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July 2002 Archives
July 31
No TV ads on 9/11? Media/TV critic Tunku Varadarajan of the Wall Street Journal thinks that the companies that have decided not to advertise on 9/11 is disingenuous and self-serving. Advertisers see it as not trying to be crassly commercial on a day of memorial. Regardless of what you think of the
Dell dude and
the other advertisers taking the day off, should 9/11/02 be commercial-free out of respect for those who lost their lives, or as Mr. Varadarajan suggests, more solemn tribute commercials? As long as advertisers aren't exploiting the tragedy like
Cantor Fitzgerald/e-speed I could care less.
posted by birdherder at 5:21 PM PST - 43 comments
I am teh mor3 l337 than yuo! Becuase I pl4y teh QuAEK 3 on teh my NES! SUCK IT CAMPARZZZZ!
No, really, this outfit's pretty cool. For a little cash, get a
fully functional computar, uh, computer that's wrapped up in an
Amiga 1000,
Atari 2600, or original
NES. Available in Linux or Windows flavors. W3rd. More PCs should be functional, practical expressions of artistry like this. Are you listening, Dell Boy? Gateway Cow?
posted by WolfDaddy at 3:43 PM PST - 12 comments
The End of the Anti-Hit List? "And with that, the Anti-Hit List is retiring, at least for the foreseeable future."
John Sakamoto's Alternate Top 10 (AKA
The Anti-Hit List) was one of the best top ten music lists on the net. It was short and sweet and a great way to discover b-sides, covers and alternate versions of songs from a wide variety of artists. And to think, it all started back on
March 12, 1996.
posted by boost ventilator at 3:18 PM PST - 4 comments
As the biggest, burliest SUV sold in the United States -- nearly 19 feet long and weighing about 7,200 pounds -- the
Excursion was attacked by social critics who accused Ford of environmental irresponsibility. I for one,
will not miss it.
posted by hotdoughnutsnow at 1:04 PM PST - 77 comments
The Woman in Hitler's Bathtub (heres the
story) was none other than
Lee Miller, free spirit, enchantress, Vogue model and
renowned photographer. She was at the center of the Surrealist community, a lover of
Man Ray, a subject of
Picasso paintings, a muse to
Cocteau, a friend to
Agar and Ernst and Duchamp and Miro and, later, wife of the collector and critic
Roland Penrose. Overall, a
fascinating woman.
posted by vacapinta at 12:24 PM PST - 13 comments
Doubtful that the US will strike Iraq by the end of this year, says chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Joseph Biden (D-Delaware). "I'm convinced the administration has not made up their mind yet," Biden said. Should we go to Baghdad and topple Saddam, or not? Is Saddam an immediate threat?
posted by Kevin Sanders at 12:20 PM PST - 19 comments
Look no further than John Fiorillo's
Viewing of Japanese Prints for the definitive online resource on the art. Covering over three centuries of Japanese print making from
Ukiyo-e through
Shin Hanga and
Sôsaku Hanga,
Viewing has detailed histories and critiques of the artists, including such legendary masters as
Katsushika Hokusai. The site also includes a wealth of information on the artform itself, with essays on topics as varied as the
deciphering of prints and the various
forms of poetry found on them, as well as archival notes on
print fading. Have a question for the man himself? Shogun Gallery's
discussion board is one of his favorite haunts, where he helps users with questions ranging from signature identification to the allusions found within a specific print. Given the wealth of information and beauty of the work, this site's a treasure.
posted by J. R. Hughto at 11:03 AM PST - 9 comments
Have you considered adopting? There are thousands of American children in the foster care system who are without permanent families. The White House has decided to
do something about it, including releasing a
public service announcement (requires RealPlayer) starring Bruce Willis to help promote a new website,
AdoptUSKids.org, which allows prospective parents to browse through detailed profiles of available foster children. Hopefully these measures will increase public awareness about the facts regarding adoption and help more children find good homes.
posted by insomnyuk at 10:49 AM PST - 32 comments
Quit for the kitty? Dr. Antony Moore knows smokers often won't quit to protect themselves or their children. But he hopes his new study tying second-hand smoke exposure to the most common kind of feline cancer will persuade some people to kick the habit. (via bko)
Remember folks, every time you light up, God kills a...
posted by adampsyche at 10:27 AM PST - 36 comments
Security warning draws DMCA threat Find a flaw in HP Code? Prepare to go to prison or pay a $50K fine if you tell anyone. Invoking both the controversial
1998 DMCA
and computer crime laws, HP has threatened to sue a team of researchers who
publicized a vulnerability in the company's
Tru64 Unix operating system. So now, it appears that some technology companies see "security debate" on the same level as "piracy" or "copyright controls."
posted by dejah420 at 10:13 AM PST - 10 comments
Special Operations Soldiers return from Afghanistan and kill wives. With all the talk about going to war with Iraq, is it time to take a serious look at what the effects of modern combat have on the soldiers who we send to fight? In the past six weeks four soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg (all recently returned from Afghanistan) killed their wives by shootings (2), strangulation (1) or stabbing (50 times) and burning the body (note - not a special opps soldier for this one). Are these killings just the tip of the iceberg for a future trend, and what can the US military do to make sure that the training they give to soldiers not turn them into domestic terrorists upon their return?
posted by DragonBoy at 9:17 AM PST - 34 comments
"Al Qaeda Scotland" targets the Edinburgh Festival with a leaflet campaign and no-one seems to be doing anything about it. Don't like this man's chances of getting away with it in London or New York.
posted by Summer at 9:08 AM PST - 12 comments
Back from a vigorous and exhausting vacation of petty but life sustaining activities, I find
this overview of our larger reality, without the noisy claptrap of narrowly self serving ideologies, yet worrisome enough to shake the world's boat I'm travelling in with some comfort and some reasonable concern spiced with anxiety. (NYT)
posted by semmi at 7:48 AM PST - 5 comments
Heather Champ is the Queen of the Known Universe. Someone in Brazil really likes some of Heather Champ's photographs. They like them so much that they put them prominently on the top of the main page of their website. But they didn't just put them on the website, they direct linked to them on Heather's server, and this is how Heather found out. So she's done what most webmasters do --
she's replaced the images with new ones. The only thing is, aside from the lack of control one has over access to the original file, isn't direct linking to images (and other content) on servers that aren't your own
the whole effing point of the world wide web?!
posted by crunchland at 7:41 AM PST - 56 comments
White House acts to shed arrogant image. The White House will set up a new office to try to salvage America's plummeting image abroad, it was announced yesterday as an independent taskforce reported that even the country's allies saw the US as "arrogant", "hypocritical" and "self-absorbed".
This autumn, an office of global communications will take over the job of selling "Brand America" from the state department, which the White House believes has failed to do the job effectively.
Propaganda to garner support for an invasion in Iraq, genuine desire to promote the image of the country, or a meaningless facade that's a waste of money? You make the call.
posted by Ufez Jones at 7:39 AM PST - 68 comments
The Emmy nominations are out and the news nominations go to the biggest story, September 11. No surprises there. PBS has 41 nominations and Fox has 0. No surprises there either. Does this say something about the news industry and it's ability to discern serious news from chaff? Is Bill Moyers a national treasure? Do you think perhaps Murdoch should rethink the direction of his media empire?
posted by nofundy at 5:59 AM PST - 19 comments
Don't watch this. Dreamworks is starting up the hype machine for their remake of the Japanese horror film
Ringu (aka The Ring), and it looks like they're taking the A.I. route with it. The movie centers on a mysterious videotape that causes those who watch it to die seven days later.
Websites are popping up all over the place that seem to connect to the 'mystery'. The first link up top goes to a flash teaser of the actual video from the film, but if you're brave, you can
watch the whole thing at iFilm. I'm curious if this will indeed turn out to be an online game like
the Evan Chan mystery from A.I., or just some better-than-average Web marketing for what looks to be a damn creepy movie.
posted by toddshot at 2:54 AM PST - 29 comments
July 30
Mentor of Steve Jobs is dead Kobun Chino Roshi died tragically a few days ago.
There is a mention of Kobun Chino in the book
"Infinite Loop".
According to the book's author, Michael Malone, Steve Jobs
contacted Kobun Chino due to his discomfort at being so immersed in capitalism.
Chino advised that he would find little difference between life in a
monastery and life as an entrepreneur (pg 85, "Infinite Loop").
posted by fletcher at 10:18 PM PST - 10 comments
What happens when you combine plywood, 1200 pounds of concrete, and 500 pounds of steel? How about a MadCat BattleMech at 38% scale of a real one?
These lucky kids get their father to
build them their own BattleMech. posted by TuxHeDoh at 5:35 PM PST - 19 comments
"If we sort out Iraq and Detroit develops a hydrogen engine,"
says a U.S. diplomat, "Saudi Arabia will go back to being a fascinating, benighted part of the world that people don't visit."
posted by artifex at 3:59 PM PST - 19 comments
Psssst...He's a Democrat OK, I know there are scummy politicians of every stripe, but why did this article take 172 words before it identified this loud mouthed, bribe-taking, jail-bound congressman as a Democrat?
posted by nobody_knose at 2:22 PM PST - 57 comments
The Vancouver Company that created
ReBoot will be making a
CGI Spider-Man cartoon for
MTV. Neil Patrick Harris as Spidey, Lisa Loeb as Mary Jane and Ian Ziering as Harry Osborn will inhabit a
"seemingly realistic neon lit city of the immediate future". Will this show set a new standard of production for cartoons based on comics? Will MJ wear glasses?
posted by will at 1:19 PM PST - 23 comments
What you watch can now get you arrested. 115, yes
115 people were jailed for attending a club where there was a live sex show on stage. Of course, the cops watched the show for
three hours before busting them all.
I wonder how many murders were committed that same night in Atlanta..
posted by eas98 at 1:04 PM PST - 37 comments
The upside-down world of the INS. On September 12th Deena Gilbey (the wife of Paul Gilbey, a EuroBroker that died when the towers collapsed) received a letter from the INS stating that she was now subject to arrest and deportation because her husband no longer retained a valid visa (he was dead). And so the
story begins of one Deena Gilbey and of her two children (born in the U.S.) and of the
Visa Express pilot program in Saudia Arabia and the UAE that permitted three of the hijackers to obtain a visa without having to go through a consular official.
posted by ( .)(. ) at 12:40 PM PST - 21 comments
Man hijacks al-Qaida Web site. He offers it to the FBI to use for intelligence gathering, but the FBI stumbles around for a week trying to find somebody with the technical abilities to take advantage of the site. By then, the site's militant Islamic visitors had discovered the ruse. Go figure.
posted by TBoneMcCool at 11:28 AM PST - 24 comments
Get laid off in public. Vanguard Airlines suspends operations; posts its system-wide pink slip on its HOME PAGE for you all to see. "Wages and salaries owed you as of today are "prepetition wages" and likely will not be paid for a matter of months, if not longer.... Any Vanguard stock you hold (including stock purchased in the Employee Stock Purchase Plan) is almost certainly worthless and it is likely you will be entitled to claim a capital loss on such stock this year." But not all is gloomy: the CEO "wish[es] you the best in your future career. You will be in our prayers." Aww, shucks.
posted by PrinceValium at 11:03 AM PST - 29 comments
Weatherpixie is a cute, customizable weather report graphic, populated by a single pixie/stortrooper for attitude. Does anyone know of other similar weather services which offer regularly updated remote weather reports for your page, whether in text or graphic format?
WUnderground's weather stickers, for example.
posted by brownpau at 10:06 AM PST - 21 comments
D-O-S attack disables RIAA site. Do you think someone's trying to make a point about one group lobbying for the power to shut down individual's computers if they SUSPECT them of doing something they don't like, and another group ALREADY having that power?
posted by thunder at 9:55 AM PST - 25 comments
Harry Partch: "
iconoclastic American composer, musical theorist, philosophic instrument builder, raconteur, hobo, artist -- presents unique challenges and aesthetics." A huge influence on the weirder work of
Tom Waits and a great
craftsman, his work is still being performed
today, albeit with some difficulty.
And, of course, there's always
controversy.
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 8:58 AM PST - 4 comments
Play The Britney Spears vs. Shakespeare Game: This is more than a bit of fun from
The Philosopher's Magazine. After answering a few questions on your definition of what makes a great work of art, you get to choose two artists and rate them both. ( Yes, you can even pit Britney against Shakespeare). You'll then get a final score on who is, according to your criteria,
il miglior fabro.
Julien Baggini's essay,
Who's The Greatest?, is well worth reading beforehand. [
I pitted T.S.Eliot against Miles Davis and Miles Davis won hands down...]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 8:48 AM PST - 19 comments
Open source music? Give away the songs without copyright, sell the audio source files dirt cheap and waive the copyright. That's the idea behind
Brad Sucks. Are any bands you know of doing something like this?
posted by Leonard at 7:52 AM PST - 5 comments
America's CEOs aren't greedy enough, argues Elan Journo:
"Far from being too 'greedy,' too many of America's CEOs are not greedy enough. They are pragmatic corner-cutters, who fail to recognize that there is far more wealth to be achieved by a consistent, long-range policy of honesty - by creating a good product and maintaining the company's reputation over many years - than by squeezing out some momentary advantage."posted by dagny at 7:46 AM PST - 33 comments
Bin Laden alive and planning attacks... I don't think so! Bush should publicly issue a direct challenge to Bin Laden. Just go on every TV and proclaim him dead! "We killed him." Period. If Bin Laden is still alive he would have to respond or be considered a joke.
posted by emorawski at 7:29 AM PST - 32 comments
You've got Jail is a light hearted, easy summer reading and informative article which explodes the myth that malfeasing CEOs get sent to "Club Fed", a prison so minimum in insecurity that its really like an enforced vacation in the country rather than the
more typical round of
incarceration. Required reading for the Skillings, Rigas, Taubmens and every college student considering an MBA.
(So is the
MeFi fascination with Prison life an
idle one or am I keeping the wrong company?)
posted by BentPenguin at 7:08 AM PST - 5 comments
Dishonesty in defense of tax cuts. Paul Krugman sets the record straight with refreshing honesty. If only he were in charge of our country's economics... From the CEO White House to our Banana Republics to our largest corporations budgetary dishonesty abounds and we'll eventually have to pay the bill.
posted by nofundy at 5:48 AM PST - 7 comments
It is not a crime to look at bomb-making websites... or so says Lieutenant Jason Ciaschini, police spokesman in Punta Gorda, where a Briton who was using a computer to look at bomb-making websites is now being held at Charlotte County Jail on immigration violations.
Florida police had evacuated the library and arrested him after he looked at bomb-making websites, and found suspicious liquids in his backpack.
"
Looking up stuff on the Internet - everybody has freedom to do that," he also said.
posted by Blake at 4:15 AM PST - 6 comments
Heaven-or-hell argument ends with shotgun slaying An argument over who was going to heaven and who was going to hell ended with one Texas man shooting another to death with a shotgun, police said Monday.
So now we'll never know who was right - or does murder 1 and effective suicide suggest a spell in the "other place"?
posted by zimbobzim at 1:40 AM PST - 18 comments
July 29
So you think you know the blues? Well then take the quiz. This is a 42 question quiz that is a nice mix of easy and not so easy questions. Sample:
Which performer called his or her band "The Honeydrippers"(plural)?
a. Jimmy Reed
b. Joe Liggins
c. Charles Brown
d. Big Mama Thornton
Email addy is requested to process the quiz and results are tabulated immediately.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 10:25 PM PST - 11 comments
So I'm watching Dog eat Dog tonight Mostly for the incredibly tasty
Brooke Burns. And for the contestant to win, one of the losers had to miss the question "Which 32'd president said '
We have nothing to fear but fear itself?'". Now the guy said he was guessing and answered "Roosevelt", but he didn't clarify, Teddy? or FDR? They said he got it right so the contestant lost. Personally I think a retraction or apology is due. posted by bitdamaged at 10:05 PM PST - 20 comments
The History of the Boycott. The very first boycott took place as a part of the resistance in colonial Ireland, against the eponymous
Capt. C.C. Boycott, beginning a long line in the use of personal ethics by aware 'actors' to make economic choices in pursuance of social and/or political ends. As such, this type of action marries the libertarian attitudes of personal responsibility and Adam Smith's 'invisible hand', with the quasi-socialist collective action and 'power to the people'.
[There have been a number of MeFi threads on specific boycotts: however none have dealt with the concept as a whole.]
What's your favourite boycott? (",)
More inside>>>posted by dash_slot- at 7:51 PM PST - 6 comments
Artemis Records waives Internet royalty fees. "Artemis Records [the label for Steve Earle, among others] has agreed to issue licenses to internet radio for one year for the master use of songs by all Artemis recording artists. This announcement was made today by Danny Goldberg, Chairman and CEO, Artemis Records and Daniel Glass, President, Artemis Records. During this period, beginning August 1, 2002, Artemis will waive the royalty payments that would otherwise be due them. "
posted by mikewas at 5:47 PM PST - 17 comments
The Times has a story about a preliminary UN report claiming there could have been a cover-up regarding the "wedding-party airstrike" earlier this month. Reuters/Yahoo also has
the story but it's not getting much coverage in US media.
This blog claims the story is front page material in a few european countries. The US military
denies any cover up.
posted by rhyax at 5:47 PM PST - 13 comments
“There are ethical ways to cut costs, and then there is executive greed. Your comment at the recent shareholder's meeting will be your legacy, like it or not (‘I have to make that much money, I have an expensive wife.’).”
–says a disgruntled EDS employee to his CEO, Dick Brown in an internal company memo.
FuckedCompany rides the corporation bashing bandwagon and
branches out to give you further insight into some of your favorite companies. Subscribers to the mother site get complete access. Non-subscribers can view the free rotating posts.
Described in NYTimes (password).
posted by found missing at 5:27 PM PST - 9 comments
Drop the marker and back away from the CD-RW drive. Add Senator Joe Biden (D - Delware) to the list of politicians eager to put the brakes on technology, kowtow to Hollywood and otherwise stop the Earth from turning:
Biden's new bill would make it a federal felony to try and trick certain types of devices into playing your music or running your computer program. Breaking this law--even if it's to share music by your own garage band--could land you in prison for up to five years. And that's not counting the civil penalties of up to $25,000 per offense.
Biden's bill is on the fast track and not getting the same press attention that
Sen. Holling's CBDTPA bill had earlier this year.
posted by scottandrew at 4:42 PM PST - 28 comments
Real reality tv. OneWorld TV has launched. "The site features short, Video Nation-style contributions from film-makers, both amateur and professional, from around the world. Subjects range from Aids and global warming to the conflict in the Middle East and the plight of child gold miners in Burkina Faso". You can create your own story line, with different perspectives and sources.
posted by papalotl at 4:02 PM PST - 4 comments
"
It is not an overstatement to describe the arrests in Tulia as an atrocity. The entire operation was the work of a single police officer who claimed to have conducted an 18-month undercover operation. The arrests were made solely on the word of this officer, Tom Coleman, a white man with a wretched work history, who routinely referred to black people as "niggers" and who frequently found himself in trouble with the law."
posted by artifex at 1:29 PM PST - 29 comments
Armstrong Among Best Ever. Mike Celizic at
MSNBC states his case for Lance, counteracting an earlier
Ron Borges column questioning if Lance was an athlete at all. I'd like to think Mike went into Ron's office and maybe cuffed him once or twice... Score one for the cyclists (earlier discussion
here).
posted by jalexei at 12:59 PM PST - 13 comments
One Man's Meat Is Another's Person. There are certain words which evoke powerful images and emotions. One such word is
Cannibalism. There is a lot of
myth and truth about this nearly universally distained practice. But it has happened in the
United States and virtually everywhere, at one time or another. If religion were removed from the equation would cannibalism still be wrong? Is the fear of cannibalism learned or is it a self preservation instinct which might get in the way of self preservation when starving to death? Is it the last
taboo?: We eat meat and we are meat.
posted by Mack Twain at 11:24 AM PST - 76 comments
The Dead Zone's Michael Piller is probably one of the most under-appreciated creative talents in Hollywood. One of the most egalitarian executives, he always lets the fans of his shows have a chance to get behind the scenes. (
Acrobat required for download you'll find at link, and more inside)
posted by WolfDaddy at 11:18 AM PST - 17 comments
Comic-Con is coming If you live on the west coast and are even tangentially interested in comics, you should head to San Diego this week. The biggest convention in the country starts Thursday and there WILL be costumed weirdos. (and even worse, web cartoonists)
posted by clango at 7:24 AM PST - 7 comments
July 28
Intimate Media. As computers steadily move into every aspect of personal life, MiME proposes that instead of allowing intimate media to disappear into the computer, artifacts and systems should be designed to better promote human experiences around the collection, storage and sharing of intimate media.
