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June 2004 Archives
June 30
From all over the media has recently attacked us
'bout the hangover cure made from extract of cactus
Taken hours before drinking, may ward off the curse...
...but only Charles Osgood has
reported in verse.
posted by britain at 1:07 PM PST - 4 comments
DESERTER An examination of the Bush military files within the context of US Statutory Law, Department of Defense regulations, and Air Force policies and procedures of that era lead to a single conclusion: George W. Bush was
considered a deserter by the United States Air Force.
posted by Postroad at 1:06 PM PST - 66 comments
The art of being Kuna - the Kuna, an aboriginal people living off the coast of Panama, are perhaps most famous for their colorful fabric panels called
molas. The
Kuna women wear these embroidered appliques on blouses. The most prized specimens are those that show some sign of wear, such as fading, distress, or stitch marks, indicating
authentic and
traditional molas rather than ones produced for tourists. If you'd like to try your hand at making a mola, the
5th grade class at Highland Park can show you how.
posted by madamjujujive at 12:36 PM PST - 4 comments
Big Fish! 14 year old Bobby Capri Jr. catches a
52 pound striped bass in a kayak off the Atlantic City shore. But he's not the
first kid to reel in a big fish. The adult
world record for striped bass was also caught in New Jersey. So, who here has the best fish story?
posted by MsVader at 11:15 AM PST - 20 comments
Medical Marijuana is finally going to be addressed by the Supreme Court. What this will come down to is federal law vs. state law. Who has the right to make the final decision?
posted by Dantien at 9:34 AM PST - 32 comments
The Moral Values Party With thousands of Republicans set to invade the city this summer, high-priced escorts and strippers are preparing for one grand old party. Agencies are flying in extra call girls from around the globe to meet the expected demand during the Aug. 30-Sept. 2 gathering at Madison Square Garden. "We have girls from London, Seattle, California, all coming in for that week," said a madam at a Manhattan escort service. "It's the week everyone wants to work." "It's going to be big," agreed one operator at a midtown escort service.
Now that's what I call moral clarity!!
posted by nofundy at 6:50 AM PST - 64 comments
June 29
Policing Virtual Reality. Wired reports on
Sociolotron(NSFW). A MMORPG that allows gamers to rob, rape, and kill other players. Being a gamer, I understand that actions in an MMORPG aren't "real" but how far can you take it?
"Lord Foucault is an admitted rapist. He does it on impulse -- for the thrill of it and for the feeling of control he has over his female victims."
Is this any different than running around and killing dwarves?
posted by jopreacher at 12:26 PM PST - 50 comments
Art to Enchant: Some of the works of Shakespeare as interpreted by various illustrators throughout the centuries.
posted by iconomy at 12:14 PM PST - 10 comments
Army to recall former military members It is good to be too old! "The Army is preparing to notify about 5,600 retired and discharged soldiers who are not members of the National Guard or Reserve that they will be involuntarily recalled to active duty for possible service in Iraq or Afghanistan, Army officials said Tuesday."
posted by Postroad at 11:05 AM PST - 136 comments
"The Atlanta Time Machine website is dedicated to examining the history of Atlanta, Georgia by comparing vintage photographs of Atlanta with much more contemporary images shot, more or less, from the same perspective of the original photographer."
[via kottke.org]posted by kirkaracha at 10:54 AM PST - 12 comments
Consider the scorecard. During Clinton's two terms, the median income for American families increased by a solid 15% after inflation, according to Census Bureau figures. But it rose even faster for African Americans (33%) and Hispanics (24%) than it did for whites (14%). The growth was so widely shared that from 1993 through 1999, families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution saw their incomes increase faster than those in the top 5%. By comparison, under President Reagan in the 1980s, those in the top 5% increased their income more than five times faster than the bottom 20%. Likewise, the poverty rate under Clinton fell 25%, the biggest eight-year decline since the 1960s. It fell even faster for particularly vulnerable groups like blacks, Hispanics and children. Again the contrast with Reagan is striking. During Reagan's two terms, the number of Americans in poverty fell by just 77,000. During Clinton's two terms, the number of Americans in poverty plummeted by 8.1 million. The number of children in poverty fell by 50,000 under Reagan. Under Clinton the number was 4.1 million. That's a ratio of 80 to 1.
Clinton's Biggest Gains Not on Conservative Critics' Radarposted by y2karl at 8:54 AM PST - 44 comments
Amazing Images - the BBC has a series of 10 pictures of fetuses at various stages of developments. There's no information about how they were obtained, but they are pretty striking. I imagine they must have been taken with one of the new ultrasound techniques (which are apparently called
4D imaging now).
posted by Irontom at 4:40 AM PST - 30 comments
June 28
America's Black Budget - the Manipulation of Mortgage and Financial Markets Investors benefit from understanding the federal budget, credit policies and covert intervention that drive markets -- often overriding fundamental economics. How has the US governmental apparatus become so powerful in the marketplace and what does it mean to the health of our economy? How unstable is the mortgage bubble and where are the opportunities for investors if the bubble bursts?
posted by willnot at 9:29 PM PST - 21 comments
Looks like a minority liberal government for Canada. The entire process will have been completed in a single day. The voters used pencils to mark X's on paper ballots, which were stuffed into ballot boxes then counted by hand. Despite the differences in population, is there a lesson here for our southern neighbours?
posted by Turtles all the way down at 8:57 PM PST - 91 comments
njam ... all you have to do is rotate the circle in the middle so it matches with the color of the spheres that come in from the corners. seems simple enough ...
[note: shockwave, loud audio]posted by crunchland at 8:06 PM PST - 8 comments
Legal abortion tips the voter balance from Democrat to Republican. That's Larry Eastland's theory.
Abortion has caused missing Democrats--and missing liberals. For advocates so fundamentally committed to changing the face of conservative America, liberals have been remarkably blind to the fact that every day the abortions they advocate dramatically decrease their power to do so.posted by aeschenkarnos at 7:58 PM PST - 43 comments
Shooting outside of our vision. Infrared photography is cool - the world looks surreal. But man, it's a PIA. Just keeping the film at the right temperatures is difficult.
So, all of this can be done digitally. I still haven't gotten around to buying the necessary pieces, but in replying to this
Ask MetaFilter question, I remembered eric cheng's page. For your perusal.
posted by filmgeek at 7:34 PM PST - 6 comments
Rude place names. If you're in England then this is for you. Please bare with us rest of the world, this is what we really like in our humour (at least it in Kilburn). If you're not in England then feel free to use my postcode, NW2. Ooooo,
titter ye not (and who will be the first wag to post "not"?)
posted by ciderwoman at 3:28 PM PST - 30 comments
Mmmmm... girthy. "I think many people, upon seeing this ad, will avoid buying Ball Park Franks. That's pretty much the acme of terrible marketing. Alternative: I am wrong, and Ball Park has happened on a brilliant - and profitable - means of letting straight men express their sublimated
homoerotic fantasies."
posted by soyjoy at 7:55 AM PST - 77 comments
It's all yours, boys. The US just announced the handover of sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government, two days early. Paul Bremer has said that he'll be leaving the country soon. Is this truly the beginning of an independent Iraq, or is it simply making way for
John Negroponte to be in charge?
posted by Dipsomaniac at 12:39 AM PST - 130 comments
Irdial Records sues WEA over copyright infringement. A recent Wilco album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sampled part of the "The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations" 4CD set without the permission of the label. The Cd is simply recordings of mysterious shortwave radio emissions. WEA have settled out of court. (misrepresented on
Boing Boing)
posted by mary8nne at 12:16 AM PST - 29 comments
Spy vs. Spy sell out! Mountain Dew has roped in the infamous black & white spies to shill their beverage. Quicktime needed to view the commercials.
[via waxy.org]posted by riffola at 12:00 AM PST - 11 comments
June 27
"The most intriguing story in Washington these days is a subterranean conflict that reporters cannot cover because some of them are involved. A potent guerrilla insurgency has formed in and around the Bush presidency - a revolt of old pros in government who strike from the shadows with devastating effect. They tell the truth. They explode big lies. They provide documentary evidence..." - William Greider, on what could prove to be one of the defining power struggles of our time. Through a lens darkly, yes. But deniable ? - not plausibly.
As gossip, growing louder now, the shadow-war advances. Unstoppably?
No.
posted by troutfishing at 10:53 PM PST - 40 comments
Digital Snapshot ..
"What does a moment look like? Can snapshots freeze a moment in time? In Digital Snapshot, motion fragments were captured and rearranged in a new visual context via unconventional digital manipulations. A long take camera movement cycle generates a unique 'digital painting.' In this case Digital Snapshot enables the viewer to experience a virtual walk through a beautiful park during summertime." posted by crunchland at 7:29 PM PST - 11 comments
The BBC Motion Gallery provides access to film and video clips from the BBC and CBS. Registration required to view the clips, and only small, watermarked versions can be downloaded for free, but an interesting resource all the same.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:17 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
June 26
Game PR Catchphrases: What They Really Mean Quote: “Downloadable content available through our website!"
Indicates: There's going to be new levels, new maps, new everything after the game is out, making the purchase fully worth your $50.
True Meaning: We'll fix the game breaking bug about 3 weeks after the game's out, hope you guys aren't on 56K because it'll be a 186 MB patch. Also, hopefully this game will have some devoted mod/map makers, because the publisher isn't going to release shit. But there are some cool wallpapers to download!
by Corin Tuckers Stalker and Ryan "OMGWTFBBQ" Adams, from Something awfulposted by bob sarabia at 1:13 PM PST - 13 comments
Digital Brown Shirts Begging the question, WTF?
Hot on the heels of
this micro-
fuhrer furor over the "Gore-Kerry-Hitler" net ad: Gore says something about "Digital Brown Shirts" and some rightwing bloggers adopt it as the new black. (They did decide to remove the swastika from their graphic.) I'm still blinking while I try to fathom this.
posted by StOne at 2:04 AM PST - 47 comments
Bill Gates May Blog. Always
ahead of the curve, the astute visionary's groundbreaking foray into the virginal internet territory, known by computer hackers as "web logging,"
won't be all business, either. He's expected to share personal details such as tidbits from recent vacations. I for one am trembling on the edge of my seat.
1.0 lacks that special something.
posted by scarabic at 12:48 AM PST - 18 comments
June 25
Zookeeper! Match 3 or more animals, don't let the clock run out. (Shockwave req'd)
posted by arto at 6:29 PM PST - 10 comments
Should Gaelic be an official EU language? As a happy member of the
SCA I promise to revise all my past snarkiness and negative thinking about the EU if this happens. I will
read (ploddingly and with a dictionary) all those speeches by Chirac and Schroder--as soon as they're translated into Gaelic. If
Maltese can be an EU language of diplomacy, why not Gaelic? While the world around us rages, we'll return to the Middle Ages.
(From crookedtimber)posted by jfuller at 4:22 PM PST - 27 comments
Street Memes. a sticker, stencil, or poster that can spread a single image around the world. Unlike traditional graffiti art where each piece is unique, street memes can be copied repeatedly, taking on a life of their own, and spreading through the collective effort of people scattered around the world. [via Eyebeam reBlog]posted by soundofsuburbia at 6:28 AM PST - 12 comments
The Beecher Family. 'Families that have been influential in American life and culture are often recognizable by their signature names. The Beecher family is an example of one such family whose deep religious convictions and social conscience spanned the nineteenth century and made them prominent historical figures whose impact on religion, education, abolition, reform movements, literature and public life were exceptional. Biographer Milton Rugoff claims that in "two generations the Beechers emerged, along with many other Americans, from a God-centered, theology-ridden world concerned with the fate of man's eternal soul into a man-centered society occupied mainly with life on earth." ... '
posted by plep at 4:02 AM PST - 8 comments
South Korean government bans Kim Sun-Il execution video. Activates government emergency internet monitoring system. Orders web sites and ISPs to comply.
"Web sites that fail to follow through the instructions will be subject to shut-down or police investigation".
Several South Korean web sites have already been shut down, while other sites, such as Yahoo! Korea, are assisting the government by blocking and censoring their user's email. Meanwhile,
a general strike, massive antiwar protests, and a refusal by airline unions may prevent the deployment and supply of 3,000 South Korean soldiers to Iraq, as well as the rule of the current South Korean government.
