comments
The tiny
Picture Book Of Foods
is an invaluable resource for true foodies everywhere.
Learn where many of your favorite foods really come from. There are also growing secrets, educational cross-sections, and recipe tips. And pancakes.
posted by iconomy at 7:39 AM PST - 9 comments
Wallace Cartwright, a lobster fisherman from Cape Breton Island, describes his recent
encounter with a
sea serpent:
"It had a head on it like a sea turtle, and it had a body like a snake...about as big around as a five-gallon bucket." Perhaps
Nessie has relatives abroad? The more likely explanation, however, is that Wallace had a
rare glimpse of one of these strange
creatures of the deep.
posted by debralee at 4:54 AM PST - 15 comments
Getting The Hell Out Of Africa: An excellent article by
R.W. Johnson describes the forces now driving out many African whites and quietly despairs. Post-colonial blues are sad and riddled with guilt and lost hopes. How far does collective guilt impinge on the individual? What if there is no guilt at all? What is the white man and woman's place in 21st Century Africa? I wonder whether it isn't still too early to think clearly about the many delicate issues involved. But then an all-black Africa wouldn't be Africa. Would it?
posted by MiguelCardoso at 1:27 AM PST - 18 comments
June 24
Sesame Seventies is an informational website about the three disco-related Muppets/Sesame Street records released in the 1970s. It makes for a good argument in favor of file-sharing, it reveals some of the stranger children's music of the past twenty or so years, and it's cute. (warning, some flash)
posted by pxe2000 at 11:41 PM PST - 19 comments
"Taryn Simon: The Innocents" Is an
exhibition at MOMA's P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center, of large color photographs of innocent men jailed for crimes they did not commit, exonerated by DNA evidence. For most of the photographs Ms. Simon posed each man at the scene of the arrest, the scene of the crime, the scene of misidentification or the scene of the alibi.
posted by jdaura at 5:56 PM PST - 6 comments
Katinka Matson's scanned flower art : technology lets the flowers speak. "...imagine a painter who could, like Vermeer, capture the quality of light that a camera can, but with the color of paints. That is what a scanner gives you.... In her flowers one can see every microscopic dew drop, leaf vein, and particle of pollen—in satisfying rich pigmented color....." (scroll down for images)
posted by troutfishing at 1:31 PM PST - 16 comments
Enslaved by free trade. The founding myth of the dominant nations is that they achieved their industrial and technological superiority through free trade. Nations that are poor today are told that if they want to follow our path to riches they must open their economies to foreign competition. They are being conned.
posted by badstone at 12:59 PM PST - 31 comments
So you’ve just received a junk email encouraging you to visit a website for some irresistible pornography or to consolidate your debts! Well, it’s time to oblige the people who fill your mailbox with spam. Let FriedSPAM visit their sites for you -- about a million times!
After all, you are only doing what the spammers are asking you to do. (via Pop Culture Junk Mail)posted by gottabefunky at 12:42 PM PST - 27 comments
Blog Parody Ben and Mena.
We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute.
Adam Curry.
Celeblogging. I used to be a MTV VJ, you know, big hair, that whole thing? Yeah, I was cool. MTV sucks now though. I am cool. I am Beautiful People.
Cory Doctorow.
y0 toTaL 0wnz0red. y0 LiKeZ kRaD!!1!!1! DRM is EVIL! Magic Sci-Fi Future Net-Inspired Utopia Whuffie Waffle dust. Post-death, post-work, net-in-your-head future. BounceBounce. BoingBoing. SmoingeSmoinge.posted by nyxxxx at 12:34 PM PST - 32 comments
Mitch Kapor reckons that by 2029 no computer - or "machine intelligence" - will have passed the Turing Test.
If he's right, the EFF wins $20,000 on a bet.
In the well designed and conceptualised
Long Bets website , other participants in the Predictions game:
Dave Winer,
Esther Dyson,
Vint Cerf and
Ted Danson!
All predictions
here; All bets
here
- discussions so far
here.
Any Mefites willing to stake their rep on cherished beliefs? What do you want to publicly predict will - or will not - happen, and by when?
posted by dash_slot- at 12:02 PM PST - 17 comments
You're the one that I want! Okay, I've seen trained dogs before, but this is ridiculous. A highly choreographed routine between the trainer and perhaps the world's furriest John Travolta impersonator (warning WMV link).
posted by jonson at 9:58 AM PST - 23 comments
Girls dress up, boys don't. Boys need to help girls cross the street. Girls work, boys play. Subtle gender messages (and really silly hairstyles) as observed by Monsieur Jean after collecting images from different countries of
children on street signs for his salon.
posted by iconomy at 7:11 AM PST - 18 comments
June 23
After 'The Bell Jar,' Life Went On. Sylvia Plath immortalized the guest editor program at Mademoiselle Magazine in her famed book, "The Bell Jar." A photo of the 20 young guest editors was taken back in 1953, and they were all lined up in a star -- with Plath, unsurprisingly, at the top. Plath killed herself in 1971, but the other women in her program reunited recently, to discuss their experiences, how they've changed, and their famous classmate. A fascinating read for anyone who's read "The Bell Jar." (NY Times reg required)
posted by GaelFC at 5:48 PM PST - 24 comments
The Children's Internet Protection Act is hunky dory,
according to the Supreme Court. This means that public libraries are required by law to have web filters on public terminals.
While it's great that children will now be forever protected from the evils on online pornography, the drawback is that most filters are so unreliable that just me mentioning the word "sex" in this post could get Metafilter blocked by a web filter.
posted by zedzebedia at 1:45 PM PST - 39 comments
Whichbook: a neat little flash app that permits you to select on a sliding scale up to four different features of a novel and then recommends a list of prospective reading to you. (Plain-text available
here). (via
sixdifferentways).
posted by Ufez Jones at 10:56 AM PST - 21 comments
As
Penis enlarger with new credit line will clean your septic system *--a recent piece of spam which I received--puts it:
OH MY GOD. No, really - this is one of the coolest websites of ALL TIME. You know I love you lots for sending me this url, and I am sworn to secrecy. Who the hell is this guy? And how did you find the site?
I'm going to look at every single page and download every single one of these mp3s. Before you post this to mf, that is ;) - iconomy
Ladies, Gentlemen, Neuters and quonsar, I give you ...
Johnny Spencer's 'vanity site' directed towards fans of Black popular music c1940's to 1970's. Music from both Jamaica and America!You have scans of various 45s, Johnny's beautiful dust jacket artwork, his interesting system of nomenclature defining Jamaican popular music, detailed notation and...
music!!(caveat & details within)posted by y2karl at 10:55 AM PST - 25 comments
Recalls for Dummies When, back on the 12th, scarabic posted a FPP on the Gray Davis recall, as a right coaster I couldn't work up any enthusiasm to follow the eight different links. It just wasn't my dance.
But the Sacramento Bee took the transcript of their editorial board's internal discussion of the issue, expanded and cleaned it up, then posted it on-line. One stop shopping, with the minimum of tendentiousness allowable by law. Now I've got a much better understanding of what's at stake, including why it could be a blessing in disguise for the Democrats.
posted by mojohand at 8:56 AM PST - 12 comments
A split decision from SCOTUS on Affirmative Action -- in cases specifically involving the University of Michigan, the court rules that the law school's AA standard is legal while the undergraduate standard is not. The University president is spinning this as a full out victory because the court has now "given a roadmap" for how Affirmative Action programs can be designed for higher education nationwide. While
polls show that Americans want diversity in education but are unsure about Affirmative Action, it doesn't look like it's going away any time soon. And the fundamental question remains: when it comes to education, is being a racial minority four times more important than having held a position of national leadership? Twenty times more important than writing an outstanding admissions essay?
posted by Dreama at 8:12 AM PST - 70 comments
The Godless Celebrity: As a list, it seems no better or worse than the God-fearing crowd. But the world needs atheists, if only for keeping - or trying to keep - the believers from ripping each other's heads off in the name of the various exclusivist true faiths. As Woody Allen said, it's scary that there are so many groups who are convinced they have a direct line to God. I wonder how many religious people respect and believe in the usefulness, political and intellectual, of the atheist. [
Via Bifurcated Rivets]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 7:09 AM PST - 173 comments
why americans will believe almost anything. keys to effective spin control / public relations : "dehumanize the attacked party by labeling and name calling... speak in glittering generalities using emotionally positive words... when covering something up, don't use plain English; stall for time; distract... get endorsements from celebrities, churches, sports figures, street people - anyone who has no expertise in the subject at hand the 'plain folks' ruse: us billionaires are just like you... when minimizing outrage, don't say anything memorable... when minimizing outrage, point out the benefits of what just happened... when minimizing outrage, avoid moral issues."
posted by crunchland at 6:54 AM PST - 43 comments
The Incas had binary! Archaeologists have long known that
khipu strings were used by the incas to store arithmetic records. Now, it's believed that they used a 7-bit binary code to store all kinds of "written" information. Well? Who's going to be the first to translate Harry Potter onto a khipu string?
posted by unreason at 6:40 AM PST - 8 comments
June 22
Theme Park Accidents "Four-year-old Brandon Zucker was injured, and ultimately left with brain damage, when he flew out of the ride vehicle and was pinned beneath it. A state investigation blamed Disneyland personnel for loading the Zuckers into the vehicle incorrectly, and cites additional ride design flaws. As a result, Roger Rabbit became the first attraction ordered closed for repairs under California's new theme park regulation law."posted by schlaager at 10:19 PM PST - 14 comments
Iraq Now: 20 Questions An attempt to answer the many questions about the Iraq war--how many troops are now there? Shia "revolt?" How many civilians killed? What is happening to the Kurds? etc etc
posted by Postroad at 8:28 AM PST - 9 comments
Become an eCaptain! "As an eCaptain, you'll create your personal ePrecinct: a list of online friends, family members, neighbors..."
can I be a general or a dictator?... And can I be cruel and despotic (Just a little bit)? Please? posted by troutfishing at 7:35 AM PST - 9 comments
June 21
Sure,
Scarlett O'Hara Barbie is lovely, and yeah,
Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz Barbie is cute, but for my money, it's hard to beat
Marge Simpson Barbie,
Medusa Barbie, or
Dominatrix Barbie. The full collection, located
here, clearly owes a debt to
Todd Haynes, and the
Barbie Liberation Army, but is still worth a chuckle.
posted by jonson at 1:01 PM PST - 7 comments
June 20
Savant for a Day! NYTimes journalist Lawrence Osbourne becomes a guinea pig for a University of Sydney's professor's mind-enhancing device based on the theories of autistic "Rainman" cognition with interesting results.
posted by skallas at 4:17 PM PST - 27 comments
Robert Meeropol, the younger son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, writes about his parents. I'm suprised nobody else posted about this yesterday--June 19th was the
50th anniversary of their execution for espionage.
The executions at Sing Sing on June 19, 1953, ended a sensational Cold War case that still symbolizes the years when McCarthyism held sway and the government's word was accepted more readily than today. It was the first execution of civilians for espionage in U.S. history and it reverberated into the issues of dissent, anti-Semitism and capital punishment.
