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Today we bid a sad farewell to the last of the old-school Mississippi Hill Country bluesmen: Mr. Robert Belfour was a purveyor or that gritty, driving, riff-based, often one-chord Hill Country style pioneered by people like Mississippi Fred McDowell, and in more recent years popularized by artists like RL Burnside, Junior Kimbrough and Jessie Mae Hemphill. Let's take a listen, then, as we pay our respects to the "Wolfman", to some of his rocking, soulful blues. Here's Black Mattie, I Got My Eyes On You, Hill Stomp, Go Ahead On, My Baby's Gone, Done Got Old and You Got Me Crying. And here's an hour-long recording from February 2013, via NPR: Robert Belfour: Live In Concert.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:59 PM PST - 13 comments

Masha Tupitsyn interviewed by Keaton Ventura for Sex Magazine:

What sort of trouble? Mainly the reaction was, what is this? What are you doing? This isn’t a novel. This isn’t fiction. This isn’t straight criticism. It’s all mixed up. Or this criticism is too personal or too critical about the wrong things. But the minute I would call Beauty Talk nonfiction people would accept the terms that I using. So it was always about how I was categorizing that book. What I was calling it. That would determine how people would respond to the book and its ethos, which I always thought was absurd. If I called it nonfiction, if I called it essays, if I called it criticism, people accepted the book more. But if I said it was fiction, people would say, Well, this is not what fiction does. Fiction does this and criticism does this, and you have to keep these things separate and clear. But I am really not interested in keeping things separate. Not in my work and not in my life either. I’m interested in looking at them and putting them together because I think one of the problems with Western culture in general is that everything is reduced to binaries and categories because it keeps us from fundamentally being able to make valuable links. To connect the dots.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:57 PM PST - 2 comments

Dang! Have you ever seen waves get so cold they turn to slurpee? Get seawater cool enough, but not too cold; keep it agitated, and you get some beautiful waves.
posted by peripatetron errant at 7:51 PM PST - 39 comments

There's an odd bright spot on the dwarf planet Ceres. Scratch that, there's actually two bright spots on the its surface. Cue speculation as the Dawn spacecraft prepares to orbit Ceres.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:47 PM PST - 51 comments

This Is Not Happening is a series where comedians tell true stories. It was orginally greenlit by Comedy Central back in 2013 as web series. [more inside]
posted by joeyjoejoejr at 7:37 PM PST - 5 comments

The DevOps League is your fast track to DevOps certification by the industry's leading Thought Lords. Supported by one man – one stunning man – you will deep dive into such important concepts such as Dark Data, Data Beans and Terry the Data Goblin, to fully learn what DevOps really means. (But beware of the Realm of Dark Jon Hendren or 2014's Worst DevOps Article Headers.)
posted by slogger at 7:31 PM PST - 39 comments

The Rocky J. Adkins Public Library in Elliott County, Kentucky recently posted a job advertisement for a new director. The wage? US$7.25 per hour -- in other words, minimum wage. This garnered some immediate expressions of dismmay from librarians on social media. For others, it also reminded them of where they grew up. [more inside]
posted by metaquarry at 6:49 PM PST - 77 comments

Old Game Mags is a Tumblr that looks at the way game culture was disseminated before the widespread acceptance of the net: through specialty, hobbyist print magazines. It features snapshots from the past such as the obligatory fan art pages, covers, dev interviews, reviews, advertisements, and special features. The site has fairly regular updates, and features high quality scans.
posted by codacorolla at 5:56 PM PST - 10 comments

The day Chris Kyle died - an account of the fateful gun range encounter between the subject of the film "American Sniper" and fellow veteran Eddie Ray Routh. Routh has received a life sentence for killing Kyle and freind Chad Littlefield, with a jury finding his claims of PTSD to be "an excuse".
posted by Artw at 5:42 PM PST - 37 comments

When the Bauhaus art school opened in 1919, more women applied than men.
One woman who attended in 1927 was Amercan born Florence Henri who in the 1920's had moved to Paris.
However it wan't until she returned from a course at the Bauhaus, where she lived in the same house as Moholy-Nagy and became a close friend of his first wife Lucia Moholy and also where she met her lifetime companion Margarete Schall; that she took up photography.
She met Man Ray, Germaine Krull and the photographer André Kertész, developlng a very personal work, by using mirrors and prisms.
Her style oscillates between Bauhaus, Dadaism and Surrealism.
Photos NSFW Still lifes, and Nudes and Portraits.
posted by adamvasco at 5:41 PM PST - 3 comments

