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September 2004 Archives
September 30
Welcome to MeatShake!
Here at MeatShake Corporation, we have a simple vision: Meat. Lots of meat. We bring you our vision in the most amazing and scrumptious forms imaginable. Our dedication to meat is nothing short of mighty. That's our promise to you, the valued customer. See also:
Ugly Duckling [
.ram file]
posted by sciurus at 5:42 PM PST - 8 comments
FOX NEWS RUNNING THE CAMERA POOL at the DEBATES Tonight
The press pool rotates who runs the cameras at the various events. Tonight, Fox News just happened to win the spin. Gives new meaning to "TV networks are flexing their muscles, saying they won't be bound by rules set by the Bush and Kerry campaigns that would prevent split-screen and reaction shots and require cameras to stay fixed on the candidate speaking."
He who controls the perception of the populace, wins.
posted by jackspace at 3:50 PM PST - 272 comments
An excellent
WashPost primer on the lies each candidate is currently telling about the other, and how they hold up to reality. Also, enjoy the many euphemisms employed to avoid the "L" word: (Misleading. Inaccurate. Oversimplified. Exaggerated. Carefully selected. Unfair. etc etc) Who will be the first mainstream media outlet to state plainly that a politician has told a lie?
Login: shutyomouf@hotmail.com - pw:shaftbaby)
posted by luser at 1:43 PM PST - 6 comments
Is there a link between
today's headline:
Baghdad Car Bombs Kill 34 Children Receiving Sweets (from American troops) and this Wall Street Journal
front page article from September 22th?
"Capt. Ayers took lessons from his fellow captains. In April, Capt. Jesse Beaudin convinced a friend from the U.S. to send backpacks, notebooks and pencils for schoolchildren. Kids mobbed troops for the goods whenever they went out on patrol. "The kids provided security. No one attacked us when we were surrounded by children," Capt. Beaudin says. After hearing about this tactic at the dining hall, Capt. Ayers's men also wrote home requesting school supplies." Non-subscribers can read the WSJ article
here
posted by miguelbar at 1:17 PM PST - 15 comments
"Just for the record, do you believe the Sun goes around the Earth or the Earth goes around the sun?"
: Ages before
"Intelligent Design",
a bold PaleoCreationist pseudoscientific
gobbledygook - embodied by Tom Willis,
Creationism's man
in Kansas and head of the
Mid Atlantic Creation Research
Society - strode the Earth. The AAAS dissected the mess in
"Lions, Tigers and APES, Oh My! ; Creationism vs. Evolution in Kansas" (
Google cache) and one writer concluded :
"The War between the creationists and
the public schools is over. The creationists appear to have won" : now, in a Kansas that's scientifically proven
flatter than
a pancake,
Mona Lisa is as
happy as a clam, and
Kissing Frank's ass and appeals
to
mysterious watchmakers predominate, while on
the national stage,
God is a
real estate developer.
Meanwhile, a
new group
proposes better zoning bylaws :
Scientists and Engineers for Change
posted by troutfishing at 9:32 AM PST - 22 comments
While reading up on the Detroit City Council's latest brainstorm,
African Town, I stumbled upon this
blog that highlights many of the once great, now decaying buildings of my former hometown. If you've ever wondered what was inside some of those ancient, boarded up buildings, there are some great photos here.
posted by Oriole Adams at 9:16 AM PST - 7 comments
Oh My Stars-N-Garters! In addition to the Aardman Animations
Wallace and Gromit films online
here (previously MeFi-ed
here), you can also view the Oscar and Academy Award winner
Creature Comforts online! One of my all-time fave films. Joy!
posted by Shane at 7:59 AM PST - 12 comments
DocuTicker :
A daily update of new reports from government agencies, ngo's, think tanks, and other groups. A whole lot of grist for the mill.
posted by mfoight at 7:34 AM PST - 5 comments
Kerry Haters For Kerry
Are you going to vote for John Kerry even though you find him unpleasant, annoying, arrogant, waffling, misguided or just generally unappealing in some profound way? Then you've come to the right place! We're Kerry Haters for Kerry -- perhaps his largest constituency! No need to hide in the Kerry-hating closet anymore while you pretend to everyone that he'll be a great president. Here you are among friends. You can speak freely and honestly. You can admit: 'He's awful! And I'm for him!'
via Wonkette
posted by psmealey at 7:08 AM PST - 67 comments
The
BBC News website has introduced
links to other news sites' articles that relate to the stories they cover.
Google News is based around a similar premise, but as far as I know the BBC is the first major news organization to link to articles not written by themselves.
A good example of this in action is the current headline article about
today's bombings in Iraq (look in the right sidebar).
Only the top stories seem to have this feature activated, but hopefully (to me at least) it will spread through the site with time.
posted by lowlife at 6:41 AM PST - 9 comments
Bad Candy:
Despite the lack of new candy reviews Bad Candy remains one of those sites you can go back to time after time. Side-splitting hours within.
"None of this prepared us for the taste, of course.
My Love is a time-release candy; it doesn't taste unbearable until it has firmly entrenched itself in your mouth. Then, all at once, My Love issues forth its vinegary bitterness, wilting tongue and lips alike with its thick, saucy, Drano-like quality."
(this site was
mentioned once in passing on the blue, but deserves a post of it's own)
posted by soulhuntre at 5:01 AM PST - 14 comments
September 29
Judge Rules Against Patriot Act Provision
In what can only be described as "a good thing", a US District judge has found that "Surveillance powers granted to the FBI under the Patriot Act, a cornerstone of the Bush Administration's war on terror, were ruled unconstitutional".
posted by fenriq at 4:52 PM PST - 22 comments
Language started with emotional signaling.
That's the thesis of a new book,
The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, And Intelligence Evolved From Our Primate Ancestors To Modern Humans, by Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker.
Lived emotional experience is key to language learning, the authors suggest. "Mathematicians and physicists may manipulate abstruse symbols representing space, time, and quantity, but they first understood those entities as tiny children wanting a far-away toy, or waiting for juice, or counting cookies. The grown-up genius, like the adventurous child, forms ideas through playful explorations in the imagination, only later translated into the rigor of mathematics."
The book is very ambitious, and I don't think we'll ever
know where language came from, but this sounds like a more fruitful line of thinking than Chomsky's
deus ex machina "language gene" mutation.
posted by languagehat at 2:49 PM PST - 32 comments
The evidence is compelling:
John Kerry responds to George Bush's GOP acceptance speech with the following opening remarks: "I'll tell you what happened tonight that will be remembered. The Boston Red Sox moved to within 2.5 games of the New York Yankees."
At the time of Kerry's speech, however, the Red Sox had not moved up in the standings. While they won that night, so did the Yankees, and the Sox remained 3.5 games back.
And John Kerry accuses Bush of misleading the American people?
posted by loquax at 11:49 AM PST - 45 comments
Utopian Christians, despisers of all ornament, in some rough sense protomodernists, the eighteenth- and nineteeth-century millenarian cult known disparagingly as the
Shakers has had an impact on the history of design far in excess of its size. (At most, there were only ever a few thousand, and it's easy to understand why, given their emphasis on "perfection" to the point of celibacy.) Key to the Shaker world view was
the perfectability of the material world - its purgation of all decoration, artifice and frippery - as an act of worship. This ethos of design, summarized in these
theses toward the improvement of the domestic environment, has gifted us with a
legacy of highly esteemed craft objects. None has been more celebrated than that canny apotheosis of domestic utility,
the Shaker rail, which survives
here in a particularly nice contemporary interpretation. If only half the artifacts we're currently offered were as thoughtfully designed...
posted by adamgreenfield at 9:43 AM PST - 11 comments
Grind. Endless drudgery. Too much in your in-tray, not enough in your out-tray. You put your headphones on, but it doesn't really help. You want a distraction - just for a moment or two. "A happy employee is a productive employee" you justify to yourself, although you're not convinced. Then it happens. A 24 carat nugget of plain text escapism lands in your in-box. You're an alt-tab, double-click away from sheer bliss.
DNRC;
A.Word.A.Day;
FlipFlopFlyin Newsletter;
The Plain Text Gazette; and the previously mentioned
Snowmail and
Newsnight Newsletters, which take a less formal but equally sharp look at the day's news, with anecdotes and observations thrown in. What other quality plain text mail lists are around?
posted by nthdegx at 6:04 AM PST - 6 comments
Terrorising free speech.
Al Lorentz is a reserve Non-Commissioned Officer currently serving in Iraq. His blazingly clear, succinct article on Iraq, titled
"Why we cannot win", has raged over the wires (also at MeFi) since it was published on LewRockwell.com. Now, the military chain of command is considering charging Al with violation of Article 134 for making a statement with the intent to promote disloyalty or disaffection toward the U.S. by any member of the Armed forces. The military is also considering charging Al with violation of 1344.10, the conduct of partisan political activity, and violation of Standards of Conduct for unauthorized use of Government assets to create and email stories.
posted by acrobat at 5:29 AM PST - 30 comments
September 28
How To Cost Microsoft Money.
Microsoft has a form on their website that you can fill out to get a copy of Windows XP SP2 on CD at no charge (with free shipping by Purolator). I ordered one.
Then, at the Order Confirmation screen, I clicked Back, then Refresh, then Retry (since the form had to be posted again). I did this 149 times......
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 8:39 PM PST - 48 comments
Tattoo my head with anything anti-Bush!
An interesting interview with someone that put their skin on eBay for an anti-Bush tattoo, but instead of the $10,000-30,000 price tags, her no-reserve auction started at one cent and only ended at $103.50.
The final product kinda works no matter who wins, but still, a hundred bucks probably didn't cover the ink, let alone the commitment. Remember
the Howard Dean tattoo? How far would you go for your candidate?
posted by mathowie at 3:19 PM PST - 19 comments
The
Animaris Rhinoceros Transport: "Since about ten years
Theo Jansen is occupied with the making of a new nature. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic matierial of this new nature. He makes skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventualy he wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives." [
2MB Quicktime Video]
posted by muckster at 1:54 PM PST - 10 comments
The incredible
Michelle Yeoh. The irresistible
Maggie Cheung. And now
Zhang Ziyi? Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation...of asskicking Asian action heroines.
posted by adamgreenfield at 9:28 AM PST - 25 comments
The Pig Wings Project:
"Rhetoric surrounding the development of new biological technologies make us wonder if pigs could fly one day. If pigs could fly, what shape their wings will take? The Pig Wings Project presents the first use of living pig tissue to construct and grow winged shape Semi-Living Objects."
posted by taz at 3:43 AM PST - 2 comments
September 27
The Unfeeling President by E.L. Doctorow:
This president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.
posted by Skygazer at 9:42 PM PST - 36 comments
Was your voter registration form thick enough?
Ohio's republican secretary of state has issued an order (three days before the registration deadline) to throw out all voter registration forms printed on paper less then 80lb. Coincidence that dem-leaning areas have seen a 250% rise in voter registration, with tens of thousands of new voters in a race expected to be closer then FL 2000?
Oh yeah, the state sent out 40lb forms to those requesting them. Cute, huh.
posted by delmoi at 7:23 PM PST - 82 comments
For Sale:
Slightly Used, Amazingly Versatile 7-Letter Kit. (Letters included: L-I-N-D-O-W-S) Warning: Improper placement of W may result in lawsuits.
posted by Mwongozi at 3:55 PM PST - 11 comments
Lost Boys of Sudan
is an amazing documentary about refugees from Sudan's
Darfur conflict finding haven in the US. It's premiering on PBS tomorrow. Their website has local PBS listings as well as locations and times of upcoming screenings in the US. From sleeping on the ground in a UN refugee camp to working at WalMart in Dallas, the men in the film undertake an enormously difficult, but ultimately life-saving journey.
posted by scarabic at 1:58 PM PST - 8 comments
The Tonight Show celebrates its 50th anniversary
of national broadcast, it was a local New York show staring in 1953 tonight.
Steve Allen was its first host, blazing the trail for all late nights to come (did you know his announcer was
Gene Rayburn?). Then came
Jack Parr. The world was a better place with
Johnny Carson making us laugh nearly every night for thirty years.
Jay Leno's rise to host was certainly not easy. And, it seems, on the show's 55th anniversary, it'll be
Conan inheriting the throne!
