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Desperate for Depression Era jobs, the communities of Santa Clara, Alameda, San Mateo and San Francisco raised 476,066 dollars to purchase 1000 acres of land in the fertile Santa Clara Valley and put their community in the running for the first West Coast base for rigid airships. On February 20th, 1933, President Hoover signed the bill that authorized the Navy to accept the Mountain View property. Half of the five million dollars appropriated for construction went to the building of Hangar One, the eventual home of the USS Macon. Sunnyvale Naval Air Station, commissioned on April 4th, 1933, was renamed Moffett Field after the death of RAdm William Moffett in the crash of the airship USS Akron. On February 12th, 1935, the USS Macon ditched off Point Sur, effectively ending the Navy's rigid airship program.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:05 PM PST - 22 comments

The Origo Gallery's recent exhibition features Gyorgy Kemenyi's new works, but for a chronological context it's best to start with his earlier exhibition. The Gallery's archives provide an interesting cross section of a few Hungarian contemporary artists.
posted by semmi at 8:53 PM PST - 3 comments

Home Prices Do Fall A look at the collapse of the 1980's real estate bubble through the eyes of The New York Times
Better with Times select. Also better with Firefox's fetch text extension
posted by Kwantsar at 7:57 PM PST - 33 comments

By now, we know the story: first the U.S. Treasury department wouldn't let Cuba participate in the upcoming World Baseball Classic, only to change their mind later. Whether to play ball with Cuba or not has been debated since at least 1975, when then-commissioner of baseball Bowie Kuhn contacted Henry Kissinger about plans to arrange a game between U.S. and Cuban teams, prompting this now-declassified exchange (made available through George Washington University's National Security Archive.) Indeed, sport and politics are often intertwined in the Case of Contemporary Cuban Baseball.
posted by .kobayashi. at 7:44 PM PST - 5 comments

"I am the Jesus Christ of politics," says this controversial leader. He's also Napoleon, but taller, and recently told people: "Mussolini never killed anyone. Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile." Think we're the only country whose leader makes planetary gaffes? Think again--and elections are coming. You've got to admire the balls on a guy who owns much of his country's media, yet says: "If I, taking care of everyone's interests, also take care of my own, you can't talk about a conflict of interest."
posted by amberglow at 7:36 PM PST - 37 comments

Aliens and Children. This website features a series of drawings made by children who were abducted by aliens for the purpose of creating a new race of alien/human hybrids. They successfully resisted the aliens by using a thought screen helmet which blocks the telepathic control aliens have over humans.
posted by Robot Johnny at 5:40 PM PST - 35 comments

"I'm worried, Larry. A financial planner counsels his client: "...I think it's imperative that we start to budget and plan. New purchases should be kept to a minimum. We need to establish and execute on a diversification game plan, to eliminate (yes, eliminate) all debt and build up a significant, conservatively structured, liquid investment portfolio...." Sound advice, but you wouldn't have thought this dickhead gentleman would need it.
posted by mojohand at 5:20 PM PST - 18 comments

"Who's the only one who's always been there?" Ham asked. "God!" the boys and girls shouted.
"Who's the only one who knows everything?" "God!"
"So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?" The children answered with a thundering: "God!"

Today, on the 197th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin whose discovery of natural selection is the fundamental tenet of modern biology, fundamentalist American Christians work to indoctrinate in children a superstitious disdain for science. Meanwhile, liberal American Christians churches celebrate Darwin and evolution's compatibility with their faith.

But is "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" too corrosive to mysticism to coexist with Christianity?
posted by orthogonality at 5:09 PM PST - 89 comments

The always great (and frequently linked) RetroCrush currently has an exhibit on Polish movie posters for western films; seemingly devoid of the original branding & identity art, it's fun to try and guess what movie the images could even be trying to promote. Some are beautiful, some are amateurish, all are intriguing.
posted by jonson at 4:23 PM PST - 20 comments

Mixotheque is an mp3 blog that does some work for its readers: two songs posted every day (one "classic", one "rarity"), adding up to two well-planned mixes each month (to fit on 80min CDRs, one for newbies, one for collectors). Every mix has its own theme (and artwork, track description, etc.)

