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August 2009 Archives
August 31
The child you saved by adopting him
might just save you in return. A quiet first-person story of how a married guy became a single dad to an adopted son - the wife moved on, but the boy remained. (SLYahooV)
posted by micketymoc at 8:39 PM PST - 5 comments
" There were lots of small children in the audience. I thought about asking one little girl if she had voted for the paddle, the rod or the cattle prod." In 1995, a company called
Interfilm revolutionized the movie industry.
Oh, no, wait, it didn't. Audiences at Mr. Payback, "the first interactive movie," pressed buttons on a joystick attached to their seat to vote on the actions of the characters on-screen -- for instance, what kind of physical abuse a captured thug should undergo. Despite the pedigree of director Bob Gale (writer/producer of
Back to the Future) and co-star Christopher Lloyd,
critics were not impressed. The company folded a week after releasing its third interfilm, "I'm Your Man," scored by Joe Jackson, which did, a few years Interfilm was the brainchild of "conceptualist" and guy-with-gigantic-glasses Bob Bejan (
Dateline NBC interview), who now works at a
next-generation, data-driven marketing agency that delivers strategic, multi-channeled communication solutions designed to cultivate and sustain relationships between brands and their audiences. Watch:
Clips from "Mr. Payback."
The making of "I'm Your Man." (warning: A. Whitney Brown.) Read: the New York Times
on the 1998 DVD release of "I'm Your Man." Booklet copy from the "I'm Your Man" DVD.posted by escabeche at 6:45 PM PST - 43 comments
The Revolving Floor is a curated community of writers and artists, focused on finding creative ways to share diverse perspectives through creating content around shared topics. Every month, a new topic. Several times per week, a new post, each time by a different author. [via
mefi projects]
posted by netbros at 5:06 PM PST - 11 comments
AMASSBLOG my name is james phillips williams. most everyone calls me jp. i have been a designer in new york for 20 years. i started this blog at the urging of my friends and fellow designers who were familiar with my manic collecting. my collections are varied but generally have to do with typography or design.
posted by OmieWise at 12:31 PM PST - 11 comments
This past Thursday the Canadian government
granted refugee status to Brandon Huntley, a South African who has been living illegally in Canada since 2005. Huntley claimed that if he were to be repatriated back to South Africa he would be persecuted due to the fact that he is white. The South African government
is not amused.
[more inside]posted by PenDevil at 12:11 PM PST - 56 comments
The usual summary of comic book artist Will Eisner’s career follows the formula that he drew the Spirit all through the 1940s except for the war years and a bunch of ‘graphic novels’ from 1978 till the end of his life in 2005. There’s a long missing period between 1951 and 1978 during which he packaged and adapted cartoon art to commercial purposes, which has not been readily available for our scrutiny or pleasure. It is sometimes summarily dismissed as being of little interest. - Artist
Eddie Campbell reappraises
Will Eisner's missing years.
posted by Artw at 11:29 AM PST - 13 comments
TARP investments yield 15% returns. Almost trom the start, critics characterized the TARP program that first began under the Bush administration and that continued through early this year under President Obama as
a taxpayer funded giveaway, while government officials insisted it was a long-term investment program whose initial costs would eventually turn a profit as economic recovery began. Now the NY Times reports that the program has already yielded $4 billion in profits, and a separate report reveals that related Federal Reserve loan programs aimed at economic stabilization have returned
$14 billion in profits.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:57 AM PST - 119 comments
KITAB.UZ is a website [est. in Sep 2007 by Otabek OGULYAMOV - ed.] dedicated to creation and maintenance of digital historical, literal and cultural works about Southern Uzbekistan. Scholars, students and all individuals who are interested in the following topics are welcomed to browse our pages.
posted by yegga at 7:08 AM PST - 12 comments
First there was the
State Language Act that many
Hungarians and
EU observers claim discriminates against the significant Hungarian minority in Slovakia. The Slovaks were predictably
indigent. The issue isn't
new though. Relations soured further when the Slovaks recently
refused
entry to the Hungarian President. Clearly, there is much
history to overcome.
posted by vac2003 at 2:22 AM PST - 34 comments
August 30
Alex Kralie, a film student, was shooting his student project in 2006. It was never completed, due to what Alex called "unworkable conditions", and his friend and classmate talked Alex into handing over the raw footage.
The name of the film was to be
Marble Hornets, and that's the name of the youtube account used to released interesting or odd snippets from Alex Kralie's aborted film.
Marble Hornets Introduction [more inside]posted by boo_radley at 4:35 PM PST - 123 comments
Knossos: Fakes, Facts, and Mystery. "The masterpieces of
Minoan art are not what they seem... The truth is that these famous icons are largely modern. As any sharp-eyed visitor to the
Heraklion museum can spot, what survives of the original paintings amounts in most cases to no more than a few square inches. The rest is more or less imaginative reconstruction, commissioned in the first half of the twentieth century by
Sir Arthur Evans, the British excavator of the
palace of Knossos (and the man who coined the term 'Minoan' for this prehistoric
Cretan civilization, after the mythical King Minos who is said to have held the
throne there). As a general rule of thumb, the more famous the image now is, the less of it is actually ancient."
posted by homunculus at 2:16 PM PST - 16 comments
Alternative wine closures are being resisted. Alcoa's new glass stopper with
Dupont's vinyl ring costs nearly the same as a cork (50¢ to 70¢ each), but requires new bottling machines. Although cheaper screw caps also prevent
undesirable compounds from tainting wine, and eliminates the need for horizontal storage, they change the purist aspect of the bottle and are not biodegradable. Naturalists point out the problem of having
cork forests disappear in the Mediterranean region from low demand.
posted by Brian B. at 10:43 AM PST - 97 comments
For the last two years, Flickr user
HK Man has been collecting old photos of Hong Kong, finding the exact spots at which they were taken, and
taking them again. The result, from his first photo of
Victoria Harbor to a more recent one of
Nathan Road, comprises a chronicle of Hong Kong's unrestrained vertical development over the past few decades. In a similar vein,
Gwulo is a community site for "for everyone that is interested in old Hong Kong" and includes
photos,
mysteries, and discussions -- such as this one about
old Kai Tak Airport.
[more inside]posted by milquetoast at 3:43 AM PST - 28 comments
August 29
You'd be forgiven for rolling your eyes as soon as you hear about
yet another Beatles box set reissue whatever, but the upcoming release of practically their entire catalog in the original
MONO MIXES is certainly cause for genuine celebration for anyone who cares to hear the Beatles' music in the audio format that they themselves signed off on. Once we hear for
ourselves, come
September 9, we'll see if we agree with producer George Martin: "You've never really heard Sgt Pepper until you've heard it in
mono."
posted by flapjax at midnite at 11:55 PM PST - 149 comments
The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil: requires registration, but it's worth it.
...dependency on natural resources can poison a country’s economic and political system. Inflows of hard currency push up prices, squeezing the competitiveness of non-oil businesses and starving them of capital. As a result, productivity growth withers (a phenomenon known as “Dutch disease” after the negative effects of North Sea gas production on the Netherlands). Meanwhile, the state institutions in charge of oil often become corrupt and evade democratic control. And oil-rich states almost invariably waste the income it brings, many ending their oil booms deeper in debt than when they started.
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:43 PM PST - 32 comments
Youtube user
Omahdon takes regular old comics and adds voices, sound effects, and incidental music, bringing them to life in a way that sometimes surpasses the mute originals.
[more inside]posted by Askiba at 6:23 PM PST - 11 comments
The dog don't like you planting stuff there. It's his backyard. If you're the only one who shits in something, you own it. Remember that.
Justin posts stuff that his 73-year-old
dad says on Twitter.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:07 PM PST - 74 comments
The
Warrior Writers Project brings together recent veterans and current service members to be in creative community and utilize art-making processes to express themselves. There is a deep necessity for veterans to create when so much has been shattered and stolen. A profound sense of hope comes from the ability to rebuild and transform.
posted by netbros at 8:46 AM PST - 3 comments
August 28
Some guy named Spence Peppard takes a flying shot at Willie Nelson and Patsy Cline's
Crazy.
posted by loquacious at 9:44 PM PST - 50 comments
August Wind is a top-down 'free-roaming shooter' about mining valuable metals off the backs of cloudeels. It's the Bachelor Thesis project for Jeremy Spillmann at the Zürich School of the Arts. It features charming 2D graphics and a gypsy soundtrack.
[more inside]posted by juv3nal at 11:01 AM PST - 7 comments
Crap Happens. "Three hundred million Americans head to the restroom multiple times a day. The amount of sludge produced staggers the mind—7 million dry tons per year and counting. And it’s not even just crap—it contains residues from everything else we put down the drain, from the detergent in your dishwasher to the chemicals used at the industrial plant down the street."
posted by burnfirewalls at 7:56 AM PST - 70 comments
Painting +puzzle +compulsory 'Da Vinci' ref. Glasgow artist Frank McNab
Previously has an interesting series of paintings on display in an exhibition at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow.
Running until the end of October the paintings have the common theme of 'Libraries in the Community" and are a celebration of both the buildings themselves and their patrons.