Carrot Top is known as a Comedian. That is a statement of fact. [more inside]
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 5:06 PM PST - 73 comments

Gerbils, not rats, 'gave Europe the Black Death' BLACK rats might not be responsible for the plagues that killed millions of people across medieval Europe, research suggests. Instead scientists believe that repeated outbreaks of the Black Death may in fact be traced to gerbils arriving from Asia. [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 4:28 PM PST - 21 comments

One mom's take on the Ages & Stages Questionnaire.
posted by Ruki at 4:27 PM PST - 23 comments

Digital technology has enhanced music production, recording and distribution in ways unimaginable just a few decades ago, but are we losing something more essential in the process? Chris May (of The Vinyl Factory) talks to ambient pioneer and friend of technology Brian Eno about the dangers of digital dependence in modern music. “It doesn’t just apply with African recordings. It’s a problem everybody is having at the moment. Do I resist the temptation to perfect this thing? What do I lose by perfecting it?"
posted by misterbee at 2:40 PM PST - 50 comments

How we saved Baltimore $600,000 in one day.
posted by josher71 at 1:29 PM PST - 78 comments

​How Parks and Recreation Took Aim at Silicon Valley​ (Laura Hudson at Wired): ​

"​Over the course of the season, Leslie remarks on how the character of the town has morphed since the arrival of Gryzzl, with juice bars, yoga studios, and pet hotels popping up across Pawnee. “Everything has changed. This town is going to be unrecognizable in 10 years,” she says wistfully. One episo​​de revolves entirely around trying to save their perennial waffle hangout J.J.’s Diner; thanks to the surging housing market, the property has been bought out by a perfume magnate who plans to flip it for profit.

​"​If that sounds reminiscent of the housing crisis that’s currently plaguing San Francisco—and displacing large numbers of long-time residents—it should. Rental prices in the tech hub city are currently in the highest the nation, with the median price of a one-bedroom apartment hovering at more than $3,400 a month. Meanwhile, local establishments like the Lexington Club (the J.J.’s Diner of lesbian bars) are getting ​​sold to new owners."

[more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 12:46 PM PST - 37 comments

and yet it has somehow become the stand-alone representative of the form it is on the whole sardonically setting itself against: something about the way it’s been made — its constituent parts, its presentation — exactly and completely masks this subtly hostile aspect of it, to the extent that it’s instead become a kind of nice-to-hear-in-the-background chill-out classic, which in my opinion suggests a flaw in its conception or execution: that it can’t (or anyway doesn’t) draw the newbie into its darker heart

KIND OF BLEUGH, or seven better stand-alone ways into jazz in the early age of the long-playing disc (possibly).
posted by MartinWisse at 11:52 AM PST - 104 comments

Put animated ASCII art in your browser's address bar
posted by Going To Maine at 11:49 AM PST - 22 comments

The rise and fall of Sports Phone, the place to get live sports scores before the internet.
posted by Chrysostom at 11:02 AM PST - 14 comments

Who is the most important rapper right now? A Grantland Survey.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:35 AM PST - 81 comments

My Saga, Part 1 By Karl Ove Knausgaard [New York Times] Following the trail of the first Europeans to set foot in America, the first of two parts. Previously. Previously. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:19 AM PST - 30 comments

A grown-ass man replays Final Fantasy VII. The unfortunate part about replaying Final Fantasy VII is realizing that it is terrible. I mean, not terrible terrible, but it’s bad the way, say, a very old sci-fi movie is bad. It is enjoyable exclusively with mountains of qualifiers, with context and air-quotes and, preferably, your own reminiscences filling it in, making its absurdities lovable.
posted by tybeet at 9:08 AM PST - 195 comments

How to Save Us (trailer) is a low-budget horror film made by Jason Trost, creator of the cult hit The FP (previously). Jason Trost is a young filmmaker who continually puts out unique, sometimes satirical, but always creative films across all genres, pulling them together despite shoestring budgets derived mostly from crowdfunding that he manages himself. Jason Trost's films often draw negative reviews mostly centered around their lack of budget, however they are unique and odd enough that he has accumulated his fair share of loyal fans and supporters.
posted by Librarypt at 8:59 AM PST - 9 comments