Pete Seeger and others comment here; the Guardian
here. The
Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Trial (which features representations of the couple by Picasso, among others) notes that:
In August of 1993, members of the American Bar Association Section of Litigation re-enacted the 1951 trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. A moot trial was conducted with expertise and meticulous concern for accuracy. The unanimous verdict of the twelve jurors was "Not Guilty." This "trial" and its dramatic outcome was widely reported by the media - for one day only.posted by jokeefe at 4:04 PM PST - 20 comments
Whiteness Studies Liberals are going the extra mile to validate economic insanity by Conservatives. Do some people have an economic advantage? Do majorities have something in common that minorities don't share? I went to Japan this year, and sure, being a minority sucks. Does that mean that there is whiteness or blackness or asianness, or the new and exciting hispanicness? No.
There's no such thing. Stop the madness: Race and Gender are just more games for people who need hobbies. Insanity inside.
posted by ewkpates at 5:14 AM PST - 83 comments
June 19
Ever since I became a TiVo addict, I've found myself wanting to use its features in real life, wishing I could rewind & replay moments of random comedy & chaos, usually involving my pugs. Soon, thanks the good folks at Deja View, I will be able to, with the help of a
head mounted micro video camera unit that is always on, recording a 30 second buffer of real time, and up to four hours of manually recordable space for once you activate the record button. The scourge of ephemera will be wiped out in our lifetime.
posted by jonson at 10:39 PM PST - 13 comments
Monetary Policy in a Zero-Interest-Rate Economy [pdf] This report written by the
Dallas Fed is amazing. Amongst other things, it outlines a plan to
tax your savings as a way to continue to stimulate consumption should
rates fall to zero. While opinions of
the 'fed range from worship to outrage, their actions raise some serious questions. Why does this
unelected group wield so much power? At what point are their actions (taxing savings) a violation of our property rights? If our economy is built on capitalism, why can we not be capitalists and embrace the opportunity presented by both boom and bust? At what point are we a
command economy?
posted by H. Roark at 8:58 PM PST - 17 comments
US Olympic track and field athelete Gabe Jennings set out for Brazil from Arizona in order to learn the martial art of
Capoeira to train for the 2004 Olympics. Riding on a ten speed bike older than himself through Central and South America, Jennings was robbed nine times, got hit by a truck, was attacked by monkeys, and contracted hepatitis from eating off of the streets. Read
this journal of his travels and marvel at the 3600 mile trip taken by a man who hadn't ridden more than 50 miles previously.
posted by zsazsa at 8:00 PM PST - 4 comments
“Six men can carry you or 12 men can judge you. You decide!” "...Fugitive cosmetics heir Andrew Luster returned to California from Mexico Thursday to begin serving a 124-year prison sentence for raping three women. His return came more than five months after he fled the United States during trial." His capture involved one of the United State's most respected bounty hunters, Duane "Dog" Chapman. This is his website, this is his story. This is also, unfortunately, his mullet.
posted by jdaura at 6:22 PM PST - 43 comments
The First Casualty. The New Republic is one of the few left-leaning political journals who supported the war on Iraq. Now it seems like they've come to their senses and have written a very exhaustive story on how exactly Team Bush manipulated evidence to support the war on Iraq: "Rather, interviews with current and former intelligence officials and other experts reveal that the Bush administration culled from U.S. intelligence those assessments that supported its position and omitted those that did not. The administration ignored, and even suppressed, disagreement within the intelligence agencies and pressured the CIA to reaffirm its preferred version of the Iraqi threat. Similarly, it stonewalled, and sought to discredit, international weapons inspectors when their findings threatened to undermine the case for war."
posted by owillis at 5:34 PM PST - 11 comments
Do we need nature? What are the difficult choices that need to be made in politics, economics, society and public policy? And who is right…? Those whose actions (or inactions) seek to increase man's control over nature, or those who seek to reduce man's control? Those who seek to bypass nature, or those who hope to work with it? Those who put a higher value on human development, or those who value the preservation, even the reconstitution of nature?Wanna answer and win US$20,000? Then enter the
Shell Economist international writing competition to encourage future thinking! (warning: bad web design ahead).
I just wonder when we were separated from nature so that we can even think of living without it... oh my! those flat earth economists are unnerving!
posted by samelborp at 11:31 AM PST - 21 comments
More environmental data goes down the memory hole... Another EPA report gets "edited" by the White House to minimize warnings about climate change and the contributing factors of industrial and automotive emissions. Data from a 2001 report on climate by the National Research Council commissioned
by by White House is omitted in favor of research data funded by the American Petroleum Institute. Behold the best government money can buy...
posted by crookdimwit at 10:53 AM PST - 20 comments
Michiko Kukatani goes whacky! (NYT Reg Required) Maybe all the craziness at the NYT is taking its toll, but everyone's favorite high-brow book bully reviews Candace Bushnell's (Sex and The City chick's) new book as a letter from...Elle Woods?!
posted by adrober at 10:38 AM PST - 13 comments
Yad Vashem: Online Exhibitions. 'Yad Vashem's task is to perpetuate the legacy of the Holocaust to future generations so that the world never forgets the horrors and cruelty of the Holocaust. Its principal missions are commemoration and documentation of the events of the Holocaust, collection, examination, and publication of testimonies to the Holocaust, the collection and memorialization of the names of Holocaust victims, and research and education.'
No Child's Play;
Private Tolkatchev;
Photos from the
Warsaw Ghetto; and much more.
posted by plep at 9:53 AM PST - 7 comments
For the Lefties out there (or devious righties) -
MoveOn the
left wing PAC group with a LARGE financial endowment is looking at sharing their love with a Democratic candidate but can't quite decide which one. Their solution, let the people decide!
Register now and vote Tuesday for who you think should get the big cash prize! [More Inside]
posted by Pollomacho at 8:51 AM PST - 45 comments
He's the owner of a formerly Nashville/Country-themed cable network attempting a
massive rebranding into "The First Network for Men" through a heavy schedule of wrestling, A-Team reruns, and original cartoons featuring Pamela Anderson as a stripper-slash-crimefighter.
He's an outspoken though provocative filmmaker who seeks to bring awareness to the trials and tribulations of the African-American experience.
They sue each other! Guest starring Johnnie Cochran, weekdays at 7 on whatever the network ends up being named.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 7:31 AM PST - 36 comments
Is he the world's
unluckiest man or the
luckiest? Either way, Croatia's Frane Selak, who had already
gained attention for escaping death
seven times, has just hit the jackpot with his first lottery ticket in forty years. How can we normal mortals compete?
posted by rory at 7:00 AM PST - 13 comments
Greek Temple Architecture: They were houses--houses for cult statues, storehouses of treasures given to the gods--they were not churches. Worship consisted, by and large, of
sacrificial ritual--
animal sacrifice:
killing animals and eating them, for the most part--and, hence, it was done out of doors.
The Internet Ancient History Sourcebook's Accounts of Hellenic Religious Beliefs and
Accounts of Personal Religion give additional flavor and context. Greek religious architecture evolved from
wooden structures and was tradition bound--they built in stone as they had in wood according to variations on a traditional canon called the
orders, first and foremost, the
Doric Order , the
Ionic Order and the
Corinthian Order. Here are some
restorations. I love restorations, on paper or models rather than at the actual sites.
The first in a series.posted by y2karl at 5:05 AM PST - 15 comments
June 18
I'm getting better at volleyball, too. Parents looking to add a little excitement to their kids summer routine have a new option in Florida and Arizona (and soon in Texas)... Nudist Summer Camp for Teens. According to this NYT article kids at the nudist camp really don't see what the big deal is. The camps are organized by the
American Association for Nude Recreation (Link NSFCWP) who seem to be on the ball in terms of safety and providing a good environment for the kids. The article also introduces a new TLA; COG - for Creepy Old Guy. If you're interested in sending the youngsters to a camp they'll remember for years to come -
this page sheds light on what they can expect.
So, would you send your kids to the camp? Have you been to a nudist resort yourself? How's your vollyball game?
posted by DragonBoy at 9:03 PM PST - 66 comments
Friendly fire pilots cleared. Even though a joint US-Canada investigation found that there was sufficient evidence to proceed with court-martial proceedings against the two pilots, no military charges will be filed.
Now, while charging these two pilots will not bring the dead Canadians back, I don't think that it's too much to ask that these two hotshots be required to face the consequences of their
lethal actions.
Frankly, a court-martial is not too much to expect, in the face of the fact that these officers disobeyed a direct order.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 7:22 PM PST - 16 comments
Chocolate, Blue 'Funky Fries' pulled from shelves The notorious
freedom french fries with the flavors of chocolate, cinnamon and blue-colored variety have been pulled by Heinz due to poor sales and overall revulsion by consumers around the nation (especially
here at MeFi). Can you think of other such horrific failed foods that were disgusting from the start?
posted by Down10 at 6:48 PM PST - 71 comments
John Kerry joins the
Forest Service:
In an effort to more effectively manage the increase in the volume of e-mails received by my office and to respond as quickly and thoroughly as possible, I am using a new web based system that you can access through my web site at kerry.senate.gov. The e-mail address john_kerry@kerry.senate.gov will no longer be active. Thus we see that the economies of power, access, and influence quickly respond to
unmanageable distortions caused by new technology. Will the new equilibrium be any different from the old, or is technology ultimately irrelevant?
posted by alms at 4:15 PM PST - 15 comments
The Right to Party. "This time, for real, I’m calling for the establishment of a Party Party, or, at the very least, for a Party Party attitude. I’m issuing a call to arms for those of us always in need of, as the great Jeff Spicoli once said, tasty waves and a cool buzz." Hedonists and libertines, unite!
posted by homunculus at 12:57 PM PST - 15 comments
Investigative reporter,
Greg Palast is reporting on
Alternet about now ex-congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney.
“McKinney implied that the [Bush] Administration knew in advance about September 11 and deliberately held back the information,” said the media. The New York Times said, “Ms. McKinney suggest[ed] that President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks but did nothing so his supporters could make money in a war.” She was beaten to death, politically, by the fabricated quote in the 2002 Democratic Primary.
But Greg Palast did some investigation, and despite his best efforts, can find no evidence that she said these things. The closest he comes up with is a quote from her saying, “George Bush had no prior knowledge of the plan to attack the World Trade Center on September 11.”
Of course Cynthia McKinney kicked up a bit of a fuss about a few things embarassing to the Bush administration.
Read on for the dirt and history.posted by Blue Stone at 12:33 PM PST - 32 comments
Remembering Laci (sans taste) This link leads to a tribute song, in quicktime, to the late Laci Petersen. Sorry to bring things down to a tabloid-filter level, but the sheer hilarity of this song, as well as
this leads me to wonder whether these were done (tastelessly) in earnest, or (tastelessly) in mockery.
posted by ghastlyfop at 11:54 AM PST - 22 comments
There's a new elite force protecting the wilderness in Canada; a duo whose love of the bush has become more than a vocation, it has become a calling. This is the story of some rangers who, unlike Mounties, aren't interested in getting their man. Meet the
Lesbian Park Rangers.
posted by debralee at 11:19 AM PST - 7 comments
Gay Marriage - Go Canada Canada is only the third country, after Netherlands and Belgium, to legalize gay marriages. This surprised me because I figured we were playing catch up to most 1st world countries. Not so surprisingly my home province of
Alberta is promising to block same sex marriages and will refuse to issue licenses to same sex couples. Which must be putting smiles on faces at
Tourism BC. Interestingly this may cause big waves in the USA as they have traditionally recognized Canadian marriages as valid under US law and Canada has no
residency requirement for marriage licenses. How surprised would you be if your local authority followed Canada’s example?
posted by Mitheral at 10:45 AM PST - 39 comments
When humans faced extinction: A new study suggests that around 70,000 years ago there may have been as few as 2,000 individual humans, meaning that we could have been wiped out before we even got started. Related article
here.
posted by 40 Watt at 8:07 AM PST - 34 comments
On-line recordings of lectures delivered at Columbia University's architecture school. Speakers included Alvaro Siza, Bernard Tschumi, Marshall Berman, and a number of other important architects and urbanists.