Check out the link not just for the obvious quality of the works on display but also to see if YOU can be the one to solve the riddle hidden within the paintings themselves.
posted by Wrick at 1:08 AM PST - 2 comments
Was it triage or murder? A disturbing NY Times story about the choices made by certain medical staff at a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina. Long and not easy reading.
posted by anigbrowl at 12:29 AM PST - 81 comments
August 27
Nokia has announced the
n900 running the
maemo Linux based
operating system will be released in October. The phone has similar specifications to the
iphone, but with a keyboard and considerably higher resolution display
(800x480). In addition the OS is an open platform with free GPL development
tools. More from
The Guardian and
CNET.
posted by sien at 6:43 PM PST - 83 comments
Mickey Mouse's early road to fame (yt playlist with ~160 videos) has some odd twists and turns. One of Walt Disney's early cartoon creations was
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the star of
Trolley Troubles (5:45, 1927) and other early shorts. Disney had big plans for the popular little rabbit, and wanted to increase his budget from Universal Pictures. Unfortunately,
Charles B. Mintz wanted to scale back the budget, and in the end
Universal kept control of Oswald Rabbit. Without Oswald, Disney needed something new. Jack Dunham, one of
Disney's Nine Old Men recalled animating Oswald and "
the one without the ears." Initially, this one was called Mortimer, but Lillian Disney, Walt Disney's wife, believed the name "Mortimer"
sounded too pompous and suggested the name Mickey, though
Mickey Rooney claims he was the inspiration. Either way, the mouse was
renamed Mickey in short order, and he starred in
Plane Crazy (
video, 6:00, 1928,
previously). By 1929, he was wearing his iconic gloves (and talking), in
The Karnival Kid (
video, 7:41). But Mortimer returned, as
Mickey's Rival (8:16, 1936), eventually getting
his own themesong (1:56, modern recording off of TV;
better quality song with a still image, 1:35) and again in
a modern short (1:30, 2000), amongst
other appearances. Then there's
Uncle Mortimer, who first traveled with
Mickey Mouse in Death Valley, though it's not always clear whose uncle he is. And in the alternate universe that is
Bloom County,
Mickey's fraternal twin is Mortimer (technically, he resides in
Outland).
posted by filthy light thief at 1:51 PM PST - 10 comments
78641 is a "hit Esperanto interactive simulator" now available in English - a surreal freeware adventure game in which you play a frying pan named Dougo Beaches who deals with car trouble. There is time traveling. And don't worry, the Ethiopian children who drew the artwork were "paid in candy / peanut substance."
Video trailer.
Windows only. [more inside]posted by jbickers at 8:09 AM PST - 13 comments
August 26
Wow. I was going to say something witty and clever, and I got nothin, so: "The new Web-based
Sony Library Finder tool can be used to find e-books in the local library that can be checked out, downloaded onto a desktop computer and then loaded onto a Sony Reader device -- all without charge." [Note - Probably USian]
[more inside]posted by ZakDaddy at 8:20 PM PST - 62 comments
"God save me!" quoth the priest, with a loud voice, "is Tirante the White there? Give me him here, neighbour; for I make account I have found in him a treasure of delight, and a mine of entertainment. Here we have Don Kyrieleison of Montalvan, a valorous knight, and his brother Thomas of Montalvan, and the knight Fonseca, and the combat in which the valiant Tirante fought with the mastiff, and the smart conceits of the damsel Plazerdemivida, with the amours and artifices of the widow Reposada; and madam the empress in love with her squire Hypolito. Verily, gossip, in its way, it is the best book in the world..."
-
Don Quixote de la Mancha, Part I, Chapter 6 [more inside]posted by Iridic at 3:18 PM PST - 11 comments
A
Saudi Prince tells America to give up futile dreams of energy independence.
Op-Ed in the NYT says Peak Oil is a waste of energy and an illusion. Meanwhile, the OECD's energy advisors, the IEA are saying cheap oil will
run out in ten years, a decade sooner than estimates made as recently as 2007.
posted by bystander at 2:57 PM PST - 88 comments
From the publisher's website: "
The YouTube Reader is the first full-length book to explore YouTube as an industry, an archive and a cultural form." Features some seasoned commentators, among them film analyst Thomas Elsaesser, and an
online exhibition. Looks interesting.
posted by Holly at 2:47 PM PST - 11 comments
Last week,
Eddy Temple Morris, a DJ on UK radio station
XFM, challenged Twitter to remix as many songs as possible into 10 minutes. The previous record was held by Wizard of
Deekline and Wizard - it is now held by rapper, producer and all-round renaissance man
Akira the Don, who managed to fit a staggering 210 tracks into 1/6 of an hour. He's just put together a video to accompany the mix -
watch it hereposted by muggsy1079 at 7:44 AM PST - 22 comments
Ikea de-Futurafies. You may have noticed something at once familiar and unfamiliar about the 2009 Ikea catalogue: The company switched from a custom variant of
Futura to the font you stare at all day in your browser, Verdana. And type nerds are
losing their shit! [more inside]posted by joeclark at 5:26 AM PST - 167 comments
August 25
The
funicular railway is a kind of
cable-based railway that gives me great joy because of its peculiar shape and its uselessness for doing anything other than what it does. A funicular carriage is generally
stairstepped or
terraced, so you can't repurpose these cars for other uses. They generally work in a particular way, too, as pairs: one goes up the mountain, one comes down the mountain! Maybe this kind of glee is why they seem to be especially popular in Japan today, where they can be taken to many popular sightseeing areas--but a fair number of funicular railway riders are probably there for the journey, not the destination.
[more inside]posted by wintersweet at 8:29 PM PST - 64 comments
Old-time radio (often abbreviated as "OTR," also known as the Golden Age of Radio) refers to a period of radio programming in the United States lasting from the proliferation of radio broadcasting in the early 1920s until television's replacement of radio as the dominant home entertainment medium in the 1950s, with
some programs continuing
into the early 1960s. The origin of radio dramas in the United States is hard to pin down, but
there is evidence of a remote broadcast of a play in 1914 at
Normal College (now California State University at San José), and the first serial radio drama was
an adaptation of a play by Eugene Walter, entitled "The Wolf," which aired in September 1922. Given the age of the programs and the fact that
home reel-to-reel recording started in the 1950s (followed by Philips "compact cassettes" in 1963), it might be surprising that quite a few of
these old shows have survived. Thanks in part to original radio station-sourced recordings made on
aluminum discs, acetates, and glass recordings and other unnamed sources, many radio dramas and newscasts from decades past are
available online, and more are being digitized and restored to this day.
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 12:47 PM PST - 53 comments
"Papa" John Schnatter loved his old
Camaro so much he couldn't bear to watch it drive away after he sold it, but he used the proceeds of the sale to start a restaurant business (which ended up
going pretty well). To celebrate the 25th anniversary of starting his restaurant, he traveled the US to thank his employees and search for his lost car. Surprisingly,
he found it, bought it back and to celebrate he's giving everyone with a Camaro
a free pizza tomorrow. (Aug. 26th)
posted by 1f2frfbf at 9:30 AM PST - 53 comments
In The Mood For Chris Doyle "The most Chinese white man to have ever lived...the incomparable, incredibly talented Chris Doyle... is a highly acclaimed, AFI Award-winning cinematographer, known for his use of extreme angles and vanguard color grading. He has won, amongst other accolades, the Cannes Technical Grand Prize, Golden Osella, the Golden Horse awards (four times), and Hong Kong Film Award (six times). Doyle is an affiliate of the Hong Kong Society of Cinematographers." (
more)
posted by vronsky at 8:50 AM PST - 30 comments
August 24
Matthew Weigman, a fat, blind kid, started phone
swatting when he was 15. Three years later, he was sentenced to 11 years in prison. His exploits include trying to initiate phone sex with Lindsey Lohan, sending swat teams to people's homes and gathering confidential information from Verizon and AT&T.
[more inside]posted by kylej at 11:08 PM PST - 61 comments
In addition to poor construction, the vehicles most likely to crash have 1) poorly secured bicycle wheels 2) a high center of gravity and 3) high occupancy. Add in alcohol, a steep down grade and spectators throwing water balloons, and you get the perfect storm for destruction.
This past weekend,
the 13th Annual Adult Soapbox Derby (all slyt) was held on Mt. Tabor, an extinct volcano in Portland, Oregon. Cars built for speed can reach 40 mph, and cars built for art can be downright outrageous.
[more inside]posted by Lutoslawski at 1:33 PM PST - 14 comments
August 23
Just as quietly as when they
first voted on this, the Mexican government has decriminalized the possession of drugs for personal use. Associated Press's
take. The official
decree. Despite the understated release of the information, this is a sea change in Mexican policy and could very well be the beginning of a change in U.S. policy as well.
posted by Cobalt at 6:52 AM PST - 82 comments
Just in case you were wondering, yes, indeed, it
is the people who dance to Zinli music in Benin who have the coolest, freshest dance moves on the planet. Once you get past the extended a cappella intro, and that delicious slow groove kicks in at the 3:26 minute mark,
this video will treat you to some of the most undulating funky moves EVAR. Now, whether you wanna try some of these gyrations yourself, or whether you just dig a nice, slow, cooly percolating West African groove for listening, go here for more from singer
Alekpehanhou the "Roi du Zinli Rénové".