Happy anniversary to one of the most entertaining, groundbreaking American institutions ever.
posted by WolfDaddy at 12:17 PM PST - 51 comments
Apple-1 CPU, VG-Mint.
"This computer, as is documented, was bought from Steve Job's parents garage. The checks for the purchase and the original manual are included." More photos
here.
[via coudal]
posted by me3dia at 11:50 AM PST - 16 comments
With the DVD of
Walking Tall hitting stores today, it might be nice to read the legend of the real
sheriff Buford Pusser, six-feet and six-inches of Alabaman, two-by-four wielding, vigilante justice. Actually, it's not the first time this story's been told. The 1973 version of
Walking Tall is now considered a classic (in some circles).
What's cool is that Alabama-bred country rockers
Drive By Truckers have devoted not
one, but
two songs on their new album
The Dirty South to debunking the myths surrounding this folk hero
posted by UncleDave at 10:38 AM PST - 8 comments
Memories of a Dog
.
Moriyama Daido's
pictures are
taken in the
streets of Japan's major
cities. Made with a small, hand-held camera, they reveal the speed with which they were
snapped. Often the frame is tilted vertiginously, the grain
pronounced, and the
contrast emphasized. Among his city images are those shot in underlit bars, strip clubs, on the streets or
in alleyways, with the movement of the subject creating
a blurred suggestion of a form (warning: NSFW images if you scroll down the page) rather than a distinct figure.
His best known picture,
Stray Dog, (1971) is taken on the run, in the midst of bustling street activity.
It is an essential reflection of
Moriyama's presence as an alert outsider in his own culture.
Moriyama is also a
toy-camera enthusiast (
his favorite is the
Polga)
. He has worked
in the US, too: "
N.Y. 71".
(more inside)
posted by matteo at 10:28 AM PST - 6 comments
The evocation of dystopian space with contemporary settings. One of the many challenges faced by directors of low- or no-budget SF films is the convincing depiction of futuristic space, especially where it needs to appear oppressive or totalising. What are you to do, when you lack
the wherewithal to create
elaborate sets, and even the
cheesiest CGI is well out of reach?
You use extant buildings and artifacts, and you crop carefully. But which ones? Frank Lloyd Wright's Marin County Civic Center appears particularly popular in this context:
here it is in
THX1138, and
here in
Gattaca - the latter a film which also featured the
Citroen DS and
Studi Avanti to precisely evocative effect. (What's so sinister about this poor building?
In real life it's stunningly pretty.)
Jean-Luc Godard had a
field day in
Alphaville, with the anomic architecture of mid-60s, high modernist Paris, and again with the
same sorts of mainframe installations Lucas relied so heavily upon in
THX. Even (cough)
Logan's Run found low-rent dystopia in various Dallas and Fort Worth settings, here Fort Worth's
Water Gardens.
Maybe the poor Marin Center's a bit played out, huh? As an aid to future directors, then, let me ask you: What are some dystopic settings near you?
posted by adamgreenfield at 9:11 AM PST - 48 comments
Being threatened with litigation by the RIAA? There's always
this solution.
posted by anathema at 8:39 AM PST - 5 comments
This video costs $150,000
What’s wrong with this video?
Well, it only cost $15
$150,000 could make a difference to over 1,000,000 people
In this age of media companies and the RIAA suing everyone and their computer illiterate grandmothers, it’s nice to see an musician take a critical look at what it is that they do, if it’s really necessary, and ask if there was a better way to spend their money. And, quite frankly, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that it was
Sarah McLachlan. (QT video)
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 5:32 AM PST - 97 comments
If America were Iraq, what would it be like?
Private armies totaling 275,000 men; platoons of Christian Soldiers Militia holed up in Arlington National Cemetery; the grounds of the White House constantly under mortar fire; the Secretary of State, President, and Attorney General all assassinated in the past year; and the Air Force routinely bombing Billings, Flint, Philadelphia, and parts of LA and DC to destroy "safe houses" of "criminal gangs."
posted by johnnydark at 5:05 AM PST - 34 comments
It was bound to happen eventually - Richard Branson
announced the launch of
Virgin Galactic, a joint venture between Virgin and Mojave Aerospace Ventures, the company responsible for
SpaceShipOne. They expect to send up to 3000 people into suborbital space over five years for £115k each (around $200k)and the first ship will be named the
Virgin SpaceShip VSS Enterprise (well, I guess he can name it what he wants...). It's all immensely exciting, but personally I think Virgin Spacelines sounds classier.
posted by adrianhon at 2:55 AM PST - 14 comments
September 26
‘Staying the Course’ Isn’t an Option
"
If Bush is re-elected, there are only two possible outcomes in Iraq:
Four years from now, America will have 5,000 dead servicemen and women and an untold number of dead Iraqis at a cost of about $1 trillion, yet still be no closer to success than we are right now, or
The U.S. will be gone, and we will witness the birth of a violent breeding ground for Shiite terrorists posing a far greater threat to Americans than a contained Saddam."
posted by specialk420 at 6:34 PM PST - 50 comments
And we thought it was just a load of Soviet propaganda: Buran was pretty sweet
Well, no doubt a little bit of industrial espionage helped them in its design, but the Soviet Buran really was an impressive technological achievement and in many ways superior to the United States space shuttle. Of particular interest is the impressive technology the Soviet's developed for heavy-lift boosters. Does anyone know what's become of any of this, or know of any other interesting bits of Soviet -v- American space race trivia? This stuff always fascinates me. (Great website for geeky-cool aerospace information as well)
posted by tgrundke at 8:21 AM PST - 11 comments
"It was surprising how thick the smoke had become.
It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat --someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn't the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never any more than what I was -- a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me." -- from
Bob Dylan's new autobiography,
Chronicles, with a brief
interview, via
Newsweek
posted by digaman at 6:12 AM PST - 14 comments
September 25
Front Design
has some pretty bizarre art/products. Check the projects section to see tables, chairs, and lamp shades, among other things, made from the interaction of animals/insects/reptiles with the environment. {flash}
posted by dobbs at 11:33 PM PST - 5 comments
Why straights shouldn't marry.
"Phil and Pam both loved to eat Twinkies and Cup Cakes as children. On their first date, Phil ended a day of golf with a bottle of champagne and Cup Cakes to munch on as they watched the sun set over the Hudson." (via
Holy Shitake.)
posted by adrober at 3:03 PM PST - 44 comments
Welcome to the INFORMATION-CYBER-WAR.
Tired of the same old "song & dance" from the "Democrats" & "Republicans"? Glen Glidden knows how you feel. That's why he started "the most dangerous show on public access cable television." He takes on
City Hall, revealing that most elected officials in Minnesota suburbs are
usurpers, illegally occupying their position. He exposes the
truth about November's election: it's Clown vs. Clown. And he's a
Rammstein fan (why not?). Take a look, but remember: the truth may hurt.
posted by punishinglemur at 12:32 PM PST - 9 comments
Tom Ridge's war profiteering.
Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge has been reported to hold investments in at least seven different companies directly benefiting from new Homeland Security projects. "In response to a late afternoon telephone inquiry, DHS spokesman Brian Roehrkasse first said the department did not have enough time to answer questions ... Pressed further, he shouted an expletive to a reporter and hung up. "
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 9:16 AM PST - 26 comments
25 years old and I pretty much had made it. The critics’ darling was now a success. So what happened? Why is it that many of you here today aren’t quite sure who the hell I actually am, aside from Rufus Wainwright’s father? Why is finding a CD of mine akin to archeology? Where were the follow up hits to "Dead Skunk," funny animal songs like "I Met Her at the Pet Store" and "Stay Away From My Aardvark?"
My Cool Life by Loudon Wainwright III
posted by dodgygeezer at 8:55 AM PST - 20 comments
For Westerners, the index case of subculture has to be the
1960s UK conflict between the razor-sharp, tailored
mods and their mortal enemies, the greasy
rockers.
Difference was critical to these first self-identified youth subcultures: difference in dress, in music, in drug of choice, in the favored
mode of
transport...everything. This obsessive focus on not just standing out, but standing out
just so - on showing the world precisely the right angle of a hat, length of a coat, shortness of hair - has defined many a subculture since. We recognize
b-boys,
ganguro girls, and
straightedge punks by such deployments, among many, many other identifiable groups. (It's not just a youth thing, either:
leathermen and the
delightfully recrudescent roller derby culture are largely adult phenomena.)
To a devotee of a given subculture, such matters, far from being a "narcissism of small differences," are a matter of pivotal import in framing how one presents oneself to the world:
how we want to be seen, how we want others to understand us. But I'm getting older now, and further out of the loop, and I realize that just maybe I'm losing the ability to discern these differences in the people I pass walking down the street. I find myself asking, who and where are the new subcultures? And how do they choose to present themselves to us?
posted by adamgreenfield at 8:30 AM PST - 17 comments
September 24
Who Was Abused ? There are several ways to view the small white house on Center Street in Bakersfield, Calif. From one perspective it's just another low-slung home in a working-class neighborhood, with a front yard, brown carpeting, a TV in the living room. Now consider it from the standpoint of the Kern County district attorney's office: 20 years ago, this was a crime scene of depraved proportions... [and] this time, through Ed Sampley's eyes. Twenty years ago he was one of the boys molested in the house where sex abuse was part of the weekend fabric. That's what he told Kern County investigators. That's what he told a judge, a jury and a courtroom of lawyers... Now for the first time in 20 years, Sampley is back in the driveway of that small white house. ''It never happened,'' he tells me. He lied about Stoll, an easygoing divorced father who always insisted the neighborhood kids call him John rather than Mr. Stoll and let them run in and out of his house in their bathing suits, eat popcorn on the living-room floor and watch ''fright night'' videos. More Inside
posted by y2karl at 6:24 PM PST - 46 comments
Andrea Armstrong
wants to play basketball. She is also a muslim, and wishes to observe traditional muslim attire for a woman of the faith. Intolerance ensues.
(A link from my local paper to an Orlando Sentinel story, in that this woman is from Oregon.)
posted by Danf at 3:53 PM PST - 69 comments
When I first saw it I thought, it was fad-freaky Toyko or perhaps fashionably trendy LA, but it's NYC.Let's see... Walk several blocks possibly through a mucking huge park, or park in a expensive pay lot, or take a bus/train/taxi take an elevator to the umpteenth floor of the Empire State Building to take a 25 minute
MetroNap in a overgrown egg chair during your lunch hour. Not to mention paying what ever it took to get you there you'll shell out $13 more to take a nap. And no, that's NOT with the optional lunch, or even in a private cubicle. City folk, more money than sense. What ever happend to sleeping under your desk? If it's good enough for George Castanaza, it's good enough for me!
posted by Dome-O-Rama at 2:34 PM PST - 9 comments
The full wealth of the world's religious knowledge has been collated into the quite extraordinary
"God FAQ". A valuable resource indeed.
[via b3ta]
posted by Pretty_Generic at 2:21 PM PST - 95 comments
Black widow pop.
"With tATu, Ivan Shapovalov took the media's
obsession with paedophilia, and spun it into a
chart-topping lesbo-schoolgirl pop act. Now
he's trying to do the same with Islamic
terrorism. On Sept 11 in Moscow, he launched
nATo, a 16-year-old girl who dresses in a
Burqua, much like the Black Widow suicide bombers
who are currently terrorising Russia. With
the Beslan massacre only a week old, Nato's
launch - complete with invitations designed
like plane tickets - was not a huge success...
Mindful of the dire consequences of being a
dissenting voice in Putin's Russia these days,
Shapovalov is planning to launch nATo properly
in London later this year, and get a
recording contract here."
stolen from popbitch
posted by mr.marx at 1:58 PM PST - 19 comments
Love in a cage.
All Iranian filmmakers working in their homeland have to face the trials of the
censor, but if
the subject matter includes abortion, adultery and lesbianism, the chances of
gaining official approval in the
Islamic republic are all but zero. Actress
Mania Akbari, the lead of
Abbas Kiarostami's
"10", explores this territory in her first feature film as a director, "
20 Fingers", which
unspooled in the new "Digitale" section at the
Venice Film Festival (.pdf file) and
won the first prize as Best Movie Shot On Digital. The film's use of digital video was also invaluable in getting around censorship: the only way to shoot in Iran on 35mm is to hire equipment from the central authorities, which means script approval and a government minder attending the shoot. Shooting on digital video requires script approval, but no minder is sent along. So 29-year-old Akbari, in an amazing display of courage, gained approval for one script and then duly shot another (she could now be barred from working or from screening her films or from even leaving the country, but she insists on working in Iran, to challenge the system from there and not from abroad). The film is
coming soon at the
Vancouver Film Festival. More inside.
posted by matteo at 11:09 AM PST - 5 comments
A man and his rocket car.