[A bit more inside.]posted by slipperywhenwet at 8:04 AM PST - 3 comments
Roots Music Canada (warnings: music, mucho flash) gives you access to independent Canadian folk/country/world/etc music for free. It's fairly new, so there's not a ton of stuff there yet, but Canadians are free to submit their music (it's run by the CBC). A good application of publicly-owned media, no?
(Eh, and for the more electronically-minded, there's also a New Music Canada.)posted by transient at 7:58 AM PST - 5 comments
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
Fifty years ago,
Dylan Thomas - one of the greatest poets of our time -
drank himself to death in New York's Hotel Chelsea at the age of 39.
Swansea, his Welsh hometown, will be commemorating his life all year, culminating in a
festival in the fall.
[more]posted by madamjujujive at 4:49 AM PST - 58 comments
June 17
Homemade ice cream, in 30 seconds. All you need is cream, sugar, eggs, flavorings (strawberries, vanilla, kittens, whatever your preference) and access to liquid nitrogen. And there the plan goes south, at least for me. Where can the average joe score this crucial timesaving ingredient? Seriously. Also, I want to try the cool "shatter a flower" trick that they reference.
posted by jonson at 11:42 PM PST - 23 comments
DirecTV Suing Consumers Directly Everyone identified in those records was sent a letter by DirecTV promising that the company would forgo litigation if they would surrender their illegal access devices, promise never to buy them again, and pay damages of approximately $3,500, Mercer said. Many people complied.
Article here.
So far, 8,700 consumers who balked have been hit with federal civil suits alleging violations of the Federal Communications Act and federal wiretap statutes. That includes approximately 5,000 lawsuits filed nationwide in May, Mercer said. Newspapers in Richmond, Va., and Allentown, Pa., recently have reported the filing of numerous federal signal theft suits in those states by DirecTV.
posted by Niahmas at 7:22 PM PST - 50 comments
Cool Food For The Hot Summer Ahead: Bruce Cole's
Sauté Wednesday has some enticing summery tips, as well as a superb collection of
links to yummy articles on food and drink. Here in Portugal, we know Summer has begun when the first fresh
sardines, start arriving, fat and silvery from the deep blue sea and straight onto the open-air barbecue, to be scoffed with buttery, yellow potatoes and great big salads overflowing with grilled green peppers, cucumbers, the first ripe tomatoes, sweet new onions and crunchy lettuce leaves.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 5:53 PM PST - 9 comments
Usability Bazaar sounds like a crazy idea: getting together a group of people that will create usability guidelines for open source projects. Do you think that can work? Do OSS projects actually have usability problems? And can this actually work? Generally, usability people don't seem to get involved in open source. Why? (via webword.com)
posted by Adman at 2:59 PM PST - 24 comments
Helen Keller: A Living Lie? A fascinating New Yorker piece by Cynthia Ozick that explores Helen Keller's writing career and all the questions of authenticity it raises. She was charged with being a "fraud, a puppet, a plagiarist" and she was defended by the likes of Mark Twain and Alexander Graham Bell. Ozick ultimately asks the question: "Do we know only what we see, or do we see what we somehow already know?"
posted by adrober at 1:58 PM PST - 14 comments
Freedom from annoyance vs. freedom of religious expression A municipal bylaw restricting when Jehovah's Witnesses can go door-to-door protects residents' right to privacy and does not violate the group's right to religious freedom and expression, a lawyer argued Tuesday.
The City of Blainville, which believes many of its residents don't want Jehovah's Witnesses at their door on weekends and in the evening, is appealing a lower-court ruling that declared its bylaw unconstitutional. But the three justices cautioned Mr. Paquin that it's dangerous to distinguish between someone's right to religious freedom and their right to express their religious beliefs.
posted by orange swan at 1:41 PM PST - 56 comments
An Iranian student's account of the
recent protests in Tehran and the retaliation by pro-government vigilantes with an attack on a dormitory:
"They got shields from the police and entered the dormitory. There were about 600-700 of them — armed with swords, sticks, daggers, iron chains, and tear-gas guns — to 700 of us students, mostly in pajamas. We had run out of stones to resist any longer…". For more first hand accounts see
Buzzmachine's list of Iranian bloggers.
posted by Quinn at 10:48 AM PST - 46 comments
Avocado Memories. It's more than a photo collection and group of essays about his parents' failures with interior decoration; it's a nostalgic website brought about by Wes Clark's impulse to let his children know what it was like
growing up during a more innocent age.
posted by debralee at 10:15 AM PST - 9 comments
Hulking out. I don't know what is more overwhelming, the sheer number of products tied in with the new Hulk movie, or the amount of detail
kokogiak collected on the subject. I'm trying to remember another movie that had this variety of marketing tie ins (
Slim Jim? Shot glasses? Jello?)
posted by jonah at 9:24 AM PST - 48 comments
Bush Blasts 'Revisionist Historians' on Iraq President Bush countered those questioning his justification for the invasion of Iraq on Monday, dismissing "revisionist historians" and saying Washington acted to counter an imminent a persistent threat.
"Now there are some who would like to rewrite history; revisionist historians is what I like to call them," Bush said in a speech to New Jersey business leaders.
posted by onegoodmove at 12:01 AM PST - 94 comments
June 16
Ask not what the public domain can do for you... (...ask what you can do for the public domain.) The
Eldred vs. Ashcroft folks are circulating a petition proposing a federal law requiring $1 copyright renewal after 50 years, or the work hits the public domain. The name-rank-serial# form has an interesting question: List something you have created using the public domain. Some of the answers:
Audiotexts of Aesop's Fables,
annotation of Descartes' Discours,
Digital Historia Numorum: A Manual of Greek Numismatics,
choral sheet-music library,
Mercury Theatre on the Air,
a pop opera based on Cyrano,
NASA images jigsaw puzzle,
French proverbs from 1611,
blind audio tactile mapping system,
Alexandre Dumas père website,
Light and Matter physics text,
Voice of Hibakusha: Eyewitness accounts of Hiroshima,
Distributed RNA Secondary Structure Prediction,
least-squares fitting library,
collection of chess problem books,
Philately of the Princely States of India,
Oremus Hymnal,
Allen Parker slave narrative site,
Samuel Johnson's Ramblers,
18th-century Chester Co. PA tax liststranslation of Jose Zorrilla's Don Juan (1844) ,
Digital South-Asia Language Archive,
Vedic etexts,
Gary Indiana U.S. Steel Works Photograph Collection, et al.
The above list was so diverse...led me to wonder, what works have Mefites created using public domain materials?
posted by jengod at 11:53 PM PST - 20 comments
Red, White and Jew --an examination of 6 issues facing the American Jews of today and tomorrow, religious and non, from the holocaust as history to Israel fatigue to Jewish conservatives.
...We can finally be Jewish and American, but somewhere along the line nobody bothered to figure out entirely what that meant. So it falls to us, the next Jewish generation, to balance the scales. Will we be more Jewish, more American, or a fusion of the two? More importantly, how will we do it?posted by amberglow at 9:23 PM PST - 23 comments
The CBS News American Idol Power Hour. Viacom, owner of networks CBS and MTV among many others, is aggresively pushing lucrative
bribes offers for Private Jessica Lynch to get her on CBS News, including the possibility of her own video-hosting program on MTV and special editions of TRL. Corporate consolidation the way it is, are we in an era where synergy allows news-media-owning companies to offer not just material profit but flat-out media iconization in exchange for a good story? To put it another way: have we gone beyond using the news to promote entertainment owned by the same company to using entertainment as the currency to flat-out buy the news?
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 8:29 PM PST - 12 comments
European right of reply. The
Council of Europe is drafting a proposal,
"... that Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or 'blogs'), must offer a 'right of reply' to those who have been criticized by a person or organization." Considering that
someone will have to pay for the storage and bandwidth required to host rebuttals, this seem the very antithesis of "free" speech and could get quite expensive.
posted by cedar at 5:30 PM PST - 39 comments
LATimes.com Article Reports and Links to Alleged Cyber-Harassment (thru Yahoo News, no reg, but will evaporate soon)
The story begins: " In hindsight, John Henningham wishes he had never visited
http://www.johnhenningham.com ", complete with the direct link to the site in question. Later, the article has a link to another one of the numerous websites that Bill White has registered, using another person's name to accuse him of wrongdoing (he even uses the "Hi, I'm [name], and I'm a scumbag" format), but while mentioning a
response site set up by Henningham, the article does NOT include a link (but I do). Is this bad site management (automatically generating links) or bad editing (including the links) or just bad journalism?
[more]posted by wendell at 2:47 PM PST - 11 comments
Did you miss Paddy Dignam's wake? Ah well, there's still time to celebrate
Bloomsday -- if you're in Dublin, you can (among many other delights) take a stroll across the newly-opened
James Joyce Bridge. Or, if you have a spare $60,000, you could even buy your very own
Ulysses first edition. As for me, I'll be hoisting a crystal cup full of the foaming ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of deathless Leda. (And as for Paddy? -- Dead!
says Alf. He's no more dead than you are. -- Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow.)
posted by scody at 12:31 PM PST - 34 comments
The
criminalisation of
language?.
A judge rules that chanting "Paki" at a football match is a criminal offence. "Lord Justice Auld ruled...that the word 'Paki' was 'a slang expression which is racially offensive.'" Personally I come from a culture that finds it acceptable to say things like "I'm just going to the Paki shop, do you want anything?"[Pakistani owned corner shop] and "Anyone fancy a chinki?" [Chinese food.]
I've used the terms and I think racism is silly; now I'm a racist criminal I guess.
posted by Blue Stone at 9:25 AM PST - 179 comments
Electric 6 is the new rock sensation in Europe... Their first video, 'Danger' (High Voltage) was tastless but undeniably funny... But with
their new one, 'Gay bar', nobody will dare to say Rock music isn't political anymore...
After George Michael's
Shoot the dog video (which has been discussed here if memory serves me right), this one is just another way to admit that yes, political "leaders" do inspire artists...
posted by Sijeka at 8:42 AM PST - 30 comments
"A sniff of the
fumes from the local factory, it is said, is all it takes for the sap to rise. Young and old men alike have taken on a new lease of life: such is their sexual prowess that there is barely a vacant bed in the local maternity hospital and the midwife is run ragged as loyal husbands have turned into lotharios." Book your flight to
Ringaskiddy now before it goes all
Hollywood!
posted by debralee at 8:36 AM PST - 6 comments
Proximity Politics. One kind of
proximity politics refers to new-found adjacency resulting from globalization which forces new dilemmas before citizens. Another kind of
proximity politics refers to the coat-tail riding of aspiring politicians who try to trade on the fame, glory or popularity of others. Still another kind of
proximity politics are practiced in attack ads, in which politicans seek to attach their oppenents' names to negatives without explicit accusations, relying instead upon a series of words or short phrases without the grammatical glue which might permit proper parsing or analysis. And the final kind of proximity politics—probably the most positive—are those practiced by
WatchBlog, which calls paid to the inward-looking, self-reinforcing echo chambers of one-view political forums. Instead, the two main American parties and their myriad third-party siblings are posting to the same arena. It's the answer to the question, "How can people's minds be changed if they only seek out what they already agree with?" If the opposite camp is in the text column next door, maybe you can't help but to take a dose of what's turning out to be strong commentary largely free of carbon-copy rhetoric, cardboard cut-outs, and cookie-cutter opinions.
posted by Mo Nickels at 7:28 AM PST - 9 comments
How does a genius think? Forty-seven of Linus Pauling's research notebooks, spanning seven decades and topics from AIDS to zunyite, have been scanned, indexed, and posted by Oregon State University. The random musings and labroom jottings of a
Nobel laureate and one of the towering figures of science of the twentieth century just fascinate me, even if I can't follow most of the chemistry; in less high-minded moments, I can contemplate how bad his handwriting was.
posted by snarkout at 6:13 AM PST - 17 comments
June 15
Sandman READ poster Anyone passing through libraries will have seen the series of READ posters, starring any number of actors, sports stars, musicians, and other celebrities. Everyone from Alex Baldwin to WWF wresllers to Yoda have been so honored.