[more inside]posted by flapjax at midnite at 3:36 AM PST - 16 comments
August 22
One in 8 Million "New York is a city of characters. On the subway and in its streets, from the intensity of Midtown to the intimacy of neighborhood blocks, is a 305-square-mile parade of people with something to say. This is a collection of a few of their passions and problems, relationships and routines, vocations and obsessions. A new story will be added weekly."
A photo and audio series from the
New York Times.
[more inside]posted by ocherdraco at 10:06 PM PST - 53 comments
Inglourious Basterds looks promisingly offensive, but it certainly doesn't appear to be the
most offensive thing that could possibly be written as a comedy about World War II. No, for that, you'd have to have -- no,
not Jerry Lewis, that won't do. Say it was based on a comic that was originally a
webcomic. Say it was produced in one of the former Axis countries. And that it featured all of the major players as
anthropomorphized stereotypes of those countries. And that these stereotypes were all young, attractive men who spent a
lot of time with each other. Call it "Useless Italy" -- or, in Japanese,
Hetalia: Axis Powers. [more inside]posted by Countess Elena at 2:43 PM PST - 69 comments
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported today that William Calley spoke to the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus on Wednesday. During his remarks he apologized for his role in the My Lai massacre.
“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” Calley said. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.”
The Kiwanis gave him a standing ovation, the first time the club secretary recalls that happening. (
Previously)
posted by ob1quixote at 8:47 AM PST - 106 comments
Timi Yuro, an Italian-American singer born in Chicago (where, the story goes, her nanny snuck her into clubs to watch singers like Dinah Washington and Mildred Bailey), was arguable the greatest
blue-eyed soul artist of the '60s.
[more inside]posted by The Card Cheat at 7:18 AM PST - 8 comments
Healthcare reform has agitated right-wing extremists and moneyed interests in the United States for some time — during the presidencies of
FDR and Truman as well as Clinton and Obama, most recently — but where do the objections originate from, and particularly those which are known to be based on complete untruths? Some of these lies start with or are repeated by
well-known right-wing media personalities, but there are other people who get the ball rolling, who are perhaps less well-known.
Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey originated one of the current myths more commonly known as
"death panels", but despite her attempts to market herself as a folksy voice fighting for the well-being of senior citizens, she has been an effective advocate for the interests of private health insurance companies since the early 1990s.
[more inside]posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:43 AM PST - 167 comments
August 21
The second annual
National Go Topless Protest Day will be held this Sunday, August 23, in various American cities. It happens to be run by
Raelians, members of
a UFO religion founded by Rael, a former French sports-car journalist and test driver born
Claude Vorilhon. (
Coverage of last year's protest in New York City, which is, as one might suspect, NSFW.) Though the current "Go Topless!" site talks more about women's rights than Raelism, in 2004, Raelian women were marching topless not for the legalization of bare breastedness, but
against "the repressive Myth of God." Don't remember the Raelians? This is just the most recent stunt by the publicity-hungry group that
capitalizes on media-friendly controversy: in 2002, during the slow news week between Christmas and New Year's Day,
they announced the creation of the first human clone, gaining what Rael estimated at over $500 million of free media coverage. In an interview, Rael
unabashedly discusses his passion for publicity.
[more inside]posted by ocherdraco at 5:21 PM PST - 63 comments
Cats for Clunkers? It had to be Michigan where the Humane Society is promoting its free cat adoptions like
used car sales... That's right folks, Certified Pre-Owned Cats! Standard 4-paw Drive! 100,000 Purr Warranty! Made in Michigan and Better than New! But before you take that cat home, check out
Catfax.org because nobody wants a lemonpuss. lol.
Found at Consumerist so it must be legit [more inside]posted by wendell at 4:31 PM PST - 20 comments
Decades after it was written on the eve of World War II, a lost Poirot story by Agatha Christie has been found. Today it is published in the Daily Mail for the first time:
The Capture Of Cerberus (scroll half way down the page).
[more inside]posted by lioness at 3:59 PM PST - 19 comments
In
Hypermusic Prologue, physicist Lisa Randall re-imagines her extradimensional theories of the universe as opera, with a score by Hèctor Parra. Some more about this on YouTube (the last three are in french, but you can hear some of the music):
Episode 1 (Randall speaks),
Episode 2 (scenery),
Episode 3 (the music), and
Episode 4 (more scenery).
posted by twoleftfeet at 1:10 PM PST - 20 comments
Kinpira is a shockwave-game where you play a baby samurai out to rescue his mother. You run around a 3d landscape, all of which you can pick up and throw, once you grow strong enough to lift it. To start with you're picking up vases and other light items but soon enough you're lobbing houses around and eventually entire mountains. It's vaguely reminiscent of Mario 64 and Katamary Damacy.
posted by Kattullus at 12:06 PM PST - 26 comments
Glenn Greenwald / Neil Barofsky
Hey! Can you tell us what they did with the money?
"Many banks were concerned about business-sensitive information and requested confidentiality of individual survey responses. Accordingly, pursuant to our legal obligations, SIGTARP is unable in this report to attribute any results or comments to a specific institution. However, SIGTARP is in the process of evaluating recipients’ claims of confidentiality and will provide copies of the individual responses that will include information provided by the banks to the maximum permitted by law. SIGTARP plans to post the responses, redacted as necessary, on its website within 30 days."
[more inside]posted by RoseyD at 2:48 AM PST - 21 comments
August 20
There was a historic music festival in the summer of 1969. But it's not the one that took place in Bethel, NY. The
Harlem Cultural Festival ran from
June 29 to August 24 that summer, presenting a concert every Sunday afternoon in
Mount Morris Park (known today as Marcus Garvey Park).
Three hundred thousand people turned out for the
six free concerts, hearing acts like
Nina Simone , Sly & the Family Stone (the only act to play both Woodstock and the "black Woodstock"), Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, The 5th Dimension, Moms Mabley and. Speakers included Jesse Jackson and "blue-eyed soul brother" Mayor John Lindsay. Security was courtesy of the
Black Panthers, since the NYC police refused to provide it. Filmmaker Hal Tulchin recorded
over 50 hours of concert footage, which has remained unreleased.
Historic Films seems to hold the footage; it was supposed to be made into a movie to
premiere at Sundance 2007, but its
release seems to be continually delayed for reasons unclear.
[more inside]posted by Miko at 7:15 PM PST - 19 comments
The Millions, online since 2003, is a book blog of exceptional breadth and depth, and "an independent literature and culture publication that pays its writers." Until recently, that breadth and depth was hard to fathom, as the site had outgrown its infrastructure. Now, however, its excellent
features are easy to find, as are series like
The Future of the Book,
Ask a Book Question, and
The Millions Interview. Superb reviews can be found
as they happen or in the
Book Review Index, and, a vestige of when The Millions was a one man operation, you can find out what C. Max Magee, founder of The Millions, is reading on the
Book Lists page.
[more inside]posted by ocherdraco at 2:39 PM PST - 12 comments
In 1984 computer pioneer Ken Thompson wrote one of the seminal works of computer security,
Reflections on Trusting Trust [PDF]. In it he postulated putting a trojan horse inside a compiler as a means of infecting software compiled by it. 25 years later somebody has finally done just that. Researchers at anti-virus house Sophos have
discovered a virus that places a backdoor into applications compiled with the Delphi language. They've identified at least 3000 separate Delphi applications that have had this backdoor compiled into them so far, including banking programs and programs used for cellphone programming.
posted by scalefree at 12:30 PM PST - 52 comments
Joseph Brodsky:
In Praise of Boredom -- from his
Dartmouth College commencement address in 1995. " Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to
the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's
infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw
it wide open. For boredom speaks the language of time, and it teaches you the
most valuable lesson of your life: the lesson of your utter insignificance. It
is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. "You are
finite," time tells you in the voice of boredom, "and whatever you do is, from
my point of view, futile."
posted by vronsky at 11:46 AM PST - 38 comments
Personas is a part of the MIT
Metropath(ologies) exhibit that scours the web for information and attempts to characterize a person based on an entered first and last name, showing visualizations of the process as it chugs along.
[more inside]posted by juv3nal at 10:59 AM PST - 55 comments
Fifty years ago, those decrying rock 'n' roll as devil music that would crumble the morals of America needed to look no further than
Wanda Jackson for evidence. Her
raspy, brassy voice,
suggestive lyrics, and
sexual energy were almost unbelievable for the Eisenhower years. Coaxed into singing rockabilly by her then-boyfriend,
Elvis, she had a
string of
rock hits, before marrying and IBM programmer and switching to more traditional,
conservative country music.
posted by Jon_Evil at 10:49 AM PST - 23 comments
A well-dressed man wakes up in a Seattle city park. He has $600 in his sock and no memory of who he is or how he got there. He is fluent in English, French and German and has an apparent deep knowledge of European cultural history. He seems to have traveled the world. And he says he is a widower. Doctors suspect he is not faking it but they don’t know how to help. Police are stumped as well.