Interesting research by Philips. How will you share your personal artifacts in the future?
posted by hockeyman at 6:56 PM PST - 8 comments
The catch-22 of prison therapy. The biggest criticism of sex offender justice is that imprisonment does not mean rehabilitation. In Massachusetts because of stringent anti-sex offender laws, lawyers are advising their clients to turn down prison therapy because it will be used against them. Even used against them after they're done with their sentence. These are serious violations of double jeopardy and doctor patient privilege.
posted by skallas at 4:38 PM PST - 9 comments
Clinton Fires Back at Republican Accusations "There was corporate malfeasance both before he took office and after. The difference is I actually tried to do something about it and their party stopped it. And one of the people who stopped our attempt to stop Enron accounting was made chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission." He also talks about the Middle East and the related "Blame Clinton" movement. I can hear the teeth gnashing already.
posted by owillis at 4:19 PM PST - 60 comments
"Granted, we're a long way from resembling the kind of authoritarian state Orwell depicted, but some of the similarities are starting to get
a bit eerie."
posted by jjg at 11:54 AM PST - 54 comments
Good! It's "Let's Make Fun Of Wall Street" Day At The Miami Herald! Can it be a coincidence that the two funniest columnists in Miami,
Carl Hiaasen [
Imagine if the entire board of Arthur Andersen were rounded up, blindfolded and flown to Guantánamo Bay for interrogation.] and
Dave Barry [
Wall Street is in trouble, and things are not going to get better until you, the small investor, stop selfishly thinking about yourself all the time.] have chosen this Sunday to raise a few laughs at the expense of poor, old beleaguered Wall Street? Let's hope not.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 3:50 AM PST - 10 comments
July 27
The Kid Stays In The Picture is the recently released documentary based on the auto-biography by Robert Evans. The book, read shamelessly by Evans himself, became an instant classic inside Hollywood. Sure, this site is pure marketing, but the virtual Robert Evans is classic. While Evans may have been an egocentric nut, weren't movies better when colorful personalities like his called the shots, rather than todays CEOs and the yes-people reporting to them?
posted by herc at 3:56 PM PST - 2 comments
I posted about it
before and there was a mixed response. But
Blogathon 2002 actually started this morning at 6 am PST. Bloggers with a gimmick have posted details
here and it's not too late to
sponsor. Are you watching? And what's your favorite blogger doing?
posted by dobbs at 1:08 PM PST - 13 comments
Is Fast Track Back? The House of Representatives voted 215-212 to give "Fast Track" trade agreement authority to W in the "early morning hours." Is this the return to all that 'globalism' stuff that was newsworthy before 9-11?
And, most of all, what is the Senate going to do about it?
Tell him to take a flying leap, or jump on the corporate bandwagon?
posted by kablam at 8:14 AM PST - 7 comments
Is bin Laden dead? Some people in the intelligence community are apparently beginning to think so and are even quietly speaking to reporters about it.
posted by TBoneMcCool at 5:58 AM PST - 77 comments
Generative Art The musician
Jem Finer (formerly of The Pogues) has created a musical composition,
The LongPlayer, that will play, without repetition, for a thousand years (made with
SuperCollider). It is currently playing live at a
London lighthouse. The
Dream House is another example of a generative art piece, in this case one that was set to run for eight years. These are both examples of Generative Art, Art generated by rules.
The GA community
is an active one. Also, see
Virangelic - a random composition generator.
Art generated by Artifical Life swarms.
NewZoid - A false News Headline generator. And,
N-Gen - computer generated Graphic Design.
posted by vacapinta at 2:27 AM PST - 11 comments
9 Beet Stretch - What if you took Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which normally runs about 70 minutes (this is, incidentally, the reason CDs are the length they are), and stretched it out to
24 hours using digital audio processing? The pitch remains intact; only the length is changed. What you end up with can only be called majestic and ethereal, kind of an orchestral version of loveliescrushing. For your convenience, you can listen to the work in one-hour, twenty-minute RealAudio chunks. Hm, I wonder what other music might work well with such radical time-expansion...
(via interconnected)posted by kindall at 1:14 AM PST - 43 comments
July 26
Batman vs. Superman movie rumored to be in the works. (scroll down for the good stuff)
"It is a clash of the titans," Petersen told Daily Variety. "They play off of each other so perfectly. (Superman) is clear, bright, all that is noble and good, and Batman represents the dark, obsessive and vengeful side. They are two sides of the same coin and that is material for great drama."
I'm excited. The Batman vs. Superman comic books were always some of the most fascinating ones I'd ever read.
posted by SilentSalamander at 10:14 PM PST - 31 comments
Ryan Leaf retires from NFL at 26 This article calls him one of the biggest busts in NFL history. When signed in 1998, he said "I'm looking forward to a 15-year career, a couple of trips to the Super Bowl and a parade through downtown San Diego." Instead he got interceptions, fights related and unrelated to his job (for which he blamed everyone but himself), and a lot of disappointed fans. What happened?
posted by GaelFC at 8:01 PM PST - 23 comments
Marketing, meet Marketing. An Austin Powers-themed PowerPoint template (bottom of the page). The mind boggles. Something tells me the pitch for this was made with PowerPoint.
posted by shecky57 at 4:43 PM PST - 6 comments
I am fat and its your fault Has america really degraded into such a victim society that this is a valid reason to sue?
"They said `100 percent beef.' I thought that meant it was good for you," Barber told Newsday. "I thought the food was OK." common people, how about getting a clue with that super size.
posted by vincentmeanie at 4:13 PM PST - 77 comments
A ray of hope: Internet Radio Fairness Act . Disappointed in the Librarian of Congress' recent imposition of high fees on web radio broadcasters and the resultant shutdown of many web radio broadcasts (including KIRO and KMTT in Seattle), U.S. Reps. Jay Inslee [right] (D-WA), George Nethercutt [below] (R-WA), and Rick Boucher (D-VA) introduced new legislation to change existing web radio laws.
posted by y2karl at 12:54 PM PST - 22 comments
House likely to approve homeland security bill that erodes labor protections "But the Senate, which likely takes up the matter next week, so far has pursued a much different course. On Thursday, the Democratic-led Senate Governmental Affairs Committee crafted legislation that would protect all current civil service protections and make it more difficult for the president to move workers out of unions. Bush and other Republicans said the measure would give the president less authority than he has now."
The House seems to be so much more conservative and extremist than the Senate. Heck they're
still working on trying to ban selected types of abortion procedures even when there's a strong chance it won't pass constitutional muster and the Senate isn't likely to support them.
Is it your perception that the House is more conservative? If so, why do you think that's true?
posted by Red58 at 11:23 AM PST - 19 comments
Are English Men The Worst Lovers In The World? Oh yes, absolutely, says Canadian columnist and "acknowledged beauty"
Leah McClaren after her disheartening experience in London. And, truth be told, I've never heard any woman friend, whatever her nationality, actually praise their enthusiasm, sensitivity, or prowess. But are Canadians any better? Are Italians really the best of the latin lovers? Are Frenchmen only at their best when adulterous? Are American liberals too self-conscious?
Stereotypes are fun and, like clichés, methinks there may be something to them...
posted by MiguelCardoso at 11:19 AM PST - 60 comments
Gore questions timing of Iraq concern Is it proper to invade Iraq? This would be an unprecedented move for the US military as Iraq has not attacked the US anyone the US has defense treaties with.
"Republican National Committee spokesman Jim Dyke called Gore's comments "irresponsible."
"This is no time to attack the president or Republicans for their handling of the war for political gain," he said."
Hmmm..so he admits the Iraqi attack IS for partisan political gain, eh? I would have never suspected it.
posted by nofundy at 11:16 AM PST - 27 comments
Wars and propaganda in gaming: you've all heard of
America's Army by now, but what about
Under Ash where you can fight the IDF (no civilians targets here) as a palestinian rambo? Perhaps you'd prefer a more spiritual route, and want to
convert heathens? Or the truly repulsive
Ethnic Cleansing game? Artists are getting into too with the likes of
Cultural Revolution Doom, and some politicians considered
doing it the direct way. Clearly, folks with an agenda have realized that games are a way to get their message out, and maybe noticed the success of
"realistic" but largely apolitical shooters.
Fortunately for gaming peaceniks (kill pixels not people!), the games mostly suck.
posted by malphigian at 10:41 AM PST - 6 comments
Maxim Saves Journalism "The reason the notion of Maxim saving journalism is funny is because everyone buys into this holier-than-thou notion that Maxim, because it dares to package itself in an easily digestible format and obsess over the real concerns of real people instead of operating on a higher theoretical plain, is anti-intellectual, maybe even partly responsible for what’s being called the “dumbing down of America.” That’s the squawking canard I’m going to try to chop the head off of today. I’m going to take you behind the titillating eye candy and show you what Maxim really is, and how it’s part of a growing movement already blowing the cobwebs out of a truly ancient and intransigent industry." (via
medianews)
posted by owillis at 10:01 AM PST - 36 comments
Smoke 'em if you can get 'em? Philip Morris' decision to support FDA regulation of cigarettes has smoke coming from between my ears trying to figure it out. Good, bad, victims of the cigarette tax money-grab?
posted by fncll at 10:01 AM PST - 33 comments
What happens when crude Flash animation meets an absurd sense of humour? The surreal serial
Weird Emma, that's what. If Emma's not up your alley, maybe you'd prefer the static cartoons of
Wulff Morgenthaler.
posted by dobbs at 9:59 AM PST - 1 comments
Has Friday Flash lost its spark? Can't buy a thrill? Then what you need is some
Friday Frank (as in Zappa).
Broadcast by the good folks at radio station WNCW 88.7, out of Spindale, NC, the show is one hour of crispy live cuts from the wealth of boots in circulation. The show starts at 12noon Eastern Time Zone. (Its a Real Audio Stream, here's the
Windows Media feed as well.
posted by BentPenguin at 8:22 AM PST - 2 comments
Bait and Switch? (Quicktime Movie) - One of the Mac Faithful at
fury.com makes a funny (but true) statement about the new
.Mac service charge that Apple recently announced. How far can Apple push their core consumer market with this type of thing? In a
News.com report, Apple predicts losing up to
90% of their existing .Mac users. That's some public relations plan. They are indeed thinking differently.
posted by Argyle at 8:05 AM PST - 27 comments
Great feat, but not a great athlete. Let the Cyclist bashing continue.
As a follow up to the pointless
Bicycles and cars don't mix column, Ron Borges over at
MSNBC wonders if Lance Armstrong is even an athlete.
He says Athletes must do more with their bodies than pump their legs up and down. For his money, being the greatest athlete in the world involves strength, speed, agility, hand-eye coordination, mental toughness and the ability to make your body do things that defy description.
Anyone who has ever been in a bike race (Road or MTN) knows it does indeed take all that and more. Anyone who writes about sports, rather than participating, would of course have no clue it takes more than moving your feet up and down.
posted by Blake at 8:03 AM PST - 48 comments
Challange the Church is a Catholic youth group working to bring a very different set of messages to
world youth day. Even though pilgrims have been encouraged by event organizers to
"ask tough questions", the church establishment seems to have very little patience for the provocative measures of Milton Chan (Catholic), which include passing out condoms to worshipers. Is this an indicator that the Catholic faith is changing to reflect modern realities, or is the Church too rigid and doomed to irrelevancy?
(via existential dishwasher)posted by astirling at 4:30 AM PST - 17 comments
blog.hotornot.com. call it a sophomoric joke. but i'm betting everyone included in the beauty pageant is afraid of a low rating. the only thing about this i find surprising is that
neale hasn't done it already. (via
victor.)
posted by patricking at 2:58 AM PST - 15 comments
Chicago Rat Patrol. No, not
this kind of rat patrol; for this crew,
rat spotting is just a sideline. What these guys skulk in alleys for, though, is
discarded bike parts to kludge, especially in strange and
unexpected proportions. Most of them work. As a result of their experiments, they're attuned to the
kitbashed contraptions used by (mostly) economically marginal folk. Additionally, or superfluously, they're sort of
anarchist anti-corporate critical-mass types. Updated until almost a year ago.
Note: Geocities site. Tread lightly. And stay away from the "Rodeo" link, where there's a quicktime video, until tomorrow.posted by dhartung at 2:08 AM PST - 4 comments
Skin flicks? Close. Ok, not really. Not at all. Someone had a little too much time on their hands and deconstructed a bevy of actors and their skin conditions.
posted by mikhail at 12:05 AM PST - 6 comments
July 25
give jack saturn his old job back! of course one could assault me for posting something found from the infamous
j.ko that has to do with
blogger - and lord knows there's enough of those threads already - but i found this to be too interesting to pass up.
if you weren't already aware, pyra [blogger's parent company/alter ego] is
looking for someone to handle customer support and jack saturn [who had the job before and hasn't had one since] is looking to get his job back. i don't know about anyone else, but i'd like to see the old team have the chance to come back....
posted by boogah at 10:20 PM PST - 62 comments
Ashcroft's lunacy knows no bounds. In the midst of touting TIPS, he continues to defend his proposal "to immediately destroy government records of people who buy guns, disputing a congressional report that said his idea could help criminals get firearms illegally."
posted by donkeyschlong at 2:35 PM PST - 37 comments
"Well then, can we fight the old-fashioned fun war, where you and an enemy choose up sides, and you pick out a place, and you throw bombs at them, and they throw bombs at you for four or five years, and then you decide who wins and who looses, who pays the indemnity, and who does the helping... Can't do that anymore, because nobody's got the gasoline for it. Except the Arabs. And they can't fight a war unless somebody gives them something to put the gasoline in. So we are already in a world without war. The only thing is that what we need in the 21st century is a world that realizes it's a world without war." - Issac Asimov circa 1974 [more]
posted by ZachsMind at 10:58 AM PST - 6 comments
Food For Thought For Serious Foodies And Would-Be Pros: Egullet.com is mainly written
by professional cooks
for professional cooks
but obsessive, perfectionist gastronomes like you and I can join in too. It's delightful and delicious; like a MetaFilter for fussy gluttons, over-curious gourmets and gastro-porn addicts. Today, celebrated chefs
Dan Barber and
Michael Anthony, currently wowing New Yorkers at the
Blue Hill restaurant, will be answering questions from hoi-polloi such as ourselves. My question's already in...[
From the August issue of Food and Wine magazine, where Michael Anthony was interviewed as one of the best new American chefs.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 10:53 AM PST - 12 comments
"EX-DICTATOR BROKE, LIVING WITH MOM": This is not an
Onion link. In the Washington Post, read the story of Valentine Strasser, former Sierra Leonean military dictator, who took power at 25, was ousted four years later, lived in exile in Britain, went to law school on a UN scholarship, dropped out, lived in London under an assumed name until his student visa ran out and he was deported. He's now back home, unemployed, living with his mother.
"The government says Strasser is not entitled to benefits because he took power by force. Strasser concedes the point but says he should be treated better.
Last year, the government called on citizens not to throw stones at the former head of state, who without a car, was wandering around Freetown on foot."
Link via Sasha, in turn via Glenn.posted by monju_bosatsu at 10:49 AM PST - 22 comments
The Cook, the Egg, the server and breakfast. Emeril, eat your heart out. This enterprising chef/computer geek has managed to fry an egg using only the heat sink on his server, some tinfoil and a collection of copper 1p and 2p coins. Sure the egg took 11 minutes too cook, but it did taste "loverly!" Photo's galore!
posted by DragonBoy at 9:02 AM PST - 13 comments
From NPR (The MetaFilter giveth, the MetaFilter taketh away...)
Remembering Tuskegee
600 low-income African-American males, 400 infected with syphilis are monitored for 40 years. Even though a proven cure (penicillin) became available in the 1950s, the study continues until 1972 with participants denied treatment. Perhaps as many as 100 died of syphilis during the study (Allen, 1978).
Additional resources.Thirty years ago is not that long a time.
posted by y2karl at 8:35 AM PST - 27 comments
Brian's been a very naughty boy... i would like to tell you lot about brian the watford fan. i have been going out with him for 3 years and he has been cheating on me and i found out last week that he hase given me hepatitis after his holiday in Greece. i know he spends a lot of time on here. some of you will know him.
[a few 100k of download]
A young woman takes revenge on her ex by reporting his activities on the message board of the football club they both support. Global hilarity ensues.
[Warning: contains crude language, allegations of g0at se.x and terrible spelling]
posted by i_cola at 8:33 AM PST - 13 comments
The Moon Also Rises. Or how about: Ask Not For Whom the Moon Rises...
Both Karl Marx and Mohammed agree, he da' man..err...True Parent! He's serious but I'm laughing. Please God, make him stop!! Falwell and the right wingers actually suck up to this guy!
posted by nofundy at 8:26 AM PST - 9 comments
When Rock bands leave their irony at home (or potentially never had any). An outrageously hilarious collection of musicians taking incredibly self-concious photographs of themselves. All of my fellow musicians on metafilter, you will find this particularly hilarious (and cringe-worthy, as you wait to see if the next pic will be...you!)
posted by glenwood at 7:44 AM PST - 53 comments
A New Way to Catch Hepatitis "Israeli doctors have discovered a gruesome new way to catch hepatitis
and possibly other blood-borne diseases - from the flying bone fragments of suicide bombers." (empahasis added)
posted by Irontom at 6:27 AM PST - 9 comments
The Website of Anti-Porn Guy Welcome to my site! My name is David McNamara and I am 19 years old. I have 2 cats and I am a senior at Royal Palm Beach High School in Royal Palm Beach, Florida......I want to ban pornography with a 10-year prison term for viewing or participating in pornography, as well as oral and anal sex with a 1-5 year prison term for oral sex and a 1-10 year term for anal sex. I also want to ban the manufacture and sale of contraceptives (birth control) with a prison term of up to 1 year in jail and/or a fine of up to $5,000 for violating this ban. None of these laws will be retroactive. Wonder what he's doing now - his site was last updated 12-10-00. Discuss? Dismiss?
posted by Corky at 4:19 AM PST - 52 comments
On media darlings. Do you think this was deliberate or a coincidence? Who do you think are the other darlings of the mainstream media in USA and elsewhere (i.e. if you accept Slate's premise)?
posted by justlooking at 3:01 AM PST - 5 comments
the choice of
dr rowan williams as the new archbishop of canterbury is inspired and his
acceptence speech filled me with hope.
so, i am hoping that the new archbish will bring some sense of moral guidance to the country and remind us of what the church is for. the guardian has an illuminating introduction to the man and his beliefs:
the head of the anglican church in his own words has extracts from his many books.
here is a short quote from
Writing in the Dust: reflections on 11th september:
"Last words. We have had the chance to read the messages sent by passengers on the planes to their spouses and families in the desperate last minutes; and we have seen the spiritual advice apparently given to the terrorists by one of their number, the thoughts that should have been in their minds as they approached their death they had chosen (for themselves and for others).
Something of the chill of 11 September lies in the contrast. The religious words are, in the cold light of day, the words that murderers are saying to themselves to make a martyr's drama out of a crime.
