MetaFilter

Man down in the Great Democratic Upheaval of 2006. Paul Hackett announced yesterday that he's bowing out of the primary race for the Ohio senate seat. This race might have been the wrong fight at the wrong time, though it was hardly the only front. There have already been some bad ideas shot down, and at least one fantastical dream that seems to be stuck in the pipe.

But there are more promising battles brewing up ahead, and the fight is just now being joined. The first target -- marked by a kiss. As was the head that would be the most prized trophy of the season.
[reg sites abound, WaPo, NYT, LAT and more]
posted by snortlebort at 10:00 PM PST - 47 comments

60 "secret" Abu Ghraib photos have been leaked to the Sydney Morning Herald. (Warning, very NSFW and disturbing.) They are thought to be among those viewed in private by U.S. senators following a May, 2004 hearing and "withheld from the public to protect the integrity of military trials and to avoid further inflaming America's enemies."
posted by Saucy Intruder at 6:59 PM PST - 200 comments

RIP Andreas Katsulas...and G'Kar, and Commander Tomalak, and the big screen's one-armed man, and ... damn.
posted by WolfDaddy at 6:52 PM PST - 60 comments

Tess Fragoulis: "Alternately, you might spend time with people who should have got divorced, but didn't, opting instead for a lifetime of bickering and dissatisfaction. Call up Mom and Dad and invite yourself over for dinner. Understand once and for all why marriage has always seemed a fate worse than death to you."
posted by rehpotsirhc at 6:39 PM PST - 8 comments

Sex, Drugs, Einstein, & Elves: Sushi, Psychedelics, Parallel Universes and the Quest for Transcendence (♫); Solving all the world’s problems with nanotechnology (♫); Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Robot Rebellion (♫); Origins of the Homebrew Computer Club (♫); Philip K. Dick, the robot (♫); Found processes as conceptual art (♫); Hip: The History (♫); Poetry slams, feminist burlesque performance art and the war against the past (♫); Arthur! (♫); BoingBoing co-founder (♫); Evolution Control Committee (♫); Singularitarianism (♫); Burning Man (♫); UFOs, time travel, and making the technology of Star Trek a reality (♫); RE/Search Publications reprints J.G. Ballard (♫); Was 9/11 a Conspiracy? (♫); The last editor of the first great website (♫); Everybody Into The Pool (♫).

Podcasting with RU Sirius and The MondoGlobo Network. (video of the studio)
posted by airguitar at 5:31 PM PST - 21 comments

The Roofless realm. Prestes Maia, is a colossal abandoned clothes factory that towers over central Sao Paulo: "At first glance Prestes Maia, which sem-teto members occupied in 2002, resembles a chaotic, multi-storey shantytown; cardboard spews out of its cracked windows, graffiti litter its walls and children rattle through its wide corridors on bicycles. But the community is meticulously organised." It was first occupied as part of the Movimiento dos Sem Teto, an organized movement of homeless families and workers and now houses over 468 families. But, now, an injunction has been issued for the repossession of the building. Everyone must leave by February 15th but there is no plan and the authorities fear violence will erupt. There's a Flickr community.
posted by vacapinta at 3:38 PM PST - 15 comments

MacArthur Award winning novelist Jonathan Lethem chats with cartoon art and graphic genius Gary Panter about lots of stuff , then blogs about music, ducks and chickens.
posted by yakcat01 at 3:15 PM PST - 12 comments

Edna Lewis, the Julia Child of Southern cooking, has passed away at the age of 89.
posted by dersins at 1:52 PM PST - 11 comments

Mind Over Matter: South African Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy site. Bound by the code of conduct of the South African Association of Hypnotherapists ("1.17 Practitioners must not practice dentistry unless they hold an appropriate qualification. 1.18 Patients suffering from AIDS may be treated at the discretion of the practitioner"). Possibly associated with these folks; I'm certainly inspired to put my subconscious in the glittery hands of this guy. P.S.: The female orgasm is 100% Purely Mental.
posted by Gator at 12:58 PM PST - 7 comments

Cheney's "victim" has heart attack after birdshot moves to his heart. (washington post) previously discussed here.
posted by punkbitch at 12:50 PM PST - 300 comments

Happy Valentine's Day
to my favourite virgin.
I'd show you how much I love you,
but I don't feel like getting married.
The 8th Annual Pamie.com Valentine's Day Poems (previously on MetaFilter...)
posted by Robot Johnny at 12:39 PM PST - 5 comments