[more inside]posted by bz at 10:37 AM PST - 75 comments
Saturday, September 26th, the Smithsonian museum family and their affiliates will be hosting a free admission event, if you go to
their MUSEUM DAY site and print out the admission coupon. One coupon = 1+ admission.
[more inside]posted by FunkyHelix at 9:13 AM PST - 20 comments
Can't Wait for Friday Flash Fun:
Cyclomaniacs is a bicycle racing game. Pretty self explanatory (GO FAST AND SPIN A LOT!) and fun.
posted by schyler523 at 7:30 AM PST - 18 comments
August 19
In programming, as in life, you find those who's turn a mundane task and turns it into art. In the Ruby world one of those people goes by the psuedonym of
why the lucky stiff or simply
_why. _why's
Poignant Guide To Ruby [PDF - large, and still worth a look] is an almost transcendent look at what a programming book can be, full of cartoon foxes and wizards and even a
soundtrack. _why didn't really care about making a mint off of his work instead deciding he wanted to get kids excited about programming, in a way that they could understand, teaching them by
"fated appointment only" [Vid Link, 30 mins and fun]. He created a whole framework designed to make it easy for kids to get into programming called
Hackety Hack.
Today for some reason _why's online
presence,
sites and
code have disappeared from the inter tubes and nobody knows
_why.
Though some believe its because someone pierced the veil and found
his real name but many wonder if he didn't get
hackedposted by bitdamaged at 4:30 PM PST - 85 comments
Let's Panic About Babies! "Fortunately for everyone in the whole wide world,
Alice Bradley and
Eden M. Kennedy have created the only website that accurately explains the journey from morning sickness to third-degree tears to keeping that baby alive for a year–or more! LET’S PANIC ABOUT BABIES will serve as a salve to the mystery and degradation of this most female of challenges. Its authors may not have 'science' on their side, but what they do have is far more valuable: a heady mélange of female intuition, sentence-forming know-how, and the achingly vivid memories of their own gestational journeys and unending motherhoods. So join Alice and Eden as they tell you exactly what to think and feel and do on every one of your 2,681 days* of pregnancy. They know everything!
* 'Science' would tell you that human gestation is actually, on average, 266 days. This is one of many ways in which science is terribly wrong." [more inside]posted by ocherdraco at 1:27 PM PST - 63 comments
"It turned out 30 employees were let go that day. The Dirty Thirty. Back in March, 30 others were let go. And before that, 25 were shown the door. ‘All difficult but necessary actions’ we were told in a group staff meeting following the first cuts. Then the company stopped convening staff meetings to talk about its problems ... Kevin, my manager for five years and editorial director at the organization, never said a word to me. No goodbye. No handshake. No apology. No compassion. Nothing." Matthew Newton on job loss. (
Part I,
Part II)
posted by geoff. at 7:30 AM PST - 77 comments
Theodore Olson was the 42nd United States Solicitor General, serving from June 2001 to July 2004. He also was attorney general during the Ronald Reagan administration, where he defended Reagan during the
Iran-Contra affair. He appeared before the Supreme Court fifty-five times as solicitor general, most recently arguing Bush's side in the case
Bush V. Gore which decided the outcome of the 2000 election. He is a member of the
Federalist Society, which seeks to reform constitutional law to bring it more in line with an originalist interpretation of the constitution, and was on the board of
The American Spectator magazine.
But his current case, which he says could be the most important case of his career, has many fellow conservatives scratching their heads. Because Theodore Olson is going to
argue before the Supreme Court in favor of overturning
California's Proposition 8 and thus legalizing same-sex marriage.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:37 AM PST - 57 comments
After ending the 2007 season for Green Bay with pretty much e
very passing record in the NFL and a Super Bowl win under his belt, Brett Favre announced his retirement in a
tearful press conference. He later
rescinded his retirement to play for the Jets in 2008. Citing an aging body unable to stand up to the rigors of another season, he
retired again after last season. Despite rumors of moving to the Minnesota, he was still
officially retired as late as July. Well,
not anymore.
He’s back, and playing for the rival Vikings. Needless to say, the move has made him an arch- villain in
the town that built him into a legend.
[more inside]posted by jadayne at 6:10 AM PST - 51 comments
It's always a hoot to look through old issues of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, and with
Google Books you can now do just that! But what do you get if you mix an eternally medieval city with eternally hopeful futurists? You get these mags' interesting take on
Venice, Italy! Through their pages, you see the 20th century slowly but surely arrive to the canal city (or not, as sometimes the case may be...)
[more inside]posted by Misciel at 3:14 AM PST - 3 comments
August 18
ECCEROBOT - Embodied Cognition in a
creepy looking Compliantly Engineered Robot, an anthropomimetic robot whose plastic bones and joints imitate the body structures of the fleshy ones.
posted by Artw at 10:08 PM PST - 17 comments
The Great Flu — "Even at the lowest difficulty this game delivers a sense of just how hard it is to handle and contain the spread of a dangerous virus." (
via)
posted by netbros at 9:16 PM PST - 28 comments
What you don't know about your friends:
The problem, [Francis Flynn, a psychology professor at Stanford] says, is that interacting with people and sharing experiences with them doesn’t necessarily translate into knowing lots of things about them. The main hurdle is the way we talk to those we’re close to: our conversations are usually meant not so much to gather information as to establish rapport and to bond - in short, to make friends.posted by Korou at 11:11 AM PST - 69 comments
Paul Tschinkel is the producer and director of the series called ART/new york. -- After showing video pieces in New York galleries, he turned to the fledgling New York cable system (Manhattan Cable downtown and Warner Cable uptown), producing a half hour weekly arts program - a gallery on television. From 1974 to 1979
Paul Tschinkel's Inner- Tube was devoted to conceptual and narrative video art pieces.
[more inside]posted by vronsky at 10:48 AM PST - 4 comments
Running is actually good for your knees, if you haven't suffered knee injuries in the past.
[D]espite entrenched mythology to the contrary, runners don’t seem prone to degenerating knees. An important 2008 study, this one from Stanford University, followed middle-aged, longtime distance runners (not necessarily marathoners) for nearly 20 years, beginning in 1984, when most were in their 50s or 60s. At that time, 6.7 percent of the runners had creaky, mildly arthritic knees, while none of an age-matched control group did. After 20 years, however, the runners’ knees were healthier; only 20 percent showed arthritic changes, versus 32 percent of the control group’s knees. Barely 2 percent of the runners’ knees were severely arthritic, while almost 10 percent of the control group’s were. posted by caddis at 8:03 AM PST - 81 comments
How American Health Care Killed My Father After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem. (via
mr)
[more inside]posted by kliuless at 6:40 AM PST - 144 comments
The Road to Moloch. A short film.
Will the genre of rag-tag band of (battle-hardened soldiers/sex-crazy students/escaped convicts) stumbles upon (cave in the desert/cabin in the woods/house on the hill) and unearths (unspeakable zombie terror/undead apocalypse/soul stealing demons)
ever get old?
posted by jadayne at 5:48 AM PST - 13 comments
August 17
Ahmet Ertegun was profiled by George W. S. Trow in The New Yorker in a classic piece back in 1978. Ertegun was the son of the Turkish ambassador to the US and he remained behind in D.C. studying medieval philosophy at Georgetown. Instead of devoting himself to his studies he founded Atlantic Records with his friend Herb Abramson. Trow charted how Ertegun moved from tramping through muddy, Louisiana fields in search of hot new sounds to the whirl of Studio 54. Below the cut are links to the songs mentioned in the article, as best as I could find, in the order in which they appear.
[more inside]posted by Kattullus at 6:42 PM PST - 25 comments
Years have passed since Zarkon's invasion of Arus.
A team of Space Explorers approaches the planet. Young but determined, these explorers have been sent by the Galaxy Alliance on a special mission: to search for the secret of Voltron. The team of explorers consists of five brave young (brick)men:
Keith,
Pidge,
Hunk,
Lance, and
Sven. Together, with
71 hours of building, they form
Lego Voltron. From
work in progress to
cockpit details and
shoulder pin mechanisms, the photographed details are there to enjoy.
The builder includes credits to the
Teknomeka plans for the frame of the structure (
history of the plans,
models, and
another model) (
via).
posted by filthy light thief at 11:36 AM PST - 35 comments
The unexpected (possible) history of the world's most famous typeface. Mike Parker, former head of typographic development at Morgenthaler Linotype,
has challenged the standard history of Times New Roman. The typeface, Parker claims, wasn't designed by "the great persuader"
Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent of Monotype in 1931, but rather thirteen years earlier by an American,
William Starling Burgess,
an airplane and yacht designer, published poet, and naval architect who married five times and whose daughter, also named Starling Burgess, described him as “a bird of paradise in a family of English sparrows.” By the time of that statement, she no longer shared his name, but
had become the celebrated children's author
Tasha Tudor.
(via)posted by ocherdraco at 11:32 AM PST - 46 comments
Historic Bridges of the U.S. This is the most complete database of historic bridges I've seen. The front page is blog style that seems to have an emphasis on preservation, and which links to a database that is actively being updated & expanded. You can search by
state or by
county, and look at each bridge's individual
page, including a wealth of stats, and a high-res
photo, when available.