It caught my attention because the first month's theme is New Zealand rock, a sweet, occasionally noisy, rather inbred realm of the music world. Already posted are mp3s from the "big" names (like the Clean and the Verlaines) to the obscure-even-for-New-Zealand. The commentary so far has been both enlightening and personal, and a month of this will probably be both a decent education and a solid chunk of probably-new-to-you music.
posted by snortlebort at 4:19 PM PST - 19 comments

Peter Benchley is now sleeping with the fishes.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 4:10 PM PST - 31 comments

Kid Congo Powers, noted guitar stylist, teenage president of The Ramones Fan Club, erstwhile member of The Cramps, The Gun Club, and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (also known for his collaborations with Julee Cruise, The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Khan and others) has produced a two part online autobiography of sorts for New York Night Train. It includes oral histories, available as transcriptions or MP3s, pages from his Cramps scrapbook, a vintage Creem article, free MP3s from his back catalogue, and, of course, his recipe for enchiladas.
posted by jack_mo at 4:04 PM PST - 6 comments

State of the World 2006, an annual research report prepared by the Worldwatch Institute, has just been released, with a special focus on China and India. Although Limits to Growth type predictions have had their critics, many of the stats and projections presented have a certain brutal inevitability about them.
posted by wilful at 3:39 PM PST - 14 comments

Cheney accidently shoots a hunter. oops.
posted by squirrely at 1:13 PM PST - 313 comments

The School of the Air is a unique accident of time and space; serving as the link to the wider world for thousands of isolated children in Australia's Outback, providing classes by correspondence and evolving into a social network. Radio provided these sheep stations with access to medical care, community life and education. There was no choice.
posted by infini at 12:29 PM PST - 7 comments

What unites hardliners like Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh -- their uncompromisingly conservative take on politics? In a provocative blog post titled Do Bush followers have a political ideology?, Glenn Greenwald persuasively argues otherwise. He believes that the conservative movement -- traditionally against big government, excessive spending, and federal intrusion into the private lives of Americans -- has been hijacked by something much more dangerous: an authoritarian cult of personality, or as Greenwald puts it, "a form of highly emotional mass theater masquerading as political debate."
posted by digaman at 9:31 AM PST - 136 comments

"The German invasion of Britain took place in July 1940, after the British retreat from Dunkirk". We see, documentary-style, members of the Wehrmacht trooping past Big Ben and St Paul's Cathedral, lounging in the parks, having their jackboots shined by old cockneys, and appreciatively visiting the shrine of that good German, Prince Albert, in Kensington Gardens. Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's film "It Happened Here", with its cast of hundreds (.pdf), imagines what a Nazi occupation might have been like — complete with underground resistance, civilian massacres, civil strife, torch-lit rallies, Jewish ghettos, and organized euthanasia. Shot on weekends, eight years in production, made for about $20,000 with nonactors and borrowed equipment and Stanley Kubrick's help, "It Happened Here" was originally envisioned by Brownlow as a sort of Hammer horror flick about a Nazi Britain. Thanks in part to Mollo's fanatical concern with historical accuracy, however, it became something else. The most remarkable thing about this account of everyday fascism is that it has no period footage. Brownlow's 1968 book about the film's production, "How It Happened Here", has recently been republished. More inside.
posted by matteo at 8:04 AM PST - 16 comments

"There are chakrahs in our hands, Jesus had nail holes in his palms, and a sign of worship is to stand with your palms raised. Fortune tellers read palms. Handwriting is analyzed to expose deep secrets. Man’s thumbs differentiate humans from lower species....We control our world with our hands, and our hands are shaped by our world." -- The Manual Project by Bill Westheimer. "Using 19th century collodion wet plate photography I photograph their dominant hand, then we work together to make a photogram of their palm print. Combining these two images together with the person’s handwriting, I create one portrait of the subject. "
posted by Gator at 6:30 AM PST - 12 comments

It's on. Strategists at the Pentagon are drawing up plans for devastating bombing raids backed by submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks against Iran's nuclear sites as a "last resort" to block Teheran's efforts to develop an atomic bomb.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 5:16 AM PST - 104 comments

This is not a study for the weak of heart or will. If you do it right, it is gonna hurt. A Simple Guide to Ansel Adam's Zone System.
posted by sgt.serenity at 2:58 AM PST - 37 comments

Music history rendered on a London Tube Map They say: "Could we chart the branches and connections of 100 years of music using the London Underground map? Dorian Lynskey explains how a box of coloured crayons and lot of swearing helped." I say: Look also at the comments in the accompanying thread, which features trolling, snarkiness and repetition, beginning with "Why did you do this? What is the point? Wouldn't you have been better off doing something else? Sometimes you media people really worry me." The Guardian are introducing commenter registration on their new blog.
posted by feelinglistless at 2:44 AM PST - 18 comments