The day in posts: 04/05/2007

What was in YOUR childhood toybox? Mr. Potato Head? Colorforms? Viewmaster? Magic 8 Ball? Weebles? G.I. Joe? Betsy Wetsy? Polly Pocket? No matter what generation you're from, The Vintage Toy Encyclopedia and The Big Red Toybox have facts and history on (almost) all of your playthings.
posted by amyms at 10:13 PM PST - 54 comments

Lawrence Dennis: Harvard grad, soldier, fascist... with a secret.
posted by atchafalaya at 10:12 PM PST - 17 comments

Lawyerbear: The Leader In Ursine Litigation and Defense The bear that is a lawyer. Comics and sundry parodies penned by a local. [via mefi projects]
posted by Burhanistan at 8:16 PM PST - 11 comments

Clell Tickle: Indie Marketing Guru. 3 Conversations with Maya Arulpragasam. Partisan Jab. Other Music. The Shittiest Mixtape Ever Contest. Lie Girls. etc. Ever since GooTube, we've been hearing about how online video will propel a new generation of talent to superstardom, but so far it's seemed mostly hype. Tonight, after literally decades of climbing the online video charts, Aziz, Rob, Paul, Jason and Bobbe'J make their MSM debut in MTV's The Human Giant.
posted by Tones at 7:11 PM PST - 10 comments

An excerpt from Don DeLillo's eagerly anticipated and much-hyped new novel Falling Man. It's been done before, at times more memorably [.pdf] than others, but early reviews suggest a return to form for the eerily prescient novelist.
posted by inoculatedcities at 6:28 PM PST - 26 comments

Sleazoid Express (this post rated NSFW) was a New York film fanzine that championed the grindhouse cinema that played in sketchy Times Square movie theaters during the pre-Giuliani era. Featuring in-depth reviews of film fare such as Pets, Nanami: Inferno of First Love, and Let Me Die A Woman, the Sleazoid Express zine later inspired a book, which can probably take some credit for stoking Quentin Tarantino's interest in grindhouse filmmaking. (An excerpt from the book, Sleazoid Express, can be found here, and here's some original grindhouse trailers thrown in for good measure.)
posted by jonp72 at 5:59 PM PST - 12 comments

As legends go, the first recorded instance of violence in the feud occurred after an 1873 dispute about the ownership of a hog: Floyd Hatfield had it and Randolph McCoy said it was his. The rest is Appalachian history. But it turns out that history may have had a helping hand in something called Von Hippel-Lindau disease. It weren't the moonshine, Pa. It was the DNA that did it.
posted by frogan at 5:47 PM PST - 17 comments

"Colorectal surgery has undergone rapid advancement in recent years and leading the way has been Dr. Conor Delaney, Chief of Colorectal Surgery at University Hospitals Case Medical Center. A pioneer in the use of minimally invasive techniques for colorectal surgery." If you have an extra hour and fifty minutes you can watch a laprascopic bowel resection for colon cancer via OR Live. At about minute 7 you can see most of the patient's internal abdominal anatomy. Dr. Delaney compares it to playing playstation.
posted by Recockulous at 5:26 PM PST - 16 comments

FIRST!
posted by delmoi at 5:04 PM PST - 119 comments

Lost and found in "Green Hell."
posted by pwedza at 2:27 PM PST - 18 comments

Twenty-two browned, hollowed-out loaves of Italian white bread. Twenty-two pounds of bacon. Twenty-two jars of peanut butter. Twenty-two jars of jelly. Forty-eight tablespoons of butter. A case of Perrier. A case of champagne. And the King.
posted by WCityMike at 2:23 PM PST - 40 comments

For anyone with even a passing interest in Islamic history or cartography, 'The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes' site at Oxford University's Bodleian Library will provide a thoroughly interesting timesink. This recently discovered 13th/14th century copy of an 11th century Egyptian manuscript was partly based on Ptolemy and includes the oldest rectangular map of the world...not to mention the famed human-bearing Waq-Waq tree. [via]
posted by peacay at 1:21 PM PST - 7 comments

Speaking of the White House Egg Roll... The GLBT organization Family Pride plans to once again fill the annual event with hundreds of gay and lesbian families. What many welcome as a rare opportunity to be included as legitimate American families in a historic national tradition is seen by opponents as the crude politicizing of a children's event.
posted by hermitosis at 12:37 PM PST - 105 comments