As documentaries enjoy an unprecedented level of popularity and financial success, it's high time that an obscure Canadian National Film Board
doc from 1981 was (re)discovered. The story of Ken Carter, who spends several years and millions of dollars of other people's money in the single-minded pursuit of one goal: jumping a jet-powered car across the St. Lawrence River from Canada to the United States. What is it with Canadians and
insane dreams?
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:03 AM PST - 10 comments
(Danger! Danger! Silly .gif images ahead!) A little something to file under "wacky web":
ballOOns Museum German web site, featuring classic paintings and sculpture with a dollop of goofy animation thrown in for fun. After you enter, click "Gemälde" and "Skulpturen" in the new window to view the galleries.
posted by taz at 7:41 AM PST - 4 comments
Streamor.com: Streaming Surgical Education
'Featuring the World's First SurgeonCam and The Digital Endoscopy Fellowship. A Digital Window to the OR for Physicians, Trainees, and Patients.' Clips are free, and are available in Real Video & Windows Media formats. "Surgery is an inherently visual art. It must be seen to be understood."
(via The Eyes Have It).
posted by misteraitch at 4:40 AM PST - 2 comments
Pressure Groups and Censorship in Israel/Palestine.
"I suspect that the causes are complicated and multi-factorial. I suspect that I and others like me – who remained ignorant and negligent on this issue for so long – bear much of the guilt. I suspect that others whose emotional ties to Israel served as blinders on this subject share in our culpability. I suspect that still others who knew the truth and refused to speak of it, or who participated in its cover-up, bear a significant portion of this awful responsibility. I suspect that the career damage and death threats that often result when one begins to speak out on this issue played a part."
posted by acrobat at 3:20 AM PST - 33 comments
September 23
Our Eyes photography. Interesting photographs submitted from around the world using a left-right scroll layout of 10-15 shots with various themes. The scrolling is an interactive part of the piece. Caution: Your workplace may be dangerous to these artists.
Some (SFW)
favorites.
posted by stbalbach at 10:14 PM PST - 6 comments
What a coincidence, huh?
(wapo, reg reqd) For the third time, environmental advocates have discovered passages in the Bush administration's proposal for regulating mercury pollution from power plants that mirror almost word for word portions of memos written by a law firm representing coal-fired power plants.
The passages state that the Environmental Protection Agency is not required to regulate other hazardous toxins emitted by power plants, such as lead and arsenic. The actual proposals and study are
here.
posted by amberglow at 6:04 PM PST - 9 comments
Some of the things you can find at Jan Geerinck's
Jahsonic.com: A history of
disco,
"black music",
punk, and
other genres; extensive writes-ups on
media,
erotica,
art,
history, and cinema (broken down into
voyeurism,
gay,
world,
Japanese,
postmodern,
underground,
European, and
trash cinema, among
others); and of course,
a blog. Also interesting are the keyword entries for words such as
genre,
sex,
drugs,
fiction,
cult,
taste, etc.
Pretty SFW, but there may be a few film stills or paintings that are iffy.
posted by dobbs at 4:51 PM PST - 3 comments
I'm studying at Warwick University in the UK, and I had just finished my Computer Science finals (I'm going on to do a PhD in Edinburgh next year). I went out and got drunk, had a nice lie in and bought a couple of new games in town, but I just didn't feel totally liberated.
So I decided to build an
enormous f*****g sandwich.
(via)
posted by Ufez Jones at 3:06 PM PST - 72 comments
My Back Pages--Interesting in his own right
Eyolf Østrem still maintains the fan's fan tab, chords and music site, the standard by which all others are judged. I just revisited it the other night, while trying to recall how that little run in Dylan's version of
Delia went, and dang, if it didn't have the
back story of that ballad. I love this kind of stuff. The source of that account, John Garst, is the folklorist king of such research--he puts
John Henry at a railroad tunnel near Leeds, Alabama, just east of Birmingham on September 20, 1887, for example. Murder and heroic death ballad back stories are of extreme interest to me, so I decided to post a few more here:
Frankie and Albert,
Frankie and Johnny,
Casey Jones and
Stagger Lee. Did I say I love this kind of stuff?
posted by y2karl at 2:56 PM PST - 10 comments
Milkmen.
"David could do it simply through suggestion. He began telling himself that he would lactate, and within a week, one of his breasts swelled up and milk began dripping out." (SFW, but not for my sense of genetic order)
posted by adamms222 at 10:50 AM PST - 31 comments
The Art of Cats:
The
Kattenkabinet (
Cat Cabinet, the Cat Museum) of Amsterdam:
a collection of objects d'art wholly centered around the theme of the cat, among which you will find a wonderful
gallery including
Picasso. Controversial
social taboos are not avoided. Malaysia's
Cat City of Kuching has a
Cat Museum; more info on the Museum of Meows
here (
Ancient Egyptians shaved their eyebrows in mourning when the family cat died. Malays attached superstitions to cats believing they possessed supernatural powers...) The scullery of Kathleen Mann's Antiques in London's High Street has a "
Purrfect Museum" too, with 250 exhibits from all over the world going back to the 1770s, founded by Kathleen and her mother ...
Kitty. Not to be outdone,
Lithuania and
Russia have cat museums as well.
posted by Shane at 9:00 AM PST - 5 comments
Loyalty
Note: the 'l' links to a pdf file.
There are as many different interpretations/definitions as there are people on this big blue ball.
Exactly why does it mean something ever-so-slightly different to everyone? [mi]
posted by kamylyon at 7:44 AM PST - 9 comments
The
Situationists famously had their own ideas about cities, and about how to city them; in particular, they held forth the derive, or aimless drift, as the ideal way to encounter and make sense of urban place. It's easy to caricature the derive as an essentially passive mode of experience, but it was intended to be
anything but: a playful, lively, engaged, and above all social act.
Now that cities are where most of us live, for better or
worse, and we have the ability to document our travels through these conurbations and
share them over the Web, might it be safe to say that Situationist psychogeography has gone mainstream? That the moblogged drift, in fact, takes things to an entirely new level, by making the city and its flows not merely more
legible to ourselves, but
visible to a potentially global audience?
posted by adamgreenfield at 6:20 AM PST - 39 comments
The piatarbajo,
the chromelodeon,
the trimba,
cloud chamber bowls,
the simeon,
the pyrophone,
the virtual rhythmicon,
cigar box guitars,
the skatar, and all the other assorted instruments by musical visionaries who find guitar, bass, drums, and the symphony orchestra too confining.
posted by jonp72 at 1:32 AM PST - 10 comments
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
is published today, in print and online: a biographical record of everyone who's ever been anyone in British history (50,000 individuals) and an astonishing feat of scholarly collaboration (10,000 contributors from all over the world). Access to the full database is fearfully expensive, but the official site gives you a good selection of
sample entries, with a new one added every day; and a feature in today's
Times gives you
some more, beginning with Mary Toft, the woman who gave birth to rabbits.
posted by verstegan at 1:13 AM PST - 11 comments
September 22
After School Specials.
Is that a Trapper Keeper in your locker or are you just happy to see me? Next month, two volumes of
ABC's "After School Specials" will be released on DVD (in DVD sets designed to look like Trapper Keepers). After the first two sets, at least four more will follow. TV Shows on DVD has the names of many the specials ("Schoolboy Father," "She Drinks a Little," "Did You Hear What Happened to Andrea?") to jog your memory. Of course,
Jump the Shark has plenty of memories of them, too. And anyone who saw Helen Hunt host "SNL" knows that in at least one (possibly two), she jumps out the window. Those were the days.
posted by GaelFC at 11:18 PM PST - 19 comments
"So, during the run of
The Judas Contract, Dick
Grayson's new crimefighting identity was established.
Nightwing was born. Though neither
Marv nor I were originally crazy about his new name, in the long run, it seems to have won the fans' hearts. Those who considered themselves
Robin-Rooters have proudly followed Dick's new career as avid
Wingnuts.
--George Perez
Has it really been
20 years since Dick Grayson stopped being a sidekick? Happy belated birthday Nightwing!
posted by WolfDaddy at 10:37 PM PST - 11 comments
"I must congratulate you on your virtuoso performance, my boy. Centauri is impressed. I've seen 'em come, and I've seen 'em go, but you're the best, my boy. Dazzling! Light years ahead of the competition! Centauri's got a little proposition for you. Are ya interested?"
That's right. The Last Starfighter: The Musical. Can a
Planet Of The Apes musical be far behind? What other sci-fi flicks would you like to see a musical made of? And why isn't Carrie Fisher's virtuoso
performance from the
Star Wars Holiday Special on the new DVD set?
posted by keswick at 8:40 PM PST - 29 comments
Redemption and the Power of Man. In Christianity, redemption is essentially an act of divine grace, the salvation of a sinful humanity that is incapable of saving itself. In Judaism redemption depends entirely on man, who is responsible for his own fate. To what extent did Judaism
influence the development of progressive, pluralistic democracy?
posted by semmi at 4:24 PM PST - 30 comments
Newsweek reports that Irony is alive and well.
Newsweek reveals that CBS and
60 Minutes, in order to make room for their now-infamous report on alleged documents from George Bush's National Guard Service, dropped their originally planned piece for that evening's show... about the Bush administration being misled on erroneous documents pertaining to the alleged Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 3:58 PM PST - 18 comments
Agitator.
Blood doesn't politely trickle in
Takashi Miike's
films: it
gushes out in
(warning: NSFW, graphic) improbable fountains,
painting walls and filling up small cars.
His trademark point-of-view shots are
taken from places other directors wouldn't dream of: the bottom of a dirty toilet bowl (as a man falls into it after being killed); within the ear canal (as it is pierced by a metal spike); even from inside a character's vagina. He has
depicted incest,
drug abuse, teenage prostitution,
violence against women and children
and small dogs, and necrophilia -- and that was just in one film,
Visitor Q, his take on
Pasolini's
Teorema.
Miike has just introduced his latest movie,
Izo, at the
Venice Film Festival (.pdf file).
Miike is less sure about why Americans are now embracing Japanese horror films. His country's horror genre is influenced by "
kwaidan," traditional Japanese
ghost stories that feature revenge and malice: "The stories always have the 'hatedness.' You always bring the feelings of hate [that] you don't see in American cinema". What freaks him out the most, however, is the
everyday automobile accident. "Even in a film, I can't bear to watch it -- it's so much (about) how people are weak, to be just crushed with a car. It makes me feel really depressed".
posted by matteo at 1:15 PM PST - 24 comments
"Tom Ridge unveils a redesigned Air Force 1, painted like the General Lee car from Dukes of Hazzard. No longer will there be a carpeted stairway; instead passengers will have to enter through the windows and holler like they're feeding pigs when boarding the President's jet."
Enter the
Guess the October Surprise contest and win a coffee mug.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 11:46 AM PST - 11 comments
Utilikilts: Comfort, Style and Utility for Today's Modern Man
- committed to pioneering a comfortable alternative to trousers by producing "Men's Unbifurcated Garments".
I can't decide if its a joke or not. I think it began as a joke and then people started ordering them. Note the trendy
Survival Kilt (currently on backorder) or the stranger looking than the others and that's saying something
Denim Kilt. And don't worry about the beer gut, fellas, they've got an option for a special cut just for you ($25 upcharge but comfort knows no price!).
posted by fenriq at 10:46 AM PST - 61 comments
“If You Harbor Terrorists, You Are a Terrorist”
While delegates to the GOP convention were congratulating themselves for their candidate’s tough stand against terrorism, the Bush administration was creating an international incident—little publicized in the United States—by harboring a notorious group of international terrorists on U.S. soil.
posted by Postroad at 4:33 AM PST - 34 comments
September 21
Iraq: The Bungled Transition. Iraq: How bad can things get?--
The Making of a Mess.