The non-religious words are testimony to what religious language is supposed to be about - the triumph of pointless, gratuitous love, the affirming of faithfulness even when there is nothing to be done or salvaged."
there is a larger extract online:
part one and
part twoposted by quarsan at 1:01 AM PST - 6 comments
July 24
Independent Music Owners in Favor of Internet Radio "This is a list of artists and small record labels who own the rights to some independent music, who have signed up to be counted. This list is to indicate that there are many music owners who view internet radio as desirable, and that they would like to enter into discussions with internet radio to allow their music to be played, and to circumvent the CARP fee . This is not an agreement or release-- it is just a list of interested parties."
posted by lbergstr at 10:46 PM PST - 4 comments
The clash of battling war plans. "Imagine Operation Overlord for D-Day splashed all over the front page of the New York Times. Unthinkable, you say. Then imagine the German high command's plans to repulse the Allied invasion announced by Adolf Hitler himself in a meeting with his closest advisers and then leaked to a London newspaper. Equally unthinkable. But this is how the invasion of Iraq by the United States and Saddam's plans to counterattack have been played out in the New York Times and a Kuwaiti newspaper â?? all before a single shot has been fired." First there was the
parade of leaks from the U.S., even an
influential insider making predictions on TV. Then there was the apparent counterleak of
Saddam's war plan. What is going on? Is the Iraqi leak credible? And if so, what price are American civilians going to pay?
posted by homunculus at 9:01 PM PST - 18 comments
Set your conspiracy phasers to
stun!
"If
this recollection is correct, the entire incident, and its absence from the public record, raises new questions about
the FBI investigation of Moussaoui and even the 1995 destruction of the Federal Building in
Oklahoma City." What's the credibility of Jim Crogan and this publication - it's new to me, but seems to undertake
serious investigative journalism, and publish
'weighty' names.
Now, remind me again,
why doesn't the Bush 'administration' want the air crashes on September 11th 2001 (
uniquely, it appears) to be subject to the
ususal Air Transportation investigations? Aren't there enough unanswered questions?
[NB: Not a troll: it's gentle
ribbing....]
posted by dash_slot- at 7:49 PM PST - 7 comments
WHICH MeFite boldly proclaims ties to big tobacco?
WHO is the person responsible for all the I/P threads?
WHY does everyone talk about pancakes? You won't find the answers to these questions in the
alt.gossip.celebrities Blind Item Archive, but you will find tons of gooey gossipy celebrity muck in which you may luxuriously wallow. It's good for the skin.
posted by WolfDaddy at 4:28 PM PST - 9 comments
Odds of Death Due to Injury, United States, 1998 Your lifetime odds of dying from:
Air and space transport, 1 in 5,092
Poisoning by solids and liquids, 1 in 344
Drowning, 1 in 9,396
Firearms, 1 in 202
Jumping from high places, 1 in 7,402
posted by Blake at 12:46 PM PST - 52 comments
What happens to malls when they die? Usually, not much. Deadmalls.com chronicles dormant shopping centers through stories and pictures. While the East Coast is filled in pretty well, dead malls in the West and South are barely represented. Any malls near you-all that belong on this site? (Bonus for you shopaholics: a
store locator portal!)
posted by me3dia at 11:41 AM PST - 40 comments
Bikes and cars don't mix. At least, according to the author of this column. As someone who cycles for fun and commuting, I was alternately amused by his anti-bike spewing and terrified that he's a case of road rage waiting to happen. Remind me never to bike in Pittsburgh.
posted by RakDaddy at 10:51 AM PST - 77 comments
WIG (Wing In Ground) boats are something like a cross between a hovercraft and an airplane. Taking advantage of a
phenomenon that creates a cushion of air between a wing and the ground, they fly a few feet above the surface of the water, able to reach higher speeds with greater efficiency than traditional boats. The best known WIG boats are the Russian
ekranoplans, and the largest and most famous of these was the KM, better known in the west as the
"Caspian Sea Monster".
posted by Aaaugh! at 10:39 AM PST - 4 comments
American Family Pictures 2002. "2002 was a pretty good year for the family. We made some new friends and re-sparked some old acquaintances. It didn't end on such a good note, but like granddad used to say, 'you can't will em all, even if you are undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.'"
posted by tranquileye at 9:57 AM PST - 4 comments
Could Donald Barthelme Be The Most Amusing American Writer Who Ever Lived? Is wrestling fixed? Do bears shit in the woods? To my mind, he's the best American writer I've ever read. He's probably also the most underrated and least known master of the short story.
Jessamyn's web site is full of his wonderful, endlessly re-readable tales. My favourite is probably
The Funeral Of Edward Lear. But they're all quite dazzlingly funny
and beautiful. [
WARNING: once you've read this small selection you may well find yourself intelligently investing around $100 to get hold of all his books. He died in 1989 but he writes as if he were yet to be born - say tomorrow morning at the latest.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 8:02 AM PST - 27 comments
Sign up to fight the filters. As filters get piled upon filters it gets difficult to tell whether the document requests fail due to technical problems or due to active denial. These folk are developing a distributed application which will use idle cycles to map out the boundaries of filter space and help fight the
cantonization of the Net.
posted by srboisvert at 7:42 AM PST - 4 comments
Sol: A Great Big Ball of Burning....Iron? Well that's what a UMRolla professor thinks anyway -- instead of being mostly hydrogen, that the sun is actually
mostly iron. He's going against all popular belief, and indeed lots of evidence, but his theory states that our sun formed around the iron core of an old supernova.
posted by LuxFX at 6:47 AM PST - 13 comments
July 23
HBO's Real Sports aired the tape of Al Sharpton negotiating a drug deal with an undercover FBI agent. I saw the show tonight, Sharpton was obviously unprepared to respond. He left and then came back after he figured out what he was going to say. Why would he refuse to watch it if he didn't know he was going to watch something as baldly incriminating as the tape? Why are black Americans (me included) allowing people like Sharpton to represent them in the media? As if you didn't need a reason before this to kick Sharpton to the curb. (more inside)
posted by McBain at 9:04 PM PST - 27 comments
Congress is about to consider an entertainment industry proposal that would authorize copyright holders to
disable PCs used for illicit file trading. "The measure would permit copyright holders to perform nearly unchecked electronic hacking if they have a "reasonable basis" to believe that piracy is taking place."
posted by mathowie at 7:00 PM PST - 40 comments
In a word, Google's goal is to do important stuff that matters to a lot of people. In pursuit of that goal, we've developed a set of values that drive our work, including one of our most cherished core values: "Don't be evil." We already know that Google can deliver the goods when it comes to services -- so what do you guys think? Is it possible that a company could actually be worthy of our trust?
posted by tweebiscuit at 5:20 PM PST - 29 comments
Does anyone even care anymore? 14 Dead in
apartment building bombing by missile launched from American-made
Israeli-owned F-16.
Is there any way out of this half-assed occupation, or will both sides continue to blame each other indefinitely while making no progress towards a political solution?
posted by zekinskia at 1:53 PM PST - 157 comments
savemartha.com Everyone who wants to show support for Martha should bake a cake on August 3rd and give it to someone important to them--an old friend, a new neighbor, or someone in need. It's a great way to reach out and show you care, and a great way to spread goodness to both friends and strangers alike--which is what Save Martha! is ultimately all about. posted by machaus at 1:16 PM PST - 20 comments
It's not the economy stupid: Right wing radio pundit Rush pins Apple's market share woes not on a nonexistant economic downturn (pay no attention to the plummeting chart of the DOW and NASDAQ) but instead on Steve Jobs' refusal to renounce his personal politics.
posted by nathan_teske at 12:10 PM PST - 41 comments
Catholic priests are amatuers! Move over you bunch of undisciplined pedophiles and let the Jehovah Witnesses show you how it's done! [Insert your crass joke here] Yet another invaluable link that can never be found in the US. Thanks UK!
posted by nofundy at 12:02 PM PST - 8 comments
Xymphora blog has very interesting 9/11 details The links here suggest that the govt had more information than was initially released, and that only through piecing together various reports (here) do we get a fuller picture which seems at odds with what we had previously been told. Important: this is not a conspiracy theory but rather what seems a clarification.
posted by Postroad at 9:23 AM PST - 25 comments
Big Brother is here! Close to a thousand Brirish schools have collected their student`s fingerprints via library scanners; all this without the consent or knowledge of the parents. Please commend my success in refraining from oversentionalizing the story.
YES!posted by ( .)(. ) at 9:23 AM PST - 15 comments
Non-citizens put on notice to file change in addresses The Ashcroft Gestapo strikes again!
If a permanent resident doesn't file this change-in-address form, they are talking about penalties up to and including
deportion! Note we aren't talking about student visa holders or anything like that .. we are talking about people who have lived in this country for 10 .. 20 .. 30 years or more in many cases.
This country is really turning into a police state the way things are going.
posted by ssheth at 4:34 AM PST - 44 comments
Dear Madam Or Sir: Please Allow Esquire To Write That Difficult Letter For You. Has your company just been downsized? So what do you want to do? Tell them to go screw themselves or prepare to seriously kiss some butt? Go ahead and put
Esquire's Letter Generator to the test, then! Hell, maybe you just want to
resign altogether. [
Choose between triumphant mode and contrite mode]. Or perhaps you need to
apologize for some unforgivable mistake.[
Don't worry: you can make your letter grovelling or optimistic]. Or, hopefully, all you need is to write a simple, yet effective
love letter to your beloved [
Do you prefer something light-hearted or really mushy?]. Whatever your needs, it's fun and, at least to my mind, not entirely devoid of real
savoir-faire. A few corrections here and there and they could almost work in real life...[
One or two harmless pop-ups are part of the deal]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 3:27 AM PST - 8 comments
July 22
The final nail in the coffin we call 'flash-meme'. Ok. Now that we have hit the end of the road on this sort of thing... allow us to catch on fire and then dive off the cliff. 'Kay, thanks, good game.
posted by jcterminal at 11:04 PM PST - 19 comments
Mississippi Judge with Big WorldCom and Repubilican Ties Seemed to be "Asleep at the Switch" "Judge Barbour was an ideal adjudicator for the home team. A resident of nearby Yazoo City, Miss., Barbour and his family reside in a state where WorldCom was the biggest source of local pride and a major supplier of high-paying jobs. Mississippi is undergoing a highly charged tort reform battle, with Republicans squarely on the side of curtailing shareholder lawsuits. A Reagan appointee to the bench in 1983, Barbour is a first cousin and former law partner of Haley Barbour, former Republican National Committee chairman and now a high-powered Washington lobbyist mulling a run for Mississippi governor. "
In a case filled by shareholders in March of this year Judge Barbour dismissed it and said
"The numbers are so large, the stakes were so high, and the fall of the dollar value of WorldCom stock so precipitous, that the reader reacts by thinking that there must have been some corporate misbehavior.... However, after a thorough examination, it becomes apparent that the Complaint is a classic example of 'puzzle pleading,'" or using an onrush of "cross-references and repetition" in lieu of real substance.
Forbes link. usr name=metafilter passwrd=metafilter
posted by bas67 at 9:33 PM PST - 9 comments
The pursuit of permanent military supremacy. "The question facing all Americans, therefore, is whether the expenditure of hundreds (later thousands) of billions of dollars to defend against hypothetical enemies that may not arise until thirty or forty years from now is a sensible precaution, as contended by the President and Defense Secretary, or whether it eventually will undermine US security by siphoning off funds from vital health and educational programs and by creating a global environment of fear and hostility that will produce exactly the opposite of what is intended by all these expenditures."
posted by homunculus at 1:06 PM PST - 37 comments
Today we'll be discussing Jason,
Slashdot's Commander, and
Ernie. Apparently there's going to be a class in blogging taught to journalism grad students. Do you rail against this at all? Is it because most students won't get it and eff up blogging as a whole, or is it because this means that the blog has Sold Out To The Man?
usual "I searched and couldn't find this" disclaimers apply.posted by verso at 12:50 PM PST - 25 comments
How Bush made his millions. A short story by a very conservative journalist. "It is the story of a man who has been rewarded for repeated failures by having money shot at him through a fire hose. It is the story of a man who talks with a straight face about having "earned" a fortune of tens of millions of dollars, without having ever done an honest day's work in his life."
posted by nofundy at 11:11 AM PST - 45 comments
Like, Omigod! Rhino Records' latest orgy of nostalgia,
The '80s Pop Culture Box,
arrived in stores this week. The package boasts seven disks, 142 songs, and an impressive array of extras, including
liner notes by Jamie Malanowski of Spy magazine, so this may be all that you need to become an instant '80s expert. If the
$99.98 sticker price is too steep for you, and you're
already an expert, though, you can try their
contest for a chance to win a set (and a whole bunch more!) Gag me with a spoon!
posted by yhbc at 11:06 AM PST - 47 comments
The Ballad of "John Walker's Blues" Not long after Lindh pleaded guilty to aiding the former Afghan regime, maverick country-blues musician
Steve Earle released a controversial ballad, "John Walker's Blues," that has infuriated the American heartland with lyrics like:
We came to fight the jihad, our hearts were pure and strong/We filled the air with our prayers and we prayed for our martyrdom/Allah has some other plans, a secret not revealed/Now they're dragging me back with my head in the sack to the land of the infidel.posted by laz-e-boy at 10:29 AM PST - 32 comments
With IPod, Who Needs a Turntable? This club in Manhattan lets their patrons play the DJ... but they use iPods for the music. But be forewarned... "Playing of any heavy metal ballads will result in immediate expulsion from the premises."
posted by darian at 10:16 AM PST - 6 comments
Travelling can be expensive, but there are attractions and activities that won't break the bank. The Guardian provided some
suggestions and invited readers to write in with their
own. What are your favourite "budget" thrills from around the world?
posted by jedro at 7:03 AM PST - 15 comments
Do you seem to feel anxious lately? Well
answer a few questions, and Hello Kitty will provide a psychological analysis for you!
This is just a bit scary. The questions are a little bizarre, too.
posted by Su at 1:53 AM PST - 18 comments
Seahawks Stadium was open to the public for the first time this past weekend, with activities on the field for kids, concession stands open with video menus advertising $3.25 hot dogs, and tours of the private box seats and the media room. It's a large stadium with fantastic views of downtown Seattle from some seats and views overlooking Elliot Bay from the western railings, the best hundreds of millions of tax-payer dollars can buy.
On Saturday, the first day of the public open house,
a man jumped to his death from a northwest ramp of the stadium.
posted by dan_of_brainlog at 1:18 AM PST - 15 comments
July 21
Here's a
simple example of a potentially interesting art project. Fill a Usenet post with words specifically chosen to create art based on Google's search word highlighting. Not sure if it's art or spam, but I am waiting for the first ASCII artist to step up to the plate and do something complex like the Mona Lisa.
posted by willnot at 10:34 PM PST - 10 comments
Barry Trotter Michael Gerber's parody of the Harry Potter series. The first chapter is available for download at the site. Well, I think it's funny...
posted by lilboo at 8:59 PM PST - 1 comments
WorldCom goes boom. (NY Times link.) Another big firm with accounting, ahem, "issues" declares bankruptcy. If you're comparing these disasters by size, this one completely blows Enron and Global Crossing out of the water.
posted by mrbula at 7:47 PM PST - 14 comments
Welcome to Amerika? Tom Ridge (with the blessing of George W.) thinks it's time to re-examine the
Posse Comitatus Act with an eye toward giving the Armed Forces more power to act in a domestic law enforcement capacity. After having the National Guard here during the
Winter Olympics, I'm not so keen on seeing armed soldiers patrolling the streets again.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 6:32 PM PST - 25 comments
The Burqa Incident. British freethinker
Sarah Lawrence dresses in a burqa to make a point at the US Libertarian Party Conference, and causes a hotel-wide security alert. Looks like one of those systemic sense-of-humour failures that conspire to spiral out of control these days. But isn't it a
bit worrying when even
Libertarian Party officials start threatening to report their own
conference speakers to the FBI for suspicious dress sense?
posted by ntk at 5:00 PM PST - 17 comments
They're farther along than I thought... You may have heard about Nexia Biotechnology, who have put spider genes into goats to get milk with spider silk protein in it. I thought it was still in the research phase, but Nexia have apparently
gone to market with the stuff. They've signed agreements with several manufacturers to produce spider silk protein-based products such as lightweight ballistic armor (like Kevlar, only lighter and non-toxic to produce) for the armed forces and super-strong sutures and prosthetic ligaments for medical supply companies.
posted by RylandDotNet at 12:45 PM PST - 7 comments
Striptease Nigerian style The women, ranging in age from 30 to 90, used a traditional and powerful shaming gesture to maintain control over the facility -- they threatened to remove their own clothing. All jokes aside, these women may know a thing or two about political startegy ... either that, or they have an excellent PR rep....
posted by poorhouse at 10:15 AM PST - 3 comments
July 20
Case of the Missing Anthrax "The 400 pages of documents, which I've obtained and which were described by The Hartford Courant earlier this year, quote a newly arrived officer named Michael Langford as saying that he found "little or no organization," "little or no accountability," "a very lax and unorganized system" and signs of covert work and cover-ups."
I'm concerned about the stock prices too, but, shouldn't this be on the evening news as well?
NYTimes reg. reqr'd
posted by bas67 at 8:59 PM PST - 21 comments
American Memory is a gateway to rich primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States. The site offers more than 7 million digital items from more than 100 historical collections. [more inside]
posted by acridrabbit at 8:04 PM PST - 7 comments
Alan Lomax , the legendary collector of folk music who was the first to record towering figures like Leadbelly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, died yesterday at a nursing home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 87.
Mr. Lomax was a musicologist, author, disc jockey, singer, photographer, talent scout, filmmaker, concert and recording producer and television host. He did whatever was necessary to preserve traditional music and take it to a wider audience. (NY Times- Registraion Required)
And...
Additionally... And
this.
Also...
posted by y2karl at 11:48 AM PST - 26 comments
"What are we to make of the fact that the Fearless Leader of the Free World, a man brave enough to challenge terrorists in 80 nations to worldwide war, requires a general anesthetic for a routine colonoscopy?"
Spectator magazine columnist David Steinberg
raises a stink. (Found on
Flutterby!)
posted by rcade at 11:12 AM PST - 21 comments
A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin. Ever wonder how the Middle East got so screwed up to start with? It all happened in an eight year time span, 1914-1922. The destruction of the Ottoman Empire laid the foundation for over half of the current conflicts in the world. Coupled with Huntingtons'
Clash of Civilizations, this book does more to explain WTF went wrong.
posted by Mack Twain at 10:56 AM PST - 13 comments
Get a job. This fella argues that to be a good writer (and by extension artist of any kind) you have to be out in the world of work and humdrum living. It's a big mistake, he says, to train writers as "writers" in little hothouse workshops. Exposure to the brawny world of work should be part of a writer's education. This, he suggests, is why so much modern fiction bites the weenie. (It does not, however, explain his own inability to compose a more coherent essay.) In any case, to get a job, or not get a job, THAT is the artist's question...
(from Arts Journal Daily)posted by Faze at 6:05 AM PST - 37 comments
July 19
Seating the duly-elected president in office "President-elect Gore would have to be elected to the house of representatives in 2002, along with enough democrats to give them a majority. they then elect him speaker of the house, at that point, all that's left is the simple matter of a double-assassination, and voila! President Al Gore." It's
that easy. Yikes.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:34 PM PST - 24 comments
A while back, I linked the
world's smallest web site, which was 32px
2.
Of course, someone would take that as some sort of a challenge.
So here's the new smallest site in all its glory:
Dot16.
If you revisit Guimp, you'll note they're not too pleased about this.
posted by Su at 4:17 PM PST - 13 comments
Corn: Planted over patches of American soil totalling twice the size of New York state, corn is our national symbol of agricultural dominance, writes
Botany of Desire author Michael Pollan in the NYTimes. But its proliferation may be to blame for some of the most socially and environmentally damaging
food products of the last 20 years.
Plus, since the market price for corn is $1 less per bushel than its production cost, you're not only paying the price of obesity, malnutrition, and environmental damage, you're paying, well, $1 a bushel in taxpayer-supported government subsidies.