Numerous U.S. websites are being blocked, and one of the sites,
Ogrish.com, is
under attack from hackers for carrying
the execution video. (
warning: tragic and traumatic. Windows Media.)
posted by insomnia_lj at 1:39 AM PST - 47 comments
A View from the Eye of the Storm. An Arab intellectual in Europe ponders on the Muslim world and comes to some interesting conclusions. Israel is a sideshow. Iran is the most dangerous country in the world.. in the long run the only way for us (the West) to win the war of terror is to force the problem nations to reform both politically and culturally.
via Steven Den Beste weblogposted by stbalbach at 12:35 AM PST - 45 comments
June 24
Order 17--sovereignty sure, but... The Bush administration has decided to take the unusual step of bestowing on its own troops and personnel immunity from prosecution by Iraqi courts for killing Iraqis or destroying local property after the occupation ends and political power is transferred to an interim Iraqi government, U.S. officials said. (including contractors, btw.) Apparently US immunity was used by
Khomeini in Iran as a rallying cry in the 60s. Are Sadr and Sistani listening?
posted by amberglow at 8:47 PM PST - 32 comments
Watch out, Washington, here come the interns. With cicada season winding down, DC now girds itself for the next wave of invaders: interns from all over the country, descending on the capital to gain valuable government work experience. Some of them have been
notorious, but most of them are fresh, young, wide-eyed, idealistic
go-getters, willing to tolerate
mockery to find a
home, a
job, and maybe some
romance over the summer. Anyone got links to DC intern blogs?
posted by brownpau at 8:26 PM PST - 5 comments
365 Days re-launched - UbuWeb is pleased to announce the re-launch and permanent home of The
365
Days Project. This legendary project, in which an MP3 a day - of mostly
outsider, novelty, and oddball recordings - was made available for the
public to download over the course of 2003. Briefly taken offline, it
is now
presented here in its entirety, complete with images and vast
commentary on
each selection. The 365 Days Project is part of UbuWeb's redesigned,
newly-named and much-expanded Outsiders section.
via the Rumori listposted by 2sheets at 4:23 PM PST - 16 comments
Mayday Mystery. At the University of Arizona, a
series of ads has been placed in the school's newspaper, the Arizona Wildcat. These ads have shown up every year around May 1st for the last 20 years or so, and seem to be cryptic puzzles relating to some sort of secret counterculture organization. Bryan Hance, the former webmaster of the Wildcat, noticed the ads, and has been trying to track down what's been going on ever since. He is chronicling his findings at
www.maydaymystery.org. (via
ARGN)
posted by quibx at 12:38 PM PST - 23 comments
The justice system at work. A sitting Judge in Oklahoma has been removed from the bench for using a male enhancement pump, pleasuring himself and oiling his nether regions during court proceedings - including an August 2003 murder trial. At least he was awake during the proceedings,
unlike other judges.
posted by thatothrgirl at 11:59 AM PST - 29 comments
Googling old friends. Searching for old pals online can be emotional (not everyone joins
Alumni or
Friends Reunited) and it can lead to a re-assessment of your own life and were its going.
Here, Pamela Ribon writes up her discoveries and it's one for few pieces I've seen which perfectly evokes the feelings which can develop. [As my source
John says, make sure you read the comments as well.]
posted by feelinglistless at 11:43 AM PST - 29 comments
Safe Play At All Times. "If you fall into a hole this large on a building site you will not be able to climb out. You may have hurt yourself when you fell and need to go to hospital. But because you are down a hole, it is unlikely that anyone will see or hear you. You may not be found until it is too late." Click on
Dangers and
Read all about it.
posted by jester69 at 11:34 AM PST - 9 comments
"Jesus?" he murmured, "Jesus -- of Nazareth?..." Pontius Pilate,
prefect of
Judea, is
the only historical figure named in the
Nicene Creed -- Coptic
saint or
eternally damned, his role in the
greatest story ever told has been debated by many of history's greatest minds:
St Augustine,
Dante Alighieri,
Tintoretto,
John Ruskin,
Mikhail Bulgakov,
Monty Python. Unfortunately,
there is very little historical evidence about him. His role in the
death of a
certain charismatic
Galilean healer and
apocalyptic preacher
is still being debated today by
theologians and historians
alike. He is also, of course, the main character of
The Procurator of
Judea, the classic short story (complete text in main link) by
Anatole France. (France's magnificent story has lately been tragically neglected by publishers, even if the author was one of his era's most acclaimed writers in the world -- he won the Nobel Prize in 1921 over Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and Proust, and when he died in 1924,
hundreds of thousands of people followed his funeral procession through Paris). These last 2,000 years of fascination with
Pilatus can be explained, some argue...
(more inside, for those unwilling to wash their hands of this post)posted by matteo at 11:26 AM PST - 37 comments
Check out the giant cancer fighting colon... of science! "It's part of a national tour to educate people about various types of common and preventable cancers. The 'Check Your Insides Out -- Top to Bottom' tour is full of interactive educational exhibits on colon, lung, oral, breast, prostate and skin cancers."
posted by ilsa at 10:21 AM PST - 4 comments
Superman born in Germany? It appears that "the boy's mutant DNA segment was found to block production of a protein called myostatin that limits muscle growth."
"Now we can say that myostatin acts the same way in humans as in animals," said the boy's physician, Dr. Markus Schuelke, a professor in the child neurology department at Charite/University Medical Center Berlin. "We can apply that knowledge to humans, including trial therapies for muscular dystrophy."
Or other things...posted by andreaazure at 10:02 AM PST - 17 comments
Win a part in the new Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy movie, by submitting to The Guide, a photograph of the place on Earth you think most deserves to survive the planet's inevitable destruction. Deadline:
Friday 25 June 2004.
posted by Blue Stone at 7:23 AM PST - 15 comments
Most gamblers will laugh at the idea that there exists a scientific method to (legally) beat a casino roulette.
Well, it turns out that
they are
wrong.
(
Here is a PDF file with more details, in Spanish)
Mileage may varyposted by magullo at 6:03 AM PST - 30 comments
June 23
DontvoteRalph.net "Look at just a few of those who supported Nader in 2000, but see that this year is crucially different: Noam Chomsky, Ben Cohen, Peter Coyote, Phil Donahue, Ronnie Dugger, Jim Hightower, Robert McChesney, Michael Moore, and Bonnie Raitt. In fact, can you think of a prominent supporter from 2000 who supports him in 2004? Are we all members of Nader’s “liberal inteligentsia”? Or is the Bush presidency simply such a disaster that we realize there is only one responsible action for real progressives? Despite Mr. Nader’s inevitable disagreement, we don’t think everyone is out of step but Ralph." | So who is supporting Nader?
Some think its the GOP.posted by skallas at 11:17 PM PST - 41 comments
Microsoft
granted patent for technology that will allow human skin to conduct power and transmit data. Let the jokes begin.
(funny drawing here)posted by anathema at 3:14 PM PST - 25 comments
America Is is the weblog of a "freelance photojournalist traveling across the US on a mission to hit all 48 contiguous states." Some nice photos.
posted by kirkaracha at 3:06 PM PST - 7 comments
More kids smoking marijuana than tobacco. A report by the
CDC reports that more kids now report having smoked pot in the last thirty days than those that reported having smoked a cigarette, and in fact, tobacco usage is showing a steep decline while marijuana usage is showing a steady uptick. This item is just one of many interesting statistics contained within the
Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance report, taken between February-December, 2003. The war on some drugs wages on...
(via my friend C-Dawg)posted by WolfDaddy at 10:02 AM PST - 69 comments
BATHORY mastermind Thomas "Quorthon" Forsberg has passed away. A fine day to die? Mayhaps but maybe also too soon at a young 39. One might think that those interested in the
black stuff would already know of this passing, but like Elton John said, "...then again, no" because I just found out tonight. So there it is, if any of you are listening to "Blood, Fire, Death" while at a grim and blasphemous desk job like me but have missed the news. Reviews are
here of the "band" that took off in a grim way from Slayer and Venom and spawned a grip of younger Scandanavian agents like
these and
them. (mild warning: when reading about black metal you will no doubt read about some people with anti-social ideas.)
posted by asparagus_berlin at 12:03 AM PST - 3 comments
June 22
Gmail 4 Troops! The idea of matching U.S. troops in need of a low-cost way to communicate with their friends, family, and other loved ones back home with those who have spare Gmail invitations is the brainchild of Wil Wheaton and Drew Olanoff. Gmail4Troops is their project, as a result of their inspiration. The sponsors here, including Whizardries and ISIPP, are here to help further and support Drew and Wil's project, and are honoured to be able to assist Wil and Drew, and to serve our troops serving overseas, and their loved ones back home, in this manner . posted by konolia at 5:02 PM PST - 41 comments
Not-in-the-NewsFilter "Is Mr. Ashcroft neglecting real threats to the public because of his ideological biases?" Paul Krugman on the case of William Krar, a terrorist the justice department isn't talking about.
posted by jpoulos at 10:36 AM PST - 32 comments
"You people are stupid."
That's what
Dave Chappelle had to say to a crowd of 4000 plus
after he had walked off the stage in Sacramento in protest.
What got the comic so riled up? According to Chappelle, it was audience members who wouldn't "shut up and listen - like you're supposed to." Chappelle then went on to vent his frustration on the success of his
TV Show and the extra
attention it has brought him.
Chappelle's harshest words thou were addressed to those audience members who worship entertainers and athletes.
"Stop listening to celebrities," he said. "They do what they do for money - that's all. I don't even know why you're listening to me. I've done commercials for both Coke and Pepsi. Truth is, I can't even taste the difference, but Pepsi paid me last, so there it is."posted by Dreamghost at 10:06 AM PST - 103 comments
Peter Turnley One of the great photojournalists living today. Peter, (and his twin brother David) have witnessed and documented some of the most important events in recent history.
posted by ig at 10:03 AM PST - 4 comments
After 14 years of highly successful nationwide tours that began the trend of the multi-stage, summer super rock fest,
Lollapalooza 2004 has been cancelled due to low ticket sales. I went to a 1991 show, and attended half a dozen other similar fests in the past ten years, but as I've gotten older I've become a bigger fan of the intimate club vs. the gigantic rock festival. Still, Lollapalooza being cancelled comes as a shock, especially considering the stellar line-up on both stages.
posted by mathowie at 9:15 AM PST - 66 comments
Draft Bruce
"A New York concert promoter has mounted an online campaign to 'draft' Bruce Springsteen to headline a rock 'n roll show to upstage the Republican National Convention on the night it nominates President Bush...." Said promoter Andrew Rasiej, "I've spoken to the manager of REM, to Bon Jovi's people and the rest of the names I've mentioned and they all said, 'if you build it, we will be there.'"
I'm not a big fan, but
this has the potential to be momentous.
posted by mapalm at 8:35 AM PST - 31 comments
Let's say that you have a cell phone, and you need to sound as if you're somewhere else, or you need to get the long-winded person you're talking with off the phone.posted by Witty at 6:53 AM PST - 7 comments
Status anxiety 'Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well-charted. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first.' posted by johnny7 at 3:14 AM PST - 9 comments
June 21
I Like To Watch: A photographic record of cats transfixed; self-referential cats; cat Witnesses of Our Time; cat onlookers; cats gazing stupidly at infinity; lightly hypnotized brainpan-fried cats; feline couch potatoes; cats afflicted by the staring disease; briefly and easily amused cats; UN observer cats; guilty bystander cats. All in all, an extremely important investigation into the perennial question of how to hold a cat's attention. [
Click on "Cats", funnily enough.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 11:43 PM PST - 10 comments
The Pin-up Files :: Hundreds of
classic and
modern drawings of glamorous and beautiful women. Also includes artist bios, notes on many of the images, and a great list of links to other sites. I find it interesting to see how our idea of what is erotic or beautiful have changed (and remained the same) from the '40's to today.
This site contains some material which might be considered of an adult nature. Viewer discretion is advised.posted by anastasiav at 8:56 PM PST - 13 comments
Blocked The New Yorker's Joan Acocella looks at literary history in discussing the dread Writer's Block.
posted by LinusMines at 8:28 PM PST - 4 comments
(FPA: First Post Alert) A century or so ago, there lived a French baker with a most prodigious talent. He was also one of the Moulin Rouge's most successful performers (sorry about that, Nicole Kidman). In 1974, Mel Brooks gave him a sly homage in
Blazing Saddles that blew over the heads of most theatregoers. And now, sadly, his fame and talent has been mostly forgotten to the ages. His name was Joseph Pujol, aka Le Petomane ("The Fartiste"), and in opposition to today's world of increasingly strict decency standards (and promotion of the unmanly
pimpf lifestyle), the legend of this
bellowing* blowhard deserves to live on.
*Warning: Salaciously-questionable graphic at the top of this link's page - click on one of the latter three links if you are of a delicate constitution or in a workish environment.
posted by dakotadusk at 8:11 PM PST - 17 comments
Any experts out there? Have you been asked to do a show, called "The Debate Show" on "an MTV network"? Well look out: IT'S A TRAP! "The Debate Show" is actually a new Comedy Central program called
Crossballs, a "smart, comedic spoof of programs such as Crossfire, Hardball with Chris Matthews, and the entire Fox News Network..."
A second amendment activist emerged from a taping with extremely twisted knickers, whilst a
privacy advocate barely escaped (this account via
bOINGbOING). I'm torn: part of me wants to see the show, and part of me wants to see if enough attention on the web can ruin it...