Far graver than Vietnam, some now see
a Classic guerrilla war forming in Iraq with an
Enemy With Many Faces. Iraqi Shiite philosopher--as Juan Cole calls him--and blogger Abbas Kadhim of
Calling It Like It Is, likens the Allawi government to an
onion farm--
This lack of discipline within the Iraqi interim government is not accidental. Indeed, it is the manifestation of a bigger problem: the members of the cabinet consider themselves above the restraints of their respective positions in the government... After all, their nominal chief, Allawi did not choose them, like all prime ministers do to a certain degree. They were simply imposed upon him, and for all practical purposes, he is unable to dismiss any one of them. Iyad Allawi is stuck with a concoction of personalities that may compose a parliament rather than an executive branch.--and as
US-backed armies firing blanks notes:
Since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Washington has been struggling to create a 40,000-strong military force... according to Brigadier General James Schwitters, who is part of the US command responsible for training Iraq's new army, only 3,000 of the soldiers could be regarded as having been militarily trained, as of early August. From March to 2003 to August 2004, the Coalition trained 3,00 Iraqi soldiers.
Well? Feelin' lucky, punk? /Dirty Harry
(More Inside)
posted by y2karl at 10:21 PM PST - 58 comments
Cat Stevens on NatSec watchlist.
"A London-to-Washington flight was diverted to Maine on Tuesday when it was discovered passenger
Yusuf Islam - formerly known as singer
Cat Stevens - was on a government watch list and barred from entering the country, federal officials said... Homeland Security Department spokesman Dennis Murphy identified the passenger as Islam. 'He was interviewed and denied admission to the United States on national security grounds,' Murphy said, and would be put on the first available flight out of the country Wednesday."
posted by mwhybark at 9:24 PM PST - 79 comments
Women In Iran
With the slogan of "Women's Right Is Human Right", the website tries to tell the story of struggles, issues and successes of Iranian women, and in this way we would like to extend our hands to and welcome all those who believe in the social and intellectual equality of women and men.
posted by hoder at 8:41 PM PST - 3 comments
project hello
"... To give homeless individuals a name, and in the process, encourage others to treat them with dignity, respect, and compassion. "
posted by specialk420 at 6:22 PM PST - 9 comments
Slate translates Kerry to English.
A lot of the argument lately is that Kerry doesn't really offer up a concete stand on his viewpoint. This article from William Saletan sums up what he believes Kerry is trying to say based on the speech he gave in New York earlier, and how he really stands in opposition to President Bush. Thoughts?
posted by daHIFI at 4:23 PM PST - 32 comments
Five Days in Hell
- what's it like to be an Iraqi hostage? Canadian war journalist Scott Taylor provides a harrowing account of his recent 5-day ordeal as a hostage of notorious Islamic mujahedin groups. Christopher Delisso has an
interview with Taylor, and blogger Zeyad of
Healing Iraq offers informed local commentary on kidnappings in his post,
"On clerics, fatwas and terrorism."
posted by madamjujujive at 10:50 AM PST - 14 comments
William Safire on "the izzle":
"
And now, in the pages of The New York Times, there it is — a word modified with the ubiquitous izzle. Some clever Times copy editor, for a June article about Chrysler's new 300C sedan, created the headline, "Fo' Shizzle, That Big Bad Chrysler Really Does Sizzle". So now that the gray lady herself has been izzled from the inside, is it time for everyone to wish one last fond farewizzle and shed the shizzle? (MTV interview mentioned in the article is
here.)
posted by taz at 7:06 AM PST - 33 comments
Interesting article on
The Loneliness of Being German: "Germans have turned their back on the arrogance of nationalism.. But if nationhood is obsolete then so is identity. It would mean that there is no such thing as being German and that they possess no individuality." Meanwhile, far right wing party growing
support in German elections: "It's a great day for Germans who still want to be Germans" -- Holger Apfel, NPD leader in Saxony. Germany's government has described the NPD as a latter-day version of Hitler's Nazi party.
posted by stbalbach at 12:49 AM PST - 12 comments
September 20
You're all dummies and you're reading it wrong!
Anne Rice's latest book has gotten some crummy reviews on Amazon, and she's seriously POed that the "outrageous stupidity" of the proles allowed to review on the site are tarnishing one of her her editor-free "virtuoso performance(s)." (Scroll down to Anne Obrien Rice- guaranteed real name by Amazon, and feel free to compare this rant to the one on her
official website.)
posted by headspace at 11:29 PM PST - 82 comments
View
the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.
posted by semmi at 11:56 AM PST - 18 comments
The Mystery At Webb Hill
- In the waning daylight hours of December 7, 1998, three teenage boys, hiking near Webb Hill, St. George, Utah, saw a shirt sleeve flapping in the wind near the top of the hill. Their parents had warned them not to attempt hiking the sheer red rock cliffs. What they discovered inside a stone-walled chamber was the skeletonized remains of a 16 year old male. Positive identification of this young man has eluded investigators for nearly five years.
Maybe you can help.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 10:47 AM PST - 17 comments
Ever wanted to go for a
really, really,
really long walk? Just to make it difficult, how about carrying something
really, really heavy
(in more than a few ways...) to some
rather unfriendly places...
Meet interesting
people,
get
famous,
predict the
future, accumulate
amazing
numbers, get
the
real deal on shoes... Even
kids can
play.What else would one expect from a
hippie priest with a
recording career that took him
From
Sunset Strip to the Whitehouse?
And, of course,
the
final frontier.
via my friend who loves metafilter but lacks an account
posted by UlfMagnet at 9:23 AM PST - 9 comments
Grand Unification Theory:
Salavon's work has been mentioned on MeFi before, but I thought in honor of the trilogy finally being released on DVD this week, I'd post a link to this very awesome piece of art using every single frame from Episode Four.
posted by glenwood at 6:37 AM PST - 11 comments
No pain, no gain, they say, and when it comes to real pain, the
inverse is true as well.
"
We
now have research indicating there's a memory of chronic pain,"
said Dr. Doris K. Cope, director of chronic and cancer pain for the
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. It changes the genic code
sometimes, it changes the biochemistry, and it causes new proteins to
be formed." Or in other words, the more pain you have, the more pain you have. (
More on this.) It's no wonder, then, that more money is spent on pain relief than any other medical problem, and that there has been so much
pain research and so many
clinical trials revealing such painful facts as
redheads feel more pain,
men feel less pain, and that there's a
genetic difference between tough guys and wimps. (Much more pain inside.)
posted by taz at 6:13 AM PST - 31 comments
September 19
If you don't know much about contemporary music, there's some good edumacating here: Cuff the Duke, Dirtbombs, Interpol, LIARS, Manitoba, Spiritualized, Stars, Ween, Amon Tobin, Decemberists, Controller.Controller, Heavy Blinkers, Peaches, Gentleman Reg, Calexico, Ted Leo, D.O.A., Blonde Redhead, The Constantines, Hayden, The Notwist, C'Mon, Sea & Cake, A&C, Do Make Say Think, Royal City, Oh Susanna, Death From Above 1979, White Stripes, Tobin Sprout, TV On the Radio, Add n To (X)... some of the stellar bands with streams at CBC Radio's
Just Concerts:
Live and
Studio recordings.
{All the recordings I tried were top-notch quality. Unfortch, the streams are Real, but definitely still worth checking out.}
posted by dobbs at 10:54 PM PST - 34 comments
"Black Like me"
: the notion of "Race" is know known to be
scientifically meaningless, but now roll back the clock to 1959 :
"...John Howard Griffin (1920-1980) was a true Renaissance man. Having fought in the French Resistance and been a solo observer on an island in the South Pacific during World War II, he became a critically-acclaimed novelist and essayist, a remarkable photographer and musicologist, and a dynamic lecturer and teacher. On October 28, 1959, after a decade of blindness and a remarkable and inexplicable recovery, John Howard Griffin dyed himself black and began an odyssey of discovery through the segregated American South. The result was Black Like Me, arguably the single most important documentation of 20th century American racism ever written....Because of Black Like Me, Griffin was personally vilified, hanged in effigy in his hometown, and threatened with death for the rest of his life."
posted by troutfishing at 9:15 PM PST - 47 comments
CoolGov.
Weblog on interesting stuff from the .GOV domain. Today's entry was quite appropriate. Maties.
posted by brownpau at 8:27 PM PST - 3 comments
Ladies and Gentlemen, Beatle Bob!
With today being the last day of the
Austin City Limits Music Festival, I thought it might be a good time to shine the spotlight on rock and roll gadfly
"Beatle" Bob Matonis, who, as per his habit, made the scene like sex machine, shaking his vintage-clad booty back stage (and on stage) at numerous sets this weekend. Though he's actually from St. Louis, Beatle Bob makes it to gigs all across the country, and seems particularly fond of
South by Southwest, where his presence can pretty much guarantee you picked the right showcase to attend. Over the years, I've seen Beatle Bob on literally dozens of occasions. Have you had the chance to catch this oddball rock mascot in your town?
posted by Gilbert at 4:20 PM PST - 20 comments
What's a pirate's favorite aspect of computational linguistics?
P
ARRRsing sentences.
Happy Talk Like a Pirate day, me hearties!
posted by louigi at 8:54 AM PST - 14 comments
Little Red Riding Hood's wayward past revealed:
"Once upon a time, (the story) was a seduction tale. An engraving accompanying the first published version of the story, in Paris in 1697, shows a girl in her déshabille, lying in bed beneath a wolf. According to the plot, she has just stripped out of her clothes, and a moment later the tale will end with her death in the beast’s jaws — no salvation, no redemption. Any reader of the day would have immediately understood the message: In the French slang, when a girl lost her virginity it was said that 'elle avoit vû le loup' — she’d seen the wolf."
posted by feelinglistless at 7:22 AM PST - 32 comments
September 18
Experts Study New Sign Language System A new system of sign language developed by deaf children in Nicaragua may hold clues about the evolution of languages. When the country's first school for the deaf was established in 1977, children were not taught sign language but developed a system of signs to communicate. Childhood learning may determine linguistic rules ...They found that older students used hand signals resembling the gestures employed by hearing people, mimicking the entire event physically. But younger pupils - who had interacted with other deaf children from an early age - used a more complex series of signs. They split the scene into component parts and arranged these sequentially to convey the incident. The constructions resemble the way words and sentences are built in verbal languages, using segments structured in a linear fashion. This indicates that way the younger children learnt the sign language helped reshape it according to these linguistic rules. ...............
Fascinating... /Mr. Spock
posted by y2karl at 4:02 PM PST - 20 comments
The life and death of a supersized man.
Walter Hudson was fat. Precisely how fat was impossible to determine, because the one time he agreed to be weighed on an industrial-strength scale, it broke. (Maybe it was something he
ate?) But no one denies that Hudson was one of the
most obese people of the modern era (note: pictures not safe before lunch). Former comic, erstwhile
diet guru, civil rights
activist and Michael Jackson
proponent Dick Gregory was one of Hudson's many exploiters, but Hudson's
agoraphobic existence sounds almost beatific.
posted by digaman at 9:32 AM PST - 24 comments
XXX: 30 P9RN STAR PORTRAITS (a bit NSFW, obviously)
by
photographer Timothy Greenfield-
Sanders, is a
book that features paired portraits (one clothed and one nude) of the top stars in p6rn, straight and gay, from legends like (
best-
selling memoirist)
Jenna Jameson,
Ron Jeremy and Nina Hartley to (ahem) rising stars like Sunrise Adams, Belladonna, Chad Hunt. The
book includes short essays on the intersection of p6rnography and culture by a wide range of writers, from
Salman Rushdie to
AM Homes. XXX is, essentially, about the much-dreaded
"p6rnification" of the culture at large,
recently featured in the New York Times.
As
Gore Vidal writes in the book's introduction, “Doubtless, sex tales were told about the Neanderthal campfire and perhaps instructive positions drawn on cave walls. Meanwhile, the human race was busy establishing such exciting institutions as slavery and its first cousin, marriage.”
(more inside, with totally NSFW Terry Richardson)
posted by matteo at 9:24 AM PST - 12 comments
Proof of the warming power of whiskey.