[more inside]posted by Devils Rancher at 8:05 AM PST - 31 comments
August 16
On August 16, 2008, a small plane carrying a young married couple and their flight instructor crashed in the Arizona desert. Doug Kinneard, the instructor, was killed in the crash; Stephanie and Christian Nielson survived, both severely burned. Prior to the crash, Stephanie's weblog, the NieNie Dialogues,
"had attracted a small but ardent following, thanks to its upbeat dispatches about marriage, home décor, entertaining and the art of raising four children ages 6 and younger." After the crash, with burns on over 80% of her body, she spent two months in a medically induced coma. One month later, she was
released from the hospital (link to Stephanie's sister's blog); one month after that, she
began blogging again. Stephanie's posts since then have chronicled her
gradual recovery, her re-integration into
her family, her
love and gratitude for her husband, and, finally, on the one-year anniversary of the plane crash,
herself. [more inside]posted by granted at 7:16 PM PST - 61 comments
The Obama administration signaled today it is ready to entirely abandon the public option,
i.e. giving Americans the choice of government-run health insurance (
AP,
Daily Kos,
Politico,
Hill). Further, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius indicated that end-of-life counseling was "
probably off the table", presumably due to Republican "death panel" commentary.
posted by WCityMike at 11:32 AM PST - 491 comments
August 15
At just age five, Brooke Breedwell and Asia Mansur were bitter arch-rivals, the top dogs in their age group on the Southern child beauty pageant circuit. The two were even featured in the 1995 documentary
Painted Babies [
2 3 4 5]. When the two were seventeen, the director of
Painted Babies returned to
see what kind of women they had become (the resulting documentary is linked under "more inside"). Several days ago, Brooke Breedwell spoke about the impact that beauty pageants had on her life in an interview taped for
Good Morning America.
[more inside]posted by SkylitDrawl at 3:24 AM PST - 43 comments
August 14
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a
criticism of Burning Man, LLC's
Terms and Conditions, saying that the automatic rights assignment to BMOrg for photos & video taken during the event is "creative lawyering intended to allow the BMO to use the streamlined “notice and takedown” process enshrined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to quickly remove photos from the Internet" and that this is corrosive to our freedom of speech. Burning Man
responds.
posted by scalefree at 6:14 PM PST - 123 comments
The complete and until today unaired
pilot of South Park for Comedy Central, with an additional creator's commentary track. About 90% was recut into the first episode, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe," but with a few slightly altered scenes and characters. After gaining underground popularity with two shorts that
you've all probably seen already at this point, Trey Parker and Matt Stone were contracted by Comedy Central to produce a full pilot episode for a potential show based on the shorts. This pilot episode is what would ultimately lead to a series that is now 12 years old, spans over 180 episodes, and is one of the most successful shows in the history of cable television both in ratings and revenue. The pilot is also the only episode in the series that, like the original shorts, uses stop-motion animation of paper cutouts instead of computer software.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 4:06 PM PST - 24 comments
thesixtyone is a site for the "democratization of music": tunes submitted by artists are voted up and down by users, digg-style. Standard Web 2.0 bling (Creative Commons, RSS and Twitter feed) is integrated with some nice features, including keyboard shortcuts and in-browser visualisation.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 1:04 PM PST - 15 comments
Top 100 search terms of the <18 crowd during summer. If you're Glenn Quagmire, don't read this. All others, continue!
An article with at least superficial credibility (they admit kids search for porn, etc.) about what kids, tweens and teens search for online. Randomness includes Megan Fox, Walmart, Youtube and Naked Girls. (And Craigslist. What the hell do kids need on Craigslist?)
posted by ShadePlant at 10:49 AM PST - 75 comments
Your World of Text is an infinite grid of text editable by any visitor. The changes made by other people appear on your screen as they happen. Everyone starts in the same place, but you can scroll through the world using your mouse.
[more inside]posted by grobstein at 9:52 AM PST - 85 comments
Faulkner Friday: William Faulkner's connection with the
University of Mississippi was a varied one, including a stint as an
abysmal postmaster. Regardless, Ole Miss has put together
a vast website dedicated to the writer. Learn about his
life,
his family tree, his
home at Rowan Oak, and
even a FAQ for those common questions. Learn about his
novels, his
short stories, and his
poems. And if that's all old hat, how about information on his
work in Hollywood, a
source of academic resources on the writer, a
listing of other websites on Faulkner, and lastly, a
page of trivia, quotes, and quizzes.
posted by Atreides at 8:48 AM PST - 7 comments
George Brett, baseball
Hall-of-Famer, has had an illustrious career. But even great men can have truly humbling experiences. Luckily, George is the kind of guy who isn't ashamed to discuss HIS humbling experience
at great length (Language NSFW). And it's good to know that there is no tale so tragic that it can't be turned into
a catchy song (Language and hilarity NSFW).
posted by FatherDagon at 6:44 AM PST - 27 comments
August 13
Filament aims to be a
different kind of women's magazine. They plan to "cover a wide range of topics [but absolutely no beauty or diet articles] that inspire and engage , and [give women] gorgeous boys the way
[they] like to see them."
Their
first issue is out and featured a mix of articles, fiction, poetry and pics of shirtless boys. For their second issue, they want to include a pic of a man with erection, but their
printer bailed because the printer was afraid of a backlash. The magazine has also had issues with
distributors because many of them don't want to deal with a women's magazine with a man on the cover.
Via (NSFW)
Erotica Cover Watch (NSFW) which is a blog dedicated to ending the
preponderance of (naked) women on the covers of erotic books, and is trying to get more
men and couples on the covers.
posted by nooneyouknow at 8:49 PM PST - 82 comments
Yet another 20th century English author in bed with the communists? Literally, in this case -
Arthur Ransome might be best known for his 'Swallows & Amazons' books about children sailing in the idyllic
Lake District, but before all that, he left his first wife (and a libel case that got him mixed up with Oscar Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas) to study fairy tales in Russia... only there he fell in love with Leon Trotsky's private secretary, ended up working for the Bolsheviks and also MI6.
[more inside]posted by Sifter at 4:03 PM PST - 35 comments
For your entertainment, the music of
DJ Jester the Filipino Fist joined with visuals by Samaro (aka Kid Kotex):
River Walk Riots, the video (includes NFSW moments of blue cartoon nudity and some vocal profanity). Originally made in 2001, the rediscovered video is part of DJ Jester's
River Walk Riot mixcd,
because of which he met renowned turntablist
Kid Koala. The Filipino Fist joined Kid Koala,
P-Love, and
Lederhosen Lucil in the 2003
"Short Attention Span Theater" Tour. The three turntablists took the stage in separate sets, and joined forces (as seen here in 5 parts:
Stompin' At Le Savoi,
Nufonia Must Fall: Page 275,
Drunk Trumpet,
Skanky Panky, and
N.M.F. Page 298).
[more inside]posted by filthy light thief at 1:15 PM PST - 15 comments
Cleveland, Ohio, c.1932: A young American writer named Jerry Siegel teamed up with a young Canadian artist named Joe Shuster to create science fiction comic books. Out of this collaboration, a superhero was born. In 1938, the duo sold their creation to Detective Comics, and the rest, as they say,
is history.
Ten years and several lawsuits later, Siegel and Shuster, after being fired from the company they had helped to build, signed on with a fledgling comics publisher called Magazine Enterprises. Once again, their collaboration yielded fruit. But... would lightning strike twice?
Sadly, it would not.posted by Atom Eyes at 11:09 AM PST - 62 comments
GLAAD recently published their
third annual GLAAD Network Responsibility Index, evaluating networks on the quantity, quality and diversity of images of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people on television. The SyFy (Sci-Fi) channel was given an F rating for their failure of their depiction of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) characters. In response, the head of the SyFy network promised to
be more diverse.
[more inside]posted by FunkyHelix at 7:44 AM PST - 250 comments
Most frequent flyer programs are kind of a raw deal: seats are often severely limited, many popular dates are blocked and fees can be steep. But there are exceptions: JetBlue just came out with an
All-You-Can-Jet Offer. $599 gets people unlimited travel anywhere on their network for a month beginning September 8th and seats are not limited.
The idea isn't new: American Airlines used to sell a Lifetime AAirPass through the Neiman Marcus catalog, which offered unlimited travel on any AA flight in any class. Unfortunately, it cost a cool $3 million.
posted by krautland at 4:40 AM PST - 24 comments
August 12
China’s wild west Considered journalism on the historical and political background to the recent inter-ethnic violence in Xinjiang.
posted by Abiezer at 6:28 PM PST - 9 comments
Shoot It! Create and mail a real [paper!] postcard from anywhere and to anyone around the world.
posted by ColdChef at 5:37 PM PST - 34 comments
Chuck Norris opens beer cans by biting off the top. If Chuck Norris runs into a bear in the woods, the bear flees in terror. Chuck Norris is legendary, to say the least. But how will he fare in his greatest challenge? Chuck Norris is now
blogging about politics.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:32 PM PST - 63 comments
In august of 1979, Philip Schneider was working as a government Geologist building secret military bases when he became involved in an underground
battle with alien Greys which left 67 secret service and military personnel dead.