Lunch?posted by PrinceValium at 12:22 PM PST - 27 comments
Abandoned places and abandoned spaces hold all sorts of mystery for the curious sort, and Zone-Tour takes you along to view some fantastic urban wastelands with pictures and movies. Inspired to do some investigation of your own? Then check out
Infiltration -
"The 'Zine about Going Places You're Not Supposed to Go"posted by headspace at 10:41 AM PST - 10 comments
More friday fun games... In the last three days I killed way to much time on this little game. Being that friday seems to be the day to release links to flash stuff and games, I leave you with Marbles.
posted by thebwit at 8:25 AM PST - 13 comments
In honour of it being Friday, and all the mention of rabbits below, I present you with:
The Rabbit. The
sheer volume and effort truly amazes me, and the stories are...interesting. Oh, and let's not forget the
quotes page. The creator of these pages may be a complete genius or totally crazy, but always interesting.
(it's entirely possible that some of this may not be worksafe)posted by ashbury at 7:36 AM PST - 1 comments
It's Not Easy Hating Football... ...or sports in general, when all around you conspire to make you feel an outcast and a, well, spoilsport.
Andrew O'Hagan's account of his own brave - but losing - battle against (for a lot of us) the waste of time and intelligence that are spectator sports is the funniest, most obsessive and refreshingly blinkered anti-football tirade I've ever read.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 7:32 AM PST - 14 comments
Facing Serial Unemployment, it's Time for a New Game Plan. Anyone else frustrated with jobs that disappear out from under them? What is the "new game plan" that works? (Say an unemployed person realizes that these Boston Globe articles disappear just as fast as their jobs do. In solidarity with other unemployed workers, they violate copyright and cache this article on a website. Do we prosecute?)
posted by sheauga at 7:28 AM PST - 4 comments
"Just don't tell my wife" says a guy who shot at a helicopter when it landed in a vacant lot across from his house to pick up a passenger. He was sure they were terrorists. What happened to just calling the police and reporting the helicopter's number?
posted by onhazier at 5:59 AM PST - 27 comments
July 18
'20th Hijacker' Offers Guilty Plea and Cooperation
He is charged with helping plan the September 11 attack. During his third arraignment on amended charges, Zacarias Moussaoui offered to enter a guilty plea.
"For the guilt phase, I'm guilty," he told the judge. "But for the death penalty, we will see." You'd think in this day and age, it'd be hard to pull off a complete surprise. Moussaoui is representing himself.
posted by rschram at 11:46 PM PST - 15 comments
It's Elementary Watson Apple is a big fat thief, and stealing fromthe third-party devleopers it claims to support no less. An Apple faithful, this ticks me off.
Apple stole the look, very features and functions of a shareware app called Watson and put it into Sherlock3.
Watson is the the very product Apple itself named a few months ago as the "Most Innovative Mac OS X Software". So, they know it exists and what it does, and instead off topping it, they took it. Pure and simple.
Did Apple pay for this? Did they buy them out? Did they even ask? Nope.
This is the final word from Watson's developer. Man they sound mad. I know I am. If anyone can get the word out, MF can.
posted by Dome-O-Rama at 10:33 PM PST - 30 comments
God, you our Fadda. You stay in da sky. We like all da peopo know fo shua how you stay, an dat you good an spesho inside, an we like dem give you plenny respeck. We like you come king ova hea now. We like everybody make jalike you like, ova hea inside da world, jalike da angel guys up inside da sky make jalike you like. Give us da food we need fo every day. Let us go, an throw out our shame fo all da kine bad stuff we do to you, jalike us guys let da odda guys go awready, an we no stay huhu wit dem fo all da kine bad stuff dey do to us. No let us get chance fo do bad kine stuff, But take us outa dea, so da Bad Guy no can hurt us. Cuz you our king, you get da real power, an you stay awesome fo eva. Dass it!
Hawaii Creole English, from the
Language Museum, which lists examples of 2000 languges.
posted by swift at 9:13 PM PST - 14 comments
Pregnancy test results are not considered part of confidential medical records. Why, you say? Because the cops wanted to find out who dumped an abandoned baby, and subpoenaed Planned Parenthood's records to see who had gotten positive pregnancy test results recently. The rationale for the judge's ruling? "...the records aren't medical records because the staff who provide pregnancy tests aren't required to be doctors or nurses."
posted by beth at 2:25 PM PST - 14 comments
Mac takes control of Windows! A very useful addition to the Mac desktop for those who administer Windows-based servers. This handy utility allows you to start a Terminal Services session on a Windows machine.
This and a nice
X Windows client lets my little 'ol iBook show the big iron who's the boss!
posted by Chief Typist at 2:08 PM PST - 13 comments
Turning on a single gene makes mouse brains grow huge, and fold in the skull similarly to human brains. Fancy discussing Derida over tea with a rodent? more inside...
posted by daver at 1:38 PM PST - 38 comments
All your jpegs belong to us. Another asshat clown patent claim on well known prior art.
Forgent's "fields of use" for licensing opportunities include digital cameras, digital still image devices, personal digital assistants (PDA's), cellular telephones that download images, browsers, digital camcorders with a still image function, scanners and other devices used to compress, store, manipulate, print or transmit digital images.
posted by scottst at 1:30 PM PST - 36 comments
WHAT IS THE CBDTPA? The law would force all new personal computers and digital home entertainment devices sold in the United States to have government-approved "policeware" built-in.
This policeware would restrict your use of copyrighted material on these devices -- including music files and CD's, video clips, DVD's, e-books, and more.
posted by Niahmas at 10:28 AM PST - 6 comments
Is this astoundingly bad timing or what? Big Brothers/Big Sisters "will require that all 500 of its local affiliates include active homosexuals as volunteers and mentors to children", according to this article.
On a side note, why hasn't this been widely reported?
posted by kablam at 9:33 AM PST - 176 comments
Terrist messages in digital photographs questioned (salon.com). Last week, USA Today raised a stir by
claiming that terrorists were trading hidden messages in images on ebay by the "hundreds" using an uncited source. Salon contacting other sources willing to go on the record found that finding hundreds of hidden messages requires sampling more files than were posted to ebay in the past year. In addition steganography analysis turns up a high rate of false-positivies. Is this a case of seeing what we want to see like the
Bacon-Shakespeare ciphers?
posted by KirkJobSluder at 9:16 AM PST - 18 comments
The
WebPlayer is a Shockwave app that turns a web page into music by converting the HTML into numbers and then running that through formulas developed by
Arnold Schoenberg, who came to be known as the inventory of atonalism in music, and influential in
serialism, which aims to produce music by controlling aspects of the music with number series. Don't expect Beethoven, but sometimes the output is nice.
The Google front page produced a pretty soothing bit of background sound the first time I tried it, but the next, it sounded like several other pages I tried. Some explanation for this and the choice of a single sound can be found in the informative critique.
posted by Su at 7:49 AM PST - 9 comments
AOL Joins the "Irregularity" Parade? "AOL converted legal disputes into ad deals. It negotiated a shift in revenue from one division to another, bolstering its online business. It sold ads on behalf of online auction giant eBay Inc., booking the sale of eBay's ads as AOL's own revenue. AOL bartered ads for computer equipment in a deal with Sun Microsystems Inc. AOL counted stock rights as ad and commerce revenue in a deal with a Las Vegas firm called PurchasePro.com Inc."
posted by owillis at 7:48 AM PST - 17 comments
Follow-up on
this thread: the city council of Moscow, Idaho has
banned bare breasted women in response to three roommates who staged a roving topless car wash to raise rent money. A sign declaring, "Sticks and stones may break my bones but breasts will never hurt me," reflected the view of most residents who packed the council chambers. Two women pulled off their shirts after the council approved the ordinance.
I'm thinking a mass protest is in order - thousands of women should converge on Moscow, Idaho and pull their shirts off. Fight the power!
posted by RylandDotNet at 7:25 AM PST - 82 comments
The U.S. Army pays for lapdances. "In addition to the inappropriate purchases, the GAO said more than 1,200 Army employees wrote bad checks to pay their government credit card bills. Last year alone, that cost taxpayers $3.8 million in higher fees and lost rebates." You mean, the government practices bad accounting?
Ron Paul points out that the Congress commits the
worst accounting fraud of all. But the most important issue of all is, with the government paying for Strip Club tips, gambling, and wine, does this mean that God will no longer bless America?
posted by insomnyuk at 7:25 AM PST - 18 comments
The CEO White House has yet another CEO with credibility problems. On Mr. O'Neill: "Administration officials "need to bring in someone with real credibility, with a good understanding of economics and who understands politics," said Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative political action committee."
posted by nofundy at 5:16 AM PST - 2 comments
Best British Blog. The Guardian has launched a competition to find the best British weblog. Is this another case of the mainstream media not really understanding what blogging is all about?
posted by crayfish at 3:55 AM PST - 18 comments
The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke (FFM) (in the
Tate collection)
Richard Dadd, a Victorian gentleman, a
convicted murderer and patient at the famous Bedlam asylum, spent nine years carefully crafting his masterpiece. He wrote a guidebook for it and insisted that each of the hundred characters in the painting is assigned a special task. What does he mean? Well, Neil Gaiman, among
others,
was inspired by this painting (it influenced the Sandman) and considers it a life-long obsession. He also wrote the introduction to a
new book being published about the painting as a gateway to the supernatural world.
A bit of background: Dadd was a painter of
Victorian Fairy Art. The obsession with fairies was like a fever that overtook the Victorian Mind. Another painter of note was
Richard Doyle, the uncle of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes). A.C. Doyle himself was involved in a fascinating controversy that raged at the time.
the Cottingley fairies, in which two young girls circulated
photos of themselves with fairies. Doyle proclaimed that the photos "
represent either the most elaborate and ingenious hoax ever played upon the public or else they constitute an event in human history which may in the future appear to have been epoch-making in its character" Unfortunately for Doyle, it was the former though the hoax was hardly ingenious, relying on cardboard cutouts and the will to believe.
posted by vacapinta at 12:35 AM PST - 18 comments
July 17
Classic Nick Homepage. The Adventures of Pete and Pete! Welcome Freshman! Mr. Wizard! David the Gnome! Pinwheel! Eureka's Castle! Count Duckula! Danger Mouse! Salute your Shorts! Hey Dude!
They're all here!
Relive your childhood by perusing the pages at the Classic Nick Homepage. Remember whole subplots for shows you can't remember ever having watched! Go that extra step and demand the shows be put back on the air--sign the
Petition! Already 5961 signatures strong, maybe there's a chance that MeFi could help the 80's Nick generation to once again experience the majesty of Artie... "The strongest man
in the world!"
posted by Hammerikaner at 8:29 PM PST - 41 comments
War, Incorporated. "'War is a racket. It always has been....A racket is best described as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.' Words of a radical peacenik? Only if a Marine Corps Major General qualifies as such." Of course, this particular Major General was talking about the
oooold days when corporations had the political pillow-patter
down, and our elected officials were the best money could buy. Not like the way things are today.
And who was this crackpot
Ike, anyway?
posted by fold_and_mutilate at 7:04 PM PST - 18 comments
Meta Incognita Peninsula, Anyone? Play The Place Names Game! If you're toponymy-mad like me, you'll love searching world-wide for strange, rude, funky or absurd place names on the
Getty Thesaurus Of Geographic Names.
Meta produced some fascinating results... [
Australia and Canada have their own excellent search machines and, even though the Getty machine is international, I was sorry not to find equally uncomplicated facilities for the known-to-be-hilarious U.K. or the U.S...].
posted by MiguelCardoso at 4:25 PM PST - 15 comments
Scrutiny on the Bounty. After investigating a single rape charge, a British prosecutor assigned to Pitcairn Island, the refuge of the
Bounty mutineers, began interviewing young girls. Now
20 Pitcairn men may be charged; the island's entire population is just 44. (Most Pitcairners were removed to
Norfolk Island, near Australia, in the 19th century; despite the precarious existence, some descendants returned to Pitcairn and have insisted on remaining.) The primary defense is that the island was following Polynesian customs with an age of consent as young as 12; but many Pitcairners are indistinguishable from European expats, and many spend much of their lives in New Zealand or Australia for school or work. Until recently the island's
inhabitants {official site} mainly worried about
underpopulation and
economic isolation despite touting a communal, agrarian lifestyle.
"It's like a small English town," said a teacher who spent two years there. "But you can't get away."
posted by dhartung at 4:15 PM PST - 4 comments
Tech secrets of Cocaine, Inc. - a look at the IT infrastructures of Colombian drug cartels. "I spent this morning working on the budget," the head of DEA intelligence, Steve Casteel, said recently. "Do you think they have to worry about that? If they want it, they buy it."
posted by edlundart at 3:54 PM PST - 24 comments
Senate Approves Canada Drug Imports! "Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said, "If this proposal becomes law, we are just placing our country in the hands of foreign terrorists who could easily get hold of various prescription drug products and spread desolation and disease."
Really, Senator, what hallucinogen are you on, and which drug company is buying it for you?
I'm sure this bill still faces hurdles, but sounds great to me.
posted by ParisParamus at 2:21 PM PST - 22 comments
Amazon Light is project powered by
amazon's SOAP API, with a design and interaction reminiscent of Google's clean no-frills approach. Pretty cool and clean way to use the site (without annoying popups or gold box offers).
posted by mathowie at 1:56 PM PST - 38 comments
Jeb Bush's daughter fails hair-improvement therapy... errr...I meant fails drug program. Says Jeb:
"There are consequences for every action we take in our lives, and as her parents, Columba and I wish we could have prevented our daughter from making the wrong choices." Now if somebody could just take that kind of responsibility for his brother.
posted by LuxFX at 1:37 PM PST - 28 comments
Operation TIPS is a
national system for reporting suspicious, and potentially terrorist-related activity. The program will involve the millions of American workers who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places.
Here's a
Boston Globe editorial on the program.
posted by Ty Webb at 12:34 PM PST - 33 comments
Is
"T.A.T.U." the next big thing in music? They're a
Russian teen-pop duo with a twist -- lesbianism. They appear on stage in wet t-shirts and white panties. One of their videos shows them wearing schoolgirl outfits and kissing in the rain, while another shows them building a bomb and getting naked on a carousel.
There are reports that the girls aren't actually lesbians, and that it's all just a gimmick to make their Svengali-like producer rich (surprise, surprise). We all know that controversy can sell records. If T.A.T.U. manages to get the right people upset, could they become stars in the U.S.? MTV and MTV2 started playing the video last week...
posted by Reggie452 at 10:53 AM PST - 66 comments
Scam: From 1920 to 1933,
Oscar Merrill Hartzell bilked thousands and thousands of people out of millions and millions of dollars in the midst of a Great Depression. But when he was forcably returned to the US to face trial, the "common man" hailed him as a hero and savior. As the author of (the highly recommended)
Drake's Fortune notes, confidence artists are a perverse echo of the classic Horatio Alger story, as swindlers build wealth by dint of ingenuity, perseverence, and breath-taking
chutzpah. Perhaps that is why we love to
read books and
see films of their exploits. But it doesn't explain why we
keep falling for the same ruses over and over again.
posted by Shadowkeeper at 10:32 AM PST - 6 comments
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People I've been waiting for months to post about this. Since I don't remember anyone posting the NYT article about this and Toby Young amuses me to no end, I thought this article is an ideal introduction. (more inside)
posted by rodz at 9:34 AM PST - 11 comments
White couple gets black twins, sue IVF clinic. Experts say a mistake could have occurred in one of three ways.The wrong sperm could have been used to fertilise the right egg, the right sperm could have been used to fertilise the wrong egg, or the embryo implanted in the woman may have been another couple's altogether. Although it is not clear whether another couple has laid claim to the children, legal experts say the judge will be expected to make a modern-day judgment of Solomon on who should be considered the babies' legal parents. This is unploughed legal ground. Is there a fair way to sort this out?
posted by Mack Twain at 9:10 AM PST - 34 comments
Whomever said big things come in small packages was dead on. While most of mankind focuses on building bigger homes, bigger weapons and bigger boobs
the researchers at Sandia National Laboratories think small. They are working on MEMS, or MicroElectroMechanical Systems.
It's amazing stuff - they're microscopic machines, with gears the size of human blood cells. For size comparisons they used
pictures and videos of a mite
towering over the gears.
posted by hidely at 8:36 AM PST - 14 comments
Paranoia or prudence? You decide. Seven people from an American Trans Air Chicago to New York flight were questioned by police, then released after a fellow passenger alerted flight attendants when she saw them "passing notes and changing seats". The plane was escorted to La Guardia by F-16's. Does this sound like safeguarding our freedom or are we getting rather creepy here?
posted by beth at 7:02 AM PST - 37 comments
Steve Jobs Begins Macworld Keynote. Macworld keynotes often bring with them innovative products that mac fans generally go crazy for. Today's keynote is rumored to bring with it 17" iMacs. On the other hand, it is also
rumored that Apple will discontinue it's free and widely used iTools service in favor of a paid service. Is this right for a company that only has 5% of the market?
posted by devo at 6:09 AM PST - 88 comments
Palestine. Dying to live. One hesitates to open once more the Palestine-Israel can of worms here, but this ad campaign is interesting in & of itself and because of the response itâ??s
getting (on
little green footballs, where I found it). The campaign itself is pretty well-done (i.e., the posters seem professional), and probably doesn’t mesh with most people’s idea of Pro-Palestinian propaganda in it’s sober understatement and use of (predominantly) Western icons to make it’s point. Also, the characterization that the campaign is designed to glorify martyrdom seems to be a projection by the viewer—I don’t get that at all from the posters themselves or the site (admittedly, some racist comments have made their way into the Dying2Live feedback page, but the same can be said of some of the comments on the lgf comments page). Am I missing something?
posted by sherman at 1:01 AM PST - 35 comments
July 16
Commish or Capo? Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig has been sued under the
RICO Act for wire and mail fraud. The charge stems from his attempt at the
contraction of two teams in Major League Baseball.
Mr. Selig can't seem to get a break from bad publicity. Does he deserve one?
posted by Argyle at 11:53 PM PST - 6 comments
Man and his family booted off airplane after asking if pilots were sober. Hans von Schweinitz, on his way to go fishing in Canada, asked one of the flight crew whether the pilots had taken a sobriety test. They hadn't. A blood alcohol test kit was sent for. Two and a half hours later, with the plane sitting there on the tarmac, the pilots were found to be clean. Then they ordered von Schweinitz and his family to get off the plane, while the other passengers cheered.
posted by RylandDotNet at 9:04 PM PST - 43 comments
During my long and mis-spent youth, I often spent time traveling the long dusty spaces between southern New Mexico and west Texas. There's a wide patch in the road called Orogrande, New Mexico, a virtual
ghost town. I've always wondered why there'd even be a town in the middle of the desert and nowhere.
Now I know why. Forgive the numerous pop-ups (and occassional ad for boobies) won't you? This is a tremendous resource for those interested.
posted by WolfDaddy at 5:34 PM PST - 17 comments
The Nametag Nation gets a voice online.
Retail Workers along with our brethren in
food service are the bulk of the nations clock-punchers now, and we've got a lot on our minds. Some sites, like the above linked, offer info on serious concerns.
Other sites just let us vent. You may not agree with what we think, but we deserve to be heard from.
posted by jonmc at 2:49 PM PST - 29 comments
'A Tale in the Desert' seems to be shaping up into a rather interesting game.
Not just another MMORPG, it's based upon the ancient Egyptian 'Seven Disciplines of Man'. From the FAQ:
It contains no combat: no monsters, no player-killers, no swords or armor. Your character advances by completing, participating in, or leading large projects. Negotiation and politics play a very large role. The game has a plot that unfolds in response to player actions, and when the story is over, the game ends.
posted by GriffX at 2:30 PM PST - 1 comments
Someone we trust says something reassuring. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, arguably the most powerful man in the world, blames "infectious greed" for the recent panic-like tail-spins on Wall Street, but says that the economy is on the way to recovery. One comment held that Greenspan was finally able to let out how he feels about what's going on, without shrouding his opinion in economic jibber-jabber.