A pilot project, which will see the first district heating scheme based in a distillery, is being set up at the home of the Old Pulteney in Wick. It will produce environmentally-friendly power and reduce heating and electricity bills for nearly 600 householders.
posted by psmealey at 6:36 AM PST - 5 comments
September 17
"I was born in London, England on October 26 1958, the youngest of four and much to my parent's surprise, I was born a dog." The rich inner life of
artist Ray Caesar. {keep clicking to see details of prints}
posted by dobbs at 9:37 PM PST - 14 comments
Warning - by visiting
this site, you will destroy it. Each visit will remove one pixel from these photographs. However, we will tell you a story. It's a story about Romania, which is to say, it's a story about change.
posted by willnot at 8:37 PM PST - 17 comments
Conscience Clauses and Health Care
--
"Yes, we need to respect individual freedom of religion. But at what point does it cross the line of not providing essential medical care? At what point is it malpractice?" she asked. "If someone's beliefs interfere with practicing their profession, perhaps they should do something else." The Protection of Conscience Project feels differently:
Protection of Conscience Laws are needed because powerful interests are inclined to force health care workers and others to participate, directly or indirectly, in morally controversial procedures, while
NARAL says: ... Many of these clauses go far beyond respecting individuals' beliefs to the point of harming women by not providing them with full information or access to medical treatment. Medicine, not ideology, should determine medical decisions.
posted by amberglow at 7:33 PM PST - 69 comments
Why You Should Ignore The Gallup Poll This Morning - And Maybe All Of Theirs
If you support the Dems, you might want to pass this on!
"This morning we awoke to the startling news that despite a flurry of different polls this week all showing a tied race, the venerable Gallup Poll, as reported widely in the media (USA Today and CNN) today, showed George W. Bush with a huge 55%-42% lead over John Kerry amongst likely voters. The same Gallup Poll showed an 8-point lead for Bush amongst registered voters (52%-44%). Before you get discouraged by these results, you should be more upset that Gallup gets major media outlets to tout these polls and present a false, disappointing account of the actual state of the race. Why?"...
posted by Postroad at 2:05 PM PST - 58 comments
100 key books
“Cyril Connolly chose 100 key books from England, France and America first published between 1880 and 1950 to represent ‘The Modern Movement’.”
This site asks:
“How does the list look now, in the first decade of the 21st Century?”
“an additional list of key books is needed for 1950 to 2000. What should be included and why? Does Connolly's selection criteria need adjusting [just England (when so many of the books are from Ireland), France and America!] and if so how should this be done, remembering that Connolly was very precise in delineating the list as Key books, not best books?”
posted by Grod at 9:43 AM PST - 18 comments
I found some of your life.
You are unknown to me. Your camera's memory card was in a taxi; I have it now. I am going to post one of your pictures each day. I will also narrate as if I were you. Maybe you will come here and reclaim this piece of your life. (via
the Morning News)
posted by Ufez Jones at 8:23 AM PST - 95 comments
Firefox 1.0 Preview Release
is now available. The
Spread Firefox site hopes to see a million downloads, and they've already passed the halfway mark. The advantages of Firefox have been
previously discussed on MeFi, but this version includes an interesting new feature -
Live Bookmarks, which allow you to view RSS news and blog headlines in the bookmarks toolbar or bookmarks menu. Obsessively checking MetaFilter is now easier than ever.
posted by Stuart_R at 7:36 AM PST - 51 comments
Devil Worship: The Sacred Books and Traditions of the Yezidiz
, by Isya Joseph, 1919. 'This is one of the only public domain sources of information on the religious beliefs of the Yezidi, a small group originally from the northern region of Iraq. Although they speak Kurdish, they are a distinct population from the Kurds. The Yezidi are notable because they have been described as devil-worshippers, which has naturally led to constant persecution by the dominant Islamic culture of the region ... They have many unique beliefs, such as that the first Yezidi were created by Adam by parthenogenesis separately from Eve ... ' New on
sacred-texts.com.
posted by plep at 5:44 AM PST - 4 comments
September 16
Score one for tolerance and diversity.
Three-year-old Sophia Parlock cries while seated on the shoulders of her father, Phil Parlock, after having their Bush-Cheney sign torn up by Kerry-Edwards supporters on Thursday, Sept. 16, 2004, at the Tri-State Airport in Huntington, W.Va. Do the smirking people in this photo really feel proud for terrorizing a three-year-old girl?
posted by DWRoelands at 9:31 PM PST - 58 comments
Normal for Us: The Millter Twins
This is a pretty amazing documentary, made by Eric Cain for Oregon Public Broadcasting, about twins Michelle and Mariya Miller and their family. The girls were born with Spinal Muscular Atrophy and therefore have never been able to walk. The parents were determined to have their daughters live life and so developed unique motorized transports and a home that accomodates their needs. In a tiny town in Alaska. Talk about pulling the tears right out of their ducts!
posted by billsaysthis at 5:43 PM PST - 12 comments
Mr. Sbock's Parallel Universe:
"Boobs - the female front. These are the image files of the fake artist Mr. Sbock. His mission: To create strange new pics. To publish great female forms, fascinating breasts and beautiful buttocks. To show on the net what no one has seen before." And quite possibly what no one ever wants to see again. [nsfw - maybe unless you work
here]
posted by toby\flat2 at 5:08 PM PST - 10 comments
Reason's Julian Sanchez
thinks he's found the guy who was caught on ABC News kicking a protester at the Republican convention, whose identity has been the subject of much speculation on blogs like TalkLeft. But does this kind of thing have the potential to create the Internet's Richard Jewell?
posted by transona5 at 12:11 PM PST - 58 comments
Some of the results from the city of Vancouver's
Art Underfoot contest. "The competition invited anyone who lives, works, or goes to school in Vancouver to submit design ideas for new manhole covers..."
posted by dobbs at 10:54 AM PST - 11 comments
Heckling? Good Natured Fun or Verbal Abuse
The recent assault of a fan by Texas Rangers' reliever Frank Francisco with a folding chair is inexcusable, there's no doubt about that. But what about the fans who literally spend every moment at the park needling, heckling and verbally abusing the players?
There's a difference between ribbing the opposing team and calling an athlete a fat f***. Where does the line get drawn and why is any heckling permitted anymore?
posted by fenriq at 9:55 AM PST - 85 comments
IN 1877 Isabel Gill visited an
inhospitable volcanic blob in the mid-Atlantic to help her
husband with ground-breaking astronomical measurements.
Then she wrote a wrote a
book about it, including an attempt to explain to fellow Victorian ladies the concept of a solar parallax in terms she thought they might be able to grasp:
"I myself do not understand mathematical terms, so how could I use them with the hope of explaining these things to my readers? However, I can use knitting-needles, and perhaps they may do just as well."
Wierdly, more than a century later
another astronomer visited the site and found the sandy paths which marked the Gill's lava-top camp still undisturbed by the Atlantic winds.
posted by penguin pie at 9:10 AM PST - 17 comments
Dan Rather: : "If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story. Any time I'm wrong, I want to be right out front and say, 'Folks, this is what went wrong and how it went wrong.'" (reg. req.)
Andrew Sullivan: "Memo to Rather: you can't break that story, because someone else in pajamas already did. Check the frequency, Kenneth. You are so far from being out front on this, you are leagues behind in the dust. Have you heard of the Internet? You can find it on that weird machine in your office they call a computer."
Me: Is anyone else astonished as I am at how far CBS seems to have its head up its ass WRT news media in the 21st century?
posted by ericost at 8:07 AM PST - 128 comments
An interesting assessment of the war on terrorism.
I love it when blogs seem to be filling a void in media coverage. This one is taking a critical look at the war on terrorism and seems to be finding some holes. If you go past the partisan talk (and it seems like that blog is slanted, even though it claims to be centrist), there's a lot of interesting links in there.
posted by TNLNYC at 7:24 AM PST - 9 comments
20th-century American artist, Alice Neele
, "
The Auntie Hero": "
While
Uptowners were making their way downtown to have their portraits painted by Warhol, Downtowners were going up to 107th Street to sit for this bohemian, auntie-like artist." Check out seven decades of raw, sometimes amazing, but always deeply humane portraits of the often larger-than-life figures who peopled the New York art/lit scene and Neel's personal landscape, including such iconic irrepressibles as
Joe Gould,
Andy Warhol,
Annie Sprinkle, and
Bella Abzug. (NSFW)
posted by taz at 5:59 AM PST - 13 comments
September 15
Hey, ho! He's...gone.
Today
Johnny Ramone joins
Joey and
Dee Dee at the great Blitzkrieg Bop in the sky (though admittedly he might not have much to say to either of them). This comes just days after a
benefit/tribute concert in L.A. commemorating the 30th anniversary of the first Ramones gig. Catch the new documentary
End of the Century in the meantime. Then again, maybe you'll just wanna be sedated.
posted by scody at 9:37 PM PST - 45 comments
The World's Most Dangerous Ideas:
U.S. and European goals on most issues are quite similar. Both want a peaceful world free from terror, with open trade, growing freedom, and civilized codes of conduct. A Europe that charts its own course just to mark its differences from the United States threatens to fracture global efforts—whether on trade, proliferation, or the Middle East. Europe is too disunited to achieve its goals without the United States; it can only ensure that America’s plans don’t succeed. The result will be a world that muddles along, with the constant danger that unattended problems will flare up disastrously. Instead of win-win, it will be lose-lose—for Europe, for the United States, and for the world.
posted by gd779 at 3:02 PM PST - 21 comments
Eyetracking for fun and profit.
The Eyetrack III study observed 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content. This article summarizes their observations. Too impatient to read? Cool transparent heatmap overlay gizmo
here. Via the rather cool
creativebits.
posted by stonerose at 12:08 PM PST - 10 comments
Why Bush Left Texas Growing evidence suggests that George W. Bush abruptly left his Texas Air National Guard unit in 1972 for substantive reasons pertaining to his inability to continue piloting a fighter jet. A months-long investigation, which includes examination of hundreds of government-released documents, interviews with former Guard members and officials, military experts and Bush associates, points toward the conclusion that Bush's personal behavior was causing alarm among his superior officers and would ultimately lead to his fleeing the state to avoid a physical exam he might have had difficulty passing... If it is demonstrated that profound behavioral problems marred Bush's wartime performance and even cut short his service, it could seriously challenge Bush's essential appeal as a military steward and guardian of societal values. It could also explain the incomplete, contradictory and shifting explanations provided by the Bush camp for the President's striking invisibility from the military during the final two years of his six-year military obligation... There's that elephant in the living room again.
posted by y2karl at 10:09 AM PST - 101 comments
How safe is your pension?
(UK) 'Nine million people in this country, young and old, pay a slice of their wage into final salary occupational pension schemes. But Channel 4's economics correspondent Liam Halligan reveals that most people don't realise they have no legal right to that pension money whatsoever. And some people have lost the lot.'
Think Britain's social safety net is more secure than that of the US? Think again.
Related :-
Pensions Theft, a campaigning website set up by pensions activists, some of whom lost their pensions when their company went bust.
posted by plep at 3:06 AM PST - 6 comments
Critique
Magazine's
On Writing III -
Each year, Critique Magazine's staff compiles essays by and interviews with writers, teachers, and translators of merit for inclusion in the special anniversary edition "On Writing".
Basically, a
shitload of authors provide thoughts on, ahem, writing.
{Both sites are worth a look, imo.}
posted by dobbs at 12:22 AM PST - 18 comments
September 14
Tired of American politics? Want a diversion? Become a
Sex Toy Tester. (Not safe for work, unless this is your work.)
posted by Wulfgar! at 4:57 PM PST - 19 comments
A Son's Goodbye
Pierre Elliott Trudeau was Canada's Prime Minister from 1968 - 1984. He was a flamboyant man who believed in one Canada and a strong federal government. His son Justin delivered this very touching eulogy at his funeral in 2000.
posted by Irontom at 3:34 PM PST - 8 comments
Two Years Before the Mast.