[more inside]posted by jadayne at 1:11 PM PST - 43 comments
After the Remote Area Medical (
RAM) Expedition visited
Wise County in rural Virginia, they made their next
stop at the Fabulous
Forum, in urban Los Angeles.
posted by jaimev at 1:03 PM PST - 14 comments
When you think of
Hinduism, you probably don't think of suburban
Lilburn, Georgia, yet it is home to
BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, at over 30,000 square feet the
largest Hindu
temple in the world outside of India. The
beautiful temple was assembled from 34,000 pieces of Turkish limestone, Indian pink sandstone, and Italian Carrara marble hand-carved by some 1500 craftsmen in India, then shipped to Georgia, where about 900 volunteers put in over a million man-hours to bring the architects' vision to
fruition (YT), at a cost of about US$19m.
[more inside]posted by notashroom at 9:16 AM PST - 36 comments
Scott Horton discusses the latest reports about the pending appointment of a torture special prosecutor with Keith Olbermann.
Last week,
British judges revealed that the British Secret Services fed questions to the CIA in the full knowledge that the Agency was systematically using torture in interrogations; a clear violation of international law.
Meanwhile BBC Newsweek airs "
Confessions of an Uzbek KGB officer". Shortly after 11.00 mins in the video Yakobov refuses to comment more on Secret Rendition claiming his life could be in endangered. In a
Sept. interview Yakubov's most interesting evidence is that he accompanied a CIA man to an interrogation, and that the CIA man was actually in the room during the torture of a detainee.
bradblog attempts to unravel the web of deceipt.
posted by adamvasco at 6:29 AM PST - 11 comments
August 11
"Mountain chickens have very peculiar breeding habits" "Alien-like" scenes of tadpoles feasting on eggs emerging from their mother have been caught on camera.
The footage marks the success of a captive breeding programme for the critically endangered mountain chicken frog, one of the world's largest frogs. (BBC)
Not for the easily squicked.
posted by longsleeves at 10:43 PM PST - 31 comments
Dinosaur coloration has always been a source of wild speculation. Artistic renders have ranged from the conservative (battleship grey, lizard green) to the
flamboyant, but all guesses appeared
equally valid. While there are some wonderfully preserved examples of
dinosaur skin texture, fossils have remained stubbornly monochromatic… until now.
[more inside]posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 5:48 PM PST - 62 comments
"In a hotel room in Florida during the summer of 2008, we were given an exciting preview of a "
Nintendo Mixtape" by burgeoning rap group,
No Question? As we listened, we felt like Mario must have felt during his first ingestion of a fire flower. In other words, we knew immediately that this was some good shiz."
[more inside]posted by kableh at 12:41 PM PST - 58 comments
"Even though my glory years of competitive spelling are long past, some things stay with a person. As I explore, I can't help but notice signs which contain spelling errors.
I capture them for posterity with my handy digital camera and present them here for our collective education and entertainment."
Thirty-two pages of misspelled signs in the New York metropolitan area -- each one lovingly annotated.
posted by milquetoast at 8:29 AM PST - 50 comments
Mike Seeger, folk musician and folklorist, passed away on
August 7, 2009. Half-brother to Pete Seeger, Mike Seeger was self-taught at banjo, fiddle, guitar, autoharp, and dulcimer, among other instruments. Additionally, Seeger spent decades traveling the country to collect and document American folk musicians, many of whom would have been forgotten were it not for his efforts. In the late 50's, Seeger, Tom Paley, and John Cohen founded the old-time string band
The New Lost City Ramblers. The Ramblers countered the rising tide of bluegrass music with a return to old-time traditionals and were a significant influence on the mid-century folk revival. Seeger's death coincides with the upcoming release of an
Arhoolie Foundation documentary about the Ramblers (warning: the documentary link contains an embedded video). On Youtube:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5.
[more inside]posted by signalandnoise at 7:53 AM PST - 20 comments
If you loved the 80's cartoon and toys, you owe it to yourself to see a true rendering of the Joes as re remember them with an all-star cast:
The Ballad of G.I. Joe (SLFunnyorDie). With Julianne Moore as Scarlett and Billy Crudup as Zartan.
[more inside]posted by jabberjaw at 7:45 AM PST - 29 comments
August 10
Health Insurance Reform Reality Check. The White House has just launched a new site to attempt to counter concerns arising from the various factual distortions, misrepresentations and wild-eyed fears that some participants in the ongoing health care reform debate have loudly been voicing lately.
[more inside]posted by saulgoodman at 12:50 PM PST - 276 comments
Multi - polarity in Eurasia.
Pepe Escobar on Iran, China and the New Silk Road
1 &
2
Iran and China just signed a $3 bn. deal for China to help develop Iran's refinery capacity in Abadan and the Gulf. (
previous )
posted by adamvasco at 10:47 AM PST - 16 comments
Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism. An essay in the latest
The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell. "Atticus Finch is faced with jurors who have one set of standards for white people like the Ewells and another set for black folk like Tom Robinson. His response is to adopt one set of standards for respectable whites like Boo Radley and another for white trash like Bob Ewell. A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism in Maycomb, Alabama."
posted by billysumday at 8:15 AM PST - 188 comments
Abdelrahman Zeitoun is a Syrian American businessman who spent the days after Katrina paddling around New Orleans in a canoe, saving elderly people and feeding stranded pets. His efforts were brought to a halt when he was detained by the Bush administration on suspicion of being a terrorist.
[more inside]posted by reenum at 7:14 AM PST - 30 comments
Seizure is an art installation by
Roger Hiorns (
Introducing his work in a YouTube video); "75,000 litres of copper sulphate solution were pumped into the council flat to create a strangely beautiful and somewhat menacing crystalline growth on the walls, floor, ceiling and bath (
Flickr sets) of this abandoned dwelling." First opened in late 2008, the deliberately temporary work can be viewed by the public (free) again,
thanks to a delay to development at the site in the current economic downturn.
posted by Abiezer at 1:45 AM PST - 44 comments
August 9
In 1999 and 2000, and again from 1995 to 1997, the BBC's Roy Mallard travelled across Britain documenting the everyday lives of ordinary citizens--people like us--for a documentary series with the odd title
People Like Us, to show that these everyday peoples' ordinary lives are indeed just like ours, or us, and we, like theirs, or them.
Sample episodes in the series: Actors
1 •
2 •
3 •
4 / a Vicar
1 •
2 •
3 / Freelance Photographer
1 •
2 •
3 / The Pilot Episode, which turned out to be the final episode
1 •
2 •
3 /
[Wikipedia] [more inside]posted by not_on_display at 8:55 PM PST - 20 comments
August 8
Dismantling the Empire. According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of US military bases around the world, the Empire consists of 865 facilities deploying over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and overseas U.S. territories. The United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence.
The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony -- that is, control or dominance -- over as many nations on the planet as possible.
(Related
I &
II).
posted by adamvasco at 4:35 AM PST - 162 comments
Suit cases packed, check. Did I turn off the stove, check. Electricity bills paid, check. Now all I have to do is catch my Plane at the Airport, and I’m off. One full month of rest and relaxation. What could be better, right. Wrong. Here are
some of the
best countries to get
sick in.
posted by hadjiboy at 2:53 AM PST - 30 comments
Dennis Wolfberg was one of the most distinctive voices (literally) from the stand-up comedy boom of the early 90s. A former schoolteacher, he became a fixture on the fledgling network Comedy Central roughly fifteen years BCM (Before Carlos Mencia). His vocal style and inflections had a way of selling the most outlandish comparisons. He was a guest on both Letterman and Carson, and had guest-starred as Gooshie on
Quantum Leap on multiple occasions until he tragically died from cancer in 1994. Some of his most memorable routines were his
experience with Fiber One cereal and encounter with a sigmoidoscope,,
his wife's pregnancy and
his twins' Bris. His HBO special is available in its entirety on YouTube:
part 1 -
part 2 -
part 3 (most of part 3 linked above).
posted by JHarris at 2:11 AM PST - 26 comments
August 7
Chrono-synclastic infundibulum - SLYT featuring Bob & Ray, somehow based on a concept from Kurt Vonnegut's
Sirens of Titan which refers to a region of the universe in which all conflicting opinions are simultaneously correct.
posted by longsleeves at 9:09 PM PST - 17 comments
"Lunch is really nice again, not mentioning a few
battles with foods that were calling me like sirens called Odysseus. I had some salad some pasta and some fish and we had a nice chat with some Russian girls at an “All-Russian” table. Catching up on all the gossip, laughing, and in general making fun of people! By the way I forgot to mention that this is a men’s and women’s tournament so if you lose early and you are lacking confidence there is a good chance to challenge one of the girls to a match." Russian-American tennis player
Dmitry Tursunov blogged
his experiences at a 2006 tourney in Estoril, Portugal with hilarious results.
[For best results, read from the bottom of the page up!] [more inside]posted by ORthey at 8:08 PM PST - 6 comments
The Guardian ran a series of articles looking at the state of high-speed rail travel today. France intends to
double its length of track over the next decade, and China is planning
a massive rail-building programme, including a high-speed line which will halve the travel time between Beijing and Shanghai to 4 hours.