Alluring and haunting photographs of life in Hong Kong: lost laundry, bastard chairs, copy artists, sitting in China, back door, wildlife trade [disturbing]. Michael Wolf has been linked before for his amazing architecture of density and tiny apartments. He has also collected historical portraits and propaganda posters.
posted by nickyskye at 12:21 PM PST - 18 comments

The 2007 State Easter Eggs: Since 1994, each state and Washington DC has selected an artist to paint an Easter Egg representing them for the annual White House Easter Egg Roll.
The eggs themselves are ga udy and beautiful, inscru table and fantastically artistic. Some state's submissions are bet ter than oth ers.
And then there's Wyoming.
posted by JeremiahBritt at 11:40 AM PST - 56 comments

Drug-resistant TB strain raises ethical dilemma. A man in Arizona who has a virtually untreatable strain of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR TB) has been locked up indefinitely because he failed to take precautions to avoid infecting others, even though he has not commited a crime. The new strain of TB is described as a nightmare by health officials, and though mainly found in Africa and Asia, it is slowly beginning to spread in the U.S. [Via Technoccult.]
posted by homunculus at 11:37 AM PST - 62 comments

Mother Roads. You can now customize Google maps to add commentary, photos, audio, and video. creating your own annotated maps. The linked example is a collection of oral histories of Route 66; look around for Olympic Host Cities, Monster Sightings, and more.
posted by Miko at 11:07 AM PST - 22 comments

Injured in Iraq. The story of the soldier who may have changed Congressman Murtha's mind about the war.
posted by Toekneesan at 10:22 AM PST - 25 comments

Pepsiwhite It's a cheezy, calcium-fueled enticement, but the implementation is rather good. A single player 3d board game with a milky message.
posted by Sparx at 9:05 AM PST - 35 comments

XXXChurch.com At 8 o'clock on a recent Saturday morning, more than 250 men gathered at New Life Christian Church in Morton, Illinois, for a breakfast of porn and pancakes.
posted by theemperorhasnoclotheson at 8:59 AM PST - 57 comments

Craig's List ad causes woman's home to be destroyed. We have all heard about the numerous Craig's List scams and pranks, but this one takes things to a new low. Vandals ripped apart Laurie Ray's house after an ad posted on Craig's List invited people to take anything, and everything, they wanted. From the light fixtures to the hot water heater, everything is gone - including the kitchen sink.
posted by rodo at 8:16 AM PST - 79 comments

The Tra vel ing Rings At San ta Mon ica Beach
posted by jason's_planet at 8:15 AM PST - 12 comments

Go fly a kite! Who thought it could be this [pdf] complicated?
posted by geos at 7:19 AM PST - 4 comments

God vs. the Devil: a Death Toll Perspective So, who has killed more people throughout human history? In the blue corner, it's the Lord of Hosts, the Almighty, the Creator of Heaven and Earth and all Things Seen and Unseen: God!!! In the red corner, it's Old Nick, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, the Sultan of Sulfur, the Bringer of Brimstone: Satan!!!
posted by Tommy Gnosis at 4:52 AM PST - 127 comments

Claude Laundry hates litterbugs and has the spontaneous camera footage to prove it.
posted by debralee at 4:38 AM PST - 40 comments

Listen to 'Year Zero', the new Nine Inch Nails album for free. Album main page. Via nin.com
posted by slimepuppy at 4:31 AM PST - 68 comments

Although I Am Dead (YouTube) (Parts 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10) Compelling documentary by Hu Jie (胡杰) on the death during the Cultural Revolution of Bian Zhongyun (卞仲耘), recalled by her now octogenarian husband. He photographed her corpse after she was beaten to death by Red Guards, students at the middle school of which she was deputy principal. The film's inclusion in the documentary section of YunFest has apparently led to the authorities shutting down the event. (Via)
posted by Abiezer at 4:26 AM PST - 19 comments

Hacking the Senses: The brain is far more plastic than we commonly realize. Presenting new 'senses' via the old inputs works extremely well, to the point that long-term volunteers are a little lost without their new abilities to feel magnetic north or absolute orientation. Tasting direction; feeling pictures. Fascinating stuff. In a loosely related article, genetically modified mice are able to see the full color range visible to humans, even though the last natural mouse able to see this way died out a hundred million years ago. Add the new sensors, and the brain reconfigures. [via]
posted by Malor at 2:27 AM PST - 68 comments