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 7:20 PM PST - 62 comments
TinyPic.com - "is a very simple, fast, reliable free image host. It is perfect for linking to auctions, message boards, journals, and other websites. There is no registration or login, all you have to do is submit your picture." This looks very useful. I find the
most popular pictures on the site curious though.
posted by CunningLinguist at 3:23 PM PST - 31 comments
MIT's OpenCourseWare project. Course materials for over 700 classes offered at the school, including syllabi, reading lists, related educational links for the self-learner. Get your knowledge on!!
posted by archimago at 11:23 AM PST - 15 comments
A Canadian Chinese Celebrity - (LA Times - reg required) Use
this to get login.
"The lanky Ottawa native, a virtual unknown in Canada, is most renowned for his Chinese TV appearances as the quick-witted foreigner who does amusing skits and the first Westerner to perform the ancient Chinese art of xiangsheng, or comedic dialogue."
posted by blahblah at 11:17 AM PST - 14 comments
On Cognitive Dissonance "As a behavioral psychologist, I have studied people's reactions to contradiction and inconsistency. We are capable of convincing ourselves of something, and the more evidence that builds up to contradict us the more we believe it.
For more than 40 years, social psychologists have studied the phenomenon of "cognitive dissonance" - what happens when people have pieces of information on the same subject that are inconsistent. The presence of contradictions is psychologically unpleasant, and people do whatever it takes to resolve the inconsistency."
Many in the field posit that tension between contradictory thoughts and feelings are what constitutes consciousness. It doesn't seem to me this qualifies as it appears to be highly dysfunctional and not a natural and normal tension. What say you who are more qualified?
posted by nofundy at 6:45 AM PST - 31 comments
June 20
Silly, fun music link. Stuff like this is what I consider the best of the Web, even though it took a
loooong time to download over dial-up, as it's a 34.8 MB mpg. You lucky broadband folks may enjoy it more. (Seen at
Bifurcated Rivets)
posted by Lynsey at 8:52 PM PST - 9 comments
The Pastiche of a Presidency, Imitating a Life, in 957 Pages This is a very bad review of the Clinton book, soon to be released. My question: why has the New York Times placed a book review on its front page? Would they have done this if the book were given a good review? Is the "paper of record" making a clear-cut statement about its feelings about Clinton? Has any other book review made the front page of the NY Times? I for one plan to read the book. I recall that Edmund Wilson once said: always stick to primary sources rather relying upon what some scholar or reviewer has to say about a book.
Finally, Clinton is out of office (alas). How much longer will small and jealous puppies chase after The Big Dog?
posted by Postroad at 3:16 PM PST - 33 comments
Europe versus America (PDF) is a report by a Swedish public policy institute comparing the two economies, concluding that "If the European Union were a state in the USA it would belong to the poorest group of states." The
WSJ has read the report, and highlights that "Most Americans have a standard of living which the majority of Europeans will never come anywhere near [...]. in the U.S. a large 45.9% of the 'poor' own their homes, 72.8% have a car and almost 77% have air conditioning, which remains a luxury in most of Western Europe. The average living space for poor American households is 1,200 square feet. In Europe, the average space for all households, not just the poor, is 1,000 square feet.". With a
looming demographic crisis in Europe to boot, will the EU be able to implement much-needed reforms to save their welfare-state system before it is too late?
posted by dagny at 10:33 AM PST - 118 comments
Riotous Littleport. The deportation of an English village to Australia. BBC article with links to other interesting articles on immigration and emigration on the page.
posted by plep at 7:48 AM PST - 5 comments
I found these images,
one,
two, when I typed in “tent” in the “search all fields” field and selected image as resource type. The site is
OAIster, which is a digital library, which has 3,273,233 records from 301 institutions. Its my new magic eight ball. (
via)
posted by JohnR at 6:56 AM PST - 15 comments
June 19
Bob's Animal Fights • Hornet vs. Polar Bear! Army Ant vs. Panda! Ostrich vs. Gorilla! Bob Robertson, senior lecturer on the behaviour of African mammals, sets out to prove once and for all just what is the
hardest animal on the planet.
posted by dhoyt at 4:10 PM PST - 14 comments
So this is the new European world. OK basically there is a new superpower in the world and damned if I can find anyone in my county seems to know or care..... but we're all about one mans untimely grisly death.
Compare the world to the US I think this may be a good indicator of the rifts that exist between us and the rest of humanity...
posted by Elim at 12:48 PM PST - 54 comments
Juneteenth is today, celebrating the emancipation of all slaves in Texas, on June 19th, 1865, 2 1/2 years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.
With its lighthearted name and tragicomic origins, Juneteenth appeals to many Americans by celebrating the end of slavery without dwelling on its legacy. Juneteenth, celebrators say, is Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday without the grieving.
It's become a
widely celebrated holiday among African-Americans (but not even known by many whites), and Fourteen states have made it official--is it time for it to go national?
Find an event in your state or country
posted by amberglow at 12:23 PM PST - 12 comments
Interesting dissection of US energy/environmental politics and policy along conservative/liberal lines:
"We are, it seems, always in some kind of energy crisis, real or imagined. Some worry that our major sources of energy are about to run out. Some despair that our energy-hungry civilization is destroying the natural world. Some believe our quest for energy is driving us into unnecessary wars and unsavory alliances. And some lament that excessive regulations on energy development are crippling the American way of life. When it comes to energy politics, there is no shortage of alarmism, conservative and liberal alike." The conclusion was sorta weak tho, I thought :D [via
J. Orlin Grabbe - NSFW!]
posted by kliuless at 11:44 AM PST - 1 comments
June 18
Dubya's Dilemma: Daddy Doesn't Support the Iraq War The Iraqi war that has so divided Americans is also causing a rift in the family of President George W. Bush.
The President’s father, George H.W. Bush – 41st President of the United States – disagrees with his son’s decisions in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which is why the former President has not commented in public on the war.
“The President and I discuss the war privately,” the elder Bush said in an interview earlier this year. “That is the way it will remain.”
But sources close to the Bush family say the elder Bush thinks his son has mishandled the war in Iraq.
posted by Postroad at 1:30 PM PST - 27 comments
It's Official - the future sucks. Why has the future been such a let down? It's more 1984 than Barbarella. If we can have ID cards and video surveillance, then why can't we have intergalactic flying cars and hot chicks in skimpy plastic outfits? Clearly I'm not the only one wondering where all the cool stuff went - check out
RetroFutureposted by dodgygeezer at 1:25 PM PST - 14 comments
Mad As Hell
First we had Al Gore letting loose with
both barrels at NYU, and now Bill Moyers drops the bomb on the
poverty gap in this country.
"The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more gizmos than anyone else, more clothes and vacations than anyone else. But they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else."
P.S: Earth to Kerry: mebbe you want to talk to one of these guys, they seem to be on to something. Have one of your speech writers give them a call...posted by piedrasyluz at 10:21 AM PST - 47 comments
The poet of nightfall Twentyfive years ago,
film director
Nicholas Ray died in New York. Like
Jacques Tati and
Samuel Fuller, Ray
did a lot of living before he ever
got around to filmmaking: he was of part of
Frank Lloyd Wright's
Taliesin Fellowship, a devotee of southern
folk music, an avant-garde theatre director. He had made
Rebel Without a Cause and survived
James Dean, and the title of the film seemed to dramatise his terrible, self-destructive battles with Hollywood. His films (
They Live By Night,
In a Lonely Place,
On Dangerous Ground,
Johnny Guitar,
The Savage Innocents,
King of Kings) were in love with
imprisoned life, but the dark edge of mourning was always there, too. He was idolised by the young
Cahiers du
Cinema critics who would become the directors of the New Wave.
François Truffaut once noted: "There are no Ray films that do not have a scene at the
close of day; he is the poet of nightfall, and of course everything is permitted in Hollywood except poetry." Contrasting Ray and Howard Hawks, he added: "But anyone who rejects either should never go to the movies again, never see any more films".
Jean-Luc Godard offered another sweeping panegyric: "There was theatre (
Griffith), poetry (
Murnau), painting (
Rossellini), dance (
Eisenstein), music (
Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And
cinema is Nicholas Ray. These days,
lucky Chicagoans can admire one of Ray's greatest works,
Bitter Victory -- the film about the dangerous games men play with macho self-images...
(more inside)
posted by matteo at 10:06 AM PST - 16 comments
nyctalopia --- an interactive portfolio. Part puzzle, part artwork. I can't tell you what the payoff is because I got stuck on, like, the 5th page.
[note: flash]posted by crunchland at 9:03 AM PST - 7 comments
Register to vote and you can get free beer! What better way to reach that vast pool of unregistered twenty-one year-olds than offering them something they actually want? Brought to you by the Democrats, of course. But not without some controversy (from health experts, not Republicans), even though they only get two 2-ounce glasses.
Any other examples of inventive voter registration drives out there?
posted by tommasz at 5:09 AM PST - 22 comments
Un-Fold. (quicktime clip) City Magazine asked 9 designers, from 9 cities across the world to design a chair in 90 days. Oh, and it had to fit in a FedEx box.
Pics and
more about the designers and the project.
posted by madamjujujive at 3:12 AM PST - 26 comments
This postcard (possible NSFW), likens Israel to a small penis in a speedo. If it's small on your monitor, there is a larger
PDF version. Confused yet? It turns out blueStarPR produces
several other curious pro-Israel postcards, including
this one, featuring Ray Charles (who knew?). I have to give them props for being funny and slick. Some of their material is pretty extreme, though,
such as this one, which likens the Jews to the Navajo, with the punchline: "Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism." Then there's
this one, about Israel's liberal gays-in-the-military policy (I think they actually have to serve, don't they?). An interesting mix of humor, media, and politics. [warning: propaganda]
posted by scarabic at 2:24 AM PST - 14 comments
June 17
Bush Insists on Iraq-Al Qaeda Links Despite Report
Not knowing when to give up and admit that he was wrong, Mr. Bush is digging in his heels and insisting, in spite of the 9/11 commision's findings to the contrary, that Saddam Hussein and Al-Queda are linked.
Said Mr. Bush, "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda is because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."
I guess that'll be good enough for just under half the population.
posted by fenriq at 11:39 PM PST - 90 comments
Findory Bloggery is an an aggregator with a difference--this one (supposedly) learns which types of stories you enjoy reading, automatically suggesets more, and doesn't require a login.
posted by arto at 9:12 PM PST - 8 comments
Do you have an ATI Radeon video card? If so, Adrian's Rojak Pot has a story up that shows you how to convert your Radeon based video card into a Fire GL card, with no physical modification through a process which modifies the video BIOS. The difference primarily between a
normal Radeon video card and a
Fire GL card is (drum roll.....) $120+ dollars, and enhancements designed for CAD and rendering programs. (entire list of certified programs that take advantage of Fire GL are in this
PDF, including Adobe Premier) Video BIOS images are available
here. Of course, modding your video card is
certainly nothing new, as hacking ones
BIOS can be an easy (if not somewhat dangerous) way to get more power from your investment. (Note: Although you can
save a bad flash, the process is somewhat difficult. Attempt mod at your own risk.)
posted by Keyser Soze at 7:28 PM PST - 34 comments
Doctors put spotlight on Plan B pill The American Medical Association voiced its support for over-the-counter sales of morning-after birth control, saying the Food and Drug Administration was wrong to reject such sales and urging doctors to write advance prescriptions.
posted by Postroad at 1:24 PM PST - 9 comments
Prom Story In a series of essays at Slate (
1,
2,
3) a journalist in his mid-20s lightheartedly recounts the experience of escorting a 17-year-old girl to her high-school prom (purely for journalistic purposes, it's worth noting). Posters at Slate's reader discussion forum, in spite of its
supremely cumbersome interface, express their strong (and not always coherent) disapproval, based mostly on the age difference between the author and his prom date. The author of the essays
responds:
"As the film critic Richard Roeper (who is much older, and much more influential than myself) pointed out in Esquire recently, this is indeed a strange cultural moment, one made all the stranger by the fact that we're not supposed to admit [it] actually exists." I'm not the biggest fan of journalists who engage in seemingly socially taboo behavior for the sole purpose of writing an article, but this made for interesting reading nonetheless.
posted by Prospero at 11:52 AM PST - 53 comments
Ray Abeyta.