"For once he really spoke his mind. He usually tends to obfuscate things quite a bit."
But really, how many of you expected Greenspan to say anything other than "the fundamentals are in place for a return to sustained healthy growth"? Does Greenspan actually feel this way? Could it be that he is actually majorly pessimistic, but is using his soothing sweet-song voice and obvious clout and earned respect to somehow buck recent trends? Bush's speech didn't do much for our faltering economy, but will Greenspan's? Can one man's mere words possibly change the course of history? Well?
posted by Hammerikaner at 1:54 PM PST - 27 comments
Invasion of the mall walkers? (NY Times) New Yorkers may well have seen this story about sidewalk etiquette on the front page of the metro section today, but I wonder 1) if other cities experience the same phenomenon and 2) if other New Yorkers have noticed this marked increase in sudden stoppers and other sidewalk amateurs.
posted by lackutrol at 1:44 PM PST - 42 comments
Cheney in Numbers. It's hard to spin hard cold numbers. Here's a few:
*Cheney's 2000 income from Halliburton: $36,086,635
Increase in government contracts while Cheney led Halliburton: 91%
*Minimum size of "accounting irregularity" that occurred while Cheney was CEO: $100,000,000 (One hundred MILLION dollars)
*Number of the seven official US "State Sponsors of Terror" that Halliburton contracted with: 2 out of 7
*Pages of Energy Plan documents Cheney refused to give congressional investigators: 13,500
*Amount energy companies gave the Bush/Cheney presidential campaign: $1,800,000
I
also loved this quote:
"Cheney and Bush want privacy for their conversations, but not for anyone else's." --Tony Mauro in USA Today, Feb. 27, 2002
posted by nofundy at 12:45 PM PST - 25 comments
Somewhere, beneath the cover of an innocuous-looking retail operation, those with true Power have built a facility to imprison forces man was not meant to know . . . things we were never meant to comprehend... dare you
peek inside...
posted by zeoslap at 10:27 AM PST - 12 comments
Six WTC site plans released by LMDC public-private partnership. Each idea revolves around a different conception of the memorial and is named for that, while showing variation in the structures that will be built around it. There are 3D renderings from above and from the south of the Battery, and skylines as seen from Jersey City, to show how the concept will fit into the existing neighborhood. None as imposing as the Twin Towers, but several include at least one distinctive structure that will rise above the nearest buildings, so Manhattan pedestrians can navigate again. All may be discussed Saturday in a public meeting at Javits Center, expected to attract 5000. I suspect that figure will be low.
posted by dhartung at 10:11 AM PST - 57 comments
MeFi Users: You're Preapproved! Plastic begs for users, takes shots at MetaFilter with lines such as: "Plastic: the MetaFilter that doesn't reminisce about its 'golden era', three times a week!" and "Plastic: The MetaFilter that's already had weeks of unexplained downtime." Is offering "karma" and "mod points" going to make you switch? Isn't complaining about a lost golden era better than never having one at all?
posted by magnetbox at 7:23 AM PST - 27 comments
HMOs sign on with William Morris. "We're not saying it's verboten to attack some part of the health care system. We're saying there is another side to what we do." No word yet on whether the American Association of Health Plans is set to star opposite Tom Cruise in the next summer blockbuster.
But, aside from moving beautiful people from casting to marquee, I believe this is the first time in history that the William Morris Agency has been set up as a Hollywood lobbyist. It's bad enough that
more than 100 product placement agencies continue to
bombard movies with
increasing junk. But, assuming the studios take this representation seriously, is it too much to ask that corporate interests be denied any potential sullying of the cinematic voice? Will CAA follow suit and take on the NRA? Or are today's movies beyond salvation?
posted by ed at 7:16 AM PST - 4 comments
What if they put on a concert and nobody came? Its not sales of recorded music that are in the shitter. Now it turns out that live concert ticket sales are in freefall as well (Lets see Hillary try and blame that on MP3s!)
The Clearchannel effect has been discussed here several times, but the concert promotion industry's trade paper, Pollstar, reports that sales are down 10% from last year and assigns the blame squarely on ever higher ticket prices: The average ticket cost across McCartney's recent 29 city US tour was $129.50 !!! CSNY had a tour average of $80.
I've always preferred small venue acts, but even those have gotten pricey. I just saw Jorma in a 50 person coffeehouse and the tix were $35. (Coffee not included)
So I ask the sizable MeFi musical appreciation crowd: Are you seeing less live music because of the cost?
posted by BentPenguin at 7:09 AM PST - 55 comments
We've Got Blog , with Introduction by Rebecca Blood, is now available. As one of the people in the Metafilter thread that is quoted at the end, I got my copy yesterday in the mail. Matt is among those with their own little section, as are many of your readily recognizable names. Haven't gotten through the whole thing, but seems to be a re-hash of the standard line of rah-rah.. will it appeal to people not online (or online unexposed to blogs)? If not, what value does it give to people who are into blogs and probably have read it all before online?
posted by rich at 6:56 AM PST - 28 comments
There are lots of toys modeled after automobiles, but no automobile has ever been modeled after a toy (?), until now. The insanely popular Choro-Q line of toy cars of Japan (ebay pics
here) have inspired a
whole new line of impossibly cute real cars, to be unveiled in November of this year. The tiny,
brightly colored electric autos look like something straight out of a Roger Rabbit cartoon, seat one, go 50 miles on a battery charge, and cost around $10,000.00 - $16,000. Must...have...one...
posted by iconomy at 4:33 AM PST - 15 comments
This is some scary stuff.
Life in prison for malicious hacking? We can't keep rapists and murderers away from society for very long but now hackers & crackers could be jailed for life? And on top of that the FBI can monitor internet packets without a warrant?
If you enjoy your freedom from gov't surveillance, it looks like it's time to start using
PGP.
posted by mathowie at 12:22 AM PST - 21 comments
July 15
Pariah dogs of the Middle East No, not
these two jokers, but the
real thing:
Canaan dogs. Like the more refined
Saluki,
Sloughi,
Azawakh,
Afghan Hound and "barkless"
Basenji (among
many others), Canaan dogs have been known for thousands of years. They guard herds for
modern Bedouins like they did for ancient Israelites. During the 1930s, when traditional "war dogs" were having trouble adapting to Palestine, Zionists carefully
redomesticated the semi-wild animals, turning them into
seeing eye dogs and guards for
isolated settlements. Canaan dogs became one of the first breeds trained to detect mines effectively, although their use for bomb-sniffing remains a
touchy subject [LAT, reg'n]. You also might enjoy pondering the provocative question raised by this detailed essay: Why have all three major monotheistic religions considered dogs
"a threat to the authority of the clergy"?
posted by mediareport at 8:21 PM PST - 8 comments
Coyle and Sharpe were two geniuses of street improv. Their man on the street interviews and bizarre senses of humour were unique and daring. Check out
these great mp3s. (Great to see MeFi back!)
posted by dobbs at 6:36 PM PST - 4 comments
Does Beer Really Equal Democracy Equal The U.S.A? Max Rudin's somewhat wild assumptions only make this article of his more interesting. But is it true that beer in North America overtakes all the usual class, status and income boundaries? If so, it certainly sets it apart from Europe, where all the old preconceptions and habits still prevail and (at least in the Southwest) a glass of wine is always cheaper than a beer. So I guess the question here is: just how
political can beer be? [
As a chaser, the British expert Michael Jackson's list of the ten great beers of America seems authoritative and tempting, if a tad disloyal to the cask-conditioned real, live ales of England and Scotland...].
posted by MiguelCardoso at 6:33 PM PST - 20 comments
July 14
The city of Enoch, Utah, population 3467, has an annual animal-control budget of $25,000. A budget this small means that Enoch's Animal Control must display some creativity when it comes to dealing with the problem of stray or unwanted animals. Mark Havnes of the
Salt Lake Tribune describes
Enoch's solution:
"No sterile lethal injections here. No pressurized bottles of toxic gas. Enoch attaches a hose to the back of a city-owned Dodge pickup and funnels lethal carbon monoxide into a shedlike death chamber. The unwanted, unadoptable critters then are placed inside...'We have no trouble sleeping at night,' says...the city's part-time animal-control officer... 'We can't see a darn thing wrong with what we are doing." posted by mr_crash_davis at 12:57 PM PST - 4 comments
Americans against World Empire. This Conservative/Libertarian coalition presents analysis, articles, links, opinions and rants from every corner of the political spectrum. ""Perpetual war serves a number of purposes.....It is under wartime conditions that the U.S. state will, at least initially, face the least resistance as it finishes the......process of gutting the Bill of Rights and voiding inconvenient parts of the U.S. Constitution......It is under wartime conditons that all opponents of U.S. policies anywhere in the world, including within the U.S. itself, can be most easily labled 'terrorist.'" This statement would have come from a conservative in 1940. Today it is from the Left. (Alternative Press Review, spring 2002).
posted by Mack Twain at 11:51 AM PST - 6 comments
Cat-Scan.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
posted by jkottke at 11:39 AM PST - 27 comments
Do you, Adam, take this man Steve, to be your lawfully wedded husband ... "... a panel of Ontario judges ordered Parliament to broaden its definition of marriage to include gay men and women, the first decision of its kind in Canada. " Rulings on cases in BC and Quebec to follow.
Good news for the Canadian Tourist industry, at any rate. So far the only heartbreak in all this is the utter lack of Crate and Barrel, Williams Sonoma, and Pottery Barn stores in Canada for these people to register at.
posted by kristin at 11:29 AM PST - 13 comments
This LA Times article goes into some of the details of the Bush/Harken SEC investigation. While it leaves a lot of questions unanswered, it's largely exculpatory.
posted by electro at 9:42 AM PST - 1 comments
Can't seem to finish your thesis? Then this site may be for you. It's a support group for those of us who just can't seem to write up and finish off that Ph.D./Masters degree. It'll either give you hope and motivation or it'll make you more complacent. "Well, I guess I'm not the only one who's taking a long time; I won't stress out about it anymore".
posted by percine at 5:04 AM PST - 15 comments
Sunday's Investment Tip: Snark Inc. This wasn't the sort of
snark I was looking for but it's too amusing to pass over. Worth singling out: the
Globalization game; the
Snark,
Snarquila and
Serf commercials (
this last one good enough to go legit, imho); the
Corporate Culture documentary and the
Careers questionnaire. All in all, healthy anti-capitalist fun for the whole family! [
Click on "View"; Flash required.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 12:08 AM PST - 6 comments
July 13
Elitist, moi? This is interesting in itself, but given some of the comments on MetaTalk at the moment it takes on greater resonance. Should the great unwashed be allowed access to art, or be allowed to produce art from a distinct, lowbrow perspective?
Should Mefi only be available to those who post "the best that has been said and thought"?
Is elitism good?
posted by Fat Buddha at 6:16 PM PST - 26 comments
Virtual Community to the Rescue!
Two small towns next to a forest preserve, South Orange and Maplewood New Jersey, are unique in many respects. Unfortunately for a group of cons, the towns also have something many do not: an active
virtual community.
When a door-to-door salesman's visit left one resident suspicious, she did some digging and found out it was a scam. So she alerted the police and posted a warning to the towns' message boards. Several other residents had been victims, too, but word spread quickly...
What's your story of MeFite sisters and brothers to the rescue?
from Design for Communityposted by planetkyoto at 5:47 PM PST - 5 comments
DARPA: still inventing the future (stand up straight with that exo-skeleton, son). April 2002 list of public projects from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, whose charter (let us not forget) is "to prevent technological surprise from harming U.S. national security by sponsoring revolutionary and innovative high-payoff research." Wonder which one of these beauties will have their payoff in civilian life, a la Arpanet?
And a small niggly point: should this stuff even be made public?
posted by theplayethic at 3:52 PM PST - 8 comments
When I think of Seekers, I think of people on a path to enlightenment, and not the group led by Joshua Armstrong. Despite their good intentions, I can't help but think about
this movie while reading about them. There's a lot of
variation amongst the states regarding licensing and oversight of private bail enforcers.
Should there be federal laws involving bounty hunters? The
last effort to do so seems to have gone nowhere. But,
this family seems to think so, and they are doing something about it.
posted by bragadocchio at 3:16 PM PST - 5 comments
waking life is a
wonderful film, both for its amazing
animation and its uncommon attempt to bring the
mind-body problem to the
screen. Curiously, I found this film far more engaging than most of the other
films I've seen that use the 'false reality' mechanism. Should more films bring their philosophical subject matters directly into question, instead of relegating it to sub-text?
posted by kaibutsu at 9:47 AM PST - 71 comments
'Antiques Roadshow' Expert Sent to the Pokey. "
Russell Pritchard III, a militaria expert, pleaded guilty to making the bogus TV appraisals. He also admitted defrauding artifact owners by giving them low appraisals on items, then reselling them at much higher prices and pocketing the profit." Pritchard was kicked off the show a couple years ago, when it was discovered that he was faking fabulous discoveries on the show in an effort to gain credibility. Fans of the US version of the show may remember the
civil war sword found in an attic and the owner claimed he used the valuable weapon to cut watermelons. Pritchard could have received up to 135 years in prison, and $5.3 million in fines, but only received a year in prison, and ordered to repay his bilked clients $830k. I've always wondered about the credibility of the experts on that show, and whether they've ever quoted inflated or deflated values for personal gain.
[via megosteve]posted by crunchland at 7:21 AM PST - 7 comments
Movie Poop Shoot started its web life last year as
an in-joke (warning: work-unsafe imagery) for
Kevin Smith's film Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back, but it recently underwent a rather major overhaul. Now it's an all-encompassing pop-culture news and opinions site, focusing mostly on movies, but also touching on TV, video, music, comics and toys. The contributors who write the many weekly columns are knowledgeable and entertaining, and the site feels sort of like
Ain't It Cool News minus the atrocious design and grade-school level writing. Add to that some of the
funniest headlines I've seen in a while and The Porn Star Quote Of The Week and you've got a new daily visit for this geek.
posted by toddshot at 3:53 AM PST - 12 comments
July 12
Gator ordered to stop displaying pop-ups on other sites. "We are highly confident that once all the facts are presented in the upcoming trial, no court will issue a ruling eliminating a consumer's right to decide for themselves what is displayed on their own computer screens," Gator CEO Jeff McFadden said in the statement.
posted by skallas at 10:53 PM PST - 10 comments
John B Spencer died in March. He was 57 though the first time I saw him in about 1986 he looked about 86 so his early demise isn't that much of a surprise.
No one will have heard of him but he was brilliant. Truly brilliant, in that he lit up all around him and inspired the pathetic likes of me. Read his lyrics, hear his albums and just sit and wonder at the genius of the public to ignore such talent. Sorry, my blog doesn't appear to be publishing and I didn't want his death to go unremarked.
Google doesn't offer much but
this is good enough.posted by Fat Buddha at 5:20 PM PST - 1 comments
Even though Anne cannot possibly know on her birthday that only a month later she will have to go into hiding, she begins her new diary with the following extremely significant sentence:
"I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support."
60 years ago today,
Anne Frank started
her diary while in hiding.
posted by mathowie at 4:33 PM PST - 38 comments
The National Trust I just cant stop listening to this. I first heard it this morning on a mix disc my friend made me and now it's just on repeat all day at work. I'm buying the album after payday. What albums have you recently heard that stick in your head and your CD/MD/MP3 player? Do you get as obsessed with new bands like I do? Does hearing good new music become as addictive as any drug?
posted by Dantien at 1:01 PM PST - 39 comments
Van Explodes In Northwest Parking Lot Breaking news - not sure if this is just a sad accident, or ...
A friend who works in the area said that the place is swarming with cops, and FBI guys. Has anyone else heard anything? Nothing on any of the majors yet. Could be because this will turn out to be minor.
posted by Corky at 12:54 PM PST - 41 comments
Minced words NTK is
reporting that a bug in Yahoo Mail causes inbound email containing script keywords like "eval" to be modified even when they are used innocuously. One result is that any instance of the string "eval" gets changed to "review", even when it's a substring of a larger word.
Note the large number of documents on the web that use the words
medireview (for "medieval"),
reviewuate (for "evaluate"), and
reviewuation (for "evaluation"). Is this entirely the result of the Yahoo Mail issue, or do these transformations occur in other web authoring applications?
posted by dougb at 12:05 PM PST - 20 comments
The Most Gruesome Toy Ever Well, maybe not, but Retrocrush does make a good argument for this Aurora Monster Model kit of the Girl Victim. Check out the comic book ad, featuring Vampirella and Frankenstein's monster. Do kids still play with monster dolls and monster models, or have they been shelved as un-PC? Never had the models, but as a girl in the '70s, I loved my cousin's monster dolls (uh, action figures?). (Link via
Cruel Site of the Day.)
posted by GaelFC at 11:09 AM PST - 16 comments
Last Mile by Laser "The multibillion-dollar optical-fiber backbone that was built to bring...high-performance multimedia..to office and home computers...has come up a bit short" Free Space Optics may be the answer
posted by ajayb at 11:03 AM PST - 3 comments
Error 404. Once y'all start hitting this poor server it will probably have a nervous breakdown. Be nice.
posted by elgoose at 8:24 AM PST - 7 comments
Another Cat Killer Wins "As a property owner, you have a right to do as you please and you have the right to protect it" In Coeur d' Alene, ID, accused cat poisoner Dale Crooks Jr. is acquitted of feeding tuna mixed with antifreeze to the neighbor's cats. What seems most remarkable to me, though, is that everyone is calling the plaintiffs' lawyer a publicity seeker and the cats' owners troublemakers. There must be more to the story than is printed here. Either that, or small town dwellers in Idaho REALLY hate cats.
posted by faceonmars at 8:02 AM PST - 36 comments
It's the Law in South Dakota: Convert to Islam, Lose Your Child Citing a woman's conversion to Islam as a sign of "bizarre behavior" that made her unfit to be a mother, a South Dakota judge removed her 5-year old son Trevor and gave temporary custody of him to his grandparents. "My wife and I are very concerned about Trevor's safety," explained Conrad Rederth, the child's grandfather. "Trevor's mother has engaged in some bizarre behavior, including wearing Muslim garb and declaring herself a Muslim." (Via
alt.muslim)
posted by laz-e-boy at 7:37 AM PST - 63 comments
The next wave in Filmmaking? This summer, the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, along with NVIDIA, will hold the world's first
Machinima Film Festival on August 17th in Mesquite, Texas.
Machinima is, simply stated, filmmaking within a real-time virtual 3D environment.
In an expanded definition, it is the convergence of filmmaking, animation & game development. Machinima is a very cost- & time-efficient way to produce films.
posted by lilboo at 7:21 AM PST - 11 comments
More
attempted monkeying with the Copyright Act. This proposal by two House legislators one would limit backup copies, while another section would let webcasters off the hook for cached copies. This seems fairly transparent considering now that the webcasting rates
have been set webcasting may end up in the hands of the larger corporations. Coincidence? I think not.
posted by anathema at 6:54 AM PST - 5 comments
What the law show say about cloning. Francis Fukuyama and Robert Wright, who
have written about technology and "societal evolution", discuss the pros and cons of genetic engineering. This is not a discussion about the finer points of technology, but rather the philosophical implications of moving forward.
posted by mkultra at 6:50 AM PST - 1 comments
Every day is a holida at
Girls are Pretty. Well, sort of.
But don't "Write Impassioned Letters Confessing Your Blind, Paralyzing Love For People Just To Put The Feelers Out There Day!" and "Go Buy a Shitload of Donuts Day!" just sound like so much more fun than say...planting a tree for Arbor Day?
Yeah. I thought so.
posted by Su at 5:59 AM PST - 23 comments
News Sites Hustle for Profitability In a recent survey of 429 newspaper Web sites worldwide by media consulting group Innovation, only 5.5 percent of North American sites currently charge a subscriber fee. But many are re-considering that model. Steve Barth, general manager of L.A. Times Interactive feels the need to condition us.