In Germany, domestic air travel is rapidly going extinct, and Spain's network has made
day trips between Madrid and Barcelona a possibility. The USA, which has long neglected its rail network, is
planning up to 10 high-speed lines. Meanwhile, Britain's only high-speed line goes to France, but there is talk of
a 250mph line from London to Birmingham and beyond, possibly by the early 2020s. Meanwhile, the CEO of France's rail operator, SNCF,
weighs in on what the UK should do.
posted by acb at 7:12 PM PST - 49 comments
Detroit is one of the most visually interesting cities in the world, however it is also one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented.
Detroit Book of Love is a group of photographs illustrating what contemporary Detroit artists have been doing in regards to developing an understanding and appreciation for this complex and diverse city; from street portraits of the survivors, to the landscapes of wild new growth, to the industrial leftovers. As a group they show Detroit as it is, not what it should be or what it once was.
[more inside]posted by netbros at 10:59 AM PST - 27 comments
"And much like Christmas, originally about the birth of a religious savior-figure named Jesus, is now about buying things for people and hoping that they buy more things for you, much how Easter, originally about the death of a religious savior-figure named Jesus, is now about receiving rabbit- or egg-shaped chocolates, now and forever Obon is about
collecting all of the Pokemon." Japan, trains, marketing, pachinko, hordes of stamp-seeking children.
posted by silby at 10:08 AM PST - 34 comments
Set the charges, and stand well back. No cell phones, please. This is very dangerous work, but it's been a long week for you, hasn't it? You deserve to spend your day working in
Demolition City.
posted by Eideteker at 9:17 AM PST - 39 comments
Almost three years ago, AOL started on a path towards being a "low-cost producer of high-quality content at scale" when they
purchase Weblogs, Inc. in late 2006. At the beginning of 2009,
AOL count[ed] more than 75 sites in its publishing portfolio and plans to add 30 more in the coming year, all gathered under
Media Glow. AOL currently has approximately 1,500 content-writing staff,
around 1,000 of those people are working full time for AOL, the rest are freelancing. That's twice the number from a year ago, and AOL has set the goal of doubling or tripling the total by next year. The TechCrunch article states that these writers include former journalists at BusinessWeek, New York Times, USA Today, ESPN, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Consumer Reports, Condé Nast and scores of regional and national newspapers and magazines.
In an interview, Marty Moe, SVP of AOL Media, said: "Principally, we have none of the legacy costs associated with producing print publications, for example. We don't own printing presses, or fleets of delivery trucks. We don't have the elaborate editorial structures geared to producing products over a printing press." (
via)
posted by filthy light thief at 8:52 AM PST - 24 comments
August 6
Thinking about becoming a parent? You might find the US Consumer Product Safety Commission's
list of recalled items fun! It looks like there's just under a zillion things out there that might harm your new tot. And that
doesn't include ... y'know ...
toys.
posted by GatorDavid at 8:50 PM PST - 23 comments
Building and flying free flight model airplanes is a pastime so obscure it doesn't even register on the geek heirarchy. But in the period between Lindberg's flight across the Atlantic until the start of the Second World War,
thousands of boys (and some girls)
around the
world succumbed to the allure of rubber,
lube, and
dope.
[more inside]posted by gamera at 7:37 PM PST - 13 comments
FreeBaseballRadio.com is a site that was created to help find internet broadcasts of live baseball games. Specifically those that are available for free.
posted by acro at 6:37 PM PST - 18 comments
"My Quest for Corvo was started by accident one summer afternoon in 1925..." so begins A.J.A Symons book
The Quest for Corvo, an experimental biography of the bizarre genius
Baron Corvo, much admired by D.H. Lawrence and by Graham Greene among others.
Mention Baron Corvo and
bookdealers get excited. Only 5 copies (proofs) of his Don Renato existed. Symons sold his copy to Cecil Woolf, another biographer of Baron Corvo. This copy was later bought by an American Donald Weeks who, after reading Symons book, left his job and moved to England to become part of the growing cult of Baron Corvo. He was said to have amassed an enormous collection of Corviana. Weeks
died in 2003:
"He died ... of natural causes... Because, however, he left no will nor details of next of kin, he was officially classed as a missing person. He was "no one".'
The fate of his rare-book collection has been a source of speculation.
Last week, Leeds University
announced that "The University of Leeds has acquired a collection of books and manuscripts relating to Baron Corvo, one of the most controversial English novelists of the early 20th Century."
Previews of the
catalog. As to what makes Corvo so fascinating, readers can discover for themselves.
posted by vacapinta at 12:52 PM PST - 13 comments
Steepster is a web 2.0 review/list-making/browsing tool for tea enthusiasts. Lets you easily keep a searchable, tag-able tasting log of teas you've tried, then browse for more you might like.
posted by jbickers at 12:34 PM PST - 8 comments
...The narrative of the blues got hijacked by rock ’n’ roll, which rode a wave of youth consumers to global domination. Back behind the split, there was something else: a deeper, riper source. Many people who have written about this body of music have noticed it. Robert Palmer called it Deep Blues. We’re talking about strains within strains, sure, but listen to something like Ishman Bracey’s ''Woman Woman Blues,'' his tattered yet somehow impeccable falsetto when he sings, ''She got coal-black curly hair.'' Songs like that were not made for dancing. Not even for singing along. They were made for listening. For grown-ups. They were chamber compositions. Listen to Blind Willie Johnson’s "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.'' It has no words. It’s hummed by a blind preacher incapable of playing an impure note on the guitar. We have to go against our training here and suspend anthropological thinking; it doesn’t serve at these strata. The noble ambition not to be the kind of people who unwittingly fetishize and exoticize black or poor-white folk poverty has allowed us to remain the kind of people who don’t stop to wonder whether the serious treatment of certain folk forms as essentially high- or higher-art forms might have originated with the folk themselves.
From
Unknown Bards: The blues becomes apparent to itself by one John Jeremiah Sullivan. I came across it while browsing
Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers On The Albums That Changed Their Lives. For Sullivan, that album was
American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897 - 1939), which is my favorite CD of the year. Which came out in 2005 while I just got around to buying it this year. Foolish me. It is a piece of art in itself in every respect--all CDs should have such production values.
[more inside]posted by y2karl at 11:08 AM PST - 50 comments
In August 1910, an Irish sign-painter and decorator named
Robert Noonan left the town of Hastings on the south coast of England, and made his way north and west towards Liverpool, with the hope of emigrating to Canada. Already sick with tuberculosis, his condition worsened once he reached the city, and he was to die there in a workhouse hospital ward, in February 1911. He had, however, left in the care of his daughter Kathleen
a package that was to change the political landscape of twentieth-century Britain.
[more inside]posted by hydatius at 10:18 AM PST - 12 comments
Pecsi, or Pepsi it doesn't matter, as long as you drink our sugar water.
Want to sound like a native? Which one?
This article can help you achieve that. That's the quick version, if you want something more academic, try
this.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 8:05 AM PST - 19 comments
August 5
Jorge Luis Borges:
The Mirror Man "This program examines the life and literary career of the charismatic Argentine writer, as well as the thematic, symbolic, and mythological underpinnings of his works. Archival interviews with Borges; his mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges; his second wife, Maria Kodama; and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares provide insights into the private Borges, while readings from The Mirrors, Dreamtigers, The Plot, The South, The Aleph, and other landmarks of Latin American fiction demonstrate his virtuosity as a transformer of experiences." (
ubuweb)
posted by vronsky at 3:51 PM PST - 27 comments
Three part BBC documentary analyzes and documents the revolution and the long struggle of Iran and the West to come together ever since the revolution. The documentary shows interviews with a wide range of world leaders who reveal the inner dealings of all governing adminstrations from the past thirty years, both from within Iran’s own adminstration and from the Western counterparts.
posted by semmi at 2:03 PM PST - 8 comments
Then, in November 2007, exactly three years after the disappearance of Simjanoska, another woman from Kičevo went missing. Fifty-six-year-old Lubica Ličoska was, like Simjanoska, a custodian, and she also lived in the same section of town. When the similarities were noted, locals suddenly remembered Gorica Pavelska. She was seventy-three, a retired custodian who went missing in May 2003. No one had thought much of it at the time. She might have suffered a stroke in some remote place, they had speculated, or gone to work in Skopje. No trace of her was ever found and the whole business had been forgotten. But now it appeared that little Kičevo was home to a serial killer, and Vlado Taneski’s editors smelled a big story.
-
The Mask of Sanity: On the Trail of a Serial Killer in Macedonia by Dimiter Kenarov. An account of the Kičevo Monster and the killer's surprising identity.
[Warning: Descriptions of the murders include graphic details]posted by Kattullus at 8:29 AM PST - 20 comments
August 4
A simple question shows how complex the issue is. Chris at "Cynical C" asks his fellow citizens where they get thier health care (insurance) from and the incredible diversity of the current options and situations is immediately apparent. Quite spontaneously (but surely not unexpectedly), the question of "How much does it cost you?" becomes an essential part of the answers. Outsiders opine and tell stories and commiserate.