"At first glance, many of Abeyta's works appear to be Spanish colonial paintings dating from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. However, the artist incorporates present-day imagery with Spanish colonial and indigenous elements." A short bio and history
here. Here's one of my
favorites.
posted by protocool at 10:15 AM PST - 4 comments
Pentagon officials tell NBC News that late last year, at the same time U.S. military police were allegedly abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered that one Iraqi prisoner be held “off the books” —
hidden entirely from the International Red Cross and anyone else — in possible violation of international law.
posted by hipnerd at 9:32 AM PST - 60 comments
splinter --
despite an 11pm curfew imposed by your girlfriend, you have returned home very late from a drink fest with your mates. You've forgotten your keys and you must now gain entrance to your flat and get into bed without upsetting your light sleeping girlfriend. [note: shockwave, alt link <--- nsfw banner ads]posted by crunchland at 8:53 AM PST - 23 comments
Doctors refuse laywers. So your last client managed to get restitution from that quack who left the clamp in her abdomen, just in time to pay for your daughter's delivery. Good luck finding an OB. Or perhaps your husband works for a law firm. Good luck with that nursing job. Maybe you're a neurosurgeon making less take-home than your insurance premiums. What are you going to say to the next ambulance chaser with migrane trouble? The war between the two solitudes could start racking up a real body-count.
posted by bonehead at 8:36 AM PST - 60 comments
Dear Leo, Dear Mohandas "The longer I live -- especially now when I clearly feel the approach of death -- the more I feel moved to express what I feel more strongly than anything else... the doctrine of the law of love unperverted by sophistries. Love... the highest and indeed the only law of life".
The Kingdom of God Is Within You (full text available) is
Leo Tolstoy's tractatus of "
Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion but as a New Theory of Life", a primer of (among other things) the doctrine of
non-violence. Among the many
fans of the 1894 book was an
imprisoned Hindu barrister, a
"half-naked fakir" if you want, a certain
Mohandas K.
Gandhi who was fascinated by
"the independent thinking, profound morality, and the truthfulness" of the
book. So he ended up writing fan letters to the great Russian man: who warmly wrote back to his young Indian "friend and brother". The old wise
Christian anarchist literary
giant and the shy, insecure
young man who sparked a revolution: to paraphrase another wise,
badly-dressed , pacifist old man, "Generations to come, it may be, will scarcely believe that such men ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth."
posted by matteo at 7:48 AM PST - 16 comments
Weapons that can incapacitate crowds of people by sweeping a lightning-like beam of electricity across them are being readied for sale to military and police forces in the US and Europe. From guns that shoot streams of conductive fibers to plasma that will stop a truck, the military and the police are getting
whole new ways to deal with protestors.
posted by dejah420 at 7:10 AM PST - 30 comments
It's time to send the team home: "England has bred a contemporary culture of immoderation at every level, with particular reference to drinking and fighting. The recent
Panorama programme on weekend binge-drinking in city centres provided a wake-up call, as should the novelist Andrew O'Hagan's admirable
essay on current British attitudes to masculinity, reprinted in yesterday's G2." (via The Guardian)
posted by n o i s e s at 6:17 AM PST - 27 comments
June 16
Consider
Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, military defense attorney, now representing
Salim Ahmed Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who admits he was a driver for Osama bin Laden, a prisoner at Guantanamo since 2002. He was transferred to solitary confinement in December in preparation for trial, but no trial date has been set.
He has been told the trial will be fair but that evidence may be withheld from him, and his lawyer must ask the government's permission before revealing any facts of the case. He can seek redress only up the chain of command--in other words, to the people who decided he should be charged in the first place. Swift has filed lawsuit in Federal District Court in Seattle against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush, arguing not only that Hamdan is an innocent civilian, but that the military tribunal President Bush's administration created to try him is unconstitutional. Also, he says, the tribunal rules violate military law and the Geneva Conventions. If the government is right and Hamdan cannot use this legal avenue, "the logical result" is that Hamdan "could serve a potential life sentence without ever being charged with a crime and without being afforded a chance to prove his innocence," legal filings state. (More Within)
posted by y2karl at 11:57 PM PST - 21 comments
Scientists find rodent monogamy gene. Emory researchers say that a single gene can change promiscuous rodents into faithful partners. Insert a certain gene of the monogamous prairie vole into the brain of the normally slutty meadow vole, and suddenly the meadow vole stops going to bars and hitting on other field mice.
Previously, the same scientists'
extensive research uncovered a vole sociability gene. In addition to its implications for
autism and Asperger's Syndrome, the study could spawn the next reality show hit, "Who Wants a Monogamy Implant?" (Would you do it, if you could?)
posted by onlyconnect at 9:15 PM PST - 21 comments
Fried Society is not a new comic strip, nor has it been updated in quite a long time. But it remains the most insightful use of the medium I've ever seen.
posted by effugas at 7:01 PM PST - 8 comments
Virtual Replay - Shockwave recreation of the major incidents in all the Euro 2004 matches. Select from multiple cameras, players' viewpoints or even the point of view of the ball.
note - doesn't seem to work in Firefox.posted by chill at 4:03 PM PST - 13 comments
You Too Can Profit From The War on Terra "You’d think with both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars well under way and with the war on terrorism being more than two years old that the share price of any bullet proof vest manufacturer would be fully valued. Not so!
The company that manufactures the amazing life saving bullet proof vests that Sgt. Travis L. McKinney wrote to from the Iraq front line is not only undervalued but is a screaming takeover candidate that is poised to enjoy an up to 450% increase in its stock price." Operators are standing by...
posted by owillis at 1:43 PM PST - 10 comments
Defining Deviancy Down In 1993, one of our greatest statesmen,
Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan (D- N.Y.) published one of the most important pieces of social theory entitled "
Defining Deviancy Down." Moynihan started from
Emile Durkheim's proposition that there is a limit to the amount of deviant behavior any community can "afford to recognize" (called the "Durkheim Constant"). As the amount of deviancy increases, the community has to adjust its standards so that conduct once thought deviant is no longer deemed so. Consequently, if we are not vigilant about enforcing them, our standards would be constantly devolving in order to normalize rampant deviancy. Shortly after Moynihan's article,
Charles Krauthammer offered his now-famous
response to Moynihan's article in which he argued that the corollary is that society can also "define deviancy up."
Moynihan's theory has been applied to
movies,
courage,
dress codes,
sexual indiscretions,
corporate behavior, and possibly even to
webpages. One might feel compelled to ask, "
Do standards even mean anything?" Today, the debate still rages about where we ought to be
defeatist about the devolution of standards, or whether we can
right the boat by establishing base principles and
fight to raise standards up.
posted by Seth at 1:35 PM PST - 63 comments
Operation Shoe Fly • From Afghanistan, Sgt Hook writes, "So my esteemed friends of the blogosphere...I announce the beginning of Operation Shoe Fly in an effort to shoe the children with no shoes on their feet. If you can collect the shoes, used or new, boys' and girls' (age 14 and under), and send them to me, my crewdogs and I will fly them out to the Afghani kids who so desperately need them."
posted by dhoyt at 12:26 PM PST - 38 comments
Bloomsday Virus Inflicts James Joyce on Mobile Phone Users The first ever computer virus that can infect mobile phones has been discovered, anti-virus software developers said today, rendering many phones virtually useless.
The virus was apparently released in time for the 100th anniversary of the eponymous literary holiday. It infects the Symbian operating system that is used in several makes of mobiles, notably the Nokia brand, and propagates through the new bluetooth wireless technology that is in several new mobile phones.
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 11:56 AM PST - 19 comments
Consciousness Timeline ll : 1970 - Present (summer reading) Here's a wee summer reading list - on human consciousness and more. A few from the list : Stanislav Grof (altered state/transpersonal consciousness), Charles Tart (altered state/consciousness research), Chogyam Trungpa (Buddhism), Jean Houston, James Hillman, Ralph Abraham (Chaos, Gaia, and Eros), Howard Rheingold (being himself), Mihaly Csikszentmihaly (On "flow"), Joanna Macy, John Lilly (Dolphins, LSD, and more!), James Gleick (Chaos Theory), Thomas Berry, Rianne Eisler, Howard Gardner, Stephen Laberge (Lucid dreaming), Sam Keen (on the manufacture of the "enemy"), James Lovelock (Gaia Theory), Eugene Gendlin ("Focusing"), Hazel Henderson (An alternative economics - for human beings), Jeffrey Mishlove ("The Roots of Consciousness"), Michael Harner (leading world authority on Shamanism), Amory Lovins (on alternative energy), Elaine Pagels ("The Gnostic Gospels"), Huston Smith (on World religions), Ilya Prigogine ("dissipative structures")....now, to the beach.
posted by troutfishing at 7:54 AM PST - 23 comments
pitchformula.com This project combines a computer science background and a songwriting hobby with an unhealthy obsession for popular music reviews. In it, I attempt to come up with a new computer-assisted songwriting method which takes music critics' opinions into account. By writing software to statisically analyze the content of several thousand record reviews from the Pitchfork music website (www.pitchforkmedia.com), I generate a set of compositional guidelines based on the musical preferences expressed by the critics. I then use those guidelines to write and record a couple of original songs, discussing in detail the relationships between the songs and the data that I have collected. [via music (for robots)]posted by soundofsuburbia at 3:51 AM PST - 18 comments
June 15
Nice Flash , weird experience. These guys say they will help you get a new life on another continent, in a new city. Take the ”psychometric test”, but somehow you always end up in the Bolivian slum. Of course, it's not what it appears to be. Is it good or bad advertising? It's called
LifeSwitch.
posted by Termite at 10:41 PM PST - 16 comments
Our discussion of the human condition centers around a basic but seldom accepted or understood idea: We are "asleep", compared to what we could be. We are caught in illusions while thinking we are perceiving reality.On
Waking Up by
Charles Tart, who provided my introduction to
Gurdjieff. I am currently reading his
Living The Mindful Life. As a perusal of his site will reveal, he is interested as well in the psychedelic experience, altered states, the paranormal, psi, out-of-body experiences, near death experiences, remote viewing and the whole woo woo schmear. All these are of less interest to me. He does provide a good introduction to Gurdjieff, however. There are more links within.
posted by y2karl at 10:28 PM PST - 19 comments
CleverCactus Share Combine the social networking aspect of Orkut and Friendster with the filesharing aspect of programs like Kazaa and WinMX, and you get
clevercactus share. Get the RIAA off your back by only sharing file folders with people you actually know. Throw in encrypted transfers and platform-independency as a bonus.
General Public release is scheduled for tomorrow, but you can sign up and start today.posted by quasistoic at 6:40 PM PST - 74 comments
One hundred years ago today, 1,358 members of the
Kleindeutschland, the German neighborhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, boarded a chartered ferry named the
General Slocum for a picnic excursion to Long Island. A fire broke out in the ship's hold while it cruised up the East River, the captain ran the vessel aground on the rocky shores of North Brother Island amid the swift currents of
Hell Gate, and when it was all over 1,021 people (mainly women and children) had perished by drowning or from the fire, and it remained the worst single-day New York City disaster until 9/11.
posted by Vidiot at 6:09 PM PST - 16 comments
Underexposed displays an exhaustive
list of little-known rock bands seen live by the proprietor. With photos and a near-functional guestbook. UK-centric.
posted by LionIndex at 5:49 PM PST - 3 comments
Ain't this grand? Pop Goes the Gmail is a program that sits between the http://gmail.com web server and your email client, converting messages from web format into POP3 format that a program such as Outlook Express or Thunderbird can understand.
posted by sunexplodes at 3:00 PM PST - 43 comments
Europe's oldest language? Kalevi Wiik makes the argument that most of Europe may have spoken a proto Finno-Ugric language before the appearance of Indo-European speakers in the region. It's still controversial a few years after the paper was published (and likely always will be).
Modern European derivitives of the language in question are
Hungarian, the Ugric branch's sole representative in Europe, (although it has relatives in central Asia), as well as the Finnic
Finnish,
Estonian,
Karelian (which is considered by some to be a dialect of Finnish and not a separate language),
Izhora and
Veps (which are both disputed in language v. dialect and are nearly dead),
Vod (which is dead), Liv (which is dead and doesn't Google well), and the
Saami languages, which have about 10 dialects and a sufficiently different grammar and lexicon that it gets the "strange cousin" title.
posted by Mayor Curley at 2:57 PM PST - 58 comments
360 Degrees :: Perspectives on the U.S. Criminal Justice System. {
flash |
html }
posted by dobbs at 1:37 PM PST - 4 comments
Finally absinthe is legal in Switzerland. After nearly a century of believing the hype that the green liquor could lead people to madness, the Swiss government now realizes leagalizing "would actually enable authorities to control the production of the alcohol and tax its sales."
posted by tsarfan at 11:12 AM PST - 32 comments
A Living Loan In 1936, a Midwestern farmer named Dan West travelled to Spain to serve as a relief worker in the chaos of the Spanish Civil War. Ladling out rations of milk to hungry children, he realized that he was being forced to decide who would receive the limited rations and who wouldn’t – literally, who would live and who would die. This kind of aid, he knew, would never be enough. He returned to the United States in 1938 and began working to build a better kind of aid.
posted by Irontom at 10:39 AM PST - 8 comments
Secular government,
extremist population? How is this going to play out? Where is America headed? Europe, France in particular, may face secular challenges because of imigration and subculture integration, but what's the excuse on the other side of the Atlantic? Is the US prepared to challenge the Middle East and Africa for the coveted
Most Fundamentalist Population Prize?
posted by ewkpates at 8:58 AM PST - 16 comments
Redemption? At the risk of linking to another Something Awful thread and incurring their wrath, I think it's important to point this out, especially here. In the matter of a few short days, the users over there emptied their paypal accounts to help someone in need.