Now you can add a comic character to that list. Neil Gaiman's creation of Morpheus, the Sandman, is now available as a poster. The artwork is by P Craig Russell, who was the artist for an issue of Sandman.
posted by dragonmage at 9:56 PM PST - 20 comments
My Contemporaries Are Cooler Than Yours: Actually, it can become quite depressing to find out exactly who belongs to your generation. I mean, Howie Mandell, Bill Gates, Sandra Bernhard, Margot Hemingway, Kevin Costner and Joe Jackson? Give me a break. Which, thankfully,
WhoWhatWhen, an interactive timeline generator, does quite nicely. Perfect for paranoids who like beginning sentences with "Surely it's no coincidence that in that very same year..." [
Via LinkFilter.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 1:52 PM PST - 46 comments
Meet Gopal Godse, last surviving conspirator in the 1948 assassination of Mohandas Gandhi. Still proud of what he, his brother, and the other co-conspirators did, and still looking forward to "the day when India's Muslims convert to Hinduism."
Or die.
"He speaks almost gleefully about religious riots last year in the western state of Gujarat that killed about 1,000 people, most of them Muslims. 'If (Muslims) get the reaction like they did in Gujarat, they will get to know that Muslims are not supreme,' he said." The greatest tragedy of our age is that a civilized monster like him remains hopeful.
posted by wendell at 1:08 PM PST - 14 comments
Turning the tanks on the reporters The Observer's Phillip Knightley writes that
Iraq will go down as the war when journalists seemed to become a target. Predicted
here, discussed "in progress"
here.
The BBC, Al-Jazeera, and the US Committee to Protect Journalists thought it prudent to find out from the Pentagon what steps they could take to protect their correspondents if war came to Iraq... All three organisations concluded that the Pentagon was determined to deter western correspondents from reporting any war from the 'enemy' side; would view such journalism in Iraq as activity of 'military significance', and might well bomb the area. posted by Ignatius J. Reilly at 11:01 AM PST - 25 comments
konspire2b allows anyone to be their own broadcast channel, beaming out multimedia across a p2p network to the masses. Could this be the next leap for blogging?
posted by owillis at 8:14 AM PST - 13 comments
One fine morning in December 2001, Petr and his son took their bicycles and embarked on a photo tour of psychic Rotterdam. The tally? Six tree spirits, two invisible entities, one grinning skull, one 'evil square', one sinister game of basketball, and a UFO.
posted by Sonny Jim at 1:47 AM PST - 9 comments
NYCRoads.com is an exhaustive history of the expressways, parkways, and river crossings that shaped metro New York over the last century and a half.
posted by PrinceValium at 1:30 AM PST - 4 comments
June 14
With
the wee hubbub that's going on at the moment in our government, it might be nice to take a step back and look at what this means for us Internet users (and more specifically, bloggers). When I pondered this for a moment, my mind drifted to that
briefly bearded granola and silicon presidential hopeful of
times long forgotten. Well,
Al Gore may have
invented the Internet (or, as he put it, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet"), but it is
this man who has truly
embraced the medium.
The greatest difference between this man and the cowboy currently shootin' from the hip in the Oval Office isn't about
taxes. It's not about
health care. And, yes, I contend it's not even about
women's rights. The greatest difference between the
Son of Bush and
the Dean isn't about left or right or conservative or liberal. It's all about
the flow of information.
[More inside]posted by Hammerikaner at 1:31 PM PST - 9 comments
SFGate is running an article on an
internet assisted suicide that's worth reading.
Not because of the minutiae, or any implied morality/immorality regarding suicide, but simply because it's a well-researched, well-written story of the culture of those who are about to die.
posted by Jairus at 1:26 PM PST - 21 comments
Whether you like your news right or your news left, there are watchers watching those who report. Anyone have more examples of those who keep an eye on journalists? Does it change anyone's thinking when they discover that the story they read was, for example, written by Jayson Blair, or has the damage already been done?
posted by swerdloff at 1:11 PM PST - 4 comments
Joshka Fischer Said What? That The U.S. Needs Another Boston Tea Party? Hidden in the depths of this very interesting article by
Timothy Garton-Ash, on Europe's misplaced anti-Americanism, is a very interesting revelation from Germany's Green Party-carrying Foreign Minister. To what extent are relations between the pro-American and the anti-American Europe and the United States - the so-called "Old and New Europe" - based on misperceptions? Is Europe, like the Middle East and, well, the whole wide world, too complex for the current U.S. administration to understand? Is it really possible for American foreign to swerve round France and Germany?
[Fwiw, my two centimes is that it is.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 1:06 PM PST - 8 comments
Dangerous Road Signs. Okay, so, I'm posting a link to a photoshop contest: I'm lame, that's a long established fact. That said, some of these really did amuse me - take a gander if you're up for a laugh.
posted by jonson at 12:26 PM PST - 17 comments
The one-eyed demon. In 1999 Bhutan, one of the most isolated countries in the world (Bhutan seems to have been the model för Shangri-la in James Hilton's "Lost Horizon"), became the last country in the world to adopt television. The king of Bhutan wasn't much interested in gross national product, but in his own concept "gross national happiness" and he believed that TV would increase his nation's happiness. Since then, Bhutan has experienced a crime wave unlike anything the country has previously known.
This article tells the story and claims that TV breeds crime. But the questions raised by this story are wider than that: what is it that makes our Western TV-Coke-advertisement-culture totally irresistible? Why do people instantly feel they want it when they see it? Why hasn't any nation looked at the junk we have to offer, laughed at us and walked away?
posted by Termite at 12:06 PM PST - 32 comments
Women are sexually aroused by women regardless of which gender they have sex with. "Researchers measured the psychological and physiological sexual arousal in homosexual and heterosexual men and women as they watched erotic films. There were three types of erotic films: those featuring only men, those featuring only women and those featuring male and female couples. As with previous research, the researchers found that men responded consistent with their sexual orientations. In contrast, both homosexual and heterosexual women showed a bisexual pattern of psychological as well as genital arousal. That is, heterosexual women were just as sexually aroused by watching female stimuli as by watching male stimuli, even though they prefer having sex with men rather than women."
posted by NortonDC at 8:49 AM PST - 96 comments
What am I? Clearly the most pressing question facing the human race today.
Every individual human brain contains around 10^12 (1 trillion) neurons and 10^15 (1 quadrillion) synapses, capable of changing in milliseconds, and there are 6x10^9 (6 billion) people on this planet, all potentially capable of interacting and influencing one another. Last year alone 1.6x10^11 (160 billion) minutes of international telephone calls were made between people talking at a rate of 120 to 150 words per minute. A collection of articles at newscientist.com.
posted by mokey at 7:57 AM PST - 12 comments
"Twenty-two years ago, late in the evening one night in March of 1981, to be specific, my mother was killed in an auto accident on Foothill Boulevard in a town called Claremont." Talking Points Memo author Joshua Marshall, one of the best-known political webloggers, takes an
unexpected personal detour.
posted by rcade at 7:56 AM PST - 4 comments
Large-scale marijuana cultivation in National Parks and forests. "[Growers] are killing wildlife, diverting streams, introducing nonnative plants, creating fire and pollution hazards, and bringing the specter of violence. For the moment, we are failing both parts of our mission, and that is tragic."
This is not a new problem. "The reasons are obvious: the land is fertile, remote and free. There's no risk of forfeiture, plantations are difficult to trace, and growers have land agents outmanned, outspent and outgunned."
posted by letitrain at 12:49 AM PST - 18 comments
June 13
Is it me, or does
Mac Mentor sound like the name of a comic book super-villian? (Say it slow.)
posted by sudama at 9:40 PM PST - 5 comments
The RAPTOR Mark III - "The RAPTOR Mark III is the fastest and most versatile security vehicle in the world. It mounts a devastating choice of firepower as well as a comprehensive assortment of non-lethal weapons, all interchangeable and deployed through a retractable top."
You in the Hummer 2! Hold on a second...
via William Gibson's blogposted by GriffX at 2:39 PM PST - 24 comments
Microsoft to discontinue development of IE for the Mac... Surprisingly this apparently isn't being done because of the low market share for Macintosh, but rather as a side effect of the increasing integration (whether real or alleged) between IE and the Operating System, which on the Mac is closed, so MS can cease development as support for their claims of mandatory integration between browser & OS. I await the next step, mandatory integration between email & OS? IM? Media tools? Net access?
posted by jonson at 12:15 PM PST - 68 comments
Filthy secrets of medieval toilets: Featuring the Royal Water Closet of French King John the Fearless. "Lesser mortals of course had less sophisticated apparatus... Some were no more than holes built into the wall, others were primitive outhouses perched with wooden supports onto an upper story. A series of mediaeval illuminations at the exhibition shows that accidents in these contraptions were common." Mon dieu!
posted by eyebeam at 12:13 PM PST - 9 comments
Sperm Wars: Extreme sporting's next generation may well be Exo-biotic. What could be first manifestation in this new realm of sport? Taking into account such factors as: simplicity of contest design, ease of sample collection, lots of visible action, and abundant human male competitiveness, the most logical and economic choice would be a sperm competition.
Any volunteers? What do you think the next "extreme" sport will be?
posted by bedhead at 9:49 AM PST - 17 comments
Seeing The Matrix yesterday (and just before it, the preview for the third Terminator movie) reminded me of this old David Foster Wallace essay
"F/X Porn", in which he points out how Hollywood blockbusters have become the equivalent of your average "2 for $10.99!!" XXX rentals.
[Google cached version here.]posted by slipperywhenwet at 7:51 AM PST - 36 comments
Lego Astrobots Blog From Mars Rovers - The Planetary Society has teamed with NASA to "man" it's two Mars Exploration Rover spacecraft with Lego "Astrobots." The bots, Biff Starling and Sandy Moondust, are
blogging their adventure "to allow kids to vicariously experience life in space, from launch, through the six-month space cruise, to landing and roving on the Martian surface."
posted by tpl1212 at 7:30 AM PST - 4 comments
June 12
Paghat The Ratgirl (
google cache) is one of the more interesting people that I have encountered on the Internet. A frequent poster to the newsgroup rec.gardens, her
gardening site is an interesting mix of plant history and folklore, lovely images and a darn good place to get ideas on what to add to the yard next. She frequently posts to many other newsgroups as well and
a quick google search or
two turns up thousands of messages by paghat, her detractors and her fans. She even has a
gift shop.
posted by bargle at 9:19 PM PST - 7 comments
Abbie the Cat Abbie the Cat has a posse. One of the few cat-related, non-saccharine weblogs out there. I'm pretty my cat thinks many of these things.
posted by Spezzatura at 8:28 PM PST - 6 comments
Death in the snow - a body is found in the frozen North Dakota woods. The cops say the dead Japanese woman was looking for the $1m she saw buried in the film Fargo. But the story didn't end there.