"In the following pages I design to give an accurate and authentic narrative of a little more than two years spent as a common sailor,before the mast, in the American merchant service. It is written out from a journal which I kept at the time, and from notes which I made of most of the events as they happened." At the beginning of his third year of Harvard a severe attack of measles interrupted Henry Dana's studies,
and so affected his eyes as to preclude, for a time at least, all idea of study. The state of the family finances was not such as to permit of foreign travel in search of health. Accordingly, prompted by necessity and by a youthful love of adventure, he shipped as a common sailor in the brig, bound for the
California coast.
posted by weston at 12:09 PM PST - 22 comments
Those of us following the daily heart attack that is
electoral-vote.com will notice a new site feature today. If you've ever wondered how the popular vote can be so evenly split when the red state / blue state breakdown glares so overwhelmingly crimson, now you can see a
map of the US with states inflated/shrunk according to the proportions of their electoral votes. Presumably, this map will be updated, along with the standard one, with new polling data daily. [thanks to EB for originally pointing me to the site]
posted by scarabic at 12:08 PM PST - 95 comments
The Starving Ocean
: A large collection of articles by Debbie MacKenzie on the death of the ocean. The idea is that removing most of the fish from the sea might be sort of bad for the marine ecosystem as a whole. Her writing style is a bit kooky, but she has been right on some points (ie. the Grey Seal thing). Oh, and fishing is also responsible for the rise of atmospheric
carbon dioxide.
posted by sfenders at 11:49 AM PST - 10 comments
Use one of those heavy U-locks to secure your bike? You might want to
think again. It seems the barrel style lock mechanisms some of them employ can be
opened by a Bic pen [.mov movie].
posted by normy at 9:44 AM PST - 69 comments
With our shipwrecked hearts.
Ninety years ago
Dino Campana, impoverished and outcast
poet self-published his book
Canti Orfici (.pdf file) ("
Orphic Songs", mastefully
translated into English by
poet Charles Wright). The birth of the book wasn't marred only by Campana's mental illness (soon afterwards, he was committed to a mental institution). Initially, the "Orphic Songs" were submitted for possible publication to the poet/
painter Ardengo Soffici, who promptly
lost the manuscript. Campana spent the next six months reconstructing the book from memory. Finally in 1914, with the help of a local printer of religious tracts, he self-published a first edition of around 500, selling only 44. Campana attempted, with marginal success, to sell the remainder of his portion of the run (the printer had taken half the books as partial printing payment) himself at cafes in Florence.
He is now remembered as one of Italy's greatest, most imaginative poets (with
biographies ,
award-
winning movies about his troubled life and his dangerous, scandalous
love affair with fellow writer
Sibilla Aleramo.
(more inside)
posted by matteo at 8:03 AM PST - 11 comments
Hurricane Risk for New Orleans:
"if that Category Five Hurricane comes to New Orleans, 50,000 people could lose their lives. Now that is significantly larger than any estimates that we would have of individuals who might lose their lives from a terrorist attack. When you start to do that kind of calculus - and it's horrendous that you have to do that kind of calculus - it appears to those of us in emergency management, that the risk is much more real and much more significant, when you talk about hurricanes. I don't know that anybody, though, psychologically, has come to grip with that: that the French Quarter of New Orleans could be gone." (Nb. this excerpt from a fascinating 2002 American RadioWorks documentary does not refer specifically to Ivan.)
posted by sudama at 7:41 AM PST - 55 comments
September 13
As God Is My Cleaning Lady: Crypto-Fado For Bohemian Pagan Popsters.
They can't play their classical Fado guitars very well; they have a punky drummer and the Fado singer not only smiles pouts and shakes her hips, but actually seems to
enjoy herself! What's become of this country? Are they mad? Reckless, certainly. They call themselves
A Naifa and what they've done is taken a massive, ice-crunching Waring Pro blender to all the sacred potions, fruits and flavours of Portuguese traditional music and poured out a vulgar, shameless, disrespectful and utterly
delicious shambles of a
Pop cocktail. Heresy in old Lisbon? I nearly choked on my 30-year-old
aguardente velha, but then realized I was dancing merrily and had already spilt most of it anyway. [
Probably not fun for those unfamiliar with the Fado. QuickTime required.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 11:09 PM PST - 10 comments
Why al-Qaeda is winning
As nihilistic as it may be, al-Qaeda, from a business point of view, is a major success: three years after September 11, it is a global brand and a global movement. The Middle East, in this scenario, is just a regional base station. This global brand does not have much to do with Islam. But it has everything to do with the globalization of anti-imperialism. And the empire, whatever its definition, has its center in Washington. Bin Laden is laughing: Bush's crusade has legitimized an obscure sect as a worldwide symbol of political revolt. How could bin Laden not vote for Bush?
posted by rdone at 7:11 PM PST - 20 comments
Essay on the meanings and significance of
Blade Runner. Interesting insights on particular scenes and quotes and how they are more relevant today than ever.
posted by stbalbach at 6:18 PM PST - 27 comments
US Ban on Assault Weapons Expires
Without much fanfare the ten year old ban on assault weapons has expired. How does this affect our relative level of safety now that we can all own high powered, high capacity weapons again?
posted by fenriq at 2:47 PM PST - 61 comments
Meet the CXT.
"We can see it a as a vehicle for business people who want to make distinct impression. For personal use, it's for people who want to make a statement." I think it will leave a little more than an impression.
posted by gazingus at 11:54 AM PST - 92 comments
Yesterday, Mazen al-Tomasi, a reporter for Al-Arabiya, was
broadcasting live from the scene of a carbombed Bradley Fighting Vehicle, which had attracted a crowd of locals. While making his report,
a sudden noise came from behind Mazen.
Two Apache helicopters flew in overhead, and
one of them started attacking the crowd, with their guns. The crowd, which included several small children, tried to run away. A helicopter launched a missile...
Mazen al-Tomasi was struck by shrapnel from the blast on live television. His cameraman, Seif Fouad, fell down from the force of the explosion.
Mazen's blood spattered across the camera's lens and the screams of the dying and injured were heard. Mazen screamed to Seif for help: "Seif, Seif! I'm going to die. I'm going to die."
Seif grabbed Mazen and started to pull him out of harm's way. Suddenly, another missile was launched, and Seif was hit by shrapnel in the leg and abdomen. Seif, seriously wounded, watched his friend Mazen die soon afterwards. Twelve were killed, 61 wounded in the attack.
A US military spokesman said the helicopters opened fire after coming under attack from the crowd, and that they fired to prevent looters from stripping the vehicle. That said, the vehicle was burning too badly to be stripped, and the television footage showed no evidence of any shooting from the ground, or indeed, any armed Iraqis whatsoever. The full video of this is was seen by millions of Arabs and is apparently something that Reuters has the rights to -- Saif works for Reuters -- but something tells me that it will never make the evening news.
posted by insomnia_lj at 9:07 AM PST - 66 comments
Alas, the new iMac cannot bow before the cross.
"At best, it can only give a downward nod or an upward look, and that would just communicate half-hearted politeness rather than an attitude of worship." So says the editor of the
Christian Macintosh Users Group. Love Jesus, but not Jobs? No problem - this
list of Christian computer users groups has you covered. And hey - Neo/Luddites? Even if you've left the web behind, the web hasn't left
you behind.
MeFites, when you're not bowing before the blue, what's your favorite site that melds the sacred with the techno-profane?
posted by stonerose at 8:58 AM PST - 17 comments
Terrorists Arrive in Miami!
A little-noticed but chilling scene at Opa-locka Airport outside Miami last month demonstrates that the Bush administration's commitment to fighting international terrorism can be overtaken by presidential politics — even if that means admitting known terrorists onto U.S. soil.
There are other terrorists that the US government welcomes. I challenge you to name them (hint: Cuban origins for one).
What is that smell? Are we fighting terrorism or Islam?
posted by nofundy at 7:40 AM PST - 16 comments
September 12
The Likudization of the World
"....he has cast the United States in the very same role in which Israel casts itself, facing the very same threat. In this narrative, the U.S. is fighting a never ending battle for its very survival against utterly irrational forces that seek nothing less than its total extermination. "
posted by troutfishing at 9:11 PM PST - 42 comments
The Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
More than two decades after the last chapter, Stephen R. Donaldson is set to release the first of four novels in "The Final Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant." Bonus: a "trailer" of sorts (left side of page, midpoint). Hellfire & White Gold!
posted by davidmsc at 7:21 PM PST - 25 comments
Movieoke
- emote along with your favorite scenes from Casablanca, Taxi Driver, Grease and a bunch of others. All the classics except, inexplicably,
A Few Good Men.
posted by milovoo at 12:47 PM PST - 12 comments
A LEVER TO MOVE THE MIND
The project is fascinating, even though it is still in the rudimentary graphics stage. As someone who works with people with mental illness this interested me, how about the rest of you? What am I talking about? A way to model what schizophrenia is like.
posted by edgeways at 10:07 AM PST - 9 comments
September 11
Lest We Forget
Today we should look back at how a shift in priorities played a critical role in the attacks of 9/11. Whatever your political leanings there are certain facts that should not be ignored. I present these and ask you to present other relevant facts.
posted by nofundy at 12:56 PM PST - 20 comments
Shake it, don't break it!
Linked article reviews a few laptops that can really take a beating.
Hey, I adore my sexy, sleek Sony Vaio, but I have to admit, if I ever dropped it, I'd have a really big problem.
(This article is from April, so I did search of MeFi and there were no returns, so enjoy!)
posted by erratic frog at 5:34 AM PST - 4 comments
Suing the Saudis
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has decided to
join a $7 billion lawsuit that was
filed last week by bond brokerage firm
Cantor Fitzgerald, which
lost 658 of its employees--two thirds of the firm--in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, which was three years ago today. It looks like they may be gearing up to use
RICO:
"[The lawsuit said] Saudi Arabia engaged in a pattern of racketeering as it participated directly or indirectly in al Qaida's work through its "alter-ego" charities and relief organisations, which it funded and controlled." Al Qaida
is named as a co-defendant, and four Saudis are mentioned by name: the interior minister, the defense minister, the governor of Riyadh, and the British ambassador, all members of the Saudi royal family.
posted by Asparagirl at 12:13 AM PST - 27 comments
Three years after the day that claimed 658 employees,
Cantor Fitzgerald thrives. Controversial CEO
Howard Lutnick went from tragic figure to villain in a matter of days when he abruptly terminated the pay of deceased employees, but
Cantor has since paid $145 million to families in tribute to
former colleagues. Joining many others throughout the country in a movement called
One Day's Pay, the firm will donate 100% of Monday's revenues to the family relief fund.
-more-
posted by madamjujujive at 12:05 AM PST - 11 comments
September 10
Take 100 photos of 100 faces in a metropolitan area, morph them together to create a composite male and female face, and you can see
the face of tomorrow.
posted by Orb at 7:31 PM PST - 22 comments
The British Library is putting online 93 high-resolution digitised copies of 21 of Shakespeare's plays. They include many lines and passages that are different from those found in the First Folio editions, which were not printed until after Shakespeare's death.
BBC article.
posted by stbalbach at 6:29 PM PST - 9 comments
Testy Copy Editors
is a site run by
WaPo Financial Copy Editor
Philip Blanchard, with guest columns and
discussions dedicated to blowing off steam for people in the occasionally tense business of making words fit, parse properly and make sense in print.
If you've actually edited copy under a deadline, or know someone who has, you know how thankless the job can sometimes be.
posted by chicobangs at 10:36 AM PST - 16 comments
Heavens Above!
This is a pretty neat website for anybody interested in astronomy. Give it your location (City names work, even my white bread red-neck plains town did) and it'll give you star maps, fly by times and viewing instructions for satellites and so on.
posted by substrate at 9:12 AM PST - 6 comments
My cattle grazing grounds are not my idea and vice versa.
But thanks to laws I can "own" the idea as if the idea was a cow ; link goes to a interesting university-level paper [PDF].
The author makes some interesting analysis and points attention to the fact that current intellectual property laws can go against well established economic theories at the expense of free market competition theory, technical innovations and society-as-a-whole best interest.
Recommended to people with economic theory experience , but also to everyday public-goods-privatization opposers as the paper isn't (intentionally) way too technical.
posted by elpapacito at 7:20 AM PST - 4 comments
The Pacific Wrecks Database
is an impressive collection of information about lost and found WWII wrecks in the Pacific. The site is a little hard to navigate (I suggest using the past news archives and the direct links in the description slug on the first page, rather than the drop-down menu,) but the content is worth the trouble. Essays from veterans, discovery tales, photographs, maps, and more await.
posted by headspace at 4:15 AM PST - 3 comments
Sure, it's just more Bush-bashing,
but it's gussied up durn pretty. Philip Gourevitch on Bushspeak.