They raised $12,000 in four days.posted by crunchland at 6:14 AM PST - 10 comments
Yahoo feels the
heat. Yahoo webmail users logged in this morning to find that they suddenly have mailboxes with 100MB capacity, can send emails up to 5MB in size, and have a much nicer-looking interface.
posted by bingo at 6:06 AM PST - 53 comments
A history of presidential campaign commercials, 1952-2000
In 1968, presidential candidate Richard Nixon was sitting in the office of Roger Ailes, a producer on The Mike Douglas Show, before a taping of the program. Nixon remarked, "It's too bad a guy has to rely on a gimmick like television to get elected." Ailes responded, "Television is no gimmick, and nobody will ever be elected to major office again without presenting themselves well on it." This is an exhibition from the
American Museum of the Moving Image which provides the advertising spots of the candidates for US president.
Real/Windows Media Player only, server is slow as molassesposted by tcp at 4:37 AM PST - 6 comments
June 14
netdiver, a new media design portal and digital culture magazine. If you care at all about webdesign, you should see this.
(Though I found it through random surfing, it was also an answer to an old question of mine.)posted by signal at 9:27 PM PST - 8 comments
AP reports that Michael Moore's upcoming film "Fahrenheit 9/11" was given an 'R' rating today by the MPAA. The same MPAA that says
violence is much more acceptable than sex. The same MPAA that has
close ties to the FCC, running roughshod over First Ammendment freedoms. The same MPAA headed by Jack Valenti who played himself in
Freakazoid! a cooky cartoon about superheroes that save Washington D.C. Email him if you disagree at jvalenti@mpaa.org or call the MPAA 818-995-6600 x396.
posted by heyadam at 6:18 PM PST - 84 comments
The 24 Hour Dot Com. Two Swedish students at the 'Wizards of OS' conference in Berlin decided to start a dot com, build it up, and cash in within twenty four hours. Their IRC logs make great reading to see how they bought the PR and 'product' together. The dot com has now 'IPOed' and is
available to buy on eBay.posted by wackybrit at 5:25 PM PST - 8 comments
The Apartheid Wall continues. Haaretz reports that Israel will soon begin construction of the wall around the illegal settlement of
Ariel , deep inside the West Bank, stealing thousands of acres of Palestinian farmland in the process.
posted by Ty Webb at 4:02 PM PST - 65 comments
Secret world of US jails The United States government, in conjunction with key allies, is running an 'invisible' network of prisons and detention centres into which thousands of suspects have disappeared without trace since the 'war on terror' began.
In the past three years, thousands of alleged militants have been transferred around the world by American, Arab and Far Eastern security services, often in secret operations that by-pass extradition laws. The astonishing traffic has seen many, including British citizens, sent from the West to countries where they can be tortured to extract information. Anything learnt is passed on to the US and, in some cases, reaches British intelligence.
posted by Postroad at 2:11 PM PST - 34 comments
The Supreme Court
ruled today that Michael Newdow did not have standing to sue on behalf of his daughter in challenging the recitation of the pledge in a public school classroom in California.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 11:45 AM PST - 81 comments
300 images from 1800 sites. Ro London sifted through icons from Fortune 1000 company sites, major online retailers, well known blogs, top advertising, publishing, and design agencies, technology and software industry leaders, & the very largest online news publisher and created a collection of the most interesting, unique, and beautiful formations of pixels to display.
[via svn]posted by riffola at 11:15 AM PST - 13 comments
Before and After Cosmetic surgery was born 2,500 years ago and came of age in the inferno of the Western Front. The Great War not only gave birth to plastic surgery as a modern medical specialty but also marked a rare moment when the proponents of reconstructive or “serious” surgery and the defenders of cosmetic or “frivolous” surgery declared a truce in what would become a long and morally charged battle.
posted by Irontom at 9:43 AM PST - 3 comments
Alcohol powder is a new product on the US market. It is classified as a flavoring, despite being 60 proof, and doesn't require any kind of license or special handling for purchase. You can apparently use it as a flavoring for many different recipes. I'm not sure if it will actually get you tipsy since the page mentions that it is "denatured". (courtesy of the
Vice Squad).
posted by rks404 at 8:13 AM PST - 19 comments
A worm that builds a home inside the human body, lives there happily until breeding time, then begins a journey to emerge from the skin and find a body of water to lay its eggs in. Although this may very well be a pleasant journey for the worm, for the human, it's an excrutiating one. And so we begin
The Tale of the Guinea Worm.
posted by Space Coyote at 7:43 AM PST - 9 comments
Wonderfully surreal. Five galleries of (literally) fantastic, mostly figurative images by Maggie Taylor. Serendipity has me reading
Perdido Street Station at the moment, and these quaintly eerie portraits seem almost as though they could have been plucked from Miéville's mythic population of bizarre Remades, uncanny constructs and outlandish alien races. Beautiful. (Click the eye.)
posted by taz at 4:40 AM PST - 9 comments
June 13
A
Wolf in Sheep's Clothing? Walgreens, a nationwide drugstore chain, has been unsuccessful in obtaining city approval for a new store in a south Austin neighborhood. Now, they're trying a new approach:
“Along with plan revisions and numerous neighborhood meetings, they made public in February their intention to build a permanent home for a nearby icon, Maria Corbalan's Taco Xpress.”
—Austin American Statesman, 6-13-04
...and they've hired a political consultant, reportedly with green leanings and a history lobbying the city of Austin, to drum up support for this cause (specifically the Maria's Tacos portion of their strategy). Insidious? Benign? Is this a new trend?
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 9:27 PM PST - 35 comments
We have some questions for you The DoD, with the help of some friendly legislatures, is getting an exemption to restrictions put in place after the scandals of the early '70s against intelligence operations inside US borders. PATRIOT Act III?
posted by billsaysthis at 4:23 PM PST - 5 comments
The Industrial Revolution, past and future:
The entire human race is getting rich, at historically unprecedented rates. The economic miracles of East Asia are, of course, atypical in their magnitudes, but economic growth is not the exception in the world today: It is the rule.
Nobel Prize winner
Robert Lucas discusses wealth redistribution and the world economy.
posted by trharlan at 4:11 PM PST - 9 comments
Goodbye, Norma Jean. Norma the elephant was killed by a stroke of lightning. Seventy years earlier, though,
Topsy was electrocuted by Thomas Edison, to "demonstrate" the danger of alternating current. Only a few years later,
Mary was sentenced to death by hanging, to the amusement and edification of onlookers. It's rough being an
elephant in America.posted by SPrintF at 3:22 PM PST - 11 comments
Emotional Labour It's been ages since an article so perfectly distills how work makes me feel and what it's probably doing to me. Claire works in a call centre for Orange mobile phones and on her
"computer screen, a series of little squares indicates calls waiting, and tells her how long she has been on her current call. If a call has been difficult, there are only eight seconds in which to take a deep breath and compose her voice into the expected tone of friendliness. ... What is striking is how on the one hand Claire is dealing with very rigid systems set down by company procedure and the vagaries of the computer system, while on the other she is expected to convey a sense of naturalness and her own personality. "posted by feelinglistless at 12:20 PM PST - 22 comments
Mutilation of victims and Muslim law The ruling by Sheik Omar Abdullah Hassan al-Shehabi specifies two circumstances in which the desecration of an infidel -- a non-Muslim -- is permitted. One is retaliation "when the enemy is disfiguring Muslim corpses or when it otherwise serves the Islamic nation." The other is when mutilation will "terrorize the enemy" or "gladden the heart of a Muslim warrior."posted by swerdloff at 9:27 AM PST - 45 comments
Saddam's daughter: I want to go to Iraq "...My life is a series of collapses," Raghad Saddam Hussein said in an interview in Friday's edition of Sayidaty magazine. "If age is measured by anguish and sadness, I would have been 80 today."...
posted by Postroad at 8:21 AM PST - 6 comments
June 12
A new Samarost-style game brought to us by
Amanita, the same folks who authored
Samarost. You can see the same style, although this one is actually a
band advertisement and is much shorter and easier than Samarost.
posted by Lynsey at 11:33 PM PST - 15 comments
Alexandra Gapihan Fine Art "Born in Cape Verde, raised in both Cote d'Ivoire and France, Alexandra Gapihan is currently studying fine art in Baltimore, Maryland. Inspired by her heritage and guided by a unique vision, Alexandra interprets the struggle, passion, and tradition of three worlds—sharing with us an intimate vision of life's deeper meanings."
posted by quonsar at 6:13 PM PST - 8 comments
Evil Dead: The Musical In making your list of should-be musical theater productions, you've likely considered the
Evil Dead series, right? Fortunately for you, Montreal's
Just for Laughs comedy festival has put together
just that, believe it or not, for this year's festival.
A special run will happen in Toronto on the week of June 22nd before moving to Montreal for a full run.
posted by Evstar at 6:06 PM PST - 10 comments
If you don't like dictionary posts, look away, NOW!
But if you like to play with words, the dictionarians at
Merriam-Webster have announced the winners in their poll for the
Ten Favorite Words for 2004:
defenestration,
serendipity,
onomatopoeia,
discombobulate,
plethora,
callipygian,
juxtapose,
persnickety,
kerfuffle and
flibbertigibbet
Also, a list of runners-up with more of my personal faves: oxymoron, copacetic, curmudgeon, conundrum,
euphemism, superfluous, and of course, Smock! Smock! Smock!
[more inside]
Via vidiot.
posted by wendell at 3:53 PM PST - 41 comments
Martha Ballard's Diary Includes a transcription of the diary (written between 1785-1812), images of the original MS, and a number of contextual documents and photographs, plus many other things. (Those of you who enjoy old diaries should bear in mind that one of the greatest diarists of them all,
Samuel Pepys, has a
blog.)
posted by thomas j wise at 3:45 PM PST - 5 comments
PandaMania! The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities is presenting PandaMania, 150 creatively designed Panda sculptures placed on display throughout Washington DC, May through September 2004. The exhibition will conclude with a public auction with proceeds used for arts grants and arts education programs. Some other public art links (a couple previously mentioned, but worth a second look):
LA,
the Bronx,
Chicago,
NY Public Art fund, and
Keith Haring, worldwide.posted by tetsuo at 1:40 PM PST - 20 comments
Ed's Back! Ed Broadbent was the most successful leader in the history of Canada's
New Democratic Party, leading the NDP to win 43 seats in the 1988 federal election. Now Ed's back, and he's running for under new leader Jack Layton -- with
video! (.rm, .mov, .wmv formats) Canadian hip-hop will never be the same.
Is this the future of Canadian politics?
posted by mrmcsurly at 12:23 PM PST - 15 comments
June 11
Reagan should be on a $3 bill "For the funeral of Ronald Reagan, they took the body from Beverly Hills to Simi Valley, the white Los Angeles suburb, where it stayed for a day and a half or so then they drove it in one of these two hearses to the airport and flew it to Washington and then they had a march and afterwards put the casket into the Capitol for crowds to pass by and now there was to be another march and a religous service and then a drive to the airport, where the casket will be shuttled back to the airport south of Los Angeles and in a hearse to the final ceremony at his library on Friday. That is quite a funeral. They buried George Washingon in half the time.
You keep thinking of Harry Truman, whose code was, "Do not impose." He left an order that there were to be no eulogies at his funeral."
posted by Postroad at 4:03 PM PST - 104 comments
Pray For Reason is a call to Americans of all religions and belief systems who want to see their country's policies at home and abroad based on facts, history, and reasonable thought processes.
My favorite: Dear God (in all your forms),
protect us from those humans among us who wish to direct the destiny of the world for their own gain. Bring them humility, compassion and enlightenment, and allow them to see the interconnection of all beings. (Or bring down upon them a rain of burning rocks, whichever strikes your fancy.)