An interesting read via
Follow Me Here.
posted by madamjujujive at 7:34 PM PST - 50 comments
Cranespotting (Geocities) ... is the compulsion, upon seeing a long crane boom reaching skyward in the distance, to drive over and see what's holding it up.
The crane capital of the world is Germany, where Demag, Gottwald, Krupp, Liebherr and others make some cranes with eye-opening numbers: more than 60 feet long, with 10 axles, and able to lift 1,000 tons.
Now sometimes cranes
tip over, touch power lines and so on; and there's a website for that too.
posted by kurumi at 5:44 PM PST - 7 comments
Packing it in Now remember, just because an idiot tells you it's night doesn't mean the sun has risen. But Ann Coulter has busted the New York media. Seems a David Packer is their go-to guy any time they want a man on the street. It turns out David Packer's a
real guy with apparently a lot of time on his hands.
Mickey Kaus asks the Next Question "...why the NYT would write about this semi-professional line-stander and quote machine as if he were a typical man on the street. You'd think he'd be notorious by now. ... "
They do have Nexis at the Times, don't they? [via KausFiles]
posted by mojohand at 1:09 PM PST - 20 comments
David Brinkley dead at 82. He was one third of the 'holy trinity' of network news in my youth, along with Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor. His career covered the White House from FDR to Bill Clinton. This Week With David Brinkley was one of my favorite things to watch on a Sunday. He'll be missed, and I reminisce on how much journalism, and not just on television, has
changed since I was a child.
posted by WolfDaddy at 11:47 AM PST - 8 comments
Drowning the government in a bathtub -
"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Thus spoke Grover Norquist, of
Americans for Tax Reform.
"The lunatics are now in charge of the asylum", quipped the conservative UK
Financial Times. Hardly, says
Paul Krugman. The strategy?: "Instead of challenging popular liberal programs directly, the Republicans are creating fiscal conditions that make those programs unsustainable." [lead post, Am. Prospect]. In other words, the
400 billion dollar deficit, coupled with the Bush tax cuts, is designed to shift the obligations of the Fed
onto the States and, later, to cause a fiscal train wreck after Bush is out of office.
posted by troutfishing at 10:59 AM PST - 58 comments
Fish Pr0n (Safe For Work.)
'Scientists at Fribourg university in Switzerland have discovered that sticklebacks ejaculate more sperm if first stimulated by a "soft porn" film showing flirting fish.' Further links (to the good stuff) enclosed. }++++>
posted by Blue Stone at 8:54 AM PST - 13 comments
From the better late than never dept: Now you can send instant messages between AIM/AOL and ICQ. AOL finally added
interactivity support for their two IM protocols. Best new feature...
IM with yourself
Once you have the latest ICQ beta software, you'll be able to IM with the AIM and/or AOL on your own computer!
posted by riffola at 8:26 AM PST - 27 comments
Blogger moxie.nu acuses another blogger of identity theft . The other blogger,
moxiepop.com, fires back,
saying she got harassed by moxie.nu's readers and that
she had never seen moxie.nu's site before. Another blogger
goes on the offensive and accuses moxiepop of imitating moxie.nu. Comments start flying on moxie.nu and are ultimately closed by the host. Some other blogs step in, supporting moxiepop (
1,
2,
3) and supporting moxie.nu (
1,
2,
3).
Tim Blair chimes in,
Andrea Harris has a few words,
Jim Treacher calls for some Moxie Boxing, and
Kevin Parrott adds Rockem Sockem Moxies. A delightful train wreck for all to see.
posted by jonah at 8:21 AM PST - 46 comments
Chicago Tribune's Top 50 Magazines (might require registration, sorry) Not sure if I agree with anyone in the top 50. I mean
People? Let's be serious; if you're going to put
People in a "Top 50 List" then
TV Guide should be right after
People.
What I do agree with is the list of "Mags Gone Bad:"
Newsweek - So unnewsworthy.
Playboy - Gone are the days of great journalism. Now it's like looking through a catalog written by crumb ass writers.
Premiere - Was it really ever
that good, aside from a David Foster Wallace article here and there?
Rolling Stone - Again, if it wasn't for the half-cocked rambling os Hunster S. Thompson this magazine would be total tripe.
Spin - See
Premiere but without the David Foster Wallace articles.
Vanity Fair - Maybe a nice cover or two, but not much else to celebrate.
posted by bivouac at 8:17 AM PST - 29 comments
Sometimes WIPO get it right... One of the latest UDRP decisions says that
Aberzombie.com is 'an obvious parody' and shouldn't be transferred to
Abercrombie and Fitch. What's most interesting here is that the Aberzombie site is trading on its similarity - selling 'Aberzombie' shirts amongst other things. That's usually enough for WIPO to snatch the domain straight back - but no:
Although "zombie" preceded by "aber" might call to mind the Complainants’ marks, especially in the context of the Respondent’s business of selling t-shirts, the Panel finds that the public would not confuse the Respondent for the Complainants, and thus Abercrombie and Aberzombie are not confusingly similar.
How refreshingly sensible! Also interesting: WIPO have now notched up
5,000 UDRP domain name disputes. (via
BNA's Internet Law News email)
posted by humuhumu at 8:07 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Lessig and the RIAA's Matt Oppenheim This great Q&A between two very well spoken opponents in the copyright wars answers (very clearly) many of the questions that have stemmed from the ongoing erosion of the public domain by copyright law and the degradation of the music industry by file swappers. I was struck by how straight many of the answers were... a fascinating read
posted by dirtylittlemonkey at 7:29 AM PST - 29 comments
Morbid Outlook is a polished, eclectic Goth magazine with a killer design and content to die for. With hundreds of articles and images in the categories of Art, Music, Fashion, Lifestyle, Fiction and Nonfiction, this is one of the very best online zines I've seen yet. Go to any feature, and you will find a list of related-interest articles accompanying the story, and, usually, a listing of online resources or suggestions for reading as well.
posted by taz at 7:19 AM PST - 31 comments
June 11
Oh my. Is this performance art? A political statement? An in your face variation on cosplay? Meet the very
not-safe-for-work Rati. Is this a contemporary nod to
tradition? Does it rise to the same level as another
popular theme in art? Weigh in on Rati!
posted by madamjujujive at 6:22 PM PST - 12 comments
polylog: Forum for Intercultural Philosophy. "polylog seeks... an intercultural dialogue among philosophers as well as other interested scholars and members of society – in a philosophical polylogue. The project pursues this aim by providing a virtual platform for the world-wide discussion of topics in intercultural philosophy. Intercultural philosophy is not thereby intended as a new theory, discipline, or school to be established. Rather, the diversity of intentions and approaches should be met with the greatest possible openness as well as academic seriousness – as much as possible in the appropriate form and manner." There are a lot of great articles on this site. [Via
wood s lot, which linked to
Toward a Buddhist Vision of Social Justice, a comparison of Buddhism and the philosophy of John Rawls.]
posted by homunculus at 4:10 PM PST - 3 comments
In the aisle by the chill cabinets, no-one can hear you scream.
posted by dg at 3:59 PM PST - 9 comments
At first, it appeared that the effort to begin a public probe into the manipulation of intelligence that formed the foundation of the case for the Iraq war was shaking out as bipartisan, with John Warner, and
eventually John McCain on board. Each day we would hear of another Senator or Representative pushing harder for an open review of exactly who pulled which string. It only took a few minutes this morning for all of that
momentum to cease to exist. ...
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly at 3:11 PM PST - 28 comments
The Coral Calcium scam. Coral Calcium products are on fire right now, with infomercials and brochures claiming that the miracle supplements can cure everything from fatigue to cancer. Of course there is no
scientific evidence supporting any of these claims and one of the two men featured in the infomercials is a convicted felon named
Kevin Trudeau.
New
FTC actions are ongoing and
The Mayo Clinic has just sent out a letter to patients warning that the broad range of benefits claimed by those marketing some Coral Calcium products are simply too good to be true and that if the calcium indeed comes form the Okinawa area as claimed, it could be contaminated with lead.
posted by bargle at 2:02 PM PST - 15 comments
The life of an Israeli paramedic. "The worst thing in the terror attacks, in my point of view, is to see young babies, who have done no harm," he said. "If they are alive, shouting, burns all over their body. They are experiencing pain, very big pain. There is no stronger pain than having burns."
posted by darren at 1:22 PM PST - 79 comments
Hilary Clinton is a liar. "'Living History' is a 562-page book. A work of that length would take an average writer perhaps four years to produce; a highly proficient writer might finish in two years, if working on nothing else. Clinton signed the contract to 'write' the book about two years ago. About the same time, she also was sworn in as a member of the United States Senate. ... So in the last two years Clinton has either been neglecting her duties as a United States Senator -- that is, violating her oath -- or she is claiming authorship of someone else's work."
Such is the wisdom of Gregg Easterbrook, ESPN Page 2's
Tuesday Morning Quarterback. The columns, during football season, combine incisive pigskin analysis with haiku, political commentary and -- ahem --
cheesecake photos.
posted by krewson at 12:00 PM PST - 68 comments
"Our nation can no more survive as half democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive 'half slave and half free'" (
alternative non-PDF link). "Understanding the real interests and deep opinions of the American people is the first thing. And what are those? That a Social Security card is not a private portfolio statement but a membership ticket in a society where we all contribute to a common treasury so that none need face the indignities of poverty in old age without that help. That tax evasion is not a form of conserving investment capital but a brazen abandonment of responsibility to the country. That income inequality is not a sign of freedom-of-opportunity at work, because if it persists and grows, then unless you believe that some people are naturally born to ride and some to wear saddles, it's a sign that opportunity is less than equal. That self-interest is a great motivator for production and progress, but is amoral unless contained within the framework of community. That the rich have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more homes, vacations, gadgets and gizmos, but they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else."
Bill Moyers
"tends the flame of democracy."posted by fold_and_mutilate at 10:21 AM PST - 75 comments
Unbrand America
In the coming months a black spot will pop up everywhere...on store windows and newspaper boxes, on gas pumps and supermarket shelves. Open a magazine or newspaper - it's there. It's on TV. It stains the logos and smears the nerve centers of the world's biggest corporations.
posted by mapalm at 9:37 AM PST - 115 comments
June 10
Best song of the last quarter century? Ok, I liked the song when it came out,(Nirvana Smells Like Teen Spirit) and can still listen to it today. But, VH1 is saying it is the best song for the last quarter century. That, I have a problem with. It is going to take me some time to reflect on this and come up with some alternates. I thought you folks may have your own opinions as well.