"
If we took a leadership position and did our part in helping condition the reader that not everything is free forever, hopefully other substantial news organizations would follow," says he.
posted by Blake at 5:51 AM PST - 5 comments
Using Internet Explorer, Outlook, or Outlook Express on a PC?
There's a new hack in town, ready to exploit cross site scripts like nobody's business. Do yourself a favor and disarm ActiveX on your settings.
posted by mathowie at 1:16 AM PST - 6 comments
July 11
Tonight, I saw (for the 4th time) one of the greatest live bands on the planet:
Sweep The Leg Johnny. They played to a half-empty room in Toronto. Recently, the band put out their
fourth CD. Sadly, they're calling it quits after
this tour. What are some of the bands you've told folks to
Go see now!, but no one seems to listen?
posted by dobbs at 11:25 PM PST - 36 comments
A tale of two dumb-dumbs. This car enthusiast forum story really has me wondering who the dumb one is in this situation: the guy who got his car stolen, or the guy who stole the car.
Guy befriends another guy on the forum, starts talking, gives out his VIN, information on when he drives his car to work, and his address only to have the other forum-goer steal his car. Then, the brilliant car thief posts up parts from said stolen car on the EXACT SAME forum under a new name, then makes the mistake of logging in under his old name and posting a message in
his sale thread.
An amusing read to say the least.
posted by PWA_BadBoy at 11:09 PM PST - 10 comments
Sesame Street's HIV positive Muppet The next season of the South African version of Sesame Street will feature a female muppet who has HIV.
We want to show that here is an HIV-positive member of our community who you can touch and interact with.posted by Foaf at 4:29 PM PST - 34 comments
Kvetch is dead. So what, right? But some of the lessons Powazek says he learned probably also apply here, such as:
Every collaborative project eventually outgrows its owner. You start a project like this because you have a certain way of looking at the world. But when you open it up for group participation, it always changes.
posted by timeistight at 2:24 PM PST - 25 comments
Knock Down That Wall! The wall that keeps the church and state separated, not the one in Berlin.
"Two bills currently being debated in the U. S. Congress would allow churches to spend their funds on political campaigns and to endorse political candidates.
H.R. 2357, sponsored by Representative Walter Jones (R-N.C.), would remove a longstanding rule that banned churches from using tax-exempt revenue to fund political campaigns."
posted by nofundy at 12:57 PM PST - 29 comments
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's
Vent: A collection of readers' responses to news stories. Funny, stupid, silly, odd, thoughtful non sequiturs. Updated daily.
posted by ColdChef at 12:32 PM PST - 22 comments
Last year's most popular baby names in B.C. Fashions come and go, in names as much as anything else. Madison, Mackenzie, and Taylor are on the rise for girls, Liam for boys, with Brandon and Tyler still on the charts as well as more familiar names like Matthew. This page breaks down every registry for last year; how many different ways can you spell Kayley/Kayleigh/Kaylee? What about the 9 people who named their sons Maximus, or the 6 people who have given the world more Keanus? There are also a handful of Aaliyahs, Brooklyns, Montanas, and of course Brittneys. Where does your name stand?
posted by jokeefe at 11:21 AM PST - 95 comments
Idaho city council debates proper coverage of areolas , after some entrepreneurial college students open a hugely profitable topless car wash and practically wipe out the competition.
"The latest proposal, to be voted on Monday, sets a minimum of covering the areola with a length of material running in a straight but narrow line across the breast, similar to a pair of suspenders".posted by brookish at 11:12 AM PST - 36 comments
Bush Took Oil Firm's Loans as Director "As a Texas businessman, President Bush took two low-interest loans from an oil company where he was a member of the board of directors, engaging in a practice he condemned this week in his plan to stem corporate abuse and accounting fraud."
do as i say, not as i do?
posted by saralovering at 11:06 AM PST - 118 comments
Homer Simpson: Hack your DVD player. It seems in countries in which the DVD Copy Control Authority doesn't own the government, even the giants of corpmedia don't like the "protection" features the platform foists on consumers. On Fox's Simpsons UK DVD release FAQ page, Homer himself says "I have no idea whatsoever what regional coding means. But it is essential that you buy a multi-regional player. Do it now." Is the DVD region-coding system really only relevant in the United States?
posted by Vetinari at 5:44 AM PST - 25 comments
July 10
American Magus Without Harry Smith I wouldn’t have existed!
Bob Dylan
… I put Harry Smith with the three most dear to me GRAND INTELLIGENCE!! Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Harry Smith…These were sharp motherfuckers… and heavy… talk about heavy!!
Gregory Corso
Harry Smith, a central figure in the mid-20th-century avant-garde, was a complex artistic figure who made major contributions to the fields of sound recording, independent filmmaking, the visual arts, and ethnographic collecting. Along with Kenneth Anger, Jordan Belson, and Oskar Fischinger, Smith is considered one of America’s leading experimental filmmakers. He would often hand-paint directly on film creating unique, complex compositions that have been interpreted as investigations of conscious and unconscious mental processes. Smith began as a teenager to record Native American songs and rituals. He is best known for his Anthology of American Folk Music, a music collection widely credited with launching the urban folk revival.
The Anthology is the focus here, but Harry Smith, the artist, avant garde film maker, polymath, musicologist and quintessential hipster must be mentioned, too.
Details Withinposted by y2karl at 11:54 PM PST - 32 comments
What do
Erin Brockovich,
Gotcha!, and
The Big Lebowski all have in common? Not much other than humor and a terrific character actress named
Irene Olga López. Every time I happen to see a movie in which she has a bit part, I think upon how much I enjoy seeing her, and how lucky she must be. She's been in a
lot of filmed entertainment, has gotten to work with people like Julia Roberts and John Goodman, and probably doesn't get hassled by paparazzi when walking down the street in full daylight. Let's all take a moment to appreciate those unsung actors and actresses who make our moviegoing experiences more enjoyable through the small roles. They may never win any Oscars, but the movies sure wouldn't be the same without 'em. "Jonathan! You sound-a so close!"
posted by WolfDaddy at 6:49 PM PST - 58 comments
New
Beck song
here.
New
Weezer video (with the Muppets)
here (it's a RealMedia file).
New
Coldplay single
here in WindowsMedia and
here in RealAudio.
Feel free to argue the artistic merits of these three performers as well as whether this post is worthy of a front page post in the thread (like you people wouldn't do that anyay).
posted by Reggie452 at 12:46 PM PST - 34 comments
Scalia gives divinity school students a peek at what his activism is really about. I can't say it any better than he does so I'll quote: "The reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as possible."
Of course we knew Scalia detested democracy on 12/12/2000 with his decision that infamous day but now he admits favoritism to theocracy.
posted by nofundy at 12:07 PM PST - 42 comments
Augusta National defends its membership polcies in the face of opposition from the National Council of Women's Organizations. Augusta is the annual host of the Masters and does not count any women among its 300 members. Does the NCWO have any business telling a private organization how it should structure its membership?
posted by dayvin at 10:09 AM PST - 22 comments
how's your news? mine just got a lot better: camp counselor takes a team of adults with developmental disabilities on a cross-country road trip, conducting 'man on the street' interviews along the way. end product is a hilarious and very human
non-exploitive documentary film.
posted by mlang at 9:10 AM PST - 18 comments
"The bigger the binge, the longer and more severe the hangover." A short history of accounting scandals and fraudulent bankruptcies that follow bubble economies.
posted by raaka at 7:38 AM PST - 3 comments
Arthur Anderson night in Portland From the AP wire: The Portland Beavers, the Triple-A affiliate of the San Diego Padres, are sponsoring "Arthur Andersen Appreciation Night" to poke fun at the beleaguered accounting firm...
Fans are encouraged to bring old documents to be destroyed at several "shredding stations" throughout the park. The team also will tuck away certificates for a game of "massive debt hide-and-go-seek."
A
similar story is in the
Independent.
posted by paulschreiber at 12:57 AM PST - 3 comments
July 9
Even as the fans chanted "Let Them Play" MLB's powers-that-be decided to call the All-Star game after 11 innings. It's only the second time the game has ended in a tie (the other time it was called for rain). Given the game's current environment, could there have been a more symbolic ending to this game? Between the steroid questions, contraction,and the threat of a work stoppage, can baseball fix itself, or is (North) America's national pastime rounding third and heading towards self-inflicted obscurity?
posted by herc at 10:22 PM PST - 40 comments
With friends like the Saudis, who needs enemies? "There is, then, no real need for us to be frightened by the loss of the kingdom's oil friendship. But we should be concerned by the evidence of its strategic enmity. It may be true that the Saudis are neither Iraqis nor Iranians nor Libyans; but it is quite dangerous enough that they are Saudis."
posted by homunculus at 10:07 PM PST - 24 comments
Bike the Ike! About 700 riders from Chicago Critical Mass rode on the Eisenhower Expressway for a mile at the last ride. Dangerous and insane, yes, but the cyclist in me thinks it's the bee's knees. Ah, to ride on the 10 all the way to the beach...
posted by RakDaddy at 6:32 PM PST - 25 comments
all aboard! next stop, yucca mt. the proposed yucca mt nuclear waste storage site has been approved by the senate. while only a handful of senators believe "we are being forced to decide this issue prematurely," and others are concerned with "thousands of waste shipments crossing 43 states" - most worry only about the risk of the next proposed dump site being in their state if yucca mt falls through. apparently the buildup of toxic waste at the power plants is getting pretty bad - "I believe it is a safe repository," said Lott. If the country does not find a central place for the waste, he said, "we're going to have to shut down" the nuclear industry.
is shutting down the industry a bad thing? if the waste produced by these methods is so deadly and destructive... why aren't we questioning the risk/reward factor of nuclear power plants, instead of just worrying about where to stash the glowing green ooze? they've spent 4.5 BILLION dollars just researching the yucca mt site... could that money have been spent on developing clean power generation and maybe even helped fund its deployment?
posted by ggggarret at 6:09 PM PST - 15 comments
Britain to Relax Laws for Millions of Dope Smokers. The theory is that this move will free up officers and money to deal with more serious drug problems. As far as the classification goes, cannabis will now be grouped with anabolic steroids and growth hormones, two substances that I think are more dangerous than pot. What was it grouped with before?
posted by Miss Beth at 6:00 PM PST - 18 comments
Sharing Eminem tracks on P2P? The "artist" (and I use the term loosely here) describes, in his usual trailer-park eloquence, what he would like to do to you.
The real ones in need of a beating are those who made this tard a celebrity IMHO, but then we must take pity on those who know not what they do...
posted by clevershark at 5:14 PM PST - 88 comments
Shoes. There's nothing wrong with being a heterosexual cross-dresser. There's nothing wrong with
obsessively blogging about the shoes you wear each day either. Nope. Makes for a pretty interesting read though...
posted by machaus at 5:11 PM PST - 8 comments
The Tesseract Charles H. Hinton, eccentric, bigamist, son-in-law of George Boole (yes
that Boole) coined the word
Tesseract and claimed that we could all
visualize the fourth dimension. He wrote
several books and claimed to have created a set of cubes that, used properly, would allow anyone to visualize hyperspace. His ideas were all the rage. Salvador Dali was
inspired by him. Robert Heinlein wrote
a classic short story about a house built as an unfolded tesseract. Madeleine L'Engle wrote
a classic children's story. With the
advent of Einstein and his claim that "Time was the fourth dimension", the higher spatial dimensions were forgotten. (Until
recently that is) And Hinton was forgotten. Or was he? And what happened to the cubes? Rudy Rucker, a huge fan of Hinton,
fails to reprint the instructions. Rumours are that, if you build them and use them, they will
drive you insane.
posted by vacapinta at 5:05 PM PST - 22 comments
Steven. Steven. Steven. I can't get enough of this incredibly-cute-but-I-don't-normally-go-for-such-obvious-twinkiness pitchperson for Dell Computers. Apparently, neither can anyone else, as Steven (or more properly,
actor Ben Curtis) has been Dell's most successful advertising, uh, tool ever. Why do we love him? His Bill'n'Ted vocabulary? His toothy grin? Whatever the reason, at least now I no longer have to glue myself to the television to
watch his latest commercial overandoverandoverand Dude, I'll get a Dell if you deliver it to me personally. So to speak. Is it wrong to love a fictional character so much? Is there a support group? Any other MeFites have a strange attraction going on here? I can't be the only one, can I?
posted by WolfDaddy at 3:51 PM PST - 66 comments
GM are looking to the future with plans to get a fuel cell vehicle (dubbed
AUTOnomy) on the road by 2010, unlike past attempts where fuel cell powerplants were
shoe-horned into conventional cars GM are redesigning it from the ground up with a six inch flat chassis that contains the fuel cell and powertrain allowing them to plonk a variety of different bodies on top all the while cutting costs by being far simpler to produce than conventional cars.
posted by zeoslap at 3:35 PM PST - 16 comments
Pornographers jack domain name from Florida sheriff. Aycock said the Sheriff's Office had owned the domain name since 1995, and that its registration is current. "When I was told about this, I thought they were kidding," he said. "We dug out a receipt and we're paid up through November. When we find out who's responsible for this we're going to go after them. I am not very happy that this has happened."The Sheriff may discover that precious few laws protect him and that prosecuting a Canadian company could be tricky. Link from
Delaware Law Office.
posted by mikewas at 2:47 PM PST - 5 comments
Prison in the Park Central Park is a lot of things: the pastoral center of New York City, a relaxing stroll on a Saturday afternoon, a patch of grass lined with horse manure. It’s also home to a minimum-security prison...
posted by cell divide at 2:24 PM PST - 7 comments
Escrew Service. Worried about getting scammed on an Internet auction? "Just use an escrow service," is the customary advice. Not so fast. The latest auction scam is an elaborate swindle involving creation of fake escrow services, complete with convincing Web sites like www.escrow-is.composted by srboisvert at 2:07 PM PST - 2 comments
Yahoo! Internet Life Magazine about to close: Remember the mid-90's and its big slew of "hip" net magazines?
The Web, Netguide, and too many others to mention? YIL joins the net mags graveyard as, not surprisingly, consequence of the dotcom bubble burst and next-to-nil ad revenue. I would add general user's maturity to the factors.
posted by betobeto at 1:17 PM PST - 10 comments
The Big Book of Sign Language (from rotten.com). Have you ever wondered how to sign phrases such as "I shovel shit all day long", "I want to pull the shrieking voices from my head and smoosh them", and "Unlock my legs and get it over with"? The Big Book shows you how. Inappropriate? Yes. Hysterical? Yes. (Portions may not be safe for work. Link via
Magnetbox. Thanks, ben.)
posted by moz at 10:41 AM PST - 29 comments
Don't let child pornographers share your connection! Now that sharing your Wi-Fi connection with the unwashed masses has become so popular - the BigCo's are trying to shut it down. We've talked about this
here and
here but I was blown away by this marketing speak from a AOL Time Warner VP
"By having an open transmission, it leaves you really vulnerable," Digeso said. "If you have a Wi-Fi connection in a public park, what would stop, God forbid, a child pornographer or, God forbid, a terrorist using that network?"
Are terroists using your Wi-Fi connection?
posted by dhacker at 9:17 AM PST - 34 comments
And, remember....have your
Game Show Host spayed or neutered.
Why are all the memories of my youth continuing to remind me that I'm getting old? Arg. Guess it's time for me to get an exam, too.
posted by dwivian at 8:22 AM PST - 4 comments
Logophilia Heard any good words lately? Emo, tribal marketing, google bombing, adultescent, go commando, alpha girl, hand salsa, shoegaze, alcopop, suicide magnet.
posted by andrewzipp at 7:27 AM PST - 24 comments
"When he can't get along with the real world, Wallace goes back to the only thing he has left: his computer. Each morning, he wakes before dawn and watches conversations stream by on his screen. Thousands of people flock to his Web site every day from all over the world to talk to his creation, a robot called Alice. It is the best artificial-intelligence program on the planet, a program so eerily human that some mistake it for a real person. Richard Wallace has created an artificial life form that gets along with people better than he does."
A fascinating article (NYT), how a beautiful and original mind survives in our corporate society with the help of "a daily cocktail of psychoactive drugs, including Topamax, an anti-epileptic that acts as a mood stabilizer, and Prozac. Marijuana, too -- most afternoons, he'll roll about four or five joints the size of his index finger."
posted by semmi at 7:21 AM PST - 18 comments
Is anyone else getting their
panties into a wad over the upcoming (8 days)
MacWorld Expo? Apple is closing the gap and gaining market share; how nice would it be to see them release a knockout punch with some new hardware?
posted by catatonic at 7:19 AM PST - 36 comments
The Democratic Fascist Somebody please tell me that this is some kind of really awful joke: "
Quite simply, the Democratic Fascist Movement is a well-organized, rapidly growing group of people, inspired by the work of our Visionary Mr. Sean Hannity, who affirm the necessity for Moral Unity in our Nation today. While we do not reject the Democratic Process, we also recognize the need for bringing conclusion to the mob rule which has characterized our Government of late. It is our belief that, through more stringent voting regulations, power must be placed back into the hands of the Moral Elite if this Great Nation can endure." More inside...
posted by Irontom at 7:03 AM PST - 17 comments
The World Politics Heavyweight Fight: Huntington vs. Fukuyama: Which of these two now classic approaches offers a more plausible vision of the world's future? Huntington's
Culture Clash[
Foreign Affairs, 1993] or Fukuyama's
Pax Democratia[
National Interest, 1989]? In an updating mode,
Stanley Kurtz[
Policy Review, 2002] measures their chances from a political viewpoint. On the same front,
Jack Miles[
Cross Currents, 2002] offers a refreshingly liberal and optimistic theological perspective. Yep, it's
still all about East meeting West, the Muslims and the rest of the us. Or even
increasingly...
posted by MiguelCardoso at 5:45 AM PST - 11 comments
"I've done my part, now I need you to do yours. I believe that this world is a good place, and if someone needs help, then they should ask for it.
SO I'M ASKING...
Please help me pay my debt. "
Karyn's done her part, people, by racking up $20 000 in credit card debt, buying Prada, and fancy coffee, and designer clothing.
Isn't it time you did yours, by paying that debt off for her?
(link from
Erika, via
3WA.)
posted by kristin at 5:11 AM PST - 46 comments
Let's Rock Get a real live musician to write a theme song for your blog. Of course you have to somehow return the favor. "I'm calling it the rockin' blogroll," notes Philip Clark, the
multiple band guy that is willingly offering up his own service against silence.
posted by boost ventilator at 4:49 AM PST - 3 comments
From Big to Aidan to...the ballet dancer? Sex and the City's author and inspiration Candace Bushnell got married to 33-year-old ballet dancer Charles Askegard July 4 on a Nantucket beach in Massachusetts. The couple has only known each other for eight weeks.
posted by stevis at 1:27 AM PST - 14 comments
July 8
i.heart.poutine. "Because everyone deserves to die of a heart attack before they hit forty, the Quebecois invented poutine. Poutine is the best thing to happen to the potato since just about....ever."
posted by jcterminal at 10:35 PM PST - 20 comments
One browser to rule them all... Looks like IE's win in the browser wars is strengthening its position as the de facto browser as more and more developers code to IE and IE only. I know a lot of MeFiers are developers. What do you do when you develop your sites?
posted by TNLNYC at 8:11 PM PST - 47 comments
''Tim,'' said Spitzer with a laugh, ''just slaughtered them.'' What's so special about one geek slaughtering other geeks in a game of Quake?
