If you were a North American kid (well, a kid stuck at home, younger than driving age) in the late 70s/early 80s, your Saturday nights were likely spent in front of the television watching The Love Boat. The show subsequently gained worldwide popularity. Did you know that the Pacific Princess is still ferrying the lovelorn across the blue abyss, and that she has a bridgecam? Did you know there were Love Boat action figures? For your nostalgic pleasure: complete episode guide, complete guest star list, theme song video (variations 1, 2, 3), lyrics and chords, and song facts.
posted by amyms at 11:33 PM PST - 47 comments

Legendary jazz producer and writer Orrin Keepnews was recently interviewed for a series of podcasts for the Concord Group (formerly Riverside, and Fantasy-Prestige-Milestone Records) . They usually deal with specific recordings and run about 6-9 minutes each, many now on YouTube. Fascinating accounts of his early work for Riverside with Thelonious Monk , (and the "Town Hall" album), to Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderley, McCoy Tyner, and the latest one on the classic Bill Evans "Portrait in Jazz" album. Great stuff for jazz fans of the late 50s- early 60s era.
posted by Seekerofsplendor at 10:19 PM PST - 12 comments

Coming To Alderaan [YouTube] [more inside]
posted by BeerFilter at 9:27 PM PST - 32 comments

Guitarist and singer José González's myspace page mentions [lots of youtube ahead] Low and Elliot Smith. And no review of the Swede whose parents left Argentina in the 1970s is complete without a reference to Nick Drake. But what about the influence of styles from the hemisphere his parents left behind? [more inside]
posted by umbú at 9:19 PM PST - 25 comments

You are the New Day, recorded by the Kings Singers, the Searchers, and ten thousand school choirs around the world, was written by hard-rocking bass player John David, long of Dave Edmunds’ band. You Are the New Day is that rarest of things... [more inside]
posted by Faze at 6:53 PM PST - 27 comments

The leader of the Swedish Pirate Party explaining how the US went bankrupt in 1971, and has been covering it up through an accelerating whack-a-mole borrowing frenzy that is bursting right now. [more inside]
posted by blasdelf at 6:35 PM PST - 124 comments

The Graveyard: Walk through the graveyard. Sit for a spell. Walk back out again. [via Jay Is Games] [more inside]
posted by brundlefly at 6:06 PM PST - 15 comments

50 "Last Suppers" including 3 'last breakfasts' and 6 fast-food meals.
posted by wendell at 5:19 PM PST - 40 comments

Hitler Speaks

Using advanced speech recognition technology, researchers and voice-over actors have been able to put a soundtrack to long-silent video relics of Adolf Hitler: Eva Braun's infamous home movies filmed at the Berghof, private filmed meetings between Hitler and various Reich cronies, as well as the last known footage of him taped before an awkward bunch of Hitler Youth at the Reichstag in the final days of the war made famous in Downfall. Chilling stuff.

Via.
posted by auralcoral at 2:39 PM PST - 179 comments

Gorgeous images, selected solely for their artistic appeal, from the pages of Physical Review B.
posted by dmd at 1:59 PM PST - 15 comments

Ilike2learn.com has a series of simply-wrought yet wonderfully mind-bending Map quizzes: check out North America if you're looking for a confidence booster, relive forth-grade geography by going through state capitals or impress friends with your knowledge of the European Peninsula. Find out how little you know about Africa and Asia, then peruse the mind-fuck that is Oceania. Heck, they even have capitals, oceans, lakes, rivers and mountains for the truly adventurous. The world's a big place!
posted by ignorantguru at 11:07 AM PST - 25 comments

"The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history." Henry Siegman, the former executive director of the American Jewish Congress and more recently the director of the CFR's US/Middle East Project, argues in this essay from the London Review of Books that:

...all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.

posted by bhouston at 11:01 AM PST - 43 comments

Norway's breath-taking Aurland Lookout. One of many awesome projects by architect Todd Saunders.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 10:13 AM PST - 20 comments

Gore Vidal Speaks Seriously Ill of the Dead Annoyed with the rose-tinted view of William F. Buckley displayed by some of his obituarists, Vidal slams Buckley, Newsweek, and the media in general. (MeFi Buckley obit thread here).
posted by naoko at 9:59 AM PST - 61 comments

Nanocannons and picomortars! Black powder cannons and mortars that fire BBs. (via)
posted by Class Goat at 8:07 AM PST - 16 comments

NASA is baffled by unexplained discrepancies in the velocities of some of its spacecraft. Dubbed the Pioneer Effect, it has been observed before but has now been discovered in more probes. Many theories have been put forward, many disproved, and some are wondering if our understanding of gravity is correct. [more inside]
posted by blue shadows at 1:26 AM PST - 50 comments

Some interesting papers by Shamsiddin Kamoliddin:
To the Question of Origin of the Name Hashimgird
To the Question of the Origin of the Samanids
NEW DATA ON THE BAZRS OF MEDIEVAL SAMARQAND
On the Origin of the place-Name Buxārā I found these mostly on Transoxiana.org
posted by Taksi Putra at 1:00 AM PST - 16 comments