So, lets hear it, what do you think is the best song of the last quarter century?
posted by a3matrix at 5:30 PM PST - 102 comments
Why Are The Six Best Restaurants in New York All French? Because
William Grimes from the
New York Times is a massive, provincial, toadying snob, that's why says so. [
NYT reg. req.] With his haughty tone, architectural blatherings and
whiney voice [
Real Video link] he's undoubtedly my pet hate among
restaurant critics, even though he obviously knows his stuff, not to mention a thing or two about cocktails [
here is his take on the Martini]. My favourite
critics are GQ's
Alan Richman and the
Anti-Grimes himself, a man who truly knows his food,
Robert Sietsema of
The Village Voice. What critics get
your goat or vote? Which ones are worth reading and following? More importantly, which ones - or anonymous restaurant guides, like
Zagat's, can you trust,
if any?
posted by MiguelCardoso at 3:31 PM PST - 36 comments
How Dodgy Are You? I'm in the clear. No years in prison and no fine. Safe and boring. Let's see the Mefi criminal element emerge shall we? [Imagary may now be work safe and the quiz is based on UK law ...]
posted by feelinglistless at 2:04 PM PST - 49 comments
"V" -- a science-fiction allegory for World War II -- may return to television. NBC has commissioned a three-hour movie script from writer-director Kenneth Johnson (who was responsible for the excellent first miniseries, but not the second miniseries or the dreadful series) that promises "a metaphor for the new millennium." Will Johnson might tackle unilateralism and WMD? And might a letter-writing campaign be in order to encourage production?
posted by ed at 1:30 PM PST - 29 comments
Calls for a ban on Halal and Kosher slaughtered meat in the UK are being called
an attack on religion or
necessary to improve the welfare of farm animals... Where to start thinking about this? Take 1: Is there a vast
right-wing, um, wait,
left-wing, um wait, err, something-wing conspiracy against Muslims right now? Take 2: Is this a case of "colliding waves of political correctness"? Take 3: As a vegetarian (works for me, ain't gonna preach) the notion of killing animals nicer is kind of funny. Why couldn't we just survey the animals as they enter the slaughterhouse? "Slash to throat? Bolt to head? Electrocution? Thank you, drive through." Whichever way you look at the story, it just goes to show you, the world's a complicated place and you can't please
anyone.
posted by lazywhinerkid at 9:55 AM PST - 82 comments
Backpack Nation has an interesting idea about helping out the third world.
The basic mission and strategy of Backpack Nation is to transform the world's dire political situation by sending individual travelers from the developed countries to serve as roving ambassadors to the world's less-wealthy countries.
posted by Karmakaze at 9:21 AM PST - 50 comments
"And mark my words, the calculated intimidation which we see so often of late by the "powers that be" will only keep the loyal opposition quiet for just so long. Because eventually, like it always does, the truth will emerge. And when it does, this house of cards, built of deceit, will fall." This is Senator Byrd, just a light at the end of a very dark and probably very long tunnel.
posted by acrobat at 5:15 AM PST - 91 comments
...we are all mortal Forty years ago today, the US President tentatively outlined the idea of coexistence with an intractable enemy. The famous, resonant lines about breathing the same air and cherishing our children's future feel oddly buried in the speech, between a "secondly" and a "thirdly". Cuba was still some months in the future when Kennedy gave this speech. Audio
here.
posted by gdav at 2:25 AM PST - 26 comments
Crap Towns. 'We continue to be ... surprised at the dreadful quality of British life' writes
The Idler magazine, in their on-going quest to disover 'the crappest town in Britain'. How many here have escaped from truly crap places to live, or are still trapped in them?
(more inside)posted by misteraitch at 1:30 AM PST - 65 comments
Rep. Henry Waxman has written an
(extensively footntoed and juicy) open letter to President Bush demanding answers about "misrepresenting evidence" against Iraq. Waxman is unique among an ever-growing numer of pitchfork-wielders as a Congressman who had supported the war. He wrote of the use of forged evidence about alleged nuclear transactions between Niger and Iraq:
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly at 12:36 AM PST - 51 comments
June 9
The work of Russian miniaturist Nikolai Syadristy is amazing - sculptures, watercolors, engravings, all mere millimeters in size. It's a shame, however, that the best online galleries for displaying his works are so limited.
This Flash based virtual museum and
this horrendous gallery were the most extensive collections available online. Still, his work is worth suffering through the bad user interface & limited English translation to enjoy, for those who wish to know just how many angeles truly can fit on the head of a pin.
posted by jonson at 9:11 PM PST - 4 comments
Laugh as much as you like: I still think there's a certain intensely dramatic and lyrical redneck technique behind these country music song titles. I like a song title that says everything upfront. It's not as easy as you think, either.
[Via Bifurcated Rivets]posted by Carlos Quevedo at 6:42 PM PST - 12 comments
Truth, Justice, and the Soviet Way What if baby Kal-El's spaceship had crashed on Earth 12 hours earlier, in the Ukraine instead of middle America? The new 3-issue comic book series
Superman: Red Son envisions the Man of Steel as a good-hearted citizen of the USSR, helping to spread communism across the world. Wonder Woman is his girlfriend; Batman is an anti-Soviet terrorist; Lex Luthor becomes U.S. president. This alternate-universe jaunt is not just for fun:
writer Mark Millar says it's a timely exploration of what happens when one all-powerful country anoints itself leader of the world.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:25 PM PST - 25 comments
A hip hop geek's wet dream... I don't know about you, but to find this site made my day. Dozens and dozens of full length songs that your favorite hip hop producers have sampled. If you can convert streaming audio to mp3, the songs are yours!
posted by Slimemonster at 2:04 PM PST - 22 comments
A Blast From The Past: Ass Chaps Man A piece of classic American Webiana, still hilarious after all these years. Does anyone know of other classic Web pieces that somehow missed the MeFi front page, probably because they were so well known at the time? [
With thanks to quonsar. Safe for work, I'd say, but a close call.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 7:45 AM PST - 23 comments
The Pale Horse Percentage. The demise of civilization has been predicted since it began, but the odds of keeping
Planet Earth alive and well are getting worse amid a breakneck pace of scientific advances, according to
Martin Rees, Britain's honorary astronomer royal. Rees calculates that the odds of an apocalyptic disaster striking Earth have risen to about 50 percent from 20 percent a hundred years ago.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 7:29 AM PST - 21 comments
The rantacular Francis E Dec : "Gangster Computer God Worldwide Secret Containment policy made possible solely by Worldwide Computer God Frankenstein Controls. Especially lifelong constant threshold brainwash radio. Quiet and motionless, I can slightly hear it. Repeatedly this has saved my life on the streets.
Four billion wordwide population, all living, have a Computer God Containment Policy brain bank brain, a real brain in the brain bank cities on the far side of the moon we never see. Primarily, based on your lifelong Frankenstein Radio Controls, especially your Eyesight TV, sight and sound recorded by your brain, your moon brain of the Computer God activates your Frankenstein threshold brainwash radio lifelong, inculcating conformist propaganda, even frightening you and mixing you up and the usual, "Don't worry about it." For your setbacks, mistakes, even when you receive deadly injuries. This is the Worldwide Computer God Secret Containment Policy."
Ubuweb has many sounds. Sounds are good.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:59 AM PST - 10 comments
4D rubiks Cube. There's a small (416k) download, but then it's probably the hardest puzzle in the world. It should keep you busy for a few hours.
posted by Spoon at 3:28 AM PST - 18 comments
June 8
Do you know the muffin man? If so, you've probably got a kid (or two) or were one once. That said, you'll probably dig the music of Ralph Covert, aka
Ralph's World. My favorite is his first (
self-
titled) record, mostly for
Freddy Bear the Teddy Bear and Drivin' in My Car. Give him a
listen. (All of his albums are available from
emusic.)
posted by dobbs at 5:18 PM PST - 8 comments
The first 50 years of Fiat advertising images. Fiat has been a pioneer in the development and management of its corporate image through advertising. Famous artists as Dudovich, Codognato, Casorati and De Chirico have created beautiful posters and designs for this Italian giant of which 100 from the 1899 to 1950 period have been selected for their online historial archive. The oldest being this fantastic “
Fabbrica Italiana Di Automobili” poster from 1899.
posted by riffola at 4:07 PM PST - 7 comments
When she sees the SIZE of your bank balance, she'll be digging YOUR "gold" in no time! Today's
Independent on Sunday newspaper carried the story of these fake ATM receipts showing a balance of
$314,159.26.
"After you write your number on this receipt (conveniently folded in your wallet), hand it to the member of opposite sex and watch how fast they call you!"
Tragically, they look nothing like UK ATM receipts, but it had me wondering - what's the lowest-down dirtiest line/ trick you (sorry: I mean, a
friend of yours) ever pulled in an attempt to impress a member of the desired sex?
posted by Pericles at 10:11 AM PST - 45 comments
"We have an outbreak" (James Hughes, director of the
CDC). At least 19 people in three Midwestern states have contracted a disease related to smallpox marking the first outbreak of the life-threatening illness in the United States. The disease is known as
monkeypox.
posted by stbalbach at 8:25 AM PST - 15 comments
new baghdad blogger Salim Pax's friend G. now has his own blog. The writing isn't nearly as tight, but the one entry so far is intresting
posted by delmoi at 6:54 AM PST - 4 comments
June 7
Why Does This News Make Me Uneasy? As a Jew whose sister is married to a German and who has happily visited Germany four or five times, the news that Jews are flocking back to Germany should leave me in the best of moods. But it doesn't. Antisemitism is flourishing almost everywhere in Middle Europe - specially in
France,
Germany and even
Britain - often
under the guise of Anti-Zionism. Even my synagogue in peaceful Lisbon is today protected by stringent security measures. Is this just an unwillingness to depart from old stereotypes or does it find an echo in other cautious Jews? Specially with Germans. I feel simultaneously ashamed and wary. Someone tell me - and a lot of others - I am wrong. Please. History may not repeat itself - but it sure as hell seems to
inspires itself sometimes. And we're all better off, I think, if we confront our demons. If they are demons, that is.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 8:46 PM PST - 57 comments
hair tips for men... " Psst... if you have a receding hairline, this is a good style to pick! Try shaving at the sides too! Or maybe tying up your hair! Experiment!"
Tonight's google search was for an 80s hairstyle utilizing square permanent rods - i still haven't found what i was looking for, but this was a nice momentary diversion...
posted by cadence at 4:40 PM PST - 9 comments
Joshua Allen has had to live in a motel while he looks for somewhere to live to accompany his new job.
He seems to have found all of the minor irritations: "The toilet seat won’t stay up. I have a smallish heart attack when it slaps down while I’m in mid-stream, not paying attention. I feel obligated to clean up after myself since I’ll be running into the maids all month. I desperately want them to like me, to confide in me about the other guests, the things they find in the rooms." He doesn't include the one I encountered in Paris, "The way the maid leaves your room unlocked all day while you're out after making your bed..." Luckily I had all my valuables with me...
posted by feelinglistless at 2:27 PM PST - 7 comments
Sing, Wing! This is so good:
"Hi, I am Wing! I immigrated to New Zealand with my family about ten years ago from Hong Kong. I have been learning singing in New Zealand and I do performances in Rest Homes and Hospitals.
Don't miss her, eh, "treatment" of the Carpenters, and
Summertime.
posted by sparky at 9:04 AM PST - 20 comments
June 6
Muslim woman sues over driver's license photo A muslim woman is suing the state of Florida because she doesn't want to take off her veil to take the photo. If everyone were allowed to take covered face photos, what would be the point of having a photo?
"Whaddya mean that's not me? Look at the eyes!"