Tim is blind and a company named
ZForm is developing videogames to help blind people compete fairly with sighted people. Way cool.
posted by WolfDaddy at 2:39 PM PST - 13 comments
"Piracy sure beats manual labor" Can China's Piracy industry be stopped? Should it be stopped? Will
this be the fate of all copyrighted material? Lisa Movius offers few answers, but gives a pretty good overview of the situation.
posted by Bag Man at 2:16 PM PST - 12 comments
Michael Jackson: the music industry is racist. The erstwhile
Agent M made some interesting claims about the record industry as a whole while in the midst of a dispute with his record label, Sony. He mentioned such paupers as Little Richard, Mariah Carey and Sammy Davis, Jr. as "vistims of the industry," and singled out Sony Music chairman Tommy Mottola. In other news, Al Sharpton and Johnny Cochran
have formed a coalition to investigate financial profiteering off black recording artists.
posted by me3dia at 2:06 PM PST - 43 comments
The 'Gate-less Community "But something changed when George W. Bush became president. The current administration has not lacked questionable behavior: Karl Rove met with Intel executives in the White House even as he held a significant amount of Intel stock; Deputy Interior Secretary J. Stephen Griles, a former coal-industry lobbyist, intervened in an energy-exploration dispute on behalf of former clients; Dick Cheney met repeatedly with energy company officials who appear to have had a strong hand in formulating the administration's energy policy; and, of course, there is White. Yet each retains his job. Eighteen months into Bush's term, his only appointee to resign under a cloud is Michael Parker, the former civilian chief of the Army Corps of Engineers, and not over allegations of corruption, but for what this administration views as the one true deadly sin: disloyalty. (Parker publicly criticized the president's budget.) By contrast, two years into the Clinton administration, 10 political appointees had resigned; under the elder Bush, eight; under Reagan, 13. What has changed isn't so much the conduct of officials, but the standards by which they're judged. The "new tone" that George W. Bush brought to Washington isn't one of integrity, but of permissiveness."
posted by owillis at 1:49 PM PST - 23 comments
LAX shooter is innocent What is the source of this incessant sense of denial that permeates arab society? Between the "absurdity" of an Egyptian pilot committing suicide, the computer generated videos of OBL, and the "impossibility" of a hate crime, why is it that arabs have an over-arching sense of impossibiility of committing crimes of such sort? Is there no crime in arab countries? Do criminal defenses take to form of "I'm a muslim, muslims can't commit crimes, so I didn't do it?".
posted by dreamer98 at 12:59 PM PST - 59 comments
Of all species that have existed on Earth, 99.9 percent are now extinct, yet scientists insist that we make a great effort to save
endangered species. If extinction is the natural course of evolution, why bother? And if humankind is the cause of these lastest extinctions and endangerments, should efforts be made to save people so that their exploitation of the natural world can continue? Aren't our efforts to fight diseases such as the aids epidemic in Africa not only a denial of evolutionly forces but also adding to the problem of overpopulation exerting unbearable pressure on the environment? If evolution is truely the force it's claimed to be can it's course be changed by mankind and if so, should it be?
Should evolution be allowed to take its course?posted by Mack Twain at 12:06 PM PST - 44 comments
No student/faculty dating policies? I found it odd that most universities don't actually have written policies regarding student/faculty dating. What's even more surprising is how difficult it seems to get tenured faculty out of their positions despite the number of allegations that happen to have been made against them. Or am I wrong in that type of thinking?
posted by SentientAI at 11:32 AM PST - 30 comments
You're the king of a small african nation. You have an annual health budget of $15 million. Two-thirds of the people in your nation are HIV positive, and two-thirds are living below the poverty line. What do you do? Why, you
buy a $31 million private jet, of course!
posted by Reggie452 at 11:25 AM PST - 27 comments
Judicial activism rears it's ugly head. But it is disingenuous to claim that activism is the mantle of liberals. Can you say "strict constructionist?" I didn't think so.
posted by nofundy at 11:24 AM PST - 11 comments
Aladdin Houses. I was told when I bought my house it was one of these, but this is the first time I've run across information about the company. These were houses built from a kit, like the
Sears Houses that more people seem familiar with. This site has lots of old catalogs scanned in -- as near as I can figure out,
this one is mine. I can attest to the fact that they hold up pretty well. You can still buy
prefab homes of course, but they lack the ye-olde excitement of age.
posted by JanetLand at 10:59 AM PST - 11 comments
Perdue to become the next Intel? According to today's
Washington Post, researches at the University of Delaware have filed a patent to improve microchip performance by replacing silicon with a compound made from chicken feathers. Test show that chicken feather chips are
twice as fast as silicon chips. If this works, be on the lookout for chicken farm IPOs.
posted by monkey-mind at 7:44 AM PST - 13 comments
July 7
How talk radio went right-wing. Or further proof that the airwaves are owned by corporations and not by the American people. Regardless, its an interesting look at how politics changed the radio landscape.
posted by skallas at 10:11 PM PST - 34 comments
Poverty is Expensive (part 59) The "i-Gen" prepaid MasterCard, available at a Rite-Aid near you, for those who don't have bank accounts (for debit cards) to say the least of credit ratings sufficient to get credit cards. Pay a $10.00 upfront fee, pay another $5 a month plus a "reload" fee of at least $5 every time your card runs down, all for the privilege of letting them hold on to your cash at no interest.
posted by MattD at 9:09 PM PST - 28 comments
Relief At Last: Fighting Headache And Migraine On The Web. I've been a migraine sufferer all my life, so I've tried and read almost everything in the hope of finding something to alleviate the pain. So I was surprised to find a
website that was better than any book and really
helped deal with it. Headaches and migraines are, alas, still mysteries to even the most studious and experienced neurologists. This resource, bless it, brings welcome relief from a patient's ignorance and unnecessary suffering.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 8:55 PM PST - 8 comments
Hazy shade of summer Days like today remind me our world is indeed small. Here in the Northeast US the sun never broke through the haze. More forest fires, only these were in Quebec. I had friends as far south as New Jersey notice. How'd the day look to you?
posted by jeremias at 7:04 PM PST - 33 comments
Noah Grey has returned. The photographer shares his amazing eye for capturing an image. Emotion, shadow and light...
posted by yonderboy at 9:48 AM PST - 82 comments
Pamplona is on again.Guess who seems to have won
round one.
Anybody out there been there done that ??
posted by johnny7 at 9:31 AM PST - 15 comments
Swallowing A sword may feel unconfortable and leave "a taste of stomach acids and metal" in your mouth, but it's a hell of a party trick.
posted by h0ney at 8:31 AM PST - 6 comments
According to the US State Department's
website, New Zealand citizen Mohammed Saffi was not in violation of his visa when intending to attend a Miami flight school for 727 aircraft engineering certification.
At least that's what NZ Green Party foreign affairs spokesman Keith Locke
says.
posted by sycophant at 5:45 AM PST - 9 comments
July 6
Space Colony... Impossible? Two days ago I wrote in
my blog that a space colony is a stupid idea. I don't think this project can do much against
the growing threat of terrorism. I don't like one thing is this space colony: living really near a nuclear reactor with nowere to escape should something go wrong.
posted by Baud at 11:59 PM PST - 25 comments
outer space will have to be colonized "The United States places the greatest pressure on the environment, with its carbon dioxide emissions and over-consumption. It takes 12.2 hectares of land to support each American citizen and 6.29 for each Briton, while the figure for Burundi is just half a hectare." ....meanwhile...its too hot (we're wondering why) here in mid-america - lets go to the
mall and forget about it..
posted by specialk420 at 10:18 PM PST - 25 comments
Director John Frankenheimer is dead. I don't want to make this out to be one of those "random celebrity dies and is suddenly hailed as a genius" things, but Frankenheimer's made quite a few
damn good movies (and, yes, some bad ones). While his
later works weren't nearly as great as some of his
earlier films, his gift for filming action never went away: his 1998 film
Ronin wound up on
several lists of the "best car chases on film". He was supposed to helm the upcoming
Exorcist prequel, but failing health forced him to step aside. Despite the dodgy source material, I would have really liked to see Frankenheimer's take on it. He'll be missed.
posted by toddshot at 4:55 PM PST - 34 comments
"Do you like beer?" ... "Do I ever!" The good folks at Molecular Expressions have taken photomicrographs (photographs taken through an optical microscope) of your favorite beers. Next time I take a sip of
Bass,
Newcastle or
Bohemia I'll know that science is hard at work making this a better world to live in. (via
TechTV).
posted by Bag Man at 9:29 AM PST - 2 comments
"We think of an orange as a constant, but in reality it's not." Canadian study finds that fruits and vegetables have lost much of their nutritional value in the last decades--potatoes, for example, have lost 100% of their Vitamin A. The reason, it appears, is mass production and a market that values appearance over substance. Is this symptomatic of deeper problems within a system where produce travels so far before reaching the consumer? Here in B.C., for example, the stores are full of California produce, despite the fact that we grow much the same fruits and vegetables locally.
posted by jokeefe at 9:25 AM PST - 17 comments
Fake Harry Potter novel hits China. An anonymous Chinese author has decided JK Rowling is taking too long to write the fifth book - so has written a new adventure to satisfy the huge Potter market in the country, according to a report in The Times.
Harry Potter And Leopard Walk Up To Dragon, on sale in Beijing street markets for about £1, is selling fast to the dismay of the publisher of the genuine Potter books in China.
posted by ncurley at 6:45 AM PST - 14 comments
The Official History of net.art, Volume I:
History of Art for Airports appropriates the style of universal informational graphics to represent subjects ranging from
St. Sebastien and the
Pieta, to the Star Trek transporter effect and the international sign for cannibalism you might have seen on a t-shirt.
posted by Su at 3:44 AM PST - 2 comments
July 5
There is no more excuse not to know at least where to look for it, --with graphic
topography and description of the top entertainment spot, the famed G. Do you know how to find it?
posted by semmi at 5:31 PM PST - 12 comments
Buffy the Terrorism Slayer (PDF link) The
Center For Strategic & International Studies, which appears to be, like, a bunch of grown-up
ex-senators and
accused war criminals and
former top spooks and
such, released this white paper late last September.
Any structured intellectual approach to describing this situation — and planning for it — is so uncertain that a valid structure can only be developed as an exercise in complexity or "chaos" theory. I, however, would like you to think about the biological threat in more mundane terms. I am going to suggest that you think about biological warfare in terms of a TV show called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," that you think about the world of biological weapons in terms of the "Buffy Paradigm," and that you think about many of the problems in the proposed solutions as part of the "Buffy Syndrome."
I am one vindicated overgrown Buffy fan. (Via
Need To Know.)
posted by nicwolff at 5:26 PM PST - 14 comments
It appears England is made up of an ethnic cleansing event from people coming across from the continent after the Romans left. Our findings completely overturn the modern view of the
origins of the English.posted by stbalbach at 1:16 PM PST - 21 comments
"Four years after father's dragging death, Ross Byrd speaks about his change of heart over executions." James Byrd Jr., was tied to the back of a pickup with logging chain, then dragged along a Texas country road until his body fell apart. White supremacist John W. King was one of two men sentenced to death for Byrd's murder. "On Wednesday, Ross Byrd traveled to the state prison in Huntsville to lead a 24-hour fast and prayer vigil on King's behalf. 'When I heard King had exhausted his appeals, I began thinking, `How can this help me or solve my pain?' and I realized it couldn't,' Byrd said."
So much for retribution. Instead of yet another senseless execution (this next to be performed with 18-gauge intravenous needle in lieu of logging chain), ponder a possible healing...a rebirth...crystallizing from the son of a murdered black man saving the life of his father's racist killer.
posted by fold_and_mutilate at 11:21 AM PST - 57 comments
Incompetently drawn hand-made Fathers Day card depicting some sort of blue square holding hands with larger green shape (possibly car?). Message inside reads 'Please Love Me Daddy from Josie' but spelt wrong. £offers. Unwanted Gift. Call Mr Hollyhock on 01999 482762 ..... The saga continues in the classifieds of Britains favourite local paper,
The Framley Examinerposted by grahamwell at 10:16 AM PST - 13 comments
Accusations hurled at hot dog contest! Takeru "The Tsunami" Kobayashi scarfed down 50.5 hot dogs in 12 minutes at Nathan's Famous Fourth of July international hot dog eating contest... but did he keep them all down for long enough? And you thought the National Spelling Bee Championships were intense!
posted by krunk at 9:01 AM PST - 25 comments
Even Ocicats In Hats Do It! How does this extraordinary woman know her cat is gay? Well:
People ask me why I think my cat is gay, and it's really hard to explain in words. If you hang out with him at all, it becomes obvious. His effeminate, overdramatic affectations speak volumes. He will go from languid, swishy posturing to screaming hysterics for no apparent reason, and then will fall over in an apparent swoon. If he is, he's certainly not
alone (predictably, even
Guinean cocks-of-the-rocks do it).
Giraffes are thought to be the gayest of all mammals but
cheetahs seem to run a close second.[
Please scroll down a bit. Requires Real or QuickTime. First link via Andrewsullivan.com.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 8:46 AM PST - 21 comments
The Guardian asked readers to send weblog recommendations, and they did, and the Guardian post a whole big bunch of them. Look at the page soon; sometimes these Guardian links change addresses...
posted by jhiggy at 8:43 AM PST - 12 comments
Nuking Lincoln (via www.dailygrail.com). Thaddeus McMullen, 1864.
"I showed McMullen’s writings to physicists familiar with nuclear fission and they were stunned," Remarsh states. "His bomb was crude, with maybe a tenth of the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, but it would have worked.
Maybe. I suspect this is a hoax, but it's interesting enough to post it anyway. Now whether the Confederates could have refined the uranium to make the bomb out of is another question. Any physicists care to express an opinion?
posted by aeschenkarnos at 4:32 AM PST - 28 comments
Pleix, a multi-disciplinary group of artists, are creating some incredible video works[Quicktime only], including a video for a new track by
Plaid[fullscreen, somewhat annoying].
Particularly fun is a group of "commercials" for Beauty Kits(Why Wait for Mother Nature?), which share a sick little theme with
this piece by someone I kinda like.
posted by Su at 1:13 AM PST - 4 comments
It's the clothes. A fashion columnist in
The Washington Post blames corporate scandals on business-casual clothes, which lead to casual ethics.
posted by kirkaracha at 12:52 AM PST - 30 comments
July 4
The media seem to think Steven Hatfill, the guy whose apartment was
searched by the FBI last week and former infectious disease researcher for the Army, is the anthrax mailer. Kristoff says Hatfill (Kristoff calls him "Mr. Z," presumably so he won’t be sued for liable) gave some friends who visited him Cipro, he has connections to a Rhodesian army who used anthrax in the late 70s and his security clearance was suspended less than a month before the mailings. Laura Rozen of
The American Prospect has news clips of him warning about bioterror attacks. (Bonus for the conspiracy theorists:
The Globe and Mail collected info on the "
[s]uspicious deaths" of eleven of the world’s leading microbiologists.) [
1,
2]
posted by raaka at 10:42 PM PST - 7 comments
Nat Hentoff tells the story of the Northampton Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a grassroots group of citizens dedicated to defending the Bill of Rights
"--not only against the USA Patriot Act but also against subsequent Presidential executive orders, and actions by John Ashcroft, that 'threaten key rights guaranteed to U.S. citizens and noncitizens by the Bill of Rights and the Massachusetts Constitution.'". Visit their
Web site to find out
what you can do to help, including signing the
Petition to Repeal the Patriot Act.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 10:18 PM PST - 3 comments
I want Frank Zappa's Rolls Royce. It's up for auction on Ebay Motors.
This statement of proper British elegance was the daily driver for iconoclastic composer/guitarist and Mothers of Invention founder Frank Zappa. Shortly before purchasing the automobile, Mr. Zappa let his driver's license lapse and never made the time to renew it. However, he thoroughly enjoyed the comfort of this Rolls and as a result, he was driven by a chauffer. Purchased new, it served as a vehicular counterpoint to its owner's avant garde learning.
Also up for sale:
Dweezil's Aston Martinposted by KevinSkomsvold at 9:59 PM PST - 6 comments
Worst Election Ever in PNG due to Mismanagement and Cash Crisis
Papua New Guinea's two-week polling period has been extended one week in some areas due to a near complete breakdown of voting infrastructure: corrupt common rolls in some areas, violence in others, and
no ballots or cash to pay for election services in still others. Results as they come in are available
online. What went wrong? Outright bribery, sometimes. Its a fight over who will control massive natural resources: citizens or international conglomerates. The privatising PM may be heading for a fall, despite his mishandling of election.
posted by rschram at 6:08 PM PST - 2 comments
Xenophobia at its best! " The British and the North Americans are often said to be divided by a common language. Now it seems this linguistic split may apply to the natural world too. [¶]
A pair of Canadian otters brought to Britain a year ago are under 24-hour guard at the National Sea-life Sanctuary, near Oban in Scotland, because of fears they will be attacked by indigenous cousins unable to understand their "foreign accents". "
YES!!11 GO CANADIAN OTTERS!!!posted by ( .)(. ) at 3:48 PM PST - 9 comments
"Boy's walk with upper caste girl led to trial and punishment"
From the newspaper article that is scanned and posted on the blog:
The girl was raped by four men as hundreds of villagers stood outside laughing and cheering, and was then forced to return home naked while dozens of villagers watched.
The sentence was ordered to shame the family after the girl's younger brother was seen walking unchaperoned with a girl from a higher-class tribe.posted by PWA_BadBoy at 3:32 PM PST - 35 comments
Unsubstantiated fear of terrorism headlines like this are an incitement to panic for no good reason. I awoke this morning to this one in the Indianapolis Star. Are all medium-sized American cities this reactionary, or is that honor reserved for
The Crossroads of America?posted by jpburns at 8:51 AM PST - 15 comments
It's just like the film Network. Former BBC anchor David Ickes, who claimed he was "the son of god" in 1991 has got a new job at the Sci-Fi channel ranting. In
Network, anchor Howard Beale has an on air nervous breakdown. Instead of taking him off the air, the network gives him a weekly show to rant to the nation.
Oddly, Icke's idea about reality is very similar to Philip K. Dick's
Valis, Grant Morrison's
The Invisibles and a recent
mefi discussion.
posted by drezdn at 1:31 AM PST - 6 comments
July 3
Happy Independence Day USA! Celebrate it by asserting your independence. Regardless of any of our multifarious differences, Americans live in a country where it is legal to
disagree and dissent. In fact, by simple dint of being Americans we each by default, protect each other's rights to disagree. For without free dialogue we cease to be American at all. So without further ado. Let's celebrate our freedom!
posted by crasspastor at 8:58 PM PST - 35 comments
The light at the end of the tunnel? The findings from a panel of Arab intellectuals on the state of the world's 280 million Arabs, in a Friedman's commentary (NYT).
A
Palestinian argument against suicide attacks, published June 19 in the Arabic language newspaper Al Quds and signed by 55 prominent Palestinian intellectuals and politicians. "Out of our national responsibility, and due to the gravity of the situation the Palestinian people is in, we, the undersigned, wish to hope that those behind the military actions aimed at [harming] citizens in Israel will reconsider [their acts] and cease pushing our youth to carry out these operations, because we do not see them as leading to any results except for increased hatred, enmity, and hostility between the two peoples, deepening the chasm between them, and destroying the possibility of both peoples living alongside each other in peace in two neighboring states."
posted by semmi at 8:55 PM PST - 6 comments
Canine candidate challenges Harris in FL elections Harris the dog is running as a write-in candidate in the Republican primary. Percy is described as "a compassionate conservative who takes a hard-line with social parasites, particularly fleas and worms. His past is free of sex scandals, due to 'timely neutering.'" A great reminder of why this country is so great.
posted by wackybrit at 8:10 PM PST - 25 comments
“Students, Thomas says, endanger themselves. And that is enough for the court to approve the program. It's enough to force every single American to also submit to suspicionless drug-testing, but Thomas neglects to mention this." The Justices are mostly old and frail and wield massive power. They should be tested for their "protection" and so the American public can be sure they are "physically fit, and have unimpeachable integrity and judgment."
posted by raaka at 5:00 PM PST - 15 comments
Life is Simple I'm not even going to pretend to understand this.
