GROUCHO a funny sad documentary Google video [more inside]
posted by hortense at 11:30 PM PST - 20 comments

Festival of the Trees. [Via Scientist, Interrupted.]
posted by homunculus at 10:00 PM PST - 5 comments

Haruo Suekichi invents extraordinary steampunk watches for men and women, each one unique, sometimes with a story attached, a work of art, given a name like Rabbit or Fly Me to the Moon. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 9:44 PM PST - 19 comments

The site must be marked: What is here is dangerous(?) and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger...This place is best shunned and left uninhabited. [more inside]
posted by never used baby shoes at 8:23 PM PST - 79 comments

The solution to the Mystery of the Face on the Cake (via BoingBoing).
posted by cerebus19 at 8:05 PM PST - 36 comments

Online communities to become more 'all-encompassing.' If you join the SHC community on Sears.com, all web traffic to and from your computer thereafter will be copied and sent to a third party marketing research firm - including, for example, your secure sessions with your bank! The Sears.com proxy will send your logins and passwords along with a cleartext copy of all the supposedly secure data. But wait, it gets better: you can only view the true TOS once the proxy has already been installed. [more inside]
posted by ikkyu2 at 6:52 PM PST - 71 comments

Lie, bitch, flirt your way to the top of the high school ladder
"Coolest Girl In School has been touted as Grand Theft Auto for girls"
Interview with the Ladies who made it.
The ways of Mean Girls in a game.
posted by celerystick at 6:34 PM PST - 25 comments

Noelle can't stop giving birth.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:09 PM PST - 34 comments

io9 is a sci-fi blog that went live yesterday, edited by Annalee Newitz and friends. Newitz is an AlterNet Columnist and a founder of Bad Subjects, which is a major achievement considering she used to be afraid of blogs!
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:09 PM PST - 27 comments

George MacDonald Fraser, R.I.P. I fear this means we'll never know just what Harry Flashman did at the Battle of Gettysburg and elsewhere during the American Civil War. His creator died on Wednesday at the age of 82. He leaves behind a large body of work, and dedicated bands of followers. Previously.
posted by Man-Thing at 5:03 PM PST - 33 comments

The late-fifteenth/early-sixteenth century French publisher Simon Vostre was renowned for his Books of Hours. [more inside]
posted by thomas j wise at 4:59 PM PST - 4 comments

How to Paint a Picture With a Car (Bandwidth-saving Youtube version) [more inside]
posted by ardgedee at 4:18 PM PST - 38 comments

This may be the coolest flash game ever. Although it's graphics are nothing to write home about, the game play (which I will wisely follow kotaku's example in not spoiling for you) is quite simply incredible. It's a unique and quick little work break for you via kotaku. [more inside]
posted by shmegegge at 3:21 PM PST - 92 comments

Billy Jenkins was "The Nazi Cowboy." One of the most popular German western stars of the 1930s, Jenkins (real name Erich Rudolf Otto Rosenthal) was a card-carrying member of the Nazi party. Pre-war Germany was crazy for cowboys, with Jenkins starring in pulp fiction books with titles like "Texasfieber" and "Aufruhr in Laredo" that were influenced by the works of Karl May. The only problem? Under Nazi Germany's racial laws, Jenkins was considered half-Jewish.
posted by huskerdont at 3:18 PM PST - 6 comments

It feels like the Death of My Internet Childhood. After attempting to identify "the best of the web" since August 1995, Yahoo! has stopped updating its Yahoo! Picks, preferring to showcase its airheaded-video-based The 9 (for those who can't count all the way to 10). [more inside]
posted by wendell at 2:06 PM PST - 24 comments

This + This = This, brought to you by M.I.A. [more inside]
posted by hermitosis at 1:58 PM PST - 50 comments

Burrito Project is an organization which helps feed the hungry and homeless in cities around the world. The organization encourages people "to get together with friends and build burritos to take to the streets". Anyone can start a Burrito Project and the organization encourages everyone to help feed the hungry in their local communities. Haven't heard of the Burrito Project? There's probably a good, albeit very strange, reason why. [via]
posted by basicchannel at 10:15 AM PST - 42 comments

Search into + 250,000 blogs in Spanish The Spanish blog portal Bitacoras.com released a widget to search into more than 250,000 blogs written in Spanish.
posted by jlori at 10:12 AM PST - 7 comments

Texas definitely a leader among the states, now leading in exonerations in wrongful conviction cases and also a leader in executions. One hopes there isn't too much overlap.
posted by Bovine Love at 9:15 AM PST - 114 comments

The Wire is dissent; it argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment. An already-quite-good discussion about The Wire, originating in Mark Bowden's Atlantic article ('The Angriest Man in Television') and continuing through Mark Bowden's post on the show's nihilistic bleakness gets even more interesting on Matt Yglesias's blog, where the creator of the show stops by to give his opinion on what it's all supposed to mean.
posted by gerryblog at 8:45 AM PST - 82 comments

Bruce Sterling's State of the World: an interactive discussion on the Well with the noted sci-fi author and futurist. "The political and economic landscape in 2008 is full of spinning, tottering Chinese plates poised on tall pool-cues." [An MP3 of his State of the World 2006 from SXSW was previously linked here.]
posted by digaman at 8:39 AM PST - 26 comments

The images produced by today's ordinary amateur astrophotographer rival those produced by the big observatories only a decade or two ago. (This "Two Comets" image alone is worth a look. <-Rollover for close-ups of the comets.) You can get very good results with far simpler equipment, however - even with "old-fashioned FILM". Looking for the BEST skies for astrophotography? If you aren't a weenie, you might try Dome C, Antarctica. [more inside]
posted by spock at 7:16 AM PST - 19 comments

Guitar World Tabs ain't OLGA, but it's something. [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 4:46 AM PST - 24 comments

Dreams: Night School Revonsuo puts it, "The primary function of negative dreams is rehearsal for similar real events, so that threat recognition and avoidance happens faster and more automatically in comparable real situations."
posted by drea at 3:02 AM PST - 57 comments