More links:
http://www.naplesnews.com/03/06/florida/d896205a.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002/01/30/muslim-fla-suit.htm (old)
posted by filecrave at 2:48 PM PST - 46 comments
Rudy Van Gelder was probably present for more moments of musical genius than any other human in history. He began working with
Blue Note records in 1953, and went on to engineer
thousands of sessions with some of the greatest jazz players of all time. Not bad for an
optometrist who started off by building a studio in his parents' living room.
posted by Ty Webb at 12:14 PM PST - 3 comments
Grinding Nemo. The JWC company, maker of sewage equipment, wishes to issue a press release informing small children everywhere that contrary to scenes in the hit Disney movie, flushing fish down a toilet drain will not set them free in the ocean, but rather melt them with chlorine disinfectant before shredding them into particles with processing machinery. Have a great weekend.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 9:28 AM PST - 22 comments
June 5
"Did You See Anything?" You heard gunshots. You heard sirens. Now you’re standing in front of the police tape and you’re hearing a lot of gossip.
At any given crime scene, in any given city, the people giving commentary and asking questions aren't the cops - they're the neighbors.
The Washington CityPaper reports.
posted by GriffX at 9:53 PM PST - 4 comments
This mildly salacious Mini commercial showed up halfway through the Canadian broadcast of The Amazing Race tonight. But the
French version seems to work even better with the subtle use of captions and slightly louder gasping. Cheap production trick for the bilingual Canadian market or Gallic subtlety?
(Quicktime required)posted by maudlin at 5:52 PM PST - 11 comments
Boy Meets... Boy?!!? NBC-owned Bravo will court viewers this summer with American television's first primetime gay-themed reality dating series. But in a twist worthy of the bogus baron on Fox's "Joe Millionaire," some of the suitors are actually heterosexual men who were paid by the program to pretend to be gay -- unbeknownst to the eligible bachelor.
I'm not sure whether this will be an example of a leading broadcaster leading the sociological agenda, or of another chance to humiliate folk on TV for entertainment, but with a heterosexist flavour:
FOUND VIA SAFERSEX.ORG (THX, filchyboy)posted by dash_slot- at 3:50 PM PST - 35 comments
Hot modders is a term I propose to apply to those people who pump up and modify their computers until they're no longer recognizable as a drab metal box and drab monitor, similar to
hot rodders and their cars. Here's a guy who's turned a gutted 17 inch monitor case into a fully functional PC and has provided a pretty good description of how he did it, with lots of pictures. I'd buy one. Plus, for no reason, there's kitties!
(via my friend Hurin at Dor-Lomin via Blue's News)posted by WolfDaddy at 1:25 PM PST - 28 comments
Department of Justice finds "significant problems" in the detainment of aliens after Sept. 11. Among the findings in the report by Glenn Fine, DoJ Inspector General: The FBI failed to distinguish between aliens arrested on suspicion of terrorist activities and those with no connection to terrorism. Some detainees did not receive notice of why they were being detained for more than a month. Many detainees were held for weeks and months without the FBI taking any action on their cases. Detainees were frequently subject to harsh conditions of confinement and many were not allowed adequate legal consultation. (Full report available
here - link via
Tom Tomorrow.)
posted by UKnowForKids at 10:50 AM PST - 16 comments
Life Support is an online help desk for everyday life. It operates like a tech support web site (with tickets, responses, etc.), but the issues are about religion, love, and politics instead of printers and device drivers. I got some interesting and/or entertaining responses to the issues I posted.
posted by oissubke at 9:37 AM PST - 15 comments
Fat Lazy Unsafe Smokers=FLUS CDC Official says obesity is closing in on tobacco as leading cause of death in U.S.
"We just recalculated the actual causes of death in the U.S. and we did see that obesity moved up very close to tobacco, and is almost the number one health threat," Julie Gerberding said.
Her work in an emergency unit revealed many tobacco-related cases along with some involving failure to wear seat belts and helmets. There were no cases linked to bioterrorism.
Hmmm, you mean I should just keep brushing my teeth, eat right, exercise, buckle up, etc. How boring.
posted by newlydead at 9:16 AM PST - 21 comments
"Any baseball game in America," says Bush, "including the one in your backyard, Timmy. Mwahahahahahah!"
Flying to Qatar from Jordan yesterday, President Bush showed off to the press some of the high-tech gadgetry installed on Air Force One after September 11.
Was that
arrogance or was it just a slow news day on Air Force One?
posted by emelenjr at 8:46 AM PST - 17 comments
Clocks have been posted before. Here's a new fun one called blokklok.
posted by ginz at 8:17 AM PST - 8 comments
Martha Talks and she proclaims her innocence. Martha Stewart has a new web site, independent of her company that she resigned from, that will detail her battles with the government, putting everything out in the open.
posted by benjh at 6:54 AM PST - 31 comments
Here's a fine way to start a Thursday: pour a cup of joe, settle into your ergonomic chair, and enjoy
80s Ending, a funny little film by Douglas Jordan. Six minutes long, well worth the watch.
posted by Shadowkeeper at 6:47 AM PST - 24 comments
Field Day The Field Day festival, intended to be a two-day outdoor show in Calverton, NY, (Eastern Long Island) has now been
reduced to a single day, and will be held at Giants Stadium in NJ. Tickets will be automatically refunded -- you must purchase
new tickets to the NJ show.
posted by metrocake at 5:10 AM PST - 20 comments
June 4
Short of finding your spouse from
Jailbabes, the "mail order bride" has to be the worst notion in the proud tradition of horrible spousal selection. But for too long now, the lonely women of the world have been shut out from this marketplace of love. Not anymore, thanks to
MailOrderHusbands. Order
now, going fast!
posted by jonson at 9:54 PM PST - 8 comments
Play MASH. Relive the game that made you completely ignore most of your elementary education.
Warning: Not safe for getting work done any time soon.
posted by qDot at 8:18 PM PST - 11 comments
The story of Mister, uh, Big
Initially I was going to post about this with a tongue-in-cheek tone. But when I got to the end of the piece, I was disturbed to find that an act of child abuse - an act of what I see as an act of pedophilia - has been reported matter-of-factly by Rolling Stone, without so much as the blink of an eye. It's not the central part of the story, not the reason for telling it, but still. Why? is it because perhaps the perpetrator is a woman and it's not seen as a crime? Or is it her age? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill?
Warning - might not be safe for work, especially if the link offsite at the bottom of the page is working...
posted by tomcosgrave at 5:08 PM PST - 72 comments
All the economy needs is love. "Japan is suffering from deflation and I think there are a lot of people who want to be helped," said one businessman, who had already been hugged twice. Excuse me, fuller has to go camp out in the Sailor Mercury hug line now.
posted by jfuller at 4:27 PM PST - 14 comments
New user agreement means customers lose copyright. CafePress has long been the independent's way of printing up a few pithy slogans, or
customizing small orders of apparel. But the new TOS now assigns exclusive, royalty-free rights to publish, display and gain trademark registration for the customers items. (
Oh, they also now charge a 5% fee out of your commission and are "withholding fees for taxes" and oh, did I mention the new $25.00 a month "administrative fee"?) Have they just shot their business model in the foot?
posted by dejah420 at 3:40 PM PST - 27 comments
Bountiful American Leather Babes On The Rampage: I was looking for
umbrellas,
traditional British
umbrellas, to shade me from the Portuguese summer sun, when, all of a sudden, I came across a cornucopia of
beautiful, classic American
briefcases. I still use the capacious, weather-worn Schlesinger case my father gave me when I was twelve. Well
waaah! Now I want a new one. The
British cases are
desirable too. In fact
the whole damn shop is one big leather dream. I mean moleskines, fountain pens, books and bottles are all very nice - but real men, like real women, need
truly big leather bags to carry their whole life with them. Along with
a good umbrella, of course. One of those Malaccas with a hidden flask for whisky, perhaps.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 2:05 PM PST - 16 comments
First Birds with teeth in 70 million years . Vicious toothed, flying microraptors once darkened the Jurassic skies. Now,
scientists have learned to activate the dormant, vestigal avian "tooth gene" and so coaxed chicken embryos into growing teeth. From the grave, Alfred Hitchcock enviously quips - "a messy thing indeed when toothed birds kill a man". Meanwhile the French are appalled: “quand les poules auront des dents”, which translates to “when hens have teeth”, is analogous to the English “pigs might fly”. Coming soon: flying pigs.
But there might be a baldness cure in this new research. I'll remember that as the flocks of mutant raptor-fowl move in for the kill.posted by troutfishing at 10:42 AM PST - 18 comments
Howard Dean is closing in on the lead in New Hampshire, with 16% to Kerry's 17%.
Dean is appealing to voters by being
outspoken in an environment in which many of his fellow democrats are submissive to Bush's approval rating, and due to anticipation of his
universal health care plan, which he is soon to unveil. Already established as the most net-savvy candidate, Dean has hundreds of real-life
meetups planned for
today.posted by Ignatius J. Reilly at 10:00 AM PST - 38 comments
wolfowitz spills the beans "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil." - is telling the truth a new policy of the current administration?
posted by specialk420 at 9:31 AM PST - 40 comments
Aztecs at the Royal Academy. The exhibition may be over but the website can still be enjoyed.
posted by plep at 7:32 AM PST - 3 comments
HERCUBUSH! Long ago in ancient greece lived the Bush who began it all: HERCUBUSH! Half God, half mortal, half Texan, HERCUBUSH roamed the seven seas with one mission: To Destroy EVIL!
"They're like Hitler, only more so!
We'll rub their oil on our torso!"posted by Dome-O-Rama at 7:31 AM PST - 7 comments
You've seen
Pomo tarot, you've let the wisdom of spock guide you using the
Star Trek Tarot, and in an act of desperation, you even tried getting down with the
Vampire deck. Still haven't found the deck that's right for you?
Maybe it's time you tried the
80s tarot deck. (And before you ruin the surprise, try to guess which Major Arcana they pegged Morrisey for...)
posted by Pinwheel at 6:46 AM PST - 13 comments
June 3
A Good Day for Video Games. Turns out that video games are protected by the First Amendment, at least according to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which today overturned a St. Louis ruling that video games do not constitue protected speech.
A good quote from the opinion:
"If the first amendment is versatile enough to 'shield [the] painting of Jackson Pollock, music of Arnold Schoenberg, or Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll,' we see no reason why the pictures, graphic design, concept art, sounds, music, stories, and narrative present in video games are not entitled to a similar protection. The mere fact that they appear in a novel medium is of no legal consequence."
posted by jscalzi at 5:37 PM PST - 7 comments
Walt Disney World's recent designation as a no-fly zone has had an additional
consequence: Christian extremists can no longer harass gay tourists from above.
posted by donkeyschlong at 4:49 PM PST - 28 comments
Gay Pride events are taking place worldwide this month, and
PlanetOut has got a number of interesting features to mark them: most fascinating to me are a series of coming out stories from other, mostly third world, countries. The first a tale of someone growing up gay in
Bosnia, and today from someone in the
Phillipines, with more to follow each day this week. There's also an article commemorating the
25th anniversary of the rainbow flag (which is getting back in the
pink). Good, if not terribly in-depth, stuff. Be careful when following the links, you might run into some gay/lesbian/non-vanilla NSFW stuff.
posted by WolfDaddy at 1:48 PM PST - 10 comments
Pants Are Evil -- at least for the ladies; so says the
King of Swaziland. The absolute monarch of this small African nation says the Bible prohibits women from wearing pants, and also that individual human rights are an "abomination." Before you laugh in disbelief (like I did), learn more on Swazi political and religious beliefs inside... (via
kottke).
posted by serafinapekkala at 12:33 PM PST - 33 comments
The Leading Light In Not Only Doughnuts: Canada! I don't know if any of you have noticed but Canada is becoming
fiercely fashionable in the rest of the world, perhaps as a model of an American-European fusion that everyone else can live with.