Amenposted by amberglow at 3:38 PM PST - 10 comments
The story of "St. James Infirmary." You thought it was a piece of old New Orleans? Turns out St. James Hospital was in London (and treated lepers), and the song goes back at least to the 18th century (though it used to be sung to the tune of "Streets of Laredo"). Rob Walker's Letter From New Orleans #13 describes the results of his obsessive researches. If you have more info, he wants to hear from you! (Via
Wordorigins, a site any word lover should know.)
posted by languagehat at 11:50 AM PST - 9 comments
The return of
Ralph Snart...to the
web and to
print! This is Marc Hansen's outrageous story of a mild-mannered alcoholic accountant gone completely mental, featuring
Dr. Goot (evil scientist and nemesis),
Mr. Lizard (thanks to radioactive crickets) and
Holly Hornswoggle (evil lab assistant and love interest). It originally ran from 1986 to 1994 and of course there is always the obligatory
unofficial site.
posted by boost ventilator at 11:31 AM PST - 6 comments
The Emotional Costs of Fidelity I recently came across
Suburban Sex Blog, the blog of a 30-something, married with children, sexually deprived male suburban dweller who posts about the frustrations of having a wife who just doesn't want sex. After reading this entry where his wife tells him to just "
get over it" after he confronts her about the complete lack of sexual contact between the two of them for months, I knew I'd found a blog that I'd be checking in on frequently. Guys blogging about their sex lives is nothing new you might think, but instead of filling their blogs with macho bragging about their conquests, there's a growing
number of good blogs where married guys are opening their hearts about the insecurities, depressions and fear that goes with trying hard to make a marriage work instead of giving into the temptation of cheating.
After going through some of these issues myself while my wife was going through a period of depression I know first hand how an emotionally distant wife can wreak havoc with everything from one's self-esteem, concentration and general mental well being. These blogs put things into a perspective that many men refuse to share, and many women never even suspect.
posted by DragonBoy at 8:45 AM PST - 133 comments
The Two Things. "For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”
posted by majcher at 8:14 AM PST - 23 comments
The Sound and the Fury. 75 years ago,
William Faulkner finished
his fourth novel. It was
published later in the fall (October 7, 1929), and for the first fifteen years sales totaled just over 3,300 copies (an
appendix was
added in 1946, when
most of Faulkner's books were
out of print. Of course, a few years after that he was awarded the
Nobel Prize). It was Faulkner's own favorite novel, primarily, he said, because he considered it his "most splendid failure".
Many critics think it's the finest work of an American Master: the key to Faulkner, wrote
Alfred Kazin (.pdf file), lies not only in the unflinching extremity of his God-blasted characters, but in the odd and unaccountable moments of redemptive human tenderness.
The Internet is very kind to Faulkner's fans: we can check out the
Faulkner home, his
manuscripts and even his pipe, trivia from his
Postmaster's days, we can read examples of his
snarkiness (hurled against Hemingway and
Clark Gable), we can admire the pages of
screenplays from his
Hollywood days. We can go to Faulkner academic conferences, too: in the
USA and
Japan. Want to know what
Bunny Wilson and
Ralph Ellison had to say about Faulkner?
Here.
(more inside, with Conan O'Brien)
posted by matteo at 7:27 AM PST - 30 comments
The UK local elections
have taken place, and for the first time ever forced the ruling Labour government into third position, with
their worst showing in history. Is this just a mid-term blip, or the culmination of the huge Iraq backlash that will topple the government? With Bush in trouble too, will any of the warring leaders be left come November? And can the
Big Intervention website topple Blair himself?
posted by wibbler at 5:22 AM PST - 13 comments
June 10
Today In Alternate History, blogging the what if: "In 1984, John Lennon, an obscure musician who had once been in a band with international sensation Pete Best, writes a tell-all book about Best, detailing their crazy life in Hamburg, Germany, and their rough-and-tumble beginnings in Liverpool, England. The book, I Want To Tell You, is an international best-seller."
posted by feelinglistless at 11:59 PM PST - 11 comments
Four letter words. Mapped alphabetically to three-space, that is (ie. the 3space axes are the second, third, and fourth letters.) Interesting to see which initial letters tend to map to verbs, which to nouns, and suchlike. A nice example of data visualization.
posted by five fresh fish at 8:50 PM PST - 11 comments
Gmail is too Creepy "Dear Gmail user: Due to privacy considerations, we cannot respond unless you resend your email from a different account."
posted by o2b at 1:36 PM PST - 53 comments
Naked body letters. Um... letters made out of naked bodies. Obviously not safe for work, but really more artsy and "nude" than even erotic.
K, T and C are particularly nice, for example.
posted by Shane at 1:20 PM PST - 7 comments
Ray Charles is Dead Very sad to hear. My favorite was always "Georgia on My Mind". What was yours? Any personal memories you associate with his music?
posted by jmevius at 12:46 PM PST - 69 comments
Visualizing power plant impact. A nice use of flash to show the impact of electricity generation around the USA. You can zoom in on individual states and then individual power plants. Or you can view the national impact of several regulatory regimes.
posted by alms at 11:37 AM PST - 6 comments
So, you want some hot mp3's? Well,
this is the place (Russian, but English cookie-set option in top-left). Huge repositories of
legal music, yours to download for only $0.01/Mb! If that's not enough, they'll even serve it up to you in
any format or bitrate you require (MP3, AAC, FLAC, OGG, WMV). Add on to that the fact there's no DRM built into the files downloaded, and the option to pay with Paypal is a nice touch too. So, I ask you, MetaFilter, what
is the catch?
posted by metaxa at 9:23 AM PST - 41 comments
June 9
Factory Tours! Too cool. A site devoted to collecting and sharing publicly available tours of various production facilities: candy, breweries, cars, candles, power plants... Just the idea transports me right back to being a grade-schooler watching films about How Things Are Made. I am so there, dude.
posted by NortonDC at 9:21 PM PST - 15 comments
U.S. bioterrorism research leaps past defensive tactics - Scientists are now able to explore creating genetically engineered superbugs, plus the means to mass-produce and spread them
...
'If any other country set forth a program like this, U.S. intelligence undoubtedly would call it an offensive program,' said Edward Hammond, head of the Sunshine Project, a group in Austin, Texas, that tracks bioweapons and biodefense issues.
posted by eraserhed at 6:13 PM PST - 34 comments
A couple months back, there was
a cool flash-based front-end to Google News that displayed topics and their relative importance based on size.
Now comes another visualization that's a little bit more abstract, but can be used in the same way, to get "a picture" of what the world considered news on any given day (and it has archives). Slick stuff, rollover all the colored boxes to see topics and click to see archived data.
posted by mathowie at 4:28 PM PST - 9 comments
the death of lincoln. Originally from June 1865. "The murder of President Lincoln aroused a feeling of regret deeper than was ever before known in our history. Men and papers who had opposed his policy and vilified him personally, now vied with his adherents and friends in lauding the rare wisdom and goodness which marked his conduct and character." Hmmmm... sounds familiar.
posted by sunexplodes at 3:41 PM PST - 36 comments
"No voting rights for YOU......boy!"- Florida's illegal purges of voter rolls to continue for 3rd national election? Election head resigns. While Florida
refuses to release the "purge lists" to CNN, "The head of Florida's elections division resigned Monday amid reports he was feeling political heat over a push to purge thousands of suspected felons from the state's voter rolls." (Tallahassee Sun-Sentinel) " there has been
little action (and worse, really) on Florida's
agreement to reinstate illegally purged voters to Florida voting rolls that resulted from an NAACP lawsuit over the 2000 election [
"Many voters said their votes didn't count or they were turned away from polls due to mistakes on voter lists, busy telephone lines at election headquarters, punch-card voting machine foul-ups and other problems...Statewide, the largest numbers of voting problems were found in precincts with high proportions of black and elderly voters." The NYT editorially
acknowledged the scandal on February 15, 2004.]
On May 21, 2002, Ashcroft's Justice Department began a suit against Florida counties
"for purging Black voters from voter rolls and other violations of civil rights" Now, four years after the 2000 election, illegally "purged" Florida voters will not be notified until it is
"too late to have their rights restored for this election - or are turned away on Election Day", reports the Tampa Tribune.
"The vast majority of them are black and would be likely to vote Democratic."
It's difficult for convicted felons to
regain the right to vote in Florida, but many on the "purge" lists were not (in 2000) and still are not felons at all. [ note :
Greg Palast - busy of late - must be most credited with blowing this story wide open. See
here here,
here.....]
posted by troutfishing at 2:02 PM PST - 46 comments
Microsoft is giving away a nifty piece of software. It's the beta of Expressions 3 by Creature House, something I used to use back in my Mac days but hadn't heard anything about in a long time. Apparently MS bought Creature House last year. I downloaded it (after filling out a somewhat arduous survey/profile thingy) and think it a nice drawing program. Both Mac and Win versions are posted.
posted by bz at 1:57 PM PST - 30 comments
Bush has a new running mate: Zombie Reagan. From the
FAQ:
What are some other advanatages of adding Zombie Reagan to the ticket? He will demonstrate America's resolve to continue the battle against terrorism. Instead of retreating to an undisclosed location, for instance, Zombie Reagan will be on the front lines, eating illegal combatants.
posted by mathowie at 12:11 PM PST - 42 comments
3 museums, The Science Museum, The National Railway Museum and The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television have collaborated to develop a website.
It is a thing of rare magnificence.
posted by Fat Buddha at 10:18 AM PST - 7 comments
June 8
Tales from the Mental Hospital. "I fought them the best I could, but it was no use at all. I was rather quickly overpowered and dragged inside. A smart person would have just given up at that point, but at the time I was by no means a smart person. I started pulling and struggling to get these guys off me. This only made the situation worse, as I was forced down onto the floor of the wing so the nurse could come and administer the ever popular needle of Ativan into my ass cheek. I continued to try and fight, until a rather large fellow named Abdullah decided the best way to keep me down would to be to use his knee to pin my head to the rug."
posted by UKnowForKids at 10:25 PM PST - 14 comments
Wizard People, Dear Reader is a bizarre re-reading (or, if you're Tim Burton, a re-imagining) of Harry Potter and the philosophers stone (or sorcerers stone for our friends across the pond). Basically you download it, burn it to CD and play it while watching the DVD. A new art form, a childish gimmick or somewhere inbetween?
Everybody will have a copy
soon, so get busy with the download (courtesy of the ever vigilant Talking Tina at Sissyfight.com).
posted by ciderwoman at 4:13 PM PST - 20 comments
Female genital mutilation is a blight on women's lives in many parts of Africa. Today's
NY Times has a
story,
"Genital Cutting Shows Signs of Losing Favor in Africa" by Mark Lacey, that gives grounds for optimism:
Slowly, genital cutting is
losing favor. Parliaments are passing laws forbidding the practice, which causes widespread death and disfigurement. Girls are fleeing their homes to keep their vaginas intact. And the women who have been carrying
out the cutting, and who have been revered by their communities for doing so, are beginning to lay down their knives.
(If you don't want to register with the NYT,
here's
the Mathaba.net copy.)
posted by languagehat at 4:10 PM PST - 52 comments
The CEO with the biggest head in America (no, not Trump, I'm talking literally) is recruiting
secret agents. (You want spies with that?) Or, if you'd like a slightly less creepy way to get a lot of free really junky food, you can write
sauce packet slogans.
*The term "left-of-center" is NOT meant to be political in any way. Mmm-kay.
posted by wendell at 9:45 AM PST - 14 comments
Stalin's Funeral "The crowds were so dense and chaotic outside that some people were trampled underfoot, others rammed against traffic lights, and some others choked to death. It is estimated that 500 people lost their lives while trying to get a glimpse of Stalin's corpse." The string quartet playing at Stalin's graveside wept openly - for Sergei Prokofiev, who died the same
day and hour as Stalin.
Stalin was first interred
next to Lenin, under glass. But
five years later, it was time to physically remove Stalin from a place of honor. "Stalin had been a dictator and a tyrant. Yet he presented himself as the Father of Peoples, a wise leader, and the continuer of Lenin's cause. After his death, people began to acknowledge that he was responsible for the deaths of millions of their own countrymen."
posted by stonerose at 8:26 AM PST - 34 comments
Speaking of Transit Watching. I found it really interesting to see the collection of AP photos about the transit of Venus today. Apparently the compelling story is not so much the science (planets orbit the sun, got it), but the global spectacle. It's a bit of an anomaly of late, but Venus watching seems to be something the whole world peacefully agrees is a good thing. [
View the viewers in
Abu Dhabi,
Azraq,
Bangkok,
Beijing,
Cairo,
Hamburg,
Hong Kong,
Jakarta,
Kuala Lumpur,
Kuwait,
La Linea,
Lebanon,
London,
Madras,
Minsk,
Nairobi,
New Delhi,
New York,
Pakistan
Paris,
Potsdam,
Pretoria,
Rome,
St. Petersburg,
Sydney,
Tehran, and
Yokohama
]
posted by kokogiak at 7:56 AM PST - 7 comments
"End of Oil" rebuts Reagan hagiography ? Amidst the din that is the lengthy US media coverage on Ronald Reagan's demise, the BBC reports on the growing acceptance (with oil industry attendance at a recent
ASPO conference in Berlin) of the Hubbert Curve Theory which predicts we are now close to or at the peak of World Oil production. (also see Metafilter,
October 2002).
Now, the wayback machine : the year is 1980 and the new President, Ronald Reagan, has ordered a solar hot water system, installed by President Carter, torn off the White House roof. Reagan will preceed to gut federal alternative energy subsidies and federal R&D spending on alternative energy technologies to, instead, spend many billions subsidizing oil, coal, and gas production....