Do you like radios? And museums? Then you need the radiomuseum.org gazatteer of museums and historical places around the world where you can look at radios and associated technologies!
posted by carter at 8:57 AM PST - 8 comments

After every terror attack the call rings out for the Muslim world to become modern. Whenever jihadi groups carry out an atrocity, or – as is happening a lot these days, western foreign policy failures lead to large areas of the world coming under the sway of oafs who claim to be acting for God – the call goes up for a Muslim Enlightenment. The imputation of Védrine, the French schoolteachers, and thousands of other commentators is that various internal deficiencies have excluded Islam from this indispensable cultural and intellectual event, without which no culture can be considered modern. Such views cut across political borders; they would find sympathy at the BBC as well as in the editorial offices of the Sun. Islam needs to get with the programme. [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 8:38 AM PST - 74 comments

The private photo shoot that sparked a war within Van Halen. A session with photographer Helmut Newton exposed tensions within the band, revealing and exacerbating the rift between David Lee Roth and the Van Halen brothers. The article does not explore whether Sammy Hagar, sitting in a distant supervillain lair, tented his fingers and smiled in satisfaction as his sinister plan bore fruit.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 8:35 AM PST - 43 comments

It's 2015, so first-person-view quadcopter racing is a sport now. [more inside]
posted by theodolite at 8:29 AM PST - 22 comments

For years, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended avoiding feeding peanut products to very young children to minimize the risks of developing a severe peanut allergy. Turns out that might not have been good advice. A study recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests early exposure to peanuts is a better strategy. And while you're at it, don't worry about sanitizing everything in the dishwasher; hand-washing dishes is also associated with fewer allergies.
posted by Metroid Baby at 6:55 AM PST - 130 comments

The Urban Institute has released (PDF) the first study to focus on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning (LGBTQ) youth; young men who have sex with men (YMSM); and young women who have sex with women (YWSW) who get involved in the commercial sex market in order to meet basic survival needs, such as food or shelter.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:49 AM PST - 9 comments

You are a good man, and a good father, but all this good cannot continue to make up for the race we cannot touch. I am so tired of slipping into black and out of daughter whenever race is evoked. I need for you to meet me as your daughter, as your daughter of color, all at once. We cannot keep evacuating our bodies to love each other. We cannot simply ignore the way our bodies are policed and politicized as antithetical, irreconcilably raced when we stand side by side.

"An Open Letter to the White Fathers of Black Daughters, from Kelsey Henry in Bluestockings Magazine.
posted by Stacey at 5:22 AM PST - 72 comments

A Few Silent Men. The courtroom scene from A Few Good Men, but without dialogue.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 4:40 AM PST - 16 comments

It’s 2015—when we feel sick, fear disease, or have questions about our health, we turn first to the internet. According to the Pew Internet Project, 72 percent of US internet users look up health-related information online. But an astonishing number of the pages we visit to learn about private health concerns—confidentially, we assume—are tracking our queries, sending the sensitive data to third party corporations, even shipping the information directly to the same brokers who monitor our credit scores.
posted by chavenet at 2:28 AM PST - 57 comments

‘Gresham College has provided free public talks within the City of London for over 400 years.’ ‘Since 2001, the college has been recording its lectures and releasing them online in what is now an archive of over 1,000’ of them. Some examples: Snails in Art and the Art of Snails; The History of the Bowler Hat; “Speaking Scars” - The Tattoo; Mother Green Tree Frog and her Children: How Folktales Contributed to the Confucianisation of Korea; The Psychology of Doing Nothing; Möbius and his Band; Harmony in the Lowest Home: The Guitar and the Labouring Poor. [more inside]
posted by misteraitch at 2:27 AM PST - 3 comments

When your father is the BTK serial killer, forgiveness is not tidy
posted by Sticherbeast at 2:20 AM PST - 40 comments

PES Film makes amazing stop-motion film shorts in which everyday objects take on unexpected utility.
Western Spaghetti (YT 1½m) - Fresh Guacamole (YT 1½m, Oscar-nominated "Best Short Film" 2013) - Game Over (YT 1½m) - The Deep (YT 1½m) - Submarine Sandwich (YT 2m previously) - Fireworks (YT 32s) - Moth (YT 20s)
These may be slightly NSFW depending on workplace: Roof Sex (YT 1m) - Black Gold (YT 1m) - Pee-Nut (YT 1m)
A few bits made for advertisements after the break. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 12:59 AM PST - 8 comments