Paul Robinson's list of Canada's virtues is impressive and difficult to dispute. Perhaps the lil' ol' U.S. are lagging dangerously behind in the general rush to jump on the Canadian bandwagon? And yet... And yet... What
is it about Canada or, more to the point, about the dismissive attitude of that great country's neighbours?
posted by MiguelCardoso at 11:17 AM PST - 128 comments
Yoga Kitty videos show you how to raise your cat's electromagnetic frequency, clear past karmas, and engage in self-identification
meditation, but unfortunately provides no tips on how to administer the first-aid you're going to require for bites and scratches (requires Quicktime or Windows Media Player).
posted by MrBaliHai at 10:33 AM PST - 3 comments
Paul Krugman writes that the Bush administration will fight a "khaki election" next year, taking advantage of the general good feeling after the Iraq war. The original khaki election was the British election of 1900, contested during the Boer War. Our armed forces don't really wear khaki so much anymore and I think we need a new term. I suggest calling 2004 the "Camo Election." Any better suggestions?
posted by Mekon at 10:15 AM PST - 26 comments
Radiohead fan sites have been asked to remove their lyrics and tabs archives. Yesterday, two popular Radiohead fan sites,
Green Plastic and
At Ease, were sent
this email by a legal representative of Warner Bros. Publications and Warner/Chappell Music asking them to take down any lyrics and tabs from their site. The letter claimed "their distribution constitutes an infringement of our rights under U.S. Copyright Law. More than that, the availability of these files have a direct impact on our ability to market and sell our musical arrangements and songbooks, and that adversely affects the royalties that we are able to generate and pay to the band." Those opposed have started a
petition online. Who's right on this one?
posted by josephtate at 9:39 AM PST - 48 comments
"It could be a sitcom or something completely different" What is it? A new show on Fox, based on the Sims video game by EA's Maxis studio. Will Wright, the creator of the Sim line of games, has signed on to help create the show, which is being described as "blending puppetry with animation" and "set in feudal Japan but dealing with modern-day suburban situations".
If that's not "orignial", then I don't what is.
posted by Hackworth at 9:32 AM PST - 7 comments
The Credit Card Prank is a project to see how far one could go with their signature on credit card purchases. The experiment goes pretty far and barely runs into any snags. The verdict? People don't seem to care what you sign on a receipt.
posted by mathowie at 9:15 AM PST - 72 comments
Bob Graham, Florida senator and Democratic presidential aspirant, burned 246 calories on his exercise bike on Feb. 7, 1999. Good thing, because he weighed in that morning at 187, up one pound from the previous day. How do we know this? Because over the past 26 years, Graham has
filled box after box with
journals capturing an incredible, some say obsessive, level of
detail about his daily life. Quirky, sure;
parody friendly, no doubt; but will the GOP be successful in using it to
paint him as crazy?
(Salon daypass req. for last link)posted by luser at 8:16 AM PST - 17 comments
"Trailers of Mass destruction" : By Wolfowitz Productions, starring Kris Kristofferson and Ali MacGraw. A red hot tale of sex, intrigue and death. (scroll to bottom of page). Amidst the controversy over Wolfowitz's admissions in a
Vanity Fair interview about the use of Iraq's alleged WMD threat as a pretext for war, Hollywood comes to the rescue!
posted by troutfishing at 8:13 AM PST - 20 comments
"I don't think I'd be disclosing any trade secrets if I told you that in order to sneak into something you have to have both momentum and an alibi. Momentum because stationery objects such as paintings and people are looked at; an alibi because you may get caught. I don't like to get caught because it forces you to use the alibi. I don't like to use alibis much because they are a variant of begging."
posted by Slagman at 7:33 AM PST - 13 comments
June 2
Andrew Bell has drawn a little creature on an index card and posted it online every single day since January 2002. His website,
The Creatures in my Head, now hosts an archive of over 400 drawings where readers can comment and vote on their
favorites and, at least in my case, imagine how great plush dolls would be.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 11:46 PM PST - 30 comments
Sifting through the
Archinect discussions, I came across
EZB8, House4Sex. Some guy in Athens is supposedly offering free room & board to girls provided that they be "the landlord's lover for a night." Genius in every man's
eyes dick.
posted by hobbes at 10:44 PM PST - 16 comments
The French Laundry serves dinner seven days a week, with reservations available between the hours of 5:30 pm and 9:30 pm. For the rest of us, there's finally their website, available 24/7.
posted by dchase at 7:10 PM PST - 20 comments
Don't ring 638-234-5837 whatever you do: it's MetaFilter's phone number. Mine, I'm leasing to slippery old
KY Jelly: 004-GEL-1-FUN. All this because - so I'm told by a French friend - you backward Americans actually still have letters on your telephones, along with the rotary lever to crank it up. [
From LinkFilter.]
posted by Carlos Quevedo at 6:30 PM PST - 17 comments
This page uses a 'Dukes of Hazzard' metaphor to explain that big ol' SCO vs. Linux kerfuffle.
posted by GriffX at 4:13 PM PST - 3 comments
Newly Digital is an electronic anthology of sorts. Due to the technological advancement of these things we call "computers", it's a subject ripe for nostalgia. As seen here by bloggers writing about their first . . .
posted by jeremias at 10:04 AM PST - 1 comments
is eric rudolph a christian terrorist? via atrios and who are these christian identity people?: "We declare and will wage total war on the ungodly communist regime in New York and your legaslative bureaucratic lackey's in Washington. It is you who are responsible and preside over the murder of children and issue the policy of ungodly preversion thats destroying our people," - sound
familiar?posted by specialk420 at 9:30 AM PST - 35 comments
Wigfield: The Can-Do Town That Just May Not is the latest creation from the performers who gave us
Strangers With Candy. Meet the cast of characters now before the Bulkwaller Dam is destroyed and washes the town away. [WARNING - Some of the language is NSFW]
posted by herc at 9:19 AM PST - 8 comments
Is the USA
"an empire in denial?"
"The United States is a 'danger to the world' because of its denial that it is a military and economic empire, according to Niall Ferguson, historian and new-found darling of the American right."
posted by Blue Stone at 9:05 AM PST - 21 comments
Here's an interesting story for people who like to write and post stuff on the internet Judge Diana Lewis of Circuit Court in West Palm Beach issued an order that
forbids Mr. Max to write about Ms. Johnson. That prohibition is not limited to his website. She ruled on May 6, before Mr. Max was notified of the suit and without holding a hearing. She told Mr. Max that he could not use "Katy" on his site. Nor could he use Ms. Johnson's last name, full name or the words "Miss Vermont." The judge also prohibited Mr. Max from "disclosing any stories, facts or information, notwithstanding its truth, about any intimate or sexual acts engaged in by" Ms. Johnson. Finally, Judge Lewis ordered Mr. Max to sever the virtual remains of his relationship with Ms. Johnson. He is no longer allowed to link to her Web site.
...
All this as a result of a lawsuit in which Ms. Johnson maintained that Mr. Max had invaded her privacy by publishing
accurate information about her.
posted by magullo at 6:17 AM PST - 39 comments
June 1
"Then we realized that somehow an insane god had taken control of our world and was out to kill us all." Subscribers of the multiplayer online game "Shadowbane" were in for a shock Tuesday evening when they realized the game system had been hacked, and the rules fundamentally altered, and not in a good way (unless you happen to like mayhem). While this ended up being a "no harm, no foul" scenario, as everything was eventually set right, it was breaking new ground in terms of the uses of hacking. In a world where characters in these games are sold via EBay, and nearly half a million people subscribe to Everquest, how long before legitimate (non "fun and games") version of what just happened occurs?
posted by jonson at 10:28 PM PST - 17 comments
Pixar's newest kid flick good enough for adults,
Finding Nemo was proceeded by a "classic" Pixar short,
KnickKnack. The weird thing is that they felt compelled to change 2 characters (the "bathing beauty" and the mermaid) from a ridiculously geometric, cartoony bosomy shape to flat chested. What gives here?
This reminds me of the changes Spielberg made in
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and of course, the regrettable
Greedo shooting incident in Lucas' Star Wars: A New Hope.
My question is: When is it right to change an existing work, for whatever reason?
posted by jpburns at 2:33 PM PST - 30 comments
Remember the Coastal Records Project? When I first heard about this, I applauded, then wasted a couple of hours looking at the nice pics. But I couldn't help wondering when they'd run into some compound of a celebrity who'd put up a stink (okay, I was hoping it would be Ah-nold, and there'd be a scene reminiscent of his movies, stinger missile launched from his patio at the helicopter...) alas, it's only
Barbara. Still, does this only make me wonder if our celebrities are helping push through laws to establish themselves in a higher class than us peons? Please note that the irony of rich people suing each other isn't lost on me, and I'm not trying to put forward that it could be any one of us touring in a helicopter doing this.
But I mean, the guy's taking picture's of the whole coast, not just some star-map, coastline version. Until this lawsuit, I'd wager, only the most dedicated stalker would've known this was her place. But now...
posted by Busithoth at 2:28 PM PST - 12 comments
If you're a fan of
Neil Gaiman then maybe you liked
The Sandman. If you were a
big fan of The Sandman then perhaps you stumbled upon
The Sandman annotations, a comprehensive resource covering the historical, folkloric and religious/mythological references - page by page, panel by panel - found within the storyline. From
Chaucer to
Dante to the
Eumenides, Gaiman created a fabulous story that inspired young and old alike to dream again (one of my personal favorites is
A Dream of a Thousand Cats).
some mefi sandman-related artifacts can be found here and here.posted by poopy at 11:53 AM PST - 7 comments
Kodak gives more reason to convert to digital photography. Eastman Kodak's "Kodak Park facility" in Rochester, is #1 in New York for releases of suspected toxicants and neurotoxins to endocrine, gastrointestinal, liver, cardiovascular, kidney, respiratory, and reproductive health. Remember dioxin? The stuff of Agent Orange, used in the Vietnam war that caused so much grief to war vets and Vietnamese, well Kodak released more dioxin into New York's environment in 2000 than any other source. In 1996 they were dumping methylene chloride concentrations as high as 3,600,000 parts per billion into area rivers, when the legal level is five parts per billion. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has found Kodak guilty of illegal disposal of hazardous wastes, illegal use of incinerators and waste piles, failing to notify the EPA of groundwater contaminations, making undocumented shipments of hazardous wastes, and for 20 years having leaky underground pipes, among other violations.
posted by giantkicks at 11:50 AM PST - 30 comments
The Imam who cursed the Pope and Kofi Annan. "It's hard to summarize a story as complicated as this in a few lines: Fatwas, Mormons, ufologists, secret services, the Supreme Solomonic Order of the Princes of Shekal, coups in Somalia, nuns, a mysterious murder, an African dictator and a "God intoxicated" Communist dictator."
A gem of nefarious weirdness, so bizarre it
has to be real.
Very annoying pop-ups but still worth it IMHO.
posted by talos at 9:57 AM PST - 2 comments
Are you a reluctant slob? Are your resolutions firm but your follow-thoughs flagging? If the hallway to your personal housekeeping hell is strewn with good intentions, consider KISSing your bad habits goodbye. Cat Conner's (MeFi's
frykitty) new blog-style
KISS Living site is great for us fleeting-attention-span types, providing tips based on her "Keep It Short and Simple" technique. I may not know what day it is, or whether Martha spells her name "Stuart" or "Stewart", but even I can focus my energy for
10 minutes at a time.
posted by taz at 3:21 AM PST - 18 comments