He is grossly underestimated as an orator by those who presume that good grammar, rigorous logic, and a solid command of the facts are the essential ingredients of political persuasion, and that the absence of these skills indicates a lack of intelligence. Although Bush is no intellectual, and proud of it, he is quick and clever, and, for all his notorious malapropisms, abuses of syntax, and manglings or reinventions of vocabulary, his intelligence is—if not especially literate—acutely verbal.
posted by grrarrgh00 at 1:42 AM PST - 87 comments
September 9
Echelon is a Mac application that, if you try to register it with a pirated serial number, will
delete your entire home directory. (Windows users: This is a very, very bad thing, second only to wiping the entire drive.) Is this a good way to fight piracy, and can it even be legal?
posted by jjg at 10:42 PM PST - 42 comments
Just One Question...
"How many times have you been arrested, Mr. President?"
$1002.21 Bounty to the first person to ask George W. Bush this question in a public forum.
[PayPal donations accepted to increase the bounty]
posted by lagado at 8:16 PM PST - 42 comments
Fiction Bitch
"The Fiction Bitch doesn't want to encourage new writers. She wants to weed out terrible writers before they go on to bore millions of innocent publishing house interns to tears."
posted by dobbs at 2:11 PM PST - 48 comments
Ken Jennings, why have you forsaken me?
Mr. Kottke, best known for breaking the Teacup Dome scandal, is now reporting that Ken Jennings has lost his 75th game. For the record today he will play his 42nd game, so he still has a long way to go. Perhaps most interesting is that the AP, etc. are all picking up on this but not giving direct credit to Kottke -- as seen in this
Slashdot thread.
posted by geoff. at 12:52 PM PST - 48 comments
The grim glory of war.
Hundreds of pictures from the front lines in Iraq. I was very skeptical about posting this link, but I thought it'd be useful to all our sofa warriors here at MeFi, so they'll have some images to relate to whenever they equate "support our troops" with "keep them there for as long as it takes".
posted by acrobat at 4:56 AM PST - 40 comments
This is Jon's diary. Jon is in prison on money laundering and drugs charges.
"My new co-habitants are enduring the twin evils of a broken swamp-cooler and a cockroach infestation. A neighbouring asthmatic inmate happily described how he inhaled a cockroach that had crept into his nebulizer. He could feel the insect crawling around inside him and promptly vomited his stomach contents. Unfortunately the cockroach was not ejected, as it was lodged in his lung."
posted by urban greeting at 2:44 AM PST - 13 comments
Why no Pliestocene Park?
"Everyone seems to assume that the primeval condition of the Great Plains was bison and prairie dog, with the occasional pronghorn herd, but no other large mammals. Yet for 1.65 million years, North America teemed with large animals: the '
pleistocene megafauna.' Then as the last ice age was ending and the first humans were coming over from Siberia, most of them died out." Sad -- doesn't everybody want
a pony?
posted by namespan at 12:06 AM PST - 15 comments
September 8
How long til you buy the farm?
• "The
Living to 100 Life Expectancy Calculator© was designed to translate what we have learned from studies of centenarians and other longevity research into a practical and empowering tool for individuals to estimate their longevity potential."
Wasn't this on a Futurama episode?
posted by dhoyt at 8:30 PM PST - 29 comments
World wants Bush out.
"Only one in five want to see Bush re-elected," "Senator Kerry was particularly favoured in traditionally strong US allies." Should America take into consideration the international support of their presidential hopefuls, or can they really go it alone in today's global community?
posted by krisjohn at 7:46 PM PST - 32 comments
Body Burden : The pollution in people
"In a study led by Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York...researchers at two major laboratories found an average of 91 industrial compounds, pollutants, and other chemicals in the blood and urine of nine volunteers....
Scientists refer to this contamination as a person’s body burden. Of the 167 chemicals found, 76 cause cancer in humans or animals, 94 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 79 cause birth defects or abnormal development. The dangers of exposure to these chemicals in combination has never been studied."
posted by troutfishing at 1:36 PM PST - 23 comments
George Bushes's Military record: a critical analysis
This pdf file is about as definitive a look as we are likely to get on the Bush military record. Clearly most post4ers/readers of Metafilter do not support Bush, but having some clear-cut evidence at hand to use in arguments against those who attack the Kerry militaryrecord, this will give the Bushites reason to move on to other topics
posted by Postroad at 10:19 AM PST - 64 comments
Project Rebirth
went live today. Six time-lapse cameras are shooting one frame of film every five minutes from rooftops near the World Trade Center site. Explore the
cameras, or watch the (rather lovely) film trailer.
posted by stonerose at 8:54 AM PST - 9 comments
The end of peace and prosperity.
So, remember the Onion's parody of Bush that was published on
January 18, 2001, "Bush: Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over"? Ha Ha, very funny.
Three years later they've published an updated article complete with links. Oh baby, not so funny anymore...
via Daily Kos
posted by sic at 6:14 AM PST - 56 comments
These
images
caused a great debate
among my antipodean circle in London whether they are real or have been
photoshopped. As far as we can gather it
does
exist. But it is surreal - and only in the UK surely would something like
this be real.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 12:53 AM PST - 85 comments
September 7
Banned weapons and WMD parts
were shipped out of Iraq after the US forces took power according to the UN. At least thats the best I can make of this article. Does this really say that the UN is upset at us for shipping out of Iraq the exact things they previously said were not in Iraq?
posted by soulhuntre at 10:32 PM PST - 73 comments
Russian TV broadcasts siege video:
[BBC link: RealPlayer/RealAlternative/Windows MPC] SFW
Unknown provenance of footage, but clearly genuine. Terrorist uses 'Dead Man's Brake' switch on a bomb, also shots of Hoop Bombs'.
Beware: NewsFilter
posted by dash_slot- at 3:41 PM PST - 39 comments
US Army to Rebid Halliburton Contracts
Looks like Halliburton's about to lose its sweetheart deal as the US Army looks to rebidthe contracts.
"Pentagon auditors last month "strongly" urged the Army to withhold paying 15 percent of Halliburton's bills in Iraq, saying the company had not provided enough details to support at least $1.82 billion out of $4.3 billion of logistical work."
Insert inappropriate snide political comment here.
posted by fenriq at 10:44 AM PST - 26 comments
The bias of balance : new study of how media "evenhandness" distorts truth
"Two researchers argue, in a paper published this month in the journal Global Environmental Change, that following the norms of American journalism, U.S. media have promulgated a bias in the coverage of climate change essentially by giving too much credence to climate skeptics at the expense of the scientific consensus." - "Reporters and editors at
four of the nation's top newspapers [ New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal ] adhered to the journalistic norm of balance at the expense of accurately reporting scientific understanding of the human contributions to global warming" (an
earlier work in this vein).
posted by troutfishing at 9:59 AM PST - 28 comments
Tuesday Diversion
-- puzzling entertainment for those who are having as difficult a time with motivation this Tuesday-after-a-holiday as I am.
posted by papercake at 8:52 AM PST - 13 comments
Because spaceflight, in and of itself, is just way to easy.
On 08 August 2001, NASA launched
Genesis. It was a spacecraft that would spend 1125 days in space, including 884 days collecting 0.4 milligrams of solar particles. At that point, it would launch a 500 lbs return vehicle that would travel 600 mph back to earth. When it enters the atmosphere, at approximately 11:55am EST on Wednesday of this week, it will be going close to twenty-five
thousand mph. Oddly enough, this is the easy part of the mission.
Because then, two minutes later, NASA is going to catch it. In mid-air. With a helicopter. Really.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 8:37 AM PST - 32 comments
Gravity Monuments
were erected on several college campuses in the 1960's and 1970's by the
Gravity Research Foundation "to remind students of the blessings forthcoming when science determines what gravity is, how it works, and how it may be controlled." I regularly visited the one at Colby College, in Maine. Emory
had one, and apparently
SMU did as well. Anyone know of others?
posted by mmahaffie at 4:37 AM PST - 15 comments
September 6
Coral: The NYU Distribution Network
"Are you tired of clicking on some link from a web portal, only to find that the website is temporarily off-line because thousands or millions of other users are also trying to access it? Does your network have a really low-bandwidth connection, such that everyone, even accessing the same web pages, suffers from slow downloads? Have you ever run a website, only to find that suddenly you get hit with a spike of thousands of requests, overloading your server and possibly causing high monthly bills? If so, Coral might be your free solution for these problems!"
posted by jonah at 9:26 PM PST - 4 comments
Factfilter: Sen. Bob Graham's new book shows coverup.on Saudi's behalf
Bush had concluded that ''a nation-state that had aided the terrorists should not be held publicly to account,'' Graham wrote. "It was as if the president's loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America's safety.'' And there's stuff about Iraq, too. After wearing 9/11 like a tiara during the convention, will the facts finally be aired?
posted by amberglow at 8:33 PM PST - 29 comments
Step aside
xprize, here comes the
elevator 2010 challenge. Sponsored by the
Spaceward Foundation this is a "public challenge centered around the Space Elevator concept, offering a substantial prize for the first laser-powered tether climbing demonstration that can meet specific criteria."
more here.
posted by Grod at 4:07 PM PST - 2 comments
Cheney disclosed.
Rolling Stone's profile of our ambitious vice-president and the team he assembled to keep himself in power: "'They were like cancer cells,' says retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski,
who worked on the Defense Department's Near East and South Asia desk
during the buildup to the Iraq war. 'They didn't care about the truth.
They had an agenda. I'd never seen anything like it. They deformed
everything.'" [Did you know that "dancing revolution"
blogeur John Barlow was a former Cheney campaign worker? I sure didn't.]
posted by digaman at 11:12 AM PST - 21 comments
Breeders are winning. "Conservative, religiously minded Americans are putting far more of their genes into the future than their liberal, secular counterparts." (WaPo link,
bugmenot says try fedup@mailinator.com and
fedup if you don't care to register. Definition of genetic fitness
here.)
posted by jfuller at 10:04 AM PST - 77 comments
Yesterday
was the 13th Anniversary of Freddie Mercury's death, whilst [almost] coincidentally, tomorrow marks the occasion of the 13th
Mercury Music Prize, which he had
nothing to do with.
In that time, we've seen
classical-punk piano recitals nominated,
agit-prop rockers repeatedly snubbed and Radiohead routinely listed but falling short [though not this year.]. It's always a varied list, but are
you really interested in the obscure, the fusion, the orchestral and the jazz?
Listen to 'em all
here , and fill up the gaps
here. A complete list of past nominees and winners can be found
here , and the bookies seem to rate both
The Streets and
Franz Ferdinand worthy of the accolade, according to odds published
here.
Will ascullion again pick the winner? Listen on the web to find out tomorrow, midnight GMT, or watch on digital TV in the UK .
Previous years' threads here.
posted by dash_slot- at 9:15 AM PST - 14 comments
Twenty Years Ago, The BBC produced a topical drama called
Threads - little did they know the furore it would go on to create. [more inside]
posted by metaxa at 3:16 AM PST - 32 comments
The quite amazing true story
of the man on which Spieldberg's new
Terminal is based. A tale of Iran, torture, McDonalds' breakfasts, dry-cleaning, and a man who really doesn't seem that well. And who doesn't meet and fall in love with Catherine Zeta Jones.
posted by humuhumu at 1:58 AM PST - 13 comments
Joe Gould's secret
made the
brilliant New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell a
legend, and the subject of a
movie; but Greenwich Village icon Gould's
Oral History of the World in Our Time wasn't as mythical as Mitchell presumed, even if it wasn't the masterwork Gould envisioned. Mitchell, after his lengthy exposé of Gould's imaginary 9-million-word opus in 1964's
Joe Gould's Secret, spent years at work in his
New Yorker office on a nebulous project and never published again; he
died in 1996.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 12:23 AM PST - 5 comments
September 5
A Loon.
Sometimes when you open your mind too far, your brain falls out.
WATER:Flowforms, Vortex and- Implosion in Water was my entry point, having foolishly searched for "laminar water flow" whilst thinking about a fishpond project.
posted by five fresh fish at 8:20 PM PST - 20 comments
Bush's missing service year and missing records? no worries. Bush wearing a medal he didn't earn? no problemos. Kerry's 5 Vietnam war medals?