Over the next 23 years, the US lost it's role as the World leader in efficiency and alternative energy technologies.posted by troutfishing at 6:24 AM PST - 79 comments
Is Bremer running scared? Chris Neidrich was one of those who died on Sunday when a carefully planned ambush by seven vehicles attacked a Blackwater security convoy headed to Baghdad Airport, killing four and wounding three.
Neidrich also guarded Bremer's motorcade.
The day after the attack on Bremer, the following security bulletin was released:
Effective immediately and until further notice, all CPA ground movement to/from Baghdad International Airport is prohibited. Exceptions for mission critical movements may be requested from Force Protection at DSN.
Is the U.S. military incapable of securing 2 1/2 miles of road from the Green Zone to Baghdad Airport, or has a political decision been made to not guard the road, thereby reducing the risk of military casualties. In other words, is Bremer scared, or is Bush?
posted by insomnia_lj at 3:56 AM PST - 19 comments
June 7
South Park does the "Aristocrats" joke. (WARNING! Windows Media file,
very very not safe for work.) "The Aristocrats" is a long-lived comedians' in-joke--or, rather, an extraordinarily filthy joke that's not really a joke. (Gilbert Gottfried
knocked 'em dead with it shortly after 9/11.) Now it's going public (sort of):
Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza are making a
movie featuring over 100 comedians telling their own versions. The
South Park version linked above is "not even in the top 5 for dirtiest." Yikes!
posted by 88robots at 10:52 PM PST - 54 comments
Voice of a Superpower --Foreign Policy magazine puts together an interview with John & Jane Q. Public on us, the world, terror, and stuff--based on our responses to public-opinion polls from a wide variety of sources.
posted by amberglow at 7:15 PM PST - 5 comments
Rumsfeld fears U.S. losing long-term fight against terror. The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed "zealots and despots" bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.
"It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this," Rumsfeld said at an international security conference.
Who are you and what have you done with Rumsfeld? And Can you do it some more?
via the illustrious oliver willis.
posted by jonmc at 5:26 PM PST - 60 comments
The Suicide’s Soliloquy August 25, 1838, the Sangamo Journal, a Whig newspaper in Springfield, Illinois, carried an unsigned poem, thirty-six lines long. It stands out for two reasons: first, its subject is suicide; second, its author was most likely a twenty-nine-year-old politician and lawyer named
Abraham Lincoln.
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin relates how
historians regard a broken off engagement to Mary Todd as the trigger to
his famous depression, but it was his perceived failure as politician, she maintains, that fed Lincoln's
"black dog". (For his depression,
Lincoln probably took "blue mass", a drug prescribed to treat "hypochondriasis," a vague term that included
melancholia). Lincoln's medical history file is
hereposted by matteo at 11:14 AM PST - 12 comments
Iraqis Paying 5 Cents a Gallon for Gas While Americans are shelling out record prices for fuel, Iraqis pay only about 5 cents a gallon for gasoline — a benefit of hundreds of millions of dollars subsidies bankrolled by American taxpayers
posted by Postroad at 11:04 AM PST - 47 comments
Another member of the Blank Generation lost. Robert Quine was found dead in his apartment in NYC yesterday, he committed suicide. He was sixty years old and had played with
Richard Hell &
the Voidoids,
Lou Reed,
Matthew Sweet,
Lloyd Cole, Materia,
Brian Eno and others, he also cut an LP with Jody Harris (Escape), and one with Fred Maher (Basic). It has been reported that he was suffering depression brought on by the death of his wife Alice last August. Robert also recorded the Velvet Underground on a hand held cassette deck, the highlights were issued last year as
The Quine Tapes a three CD set. Personally, I'll always remember him from the jagged guitar parts from Richard Hell and Voidoids' "Blank Generation", which were the only guitar parts that I ever bothered to learn and faithfully reproduce note for note in the many times my band covered the song. Condolences to those that survive him.
posted by psmealey at 8:57 AM PST - 18 comments
ExBack.com is either a heartless scam or a course in Stalking 101...or both. Brian Caniglia, "Dating Coach and Author," promises to help you get back with your ex, "even if they don't want to talk to you." Right.
posted by serafinapekkala at 8:34 AM PST - 8 comments
The Long Reach of the Wolf Wolves were returned to Yellowstone in 1995 after a 70 year absence (they were destroyed as menaces during the 20's). There are now 16 active packs in the park, and they have triggered a cascade of unanticipated changes in the park's ecosystem.
posted by Irontom at 7:09 AM PST - 24 comments
Keep your hands off! Warner Bros. distributes military-style night vision goggles to cinemas around Britain in order to scotch bootleg copies.
"The staff have all been trained to use the glasses and are patrolling the cinema every 15 to 20 minutes."
The company is determined to fight back after a deluge of poor-quality copies of the first two Harry Potter movies hit the black market.
posted by tcp at 5:30 AM PST - 44 comments
Flashback: Margaret Thatcher writes about Ronald Reagan. President Reagan saw instinctively that pessimism itself was the disease and that the cure for pessimism is optimism. He set about restoring faith in the prospects of the American dream — a dream of boundless opportunity built on enterprise, individual effort, and personal generosity. He infused his own belief in America's economic future in the American people. That was farsighted. It carried America through the difficult early days of the 1981-82 recession, because people are prepared to put up with sacrifices if they know that those sacrifices are the foundations of future prosperity.
posted by David Dark at 3:33 AM PST - 56 comments
Juan Cole remembers Reagan. Cole: I did not say anything yesterday about Ronald Reagan's death. The day a person dies he has a right to be left alone.
But yesterday is now history, and Reagan's legacy should not pass without comment.
posted by skallas at 1:17 AM PST - 25 comments
June 6
Consumers send 'warning sign' to US brands Tom Miller, the managing director of NOP World, said worsening attitudes to the county's products could damage US business.
"It's not like there's a massive boycott," said Miller. "Instead, it seems to be an erosion of support. It's not falling off the face of the earth, but it is clearly a warning sign for brands."posted by Rastafari at 9:19 PM PST - 27 comments
The secret of Harry Houdini's signature "Metamorphosis" escape trick is
out of the bag. Do not visit that page if you don't want to know how he did it.
posted by riffola at 6:46 PM PST - 25 comments
"Open source record labels... believe that creativity requires that musicians reappropriate and reinterpret music and sounds to enable them to create truly innovative music."
Two instances:
Opsound and
Loca Records.
(source:
Wikipedia)
posted by signal at 5:24 PM PST - 3 comments
The failure of biotech. "In June 1996, the University of California, Davis, began an unprecedented effort to help the West African nation of Mali, using the promising and controversial new tool of agricultural biotechnology... Eight years later, no help whatsoever has arrived... In the hopes that inspired the effort - and the missteps that stifled it - lies a drama larger than the sum of its parts, one that shows both the promise and pitfalls of the largest technological leap in American agriculture since the tractor: biotechnology." The start of a five-part series in the
Sacramento Bee: long, but well worth it. (Via
MonkeyFilter.)
posted by languagehat at 5:08 PM PST - 17 comments
The Empty Cradle. Our everyday personal experiences with traffic, sprawl and other irritants of modern life tell us there are too many people in the world and the problem is getting worse. However in truth world population growth
peaked 40 years ago in 1963 and has been trending downward since. Demographers predict that absolute human population will peak at
9 billion by 2070 and then contract. Long before then, many
nations will shrink in absolute size and the
average age of the world's citizens will
shoot up dramatically, including the fastest aging part of the world:
developing countries, where for example Iraq is aging 2.5 times faster than the USA and Mexico 5 times as fast. Having averted the danger of overpopulation, the world now faces the opposite problem: an aging and declining population.
posted by stbalbach at 2:56 PM PST - 28 comments
When drug companies hide data. "The attorney general's civil suit accuses the drug giant GlaxoSmithKline of committing fraud by concealing negative information about Paxil, a drug used to treat depression. The suit says that the company conducted five clinical trials of Paxil in adolescents and children, yet published only one study whose mixed results it deemed positive. The company sat on two major studies for up to four years, although the results of one were divulged by a whistle-blower at a medical conference in 1999 and all of the studies were submitted to the Food and Drug Administration in 2002 when the company sought approval for new uses of Paxil. At that time it became apparent that Paxil was no more effective than a placebo in treating adolescent depression and might even provoke suicidal thoughts.My Dad was on Paxil until 26 days ago..... that's when he shot himself.
posted by Lusy P Hur at 1:48 PM PST - 47 comments
A bushy-tailed morning in the quest for truth : MemeTank and dKosopedia This morning, I wondered - where's the update to (the deceased) Steve Kangas' mighty
liberal FAQ ? "Update?", thought I, "Well,
this attempt ran out of steam" Then..."Ah, a
Wiki !" Then, "well, isn't truth the point ?...shouldn't it be Bipartisan, or multipartisan ?" Daily Kos was just sniffing (May 28th) along that trail, it seemed....partway :
"We hope the dKosopedia will become the progressive-political version of the Wikipedia, a political FAQ so to speak" Would the "Dkosopedia" benefit from a less partisan stance ?
But, the
MemeTank rocks -with it's bestiary of Liberal/Progressive, Right Wing, and "other" memes and the (MemeTank's) "
Meme Development Project....
This section is for people who want to invent new memes and try to encourage professional journalists to start using them."posted by troutfishing at 10:19 AM PST - 10 comments
Cracking Up. "In interviews with a number of White House staffers who were willing to talk off the record, a picture of an administration under siege has emerged, led by a man who declares his decisions to be “God’s will” and then tells aides to “fuck over” anyone they consider to be an opponent of the administration."
posted by alball at 6:46 AM PST - 115 comments
We are minutes away from the 60th anniversary of D-day. The Canadians landed
at Juno beach. (
Some
news)
(
Some history).
The U.S. has a long history of movies commemorating it's role in war, including
D-day as have other smaller countries
like
Australia (WW1).
Canadians have written some good books about our wars like
"And
No Bird Sang" and
"The
Wars" (Amazon links) and the
NFB
and the
CBC have done many a
documentary
but we never seem to have done a great film to commemorate our fighting men.
Hell, even recently deceased President
Reagan remembered
Canada's role in the D-day fighting. Why have we no great film for what our
men did or about that cold blooded murder at
Abbaye
d'Ardenne on D-day?
We can a least remember them via the
Juno
Beach Centre.
posted by arse_hat at 1:04 AM PST - 16 comments
June 5
(linked page needs Java, sorry) Victor Wooten's
Bass and Nature Camp sounds interesting. Bass guitar and music master class in the woods, with animal tracking, meditation, health, and basic wilderness survival lessons.
posted by crunchburger at 5:12 PM PST - 6 comments
Photobloggers discuss subway photography ban to the villiage voice. The proposed ban on photography in NYC subways was previously discussed on metafilter
here In response to the ban, photobloggers plan a protest Sunday, June 6 starting at a kiosk for an MTA-sponsored
exhibit of photographs celebrating the centennial of the subway, many of which ironically were taken during the previous ban.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 4:17 PM PST - 8 comments
I have been in torture photos, too. Gerry Adams speaks out. "News of the ill-treatment of prisoners in Iraq created no great surprise in republican Ireland. We have seen and heard it all before. Some of us have even survived that type of treatment. Suggestions that the brutality in Iraq was meted out by a few miscreants aren't even seriously entertained here. We have seen and heard all that before as well. But our experience is that, while individuals may bring a particular impact to their work, they do so within interrogative practices authorised by their superiors."
posted by sunexplodes at 9:32 AM PST - 9 comments
June 4
How it feels to get shot. [via waxy] Each year, roughly 55,000 Americans survive firearm injuries. "People don't even get knocked backward when they get shot.. Unless hit in the head or the spine, the most common [immediate] reaction to getting shot is no reaction at all."
posted by stbalbach at 10:32 PM PST - 43 comments
CNNNN: Australia's finest news source, with the very best Newstainment around, presented by professional commentators with the aid of the CNNNN Newsband, studio audience and newsbar monkey, and advertisement support from Esteem ("because you need it") and Boggs beer ("the imported beer made right here"). Featuring new reality show Animal Farm, Bush's Slumber Down Under (let's "give him the big Dubya"), extreme news from the Firth Report, CNNNN Pay-Per-News and much, much more. [warning: RealPlayer]
posted by reklaw at 7:57 PM PST - 2 comments
National Review, Pro-Drug? I was searching for information of drug use in Vietnam and during wars in general, when I found this gem. Scroll halfway down to a very interesting pro-drug discussion between the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience and Mr. William Buckley. A little dated (1990), but I never thought I'd come out of an article thinking to myself, "Maybe all drugs should be legal."