2 4 8 16 32 64... Storybytes, an ordered archive of nanofiction. It's been done before, by syllables (17), by the masters (Classic Short Stories), and by comedians (Book-a-Minute). But in a dense natural language, with a high meaning-per-word, perhaps bytes would value infodensity more objectively: 256b, 1k, 4Kb. But then again, isn't a spec as much of a cop out as a rigged dictionary? Perhaps the highest infodensities are achieved by works which will have no human readers.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 12:35 PM PST - 8 comments

Meta-cartoon-filter: Can't get enough international incident in your funny pages? Dan Cagle has collected cartoons about the cartoon controversy. And, as the Iranian Holocaust cartoon contest starts getting entries, a group of Israeli comics artists have launched their own anti-Semitic cartoon contest. "We'll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published! No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!"
posted by blahblahblah at 12:15 PM PST - 24 comments

It's Irrational Consumerism day at last, so fold a rose, bake some tasty desserts, dress your self or your SO in something flimsy (previous two links may be NSFW), buy some love potion (via), and throw on some tasty mashup (via).
posted by sourbrew at 11:44 AM PST - 7 comments

The UCLA Folkmed Database A searchable database of over 200,000 distinct folk medicine remedies for ailments of all kinds. The entries are pretty barebones, but -- oh, oh ick.
posted by cog_nate at 11:39 AM PST - 4 comments

Lawyers Group Says Bush Exceeds His Powers [found at Linkfilter] The American Bar Association denounced President Bush's warrantless domestic surveillance program Monday, accusing him of exceeding his powers under the Constitution.
posted by Postroad at 11:11 AM PST - 59 comments

Anderson Cooper's (blog's) Valentine's Day post: "Vaginal rejuvenation costs thousands of dollars and is done with a laser..."
posted by Ricky_gr10 at 9:17 AM PST - 38 comments

Alexadex is a place to buy virtual shares in websites, with the share prices set according to Alexa.com's site traffic ranking. Metafilter.com currently stands at $535 per share.
posted by slater at 9:01 AM PST - 18 comments

Tools for Web Developers. Yahoo gives away some free stuff for people who want to get into Ajax Development. This seems like a nice addition to the other libraries already available.
posted by empath at 8:49 AM PST - 12 comments

Performing Artists and The Robot Uprising: Writers, Actors, and Directors bring us one step closer to the robot apocalypse, or provide us the necessary training to win the battle.
posted by jrb223 at 8:39 AM PST - 4 comments

Anti-Valentines: "She said, 'I've been tapping my foot under my desk so that you'll be my friend again.' Then she started crying."
posted by Mo Nickels at 8:17 AM PST - 56 comments

Zeitgeistfilter: Lumpen Leisure and Welcome to Middle-Class Lockdown... Now Shut Up and Buy Something -- two fine rants about our current state of disunion by James Howard Kuntsler, author of The Long Emergency (excerpt), and writer and Vietnam vet Joe Bageant. "All over but the keening for our soon-to-be-lost machine world," Kunstler predicts in The American Conservative, while Bageant taps the inner stream-of-unconsciousness for Dissident Voice: "Things cannot be as bad as the alarmists say. They cannot be as bad as I often suspect they are. If there really were such a thing as global warming they would be starting to do something about it. And besides, even if it were true, science will find a way to fix it. If there really were genocide going on in so many places far more people would be concerned... If the earth were heating up we would surely notice it. If our soldiers and government agencies were torturing people around the world it would make the news. If millions were being exterminated, it would be more obvious, would it not?" (Kunstler's book previously discussed here, Bageant here.)
posted by digaman at 8:11 AM PST - 52 comments

The Price of Payola and Fake News? 1.6 billion dollars for just 2003-5 alone. The GAO's new report lays it out. That's how much seven federal departments spent from 2003 through the second quarter of 2005 on 343 contracts with public relations firms, advertising agencies, media organizations and individuals, according to a new Government Accountability Office report. ... The new report reveals that federal public relations spending goes far beyond "video news releases." (full report is a PDF download from there) And there's another scandal coming, if Wonkette has it right.
posted by amberglow at 7:50 AM PST - 25 comments

I just watched the chilling video of a sniper [Flash, NSFW] in Iraq on TV. It was given to Paul McGeough of the Sydney Morning Herald and published on their site. As discussed on The ABC Lateline programme (transcript not available at posting time but pretty much covered by the SMH). Please read the report to put the video in perspective. It's propaganda but...
posted by tellurian at 5:18 AM PST - 99 comments

If, like me, you grew up on a steady diet of TV in either the 70s, 80s or 90s, then head on over to Retro Junk. There you'll remember such classics as, for example, The Spiderman Live Action Series from the 70s, Thundercats from the 80s or the legendary Samurai Pizza Cats from the 90s. It even has archives for commercials and movies from these eras as well, just to really complete that sense of nostalgia.
posted by Effigy2000 at 3:33 AM PST - 23 comments