[more inside]posted by sid abotu at 10:25 PM PST - 117 comments
Love Me is a heartbreaking photo essay that follows the life of a 17 year old girl living in extreme poverty in Southeastern Ohio.
[more inside]posted by lunasol at 5:54 PM PST - 169 comments
The Smoking Gun turns the table on a group of pranksters allegedly responsible for terrorizing strangers over the phone:
Outing An Online Outlaw describes how the group leader used skype, an unprotected wifi connection and his mothers bedroom to engage in what TSG calls "an orgy of criminal activity."
posted by krautland at 2:36 PM PST - 65 comments
The
music video for Modest Mouse's new track King Rat was released today. Interestingly, it was directed by
Heath Ledger two years ago, and released posthumously. Apparently, there's another one
coming up. It has
described as looking "like exactly the kind of thing that someone might come up with after spending a couple of months rocking
Joker makeup and pretending to
mutilate people."
The video contains a little cartoon goriness, so be warned.posted by azarbayejani at 12:23 PM PST - 20 comments
What would you do if your husband of many years, with whom you had created a family and with whom you led what you considered to be a successful life, suddenly said he thought he no longer loved you? One woman's approach:
refuse to believe it. Not everyone
agrees.
posted by shivohum at 9:41 AM PST - 168 comments
"Theatre," says Professor Lorraine Moller, Artistic Director of
Rehabilitation Through the Arts at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, in her foreword to
Laurence Tocci's The Proscenium Cage [pdf], "may well be one of the few antidotes to the de-humanizing climate of prisons." The use of theater in prisons has many forms: from projects designed to let prisoners tell their own stories as shown in the Austrian film "
Gangster Girls" (
trailer in German), to the
elaborate, high-concept costume dramas of Italy's
Compagnia della Fortezza. Some base their work on Boal's
Theatre of the Oppressed, others on Moreno's
Psychodrama, but many programs use a more direct approach: put on classic plays, and let the play do the illuminating. That's the approach of
Shakespeare Behind Bars, the troupe at Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in LaGrange, Kentucky.
Watch the entirety of Shakespeare Behind Bars,
a compelling 2005 documentary that follows the troupe for a season as they produce a production of
The Tempest.
[more inside]posted by ocherdraco at 9:32 AM PST - 8 comments
The
Daily Express reports on a UK Government Announcement to expand the use of
Family Intervention Projects. However, the Daily Express exaggerates the report somewhat,
the article stating (apparently wildly incorrectly) that the UK Government "plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV supervision in their own homes".
Other reports in the UK press make no mention of CCTV. Nonetheless, the alarmist Express article is widely
picked up and
discussed on the internet, pushing many people past 10 on the Orwellometer. Then Mefite FfejL uses Twitter to ask Ed Balls, the minister responsible, if the CCTV aspect of the Express article is accurate.
[more inside]posted by memebake at 8:55 AM PST - 34 comments
Spacehack "A directory of ways to participate in space exploration. Interact and connect with the space community."
posted by chrismear at 8:52 AM PST - 6 comments
August 3
The White House receives over 60,000 letters to the President every day. A
new video from the White House briefly shows the process of selecting the ten of them that the President reads, three or four of which he writes responses to, every day.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 4:13 PM PST - 74 comments
Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel
Inherent Vice, is causing
quite a stir, and not just because all his novels cause a stir. It seems the author of epic novels of giant adenoids and invisible clockwork ducks has written a-
gasp-detective novel, which weighs in at an astoundingly reasonable 384 pages. Some have noted confusion among Pynchon aficionados at the author’s choice to work in such a genre. One writer has used the
opportunity to examine why supposed “literary” writers have turned to the crime genre with varying degrees of success, and at least one critic
seems genuinely put out by Pynchon’s creative choice.
posted by dortmunder at 3:05 PM PST - 97 comments
Dude, wouldn't it be
totally cool if there was an
opposite microwave to cool tasty canned beverages in seconds? What if underwear had
pockets? They'd be called
Underawesomes! And don't you think
ketchup packets should be bigger? Oh man, speaking of munchies, what if you had
see-through fudge? You could see right through it! Dang, it would be rad if there was
smokable tape you could use to repair your busted spliff, huh? But I mean, dude, there should like really be a website where stoners could post and discuss the ideas they get when they're super high. I'd call it
highDEAS.
posted by carsonb at 11:26 AM PST - 99 comments
Doubt [print version] is an article by Andrew Rice about Leopold Munyakazi, a professor of French at Goucher College, who has been accused by the Rwandan government of being a genocidaire. His defenders, including the late
Alison Des Forges, claim that the Hutu Munyakazi, who's married to a Tutsi, is being targeted by Paul Kagame's administration because he's a dissenter who's challenged the official account of the genocide. Into this complicated affair steps documentarian Charlie Ebersol who wants to profile Munyakazi for his NBC primetime news show Wanted, which has been received with
considerable opprobrium and which may
already have been canceled.
posted by Kattullus at 9:57 AM PST - 9 comments
It was the media party of the decade. It was planned by the
king of parties, Robert Isabell, who died last month. Although thrown to celebrate the birth of Talk Magazine, little did the attendees know, that this was the night print media began
to die.
“I was aware it was a historic night,” Ms. Brown said. “We were on a boat and I was with Natasha Richardson. We were talking and laughing, looking at the lights of the twin towers. And then a big wave came over the side of the boat and soaked us both. Now Natasha is gone, the towers are gone. It’s very, very sad, but I am very excited by this new world we are heading into.”
posted by Xurando at 5:53 AM PST - 22 comments
Saturday, Aug 1, a gunman walked into a gay youth club in Tel Aviv at app. 22:40 pm and
started firing a gun indiscriminately at the teenagers who were there. Twelve were injured, four of them in critical condition, and two were instantly killed.
[more inside]posted by alona at 2:37 AM PST - 49 comments
August 2
Vortex Cannon : SLYT "Jem Stansfield builds a vortex cannon to pick up where the big bad wolf failed to blow over a house of brick."
More details at the
BBC.
posted by bwg at 10:02 PM PST - 43 comments
"
August is the cruelest month,"
is what Eliot must have meant and Edna O’Brien wrote a novel called
August Is a Wicked Month, and indeed, it has proved
historically to be a month of dramas and crises, especially sociopolitically.
Leo is a fixed, intransigent sign and can create
stubborn stances in the world and it is a
notorious month for coups, bombings and revolution. The late rock writer Al Aronowitz
penned the line, "August is the month when wars start." Both
the first and second world wars
broke out in August. The first atomic bombs
were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. There were
significant cold war crises in August. The Berlin wall
was built in August 1961. The Tonkin Gulf crisis
marked a serious escalation of the Vietnam War in August 1964. Russia invaded Czechoslovakia and
ended the Prague Spring in August 1968. Gorbachev
was ousted for being too liberal by communist hardliners in August 1991. Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990.
Russia invaded Georgia last August. (slightly corrected paragraph
via)
posted by infini at 9:45 AM PST - 94 comments
Bolek i Lolek and
Reksio are both Polish cartoons with little dialogue and similiar animation style. Both cartoons originated in the 60s (during the Communist era in Poland), and were extremely popular for decades. Due to their general lack of vocalization (except for Bolek i Lolek's later seasons), both cartoons were easy to bring to other markets. Famously, Bolek i Lolek was one of the cartoons broadcast on Iranian television after the 1979 revolution.
[more inside]posted by Askiba at 8:07 AM PST - 11 comments
So you've tried to quit smoking, but after having a 30-a-day habit for more than 40 years, it's tough. Really tough. So what's a man to do? Well, one way is to keep cigarettes out of arm's reach. A
long way out of arm's reach. Geoff Spice is
marooning himself on
Sgarabhaigh Island (pron: 'Scaravay') in the Outer Hebrides, an uninhabited islet where there are no people ... no buildings ... and no tobacco shops.
[more inside]posted by woodblock100 at 12:49 AM PST - 70 comments
August 1
On
Tuesday, July 28, Arnold Schwarzenegger eliminated 100% of California domestic violence shelters' state funding.
Ninety-four shelters will be affected, and the cut may lead to domestic violence victims being turned away because of a decrease in the number of staff available, a cut in programs, or
shelter closure.
StopFamilyViolence.org asks California residents to contact Schwarzenegger and their state legislators and request that the funding be reinstated.
posted by Four-Eyed Girl at 2:44 PM PST - 175 comments
The NYT reports that GE has brokered a deal between MSNBC and Fox News to "reconcile" Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly, preventing further criticism of each other or GE. The deal went into effect June 1, the very same day Olbermann
declared he was "quarantining" Fox, avoiding discussion of the channel in the future. Mr. Olbermann, who is on vacation, said by e-mail message, “I am party to no deal.” Glenn Greenwald
breaks down the political consequences of the deal.
posted by mek at 1:40 PM PST - 62 comments
NYC Grid is a photo blog dedicated to exploring and discovering The City of New York block by block and corner by corner. Updated every weekday, each post covers a new block with a focus on the mundane and ephemeral. An optimistic snapshot of New York as it is now.
[more inside]posted by netbros at 11:27 AM PST - 8 comments