On the other hand, I really like the styling, beyond the images.
posted by Su at 4:24 PM PST - 12 comments
E-mail Reaches the Unreachable via Shortwave in the Solomons
PFNet is an innovative development project which deploys a growing network infrastructure across the largely rural and remote communities of the Solomon Islands.
"PFnet is based on a model where community-managed, operator-assisted email facilities provide all groups (even illiterates) the means to send messages and Internet emails. ... Owing to the formidable logistical barriers in this scattered island nation, the mainstay of the network uses HF/Wavemail; a well proven system short-wave radios in Pactor 2 mode." The organization is a finalist for the
Stockholm Challenge, an award for innovation in IT development.
All a community needs is a shortwave radio, solar panels, and a computer running
Wavemail to send email, and potentially more. The results are quite impressive:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6posted by rschram at 12:26 PM PST - 5 comments
Anyone who ever spent any time on the Domain-Policy mailing list before NetSol shut it down without warning a year or more back (it was starting to look evidentiary, you see, and they didn't want to get sued...) will be familiar with much of what's in
this Salon piece about John "Gnu" Gilmore, CORE, ICANN('t), and the Great Domain Registration Fiasco.
posted by baylink at 12:16 PM PST - 7 comments
Paths to patriotism "Among these young Americans, children of unprecedented peace and prosperity, the change is something unrelated to festivals and fireworks. After years of being left to themselves to navigate through video games and parental divorce, political correctness and personal computers, they are now confronted with images and emotions they have never seen or felt. Sept. 11 might not have turned them into patriots in the mold of those who stormed the beaches at Normandy, but it is stirring unfamiliar – and as yet unresolved – feelings of conflict, as many young adults struggle to reconsider America and their place in it."
posted by owillis at 11:18 AM PST - 16 comments
The New Gilded Age and its Discontents. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz began explaining why markets fail long before Enron and WorldCom rose, exploded and crashed. But not many people wanted to listen during the boom-boom '90s; Stiglitz was even fired from his position as chief economist at the World Bank after he repeatedly criticized the organization's free-market obsessions.
posted by Ty Webb at 9:36 AM PST - 8 comments
Managing Fundie Eruptions. A short course on how Karl Rove manages the fundamentalists who so often disrupt the regime's plans. He gives them what they want, but secretly, kinda like fundie sex.
posted by nofundy at 8:37 AM PST - 10 comments
you worry me This American Airlines pilot hits the nail on the head for me! Thus far the Muslim voices I hear in America--and they are precious few--always seem to get half way through condemniong this or that and then insert a "BUT" or "HOWEVER." This guy asks for a simple, straight-forward response.
posted by Postroad at 7:20 AM PST - 105 comments
Another blogging tool/service recently launched, adding to the already numerous
options. They all have their own strengths and point(s) of differentiation, but is there a saturation point?
posted by jedro at 7:11 AM PST - 15 comments
(Note to young sportswriters: Always make your steroid question your last question.) Sports Illustrated Übercolumnist Rick Reilly asks Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa if he would be willing to undergo a test for steroids. After all, Sosa has said he would be "first in line" if baseball required tests for steroids. Reilly asks, "Well, why wait? Why not step up right now and be tested? You show everybody you're clean."
Sosa chuckles ruefully, pats Reilly on the back, and replies, "No, sir, that would weaken the player's union, and besides, your question is quite inappropriate."
Just kidding. Actually, Sosa yells and screams. His answer includes the word "motherfucker." "You're not my father," he tells Reilly.
Journalists writing to the
letters page of Jim Romenesko's Media News disagree on the appropriateness of Reilly's request.
posted by Holden at 6:50 AM PST - 29 comments
The anomalies of the U.S. Constitution: what next? Ok, not a serious 'polemical' post, more a request for your take on the mysteries which politics brings us...
- how come Wyoming has 3 Senators?
- how come DC has none?
- what other wierd stuff would you fix in the Constitution of your state, given the choice? (for my part, ditching the Windsors and embracing democracy would be a start...)
posted by dash_slot- at 6:50 AM PST - 64 comments
Have the anti-Euro lobby shot themselves in the foot? A video promoting opposition to the UK joing the Euro has been critisized for including a spoof of Hitler praising the currency. It's attracted publicity for the campaign, all right, but has it unmasked the "No" campaign as anti-Europe "little Englanders"? (Guardian link)
posted by salmacis at 3:52 AM PST - 23 comments
I'm sure lots of you know about
the Hunger Site, which has been around for quite awhile. Well, in case you haven't visited recently, you might be interested to know that they've just recently added an
Animal Rescue Site to their repertoire. Except for the pop-unders (which they allow you to disable if you don't already have Popup Killer or something), this seems like a great little site.
posted by Bixby23 at 1:19 AM PST - 2 comments
July 2
Stealing from the "real" President? In a bit of a follow up to a
thread last week whereupon Bush joked that he'd only go into deficit spending if he hit the "budget trifecta" of war, recession and national emergency. Well, nobody could ever find proof that he'd said any such thing during the campaign. As it turns out, it's because it was Gore who said it. In related news, it turns out that Bush "borrowed" his June 24th
Tough on Palestine speech from Natan Sharansky, Israel's deputy prime minister, who published almost a
word for word version of the speech back on May 3rd.
posted by dejah420 at 9:39 PM PST - 50 comments
Supermodels Are Lonelier Than You Think! (tabloidesque nudity). Combining two of the best things in the world, blogs and beautiful women. This Paris based weblog gives news of the fashion industry along with the occasional inside scoop. Never thought I'd care about the fashion industry but I've been following this for some time now.
posted by geoff. at 8:42 PM PST - 10 comments
So, ummm... does anyone have a
magazine published by Man's World Publications Inc.? I heard that there are some nice photos of Jennifer Aniston in 'em, just wanted to confirm. ;) (also @
bbc)
posted by hobbes at 8:28 PM PST - 14 comments
Ah, the law in Florida. (NYT) The rich princess pushed her maid down a flight of stairs, but will be allowed to plead no contest to a misdemeanor charge of battery without having to appear in court, pay a $1,000 fine and give a judge a letter of regret about injuries to her Indonesian maid in the incident.
All this because the maid cannot be in court. After she went home to Jakarta in May for her mother's funeral, the United States Embassy there denied her a visa to return to Florida and testify on the grounds that she might try to stay in this country illegally. The maid is also the primary witness in a federal investigation of the princess for possibly employing Ms. Soryono under conditions of involuntary servitude, the Justice Department said. After the court hearing in Orlando, this federal investigation appears likely to end without charges.
posted by semmi at 8:08 PM PST - 4 comments
The TouchGraph GoogleBrowser uses Google's
related: links to visualize local maps of the web. Enter
www.metafilter.com and watch the spider unfurl its arms. Click on "Show Singles" for more specific pages, or set the "radius" to 10 for more nodes. (Full
instructions are here. ) Requires something called the Java Virtual Machine and may be IE-only, but that doesn't matter: my neighbors just called to ask if I was going to keep whooping like that all night.
posted by gleuschk at 3:14 PM PST - 25 comments
Mike Ovitz uncovers a sinister organization! He claims to be the latest victim of the "gay Mafia." By most accounts, he would also be the first. Is this simple bellyaching from a man who once dominated Hollywood? Or maybe, just maybe, we’re witnessing the birth of a new crime syndicate, and with it, fresh takes on the shopworn mob movies? LA Times link (sigh, registration req.)
posted by herc at 12:16 PM PST - 17 comments
Blonder Tongue?!?!?!? Scanning through Yahoo's "Anybody and Everybody's Press Release" News, this company name lept out at me.
Blonder Tongue Laboratories? Holy Mother of Compost Tumbler! What does it mean? Were the guys who started this company (founded in 1950) named Blonder and Tongue? Does it mean something in a language other than English (babelfish is no help)? Is this electronics firm telling us to "speak Aryan" (a scary corporate message)? Does somebody have really odd pigmentation in his mouth? Or did somebody just open a dictionary to random pages in the corporate registration office?
How would you like to open your cable bill one day and see this company name?
OK, maybe you don't want to know the story behind Blonder Tongue Labs. But what's the funniest, strangest, most non-sequitur (least sequitur?), company name YOU have ever come in contact with? (And, no, I don't have anything more important/serious/relevant for a FPP, thanks for asking.)
posted by wendell at 12:05 PM PST - 51 comments
Covered with moss: I've been a continuous subscriber to
Rolling Stone ever since I bought my first issue off the newsstand in October 1975 ("Patty Hearst: The Inside Story"), back when the magazine was still published on newsprint in SF and at least seemed to be a product of the counterculture. Today it's a
glossy celebrity rag published in NY and has almost no relevance to anything except the most superficial aspects of pop culture. Publisher Jann Wenner is bringing in a new editor in hopes of appealing to a younger demographic; this piece asks: Why not just pull the plug instead?
posted by nathanstack at 11:25 AM PST - 28 comments
In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne predicted that submarines would go to the South Pole and be nuclear powered. Leonardo da Vinci, the Florentine Renaissance inventor and artist, developed plans for an underwater warship but kept them secret. He was afraid that it would make war even more frightful than it already was. Get the
facts about submarines. Check out the submarine
timeline. What's the
future for submarines?
I want one.
posted by ashbury at 11:22 AM PST - 18 comments
The Leaves Project catalogs sadly too few leaves from trees and personal stories associated with them. Highlight a leaf and click to view the story behind it. From their
about page: "The Leaves Project was borne of one simple thought: that every leaf has an inherent beauty and elegance. I have become fascinated with the colors and textures of leaves. This project is an attempt at capturing just a small portion of the wonder to be found in the natural world."
posted by moz at 10:46 AM PST - 7 comments
A disgusting
abuse of civil liberties, while it was certainly possible to obtain a facsimile of a persons driving license in the past this just goes too far in my opinion.
posted by zeoslap at 10:11 AM PST - 18 comments
Goodwill Industries Fires Worker for Being a Communist
Sewing-machine operator Michael Italie was fired by Goodwill for his Marxist beliefs. He had not been proselytizing within the Goodwill plant, and he was not accused of doing so. His political views became an issue after he appeared on television to participate in the Miami mayoral race.
posted by Irontom at 9:54 AM PST - 51 comments
On July 8, watch your newspaper for a picture of a little girl sleeping under a
blanket imprinted with an image of the U.S. Constitution, with the caption: "Security Blanket." It's the first installment in a 13-month, $2.5 million
advertising campaign by the American Bar Association to promote the Constitution in a time of terror and get people talking about security and democracy. After all, ads sell. And why shouldn't the lawyers pay for a bit of Constitutional image rebuilding?
Without that stained, dog-eared, pissed on, misread, half-shredded little 'ol document, they'd be out of jobs.
posted by jellybuzz at 8:12 AM PST - 26 comments
The President "has
more familiarity with troubled energy companies and accounting irregularities than probably any previous chief executive." (NYTimes link, reg req'd)
Krugman chimes in on Whitehouse outrage to corporate fraud.
(See also, Cheney's investigation regarding Halliburton's accounting while he was it's big cheese)
posted by BentPenguin at 7:33 AM PST - 12 comments
Shoot the Dog, George Michael's latest release, will be accompanied by an animated video which lampoons the relationship between George Bush & Tony Blair. The UK Prime Minister appears as an obedient poodle and the video also features Mr Michael's attempts to get jiggy with the PM's wife, Cherie.
Clips viewable via
this Sky News report
'It could get slated, it could land me right in the shit, but I hope it just gets people debating because there's never been a more important time to talk than now' says the man who is no stranger to controversy
following his dalliance in an LA toilet.
Here are the
ABC &
Reuters/Yahoo versions of the story but
Lileks isn't impressed [scroll down a little] and offers a curmudgeonly run thru the lyrics.
This brings up the old chestnut of pop stars as political commentators and further questions regarding the US-UK-EU-RoW relationships, dissenting voices in these various times and, of course, whether the song is actually any good? And what does
Bono think? posted by i_cola at 3:35 AM PST - 28 comments
July 1
Study Warns of Stagnation in Arab Societies. "The report, the first United Nations human development report devoted to a single region, was prepared by Arab intellectuals from a variety of disciplines, who do not fault others for what they see as the "deficits" in contemporary Arab culture, Ms. Khalaf Hunaidi said."
posted by Zool at 11:51 PM PST - 11 comments
Did you install it yet? You may want to think twice. That new software update for Windows Media Player isn't just a security update, if you read the End User License Agreement carefully, it states:
"In order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management 'Secure Content', Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer."
Does anyone know anything more about this? How about recommendations for a suitable replacement for WMP?
posted by Hackworth at 7:05 PM PST - 31 comments
Pixeljam is a "celebration of the pixel." Tiny GIF animations are resized to fill your browser window, resulting in giant blocky washes of color.
Make sure to read the info, as there are some potentially important notes in there.
posted by Su at 6:42 PM PST - 9 comments
The other way around. This time a female teacher has been accused of sexual advances on a 13 y-o boy (now 18). The two had passed love notes in class, and when there weren't enough players for a pickup basketball game the then 26 y-o would join and press her hard body against the boy when guarding him.
posted by ( .)(. ) at 5:05 PM PST - 59 comments
Are these the hardest domains in the world to register, despite the changes that took effect 1 July 2002? Businesses can now own more than one domain name and the new .id.au domain space provides somewhere for individuals to live, but there are still many restrictions, not the least of which is the
21,322 word exclusion list.
Given the recent instances of domain hijinks discussed here, it is not surprising to see that it has
already started in the .au world.
Are these restrictions good or bad news for the .au domain space?
posted by dg at 4:43 PM PST - 6 comments
J.K. Galbraith shocked at scale of corporate failures. "I can only say I hadn't expected to see this problem on anything like the magnitude of the last few months – the separation of ownership from management, the monopolisation of control by irresponsible personal money-makers." Myself and
chrispy came to the same conclusion on the drive home from the resolutely un- (rather than anti-) corporate
Glastonbury Festival today. Profit is valued and rewarded by the vast majority of corporations above all else. As a consquence, people with the same values dominate executive positions, to the exclusion of those with more 'humanitarian' or longer-term outlooks. Where is the balance? Should we make hippie non-exec directors compulsory? Or should I just go back to bed and let the drugs wear off???
posted by barnsoir at 3:20 PM PST - 9 comments
The answer to file sharing? Woodstock Systems is Beta testing an Instant Message type music thinger. Essentially, the MP3's on your hard drive can be streamed by people on your buddy list, and vice versa. It also acts as a media player where you can play cds, streaming audio/video and mp3s in addition to ripping cds directly on to your hard drive.
You can't download the MP3's though, so will any of those pesky laws that shut down Audiogalaxy and Napster apply?
posted by remlapm at 2:15 PM PST - 23 comments
Should punishments be "creative"? Judge Michael Cicconett has sentenced a kid with a loud radio to
sit quietly in the woods, a man to
hang out with a pig, at least one guy to
run a race to diminish his jail
sentence. Now Judge Michael Cicconetti is back in the news for sentencing a couple to
print
apologies in the local newspaper for their tryst on a public beach. These are rather inconsequential sentences for very minor crimes, but one might still ask: Does
creative sentencing seems intuitively more fair and/or effective, or does
it seem to leave justice up to the capriciousness of the
judge?
posted by sj at 1:50 PM PST - 23 comments
Rep. J.C. Watts to Retire. The only Black Republican in Congress is retiring to spend time with his family. Dems say they have a shot at winning his seat, and hopefully, the House. Republicans are already vying for his #4 position in the House. I'm giddy already.
posted by jennak at 1:20 PM PST - 27 comments
The Grapes of 8th Grade Wrath. When Andy Johnson refused to participate in a class reading assignment, his teacher gave him an alternative to detention or suspension: after getting permission from his mother, Johnson showed up at school in grungy clothes, goggles and a shower cap. His classmates lined up and pelted him with jelly. They laughed, he laoughed, the teacher and principal laughed...the school board called for a review of discipline policies at the school.
[via Opinion Journal's
Best of the Web.]
posted by me3dia at 12:38 PM PST - 37 comments
An excellent piece of media analysis by Michael Wolff in New York Magazine looking at the current summer-movie-plot version of Al Qaeda being artfully constructed by the NY Times ...
Then, perhaps most disconcertingly, the overall narrative itself is patently a dumbed-down rehash. It's Cold War stuff. There is the ubiquitous and yet unknown and unknowable enemy. There's the international jihad, which, with only minor adjustments, replaces the international communist conspiracy. There's the sudden purported hegemony of the Muslim world -- a new Soviet-bloc-style ideological monolith. There is the otherworldly dedication of operatives bent on overthrowing the West. There are the cells. There is the myth of superhuman discipline. There is now, even, the developing Kremlinology of the next tier of men who replace Osama. And at the center of the story, of course, is the bomb. Whether in massive retaliatory form or as a dirty-bomb package, it serves the same effect.
(link cribbed from
Altercation)
posted by mantid at 12:14 PM PST - 8 comments
Outsider Music. From a mailing list, here's a concise
description of what is really more an
idea than a genre, per se. The
Hip Surgery Music Guide has some info on
the essential artrists of the phenomenon. If you wanted to stretch the definitions of the form you could include,
some better-known artists as well.
Unspoiled genius in the rough or merely crude freakshow appeal? The answer I believe is somewhere is somewhere in between. But in an age where most music is either a copy of what is currently popular or a revival of what used to be popular, Outsider Music is a place to go for a "Wow! What was that?" musical experience.
posted by jonmc at 11:53 AM PST - 11 comments
Mashup of Salt 'n' Pepa with The Stooges! This is similar to the recently popular
mashup of Destiny's Child's "Bootylicious" + Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit."
posted by engelr at 9:58 AM PST - 10 comments
Steven Berkoff deported from the USA for overstaying his visa by 24 hours, five years ago. Such heavy-handed behaviour must be more harmful than good for the USA as a country. Surely the rules can't be so rigid as to
force the authorities into doing this, so why do it? Couldn't they just caution, or even fine him? Or has he upset someone?
[via Wibbly Weblog]posted by southisup at 6:28 AM PST - 31 comments
Apple Computer buys Emagic, an industry-leading audio software and hardware manufacturer who produces Logic Audio, the professional-level software used to make thousands of records (incl. Radiohead's KidA and Amnesiac.) The
announcement heralds the end of Emagic's Windows offerings as well, which will orphan hundreds of thousands of people who paid upwards of $1000 for their software.
em411 has some commentary on the announcement.
posted by n9 at 6:02 AM PST - 18 comments
US Ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, speaking on behalf of the Bush administration, vetoes extension of Bosnia's UN peacekeeping force. Negroponte, citing that the US is a "special target" who "cannot have its decisions second guessed by a court whose jurisdiction we do not recognize" has pretty much sealed it up that we're now entering the phase in world history known to western civ students of the 23rd century as: American Imperialism Comes of Age. BBC's (realmedia) streaming coverage
shows how (possibly) reluctant Ambassador Negroponte was reading the US's justification for the veto from his script.
In other news, the opposition to American Imperialism grows in the heartland of the redstates. Is this just anti-bush, anti-capitalistic, prevaricating peacenik, bleeding heart, wish our president was a liberal--propaganda?
I know this looks like two posts, but I have to ask: Are there other options as to how America (its people, its traditions, its innocents) fits within the rest of the world? Or is how the Bush administration views it, the ultimate in the Progress of Civilization--worthy of preservation? Capitalism as utopia while I juggle these pins, swords and torches and get you to believe I'm talented enough to keep it all in the air
infinitely.
posted by crasspastor at 2:01 AM PST - 116 comments
The UCSD administration was recently defeated by
The Koala, a student satire publication that it attempted to shut down. Said an administrator: "We condemn the Koala's abuse of the constitutional guarantees of free expression and disfavor their unconscionable behavior."
The paper's staffers have now
sold their blood plasma to raise money for a lawyer to file a countersuit against the administration. Good to see that free speech is alive and well on college campuses, this school's administration to the contrary. And its always good to see an active
college humor magazine.posted by gsteff at 12:13 AM PST - 6 comments
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