posted by geoff. at 6:14 PM PST - 18 comments
Greenfleet is an Australian environmental organisation who aim to help citizens offset their own greenhouse gas emmissions. Their
Tree Totaller (Australian-based, but I'm sure conversions are easy) works out how many trees you need to offset your annual emmissions, based on private car, home energy use and flights. It's a very neat little flash-app, and at the end it lets you chose to "subscribe" to Greenfleet so they'll plant the necessary number of trees for you. I owe 44 trees, for only AU$103 a year.
posted by Jimbob at 4:43 PM PST - 7 comments
Petals Around the Rose This little puzzle took my genius son over an hour to figure out. It took me two seconds. They say the smarter you are the harder it is...shut up.
posted by konolia at 3:29 PM PST - 140 comments
it's the little things i miss. After trying to download a plug in through firefox i had a complete computer crash. not even talking about the years of work, images, music, research-- (still in shock and denial phase)-- ahem-- it's the little things i miss, like my millions of bookmarks, work and pure subversive fun. lots like the baby jesus butt plug are gone forever, but as i got so many from you, lovely, wide ranging, all topic sprawling metafilter, help a recall damaged, traumatized gal out? give me your wacky, absurbed and heartfelt, human endeavor, holistic and achingly funny-- prove that the
monkey represents sharing?
posted by ethylene at 2:25 PM PST - 56 comments
Torture and Truth and
The Logic of Torture--Mark Danner writes about
Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade (The Taguba Report) and
Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the Treatment by the Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and Other Protected Persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq During Arrest, Internment and Interrogation in the former and concludes thusly in the latter:
Behind the exotic brutality so painstakingly recorded in Abu Ghraib, and the multiple tangled plotlines that will be teased out in the coming weeks and months about responsibility, knowledge, and culpability, lies a simple truth, well known but not yet publicly admitted in Washington: that since the attacks of September 11, 2001, officials of the United States, at various locations around the world, from Bagram in Afghanistan to Guantanamo in Cuba to Abu Ghraib in Iraq, have been torturing prisoners. (More Within)posted by y2karl at 12:49 PM PST - 16 comments
Searching for Bobby Fischer the Great Brain. "The Great Brain books are based on the true life stories of John D. and his family, in particular his older brother Tom, who is so clever he always seems to get his way... While we were reading the second in the series,
More Adventures of the Great Brain, we learned about a camping trip that J.D.'s family went on in Beaver Canyon, Utah. We recognized some landmarks described in the book, and decided to go on a field trip to try to find the town of Adenville where the Great Brain lived.
posted by weston at 12:37 PM PST - 37 comments
Ryan is a documentary about Oscar nominee/animator Ryan Larkin, who now panhandles on the streets of Montreal. A preview clip is at the far right of the photo gallery.
posted by disgruntled at 9:45 AM PST - 5 comments
A missed clue. Niaz Khan walked into an F.B.I. office and told them that he had been provided money and training by al-Qaida with the aim of hijacking a plane in the United States. [more inside]
posted by rdr at 3:44 AM PST - 22 comments
June 3
Nuclear codes = 00000000 Remember Johnson's Daisy ad, which led to the question whose finger do you want on the button? Well it seems it was not the President's finger alone. SAC took it upon itself (if this article can be believed) to set all the nuclear launch codes to 00000000 and then to tell all of the launch operators. Any one of those crews could have by themselves started WWIII. Apparently, that whole "nuclear briefcase" trick was nothing but a charade for many years. YIKES! (via Geekpress and Slashdot).
posted by caddis at 8:47 PM PST - 27 comments
Interesting article on the Japanese "social recession" (from the back pages of USA Today) "To an astonishing degree, the sexes are going their opposite ways in Japan. Young women are revolting against the traditional role of obedient housewife, opting instead to live at home and shop and socialize with girlfriends. Startled men are retreating into solitary ways. Check-ins at the country's famed 'love hotels' are even falling. As birthrates slip, a social crisis looms."
posted by Prospero at 11:46 AM PST - 38 comments
Break up stories. NYC blogger
smitten shares her friend's break-up-by-text-message story and invites readers to post their own. Resulting tales of woe (and some that aren't) include: (
1) a "Dear John" e-mail; (
2) he dedicates Robert Palmer's classic "I didn't mean to turn you on" to you; (
3) his mother calls to say happy birthday and btw her son is having an affair; (
4) you find out he has a fiance when she calls to ask who you are; (
5) you break up right after sex while everyone's still naked. Maybe there should be a Strunk and White "Elements of Style" resource for break up protocol.
posted by onlyconnect at 11:13 AM PST - 34 comments
Pardon? Posted on Thursday, May 27, 2004. From the transcript of a phone call made by Kevin B. Wyckoff to his parents, Charles and Martha Wyckoff, a few hours after they had attended his funeral on December 22. Kevin B. Wyckoff is an inmate at the Lexington Correctional Facility in Oklahoma, where he is serving a five-year sentence for offenses including kidnapping and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Originally from Harper's Magazine, March 2004.
posted by sunexplodes at 8:19 AM PST - 18 comments
It's a jackelope! Or maybe an antefeline! Or perhaps a lupursa or... heck, I don't know what this strange creature wandering Bill and Gayle Kurdian's back yard is, and neither does the curator of the North Carolina Zoo.
posted by headspace at 7:56 AM PST - 40 comments
The Copenhagen Consensus is Bjørn Lomborg’s latest agenda-setting
enterprise. Eight top economists (of which three are Nobel laureates) were
asked to rank 32 of the world’s
challenges
using cost-benefit analysis and estimation of importance. The resulting ranking
suggested that the HIV/AIDS epidemic be prioritized first.
As always with Mr. Lomborg (previously discussed
here,
here and
here), the whole enterprise was
surrounded by controversy, and triggered a counter conference,
The
Copenhagen Conscience, and earned him the privilege of getting likened to
Hitler by a high-ranking
UN officialposted by AwkwardPause at 1:53 AM PST - 25 comments
June 2
Amazon's trying out "blogging" in the form of "plogs" or
purchase personalized logs. It appears to be the same content as
your old amazon recommendations, but served up in a blog post-style format, signed by the so very intimate sounding
Amazon NewReleaseBot. I can't wait until a giant like Coca Cola starts "blogs" (beverage logs) and announces new flavors complete with permalinks and weekly archives right on every can.
posted by mathowie at 11:59 PM PST - 27 comments
Is a Market Disaster Immement? The Federal Reserve has confirmed [a] Stock Market Crash forecast by raising the Money Supply (M-3) by crisis proportions, up another 46.8 billion this past week. What awful calamity do they see? Something is up. This is unprecedented, unheard-of pre-catastrophe M-3 expansion. M-3 is up an amount that we've never seen before without a crisis
posted by willnot at 4:54 PM PST - 45 comments
The intern accused of having an affair with Kerry does some investigative reporting of her own.
And so my education had taken me pretty much as far as it could. I started out as an ambitious young woman inspired by politics and the media. I’ve ended up disenchanted with both. If I had been an ambitious young man, this story would not have happened. I’m never going to know exactly what happened, but that matters less to me now. I lost a good friend and learned a few lessons. I am struck by the pitiful state of political reporting, which is dominated by the unholy alliance of opposition research and its latest tool, the Internet. Even the Wall Street Journal’s Website ran Drudge’s story, with only a brief disclaimer that his stories weren’t always accurate.
It was important for me to set the record straight. I don’t mean to dredge up old news by writing this, and I’m not trying to create any now, though I’m not unaware of the irony that I am adding to the ink spilled on this story. I don’t intend to discuss it again in public either. But for me, this painful experience will be hard to forget. It may be only a minor footnote to the campaign, but it has changed my life completely. posted by psmealey at 12:41 PM PST - 36 comments
Son of a Bluesman The legend was that if you touched
Robert Johnson you could feel the
talent running through
him, like heat,
put there by the devil on a dark
Delta crossroad in exchange for his soul. It is why
Claud Johnson's grandparents would not let him out of the house that day in 1937 when Robert Johnson, his father, strolled into the yard. "They told my daddy they didn't want no part of him. They said he was working for the devil. I stood in the door, and he stood on the ground, and that is as close as I ever got to him. He wandered off, and I never saw him again."
Today, in the working-class neighborhood where he raised his children, Claud Johnson, a rich man, lives in a grand house on 47 acres of property. (After Claud won his court battle in 1998 and was recognized as the son of the blues legend, his lawyer handed him a six-figure cashier's check and begged him to quit hauling gravel. Claud kept hauling gravel for five months. "After 29 years, it just gets in your blood").
His victory stands out in the annals of Mississippi probate law. It took 10 years, two trips to the State Supreme Court and two trips to the U.S. Supreme Court. Not to mention, most of the first two or three generations of blues musicians died without securing rights to their composition. Explains Thomas Freeland, a Mississippi attorney and blues historian: when the San Francisco-based band the Grateful Dead
recorded songs by the
North Carolina blues musician
Elizabeth Cotten, Freeland said, "the story is,
[she] bought a dishwasher with the royalties."
(more inside)posted by matteo at 10:02 AM PST - 13 comments
Bono's commencement address to U.Penn. "The world is more malleable than you think and it's waiting for you to hammer it into shape.... That's what this degree of yours is, a blunt instrument. So go forth and build something with it."
[via Ed]posted by rory at 3:54 AM PST - 46 comments
Select your candidate the easy way, Canadians! The lazy should find this a simple way to decide. People living outside of Canada will get an insight on what topics Canadians debate! Fun for all.
posted by shepd at 12:39 AM PST - 54 comments
June 1
Moon Walk 1835 -- Was Neil Armstrong Really The First Man on The Moon? The Europeans did not arrive in American till nearly
the end of six thousand years; this time was necessary for
them to carry their navigation to such perfection, so as to
cross the ocean. The people of the moon know already,
perhaps, how to make little flights in the air, and at this
time may be exercising themselves. When they shall be more able, we may see them.posted by travis at 11:15 PM PST - 8 comments
From the where-are-they-now (-and-I-hope-they-are-doing-ok) file:
Jeremy Botter, our medic
man in Iraq, has just released all his posts from Iraq as
a free downloadable PDF. It contains the story of capturing Saddam, getting bombed at camp as soldiers died, and a whole lot of playstation2.
posted by mathowie at 9:45 PM PST - 4 comments
Enron traders caught, on tape, "talking energy" "They're f------g taking all the money back from you guys?" complains an Enron employee on the tapes. "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?"
"Yeah, grandma Millie, man"
"Yeah, now she wants her f------g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a------ for f------g $250 a megawatt hour."
Wacky Enron boys, what
will they say next.....
posted by troutfishing at 8:50 PM PST - 36 comments
Talk Energy is a filter site for discussion about sustainable energy. Their goal is to get a million people worldwide talking about energy. Members can post to a
main discussion page, create profile pages including their own journals and indentify their connections with other members. The chattiest people get free samples of neat products to
review, closing the communication loop for green companies. They're also giving away $50,000 USD in home energy renovation funds to one lucky person.
Innovators have their
own space to collaborate on ideas and projects. They're even offering
partnerships consisting of private discussion areas for any non profit that wants one.
posted by will at 8:08 PM PST - 7 comments
TCM is playing tribute this month to Archie Leach, better known to the world as
Cary Grant. The range of films, the types of roles, the co-stars. Makes you long for another era of american film-making. Of interest to you
architect types might be
Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House of 1948, with the fabulous
Myrna Loy - whose 1947 film The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer partly occupies that special message place on my answering machine. Grant's films with Hitchcock - especially North by Northwest with its great fake FLW house and fantastic Saul Bass titles - Cukor, and Hawks are well worth searching out. Don't miss his final role - Walk Don't Run - a film set at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and itself a remake of The More the Merrier of 1943. Who said that Hollywood couldn't do remakes?One of the most interesting items to come out of the TCM documentary is Cary's embracing LSD in the early pre-illegal tests of it.
posted by grimley at 6:47 PM PST - 25 comments
This Cosby show is undeserved. "These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids - $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics,''' Cosby said. "They're standing on the corner, and they can't speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk: 'Why you ain't, why you is. '... And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads.''
posted by quibx at 12:35 PM PST - 110 comments
Frogs! Some like to climb, while others prefer the ground. Some may be feeding on fruit flies; look closely to see how they eat. You may even observe some frogs hiding in holes and crevices or behind roots.
See how many you can spot!posted by azul at 12:28 PM PST - 5 comments
Can a Pharmacist Refuse To Dispense Birth Control? "Neil Noesen, a relief pharmacist at the Kmart in Menomonie, Wis., was the only person on duty one day in 2002 when a woman came in to refill her prescription for the contraceptive Loestrin FE. According to a complaint filed by the Wisconsin department of regulation and licensing, Noesen refused because of his religious opposition to birth control. He also declined to transfer the prescription to a nearby pharmacy and refused once again when the woman returned to the store with police...."
posted by Postroad at 9:44 AM PST - 102 comments