Pentagon inquiry. [reg maybe required: use mefi/mefi]
posted by kv at 2:43 PM PST - 161 comments
Bush's National Guard File Missing Records
Documents that should have been written to explain gaps in President Bush (news - web sites)'s Texas Air National Guard service are missing from the military records released about his service in 1972 and 1973, according to regulations and outside experts.
For example, Air National Guard regulations at the time required commanders to write an investigative report for the Air Force when Bush missed his annual medical exam in 1972. The regulations also required commanders to confirm in writing that Bush received counseling after missing five months of drills.
No such records have been made public...
posted by Postroad at 2:07 PM PST - 17 comments
Remember Aron Ralston, the guy that was trapped under a boulder for six days, and escaped only by amputating his own arm? In this month's Outside Magazine, he tells his story in
excruciating detail.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 8:30 AM PST - 16 comments
Zardoz speaks to you.
A fifteen-page essay on
John Boorman's, um, rather unusual film. Other analyses are
here and
here:
Imagine a science-fiction film where the entire special effects budget was spent on cocaine. Not just for the director and script-writer, but also enough cocaine to make the producer and studio heads COMPLETELY UNAWARE of the film's content. That's the only way this film could possibly have been made. (reviews contain major spoilers)
posted by Prospero at 8:01 AM PST - 27 comments
The BOBs - Best of the Blogs
DW-WORLD.DE, the online portal of German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle, is looking for the best online diarists. With "The BOBs - Best of the Blogs" awards, we plan to honor the best Weblogs in 11 different categories, including Best Weblog, Best Topic, Best Design, Best Weblog Innovation and Best Journalistic Weblog. A total of seven of the Best Journalism prizes will be awarded -- one in each of our competition languages. Weblogs from all over the world can be nominated for the awards, provided they have been written in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese or Arabic. You can nominate your favorite sites or even your own blog during the open suggestion phase from Sept. 17-Oct. 17, 2004.
posted by ronsens at 5:57 AM PST - 5 comments
September 4
The
Toronto International Film Festival begins Thursday. The
2004 program is one of the best they've had in years (certainly the best since the 90s). Planning on attending? If so, you may appreciate
TIFF Reviews - "the online meeting place for fans of TIFF 2004". Since TIFF is the the largest film festival in the world, most attendees (
myself included) find it very difficult to pick their films. Once the fest starts, members of the TIFF Reviews forum are encouraged to leave reviews of what they've been watching in the hopes that it'll help other people plan their 10 days in the dark.
posted by dobbs at 10:29 PM PST - 9 comments
LetterJames
artfully alters photographs of typography with your personalized greeting. Lots of fun
(but watch out for all those pop-ups!)
posted by Robot Johnny at 1:20 PM PST - 2 comments
FrozenHorses.com
-- where you'll learn the answers to such questions as "Will my stallion freeze?" and "Where can the stallion semen be frozen?"
posted by ewagoner at 12:56 PM PST - 3 comments
September 3
Chernobyl survivor interview -
Over at the New Scientist site Alexander Yuvchenko (one of the few surviving workers at the site) talks about the day Chernobyl went kablooie.
"...we walked outside. What we saw was terrifying. Everything that could be destroyed had been. The entire water coolant system was gone. The right-hand side of the reactor hall had been completely destroyed, and on the left the pipes were just hanging." "From where I stood I could see a huge beam of projected light flooding up into infinity from the reactor. It was like a laser light, caused by the ionisation of the air. It was light-bluish, and it was very beautiful. I watched it for several seconds. If I'd stood there for just a few minutes I would probably have died on the spot..."
posted by edgeways at 9:54 PM PST - 12 comments
200 dead.
In a time when terrorism is a major political platform and given that this event has had a bigger death toll than any other major terror activity since September 11, why is this not bigger news?
posted by dig_duggler at 9:40 PM PST - 72 comments
Richard Dawkins discusses religion with a Darwinian outlook.
RD: Could religion be a recent phenomenon, sprung up since our genes underwent most of their natural selection? Its ubiquity argues against any simple version of this idea. Nevertheless, there is a version of it that I want to advocate. The propensity that was naturally selected in our ancestors was not religion per se. It had some other benefit, and it only incidentally manifests itself today as religious behavior.
posted by skallas at 8:11 PM PST - 35 comments
A century's worth of Olympics posters
Awesome Flash-based site with over 1800 posters, official and not, from every Olympic Games, 1896-present (and even one for 2006). The retro-licious posters from the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow are particularly nice and definitely worth checking out. Also neat: posters from Games that never happened due to WWII. Great resource for looking at poster design through the years.
posted by Asparagirl at 6:56 PM PST - 9 comments
ElectionProtection
is a clearinghouse for folks who want to be part of the US electoral process. They've already
shown their stuff in
primary elections. They're
set to go in Florida.
The group is a coalition effort of People for the American Way and a bunch of other organizations--some of the usual leftish/centrist suspects (Working Assets, the ACLU, the NAACP), and some rather strange bedfellows (the United Church of Christ, the African American Ministers' Leadership Council).
One hopes that people of all political stripes will be welcomed in this effort to get the vote out and educate people about their rights. One (well, this one, anyway) hopes as well that those of us who post about our impatience with the US electoral process on MeFi will put our time and/or money where our pixels are.
posted by Sidhedevil at 10:57 AM PST - 3 comments
London's Natural History Museum's subsite on
Hair has some interesting movies and games.
posted by dobbs at 12:34 AM PST - 3 comments
September 2
"Suppose you are looking for your keys. You check your pocket, then a table by the door, and you finally notice them sitting next to a pile of mail. "These are my keys," you say. Clearly the word "these" refers to your keys. but on what does this fact supervene? Which conditions are such that, necessarily, if they obtain, then your use of 'these' has the referent it does?"
Philosophers' Imprint is a web site devoted to the free dissemination of philosophy scholarship. The
above by Susanna Siegel, Assist. Prof. at Harvard.
posted by JohnR at 4:01 PM PST - 43 comments
Stories by Joe R. Lansdale
If you're a fan of Joe Lansdale (or wonder who came up with the idea for
Bubba Ho-Tep), this site's for you. A different short story is posted every Thursday. Most of the stories are from his early years.
posted by joaquim at 1:39 PM PST - 6 comments
Protests at RNC test appropriate response
An eyewitness account by
I Can't Believe Its A Democracy - "I just have to pause here for a moment to make an observation. How many times have I seen an interview with an arrested protester who claimed he or she had done nothing to provoke the police. Almost always my reaction has been, "Yeah, sure." Only now I was seeing this very situation unfold in front of my eyes. These protesters, while certainly noisy, had obeyed police instructions down the entire length of the street. Now they were being treated as if they had gotten wildly out of control, but they hadn't. I know, because I was there."
Another account from
Captain Normal (also an eyewitness and even got arrested and held for 24 hours without being charged or being able to contact a lawyer) discusses a family of French tourists caught up in the sweep as well as some of the other residents of
"Gitmo on the Hudson".
posted by fenriq at 10:37 AM PST - 75 comments
Iraq In Transition: Vortex or Catalyst? (PDF)
A key message of the report is that should Iraq fragment, a sectarian struggle between the Shi’a majority and Sunni minority is more likely to flare up in the context of a political breakdown. Al Qaeda and other militant Sunni groups will contribute to the polarisation between Sunnis, Shi’a and other religious groups in Iraq. A fragmented Iraq could provide a breeding ground for new militant factions, both Islamist and non-Islamist. Press release
posted by y2karl at 8:41 AM PST - 8 comments
Adults are picking up instant messaging
in record numbers, with 50% of those over 35 using various systems. This study was funded by AOL, which has a major stake in the instant messaging market through its popular AIM software. But most people who use IM in the workplace are still using free and unsecured systems, despite the availability of secure versions in enterprise software and products like
IM Secure.
posted by etoile at 8:29 AM PST - 8 comments
Echo Company
An emotionally trying account of an ambush in Iraq this past April that took the lives of twelve Americans and who knows how many Iraqis, from two journalists who were there. Included is a timeline, audio & video, photogalleries, and reactions from the friends and family they left behind. You can read a USMC account of the memorial service
here.
via Editor & Publisher [Flash/Real]
posted by trondant at 12:16 AM PST - 10 comments
September 1
Four Decades in North Korea:
The Far Eastern Economic Review interviews Charles Robert Jenkins, who deserted the US Army in South Korea in 1965 and spent almost 40 years in North Korea. Enjoy a fascinating story that parallels the history of the Cold War and is still unfolding.
posted by gen at 11:39 PM PST - 4 comments
The inauguration of September heralds the opening of the current opera season within the United States. Predictable mainstays of standard repertoire will return, but a few notable performances will make their
debut this season. One of the new performances that has been already generating excitement is
Margaret Garner, to be
hosted by Detroit’s
Michigan Opera Theater in May. With the libretto composed by Nobel Laureate
Toni Morrison, the
opera is a musical extrapolation of her 1987 novel
Beloved.
Margaret Garner is the
autobiographical account of a
Kentucky slave who journeys to Ohio with her family to live in freedom. However, the Garner family is intercepted during their pilgrimage by slave traders who threaten capture, and rather than have her daughter live in bondage, Margaret murders her. Top mezzo-soprano
Denyce Graves stars as the lead, and it will be directed by Kenny Leon, last seen conducting P. Diddy in Broadway's
Raisin in the Sun.
posted by naxosaxur at 2:15 PM PST - 13 comments
Geography Olympics
"Thanks to its global accessibility, the Internet is the perfect medium to hold an international competition such as The Geography Olympics. To join the challenge in support of your country, you simply need to select which country you will be representing and take the quiz. The quiz consists of trying to locate 10 randomly selected countries on a map of the world. It is different every time."
posted by Lizc at 2:07 PM PST - 27 comments
After swearing off his (five-part) "Jersey Trilogy" forever with the release of
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back in 2001, Kevin Smith (already busy with
Fletch Won and
The Green Hornet has
announced that
View Askew is preparing a
Clerks sequel, entitled
Clerks 2: The Passion of the Clerks. The movie "is about what happens when that lazy, 20-something malaise lasts into your 30s."
Since many of us were among those the "lazy 20-somethings" that launched Smith's career, this raises a few questions, most of which
are inside. The simple one, though, is this:
Is anyone still buying what he's selling? For what it's worth, I am.
posted by Sinner at 1:49 PM PST - 40 comments
A new newspaper for London.
The first edition of
The Line comes out today - apparently, despite its size, the UK capitol lacked an independent paper until now (please feel free to correct this if it is wrong). It's still thin, but does provide an interesting alternative look at issues both
local and
global.
posted by jb at 12:19 PM PST - 17 comments
Columbus swift boat vet angry about letter
Swift boat veteran Bob Anderson of Columbus is ticked.
It bothers him that Sen. John Kerry's swift boat history has become such a political hot potato. But he's even more irritated that his name was included - without his permission - on a letter used to discredit Kerry.
"I'm pretty nonpolitical," the 56-year-old Anderson said Tuesday. So, when he found out last week that his name was one of about 300 signed on a letter questioning Kerry's service, he was "flabbergasted."
posted by Postroad at 9:04 AM PST - 78 comments
Canto do Brasil
[Flash, sound, MiguelCardosoFilter] is a street-level view of Brazil made by photographer Geoffrey Hiller, more precisely a view of Salvador Bahia, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Paulo.
Another amazing project of his is
Burma, Grace Under Pressure [Flash, sound], exposing Burma's beauty and sadness.
Also check
Eastern Europe: Visions & Icons [Flash] ,where Hiller's post-Berlin Wall photographs are accompanied by Lev Liberman's moving text,
New York City: After The Fall [Flash, sound], an elegy to New Yorkers affected by 9/11, and his
journal from Vietnam.
posted by Masi at 6:44 AM PST - 3 comments
The world's
ten worst dictators -- this year anyway. Saddam, who was No. 3 Worst last year, has dropped off the list. Charles Taylor of Liberia (No. 4), also out of power and gone. Moammar Gadhafi (previously No. 8) and Belarus' Alexander Lukashenko (No. 10) also miss the new A list not because, according to the compilers, "they have improved but because other dictators have gotten worse."
posted by jfuller at 3:54 AM PST - 20 comments
