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My Vasectomy, in pictures and word. It may be old, and the design difficult to look at, and there's some bad jokes and advertising, but interesting nonetheless. And topical. Need I mention, NSFW?
posted by ashbury at 8:49 PM PST - 11 comments

Need cash to make your own blockbuster? Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Big Picture, reveals how they do it: by taking a popular franchise and turning to immediate write-offs in tax shelters such as Germany, so that money starts coming in even before the movie enters production. No wonder we've been seeing so much crap as of late, with poor box office figures not hurting studios the way they really ought to.
posted by Goblindegook at 6:50 PM PST - 29 comments

This is not science fiction. It's really happening. (Links to Slate article) Apparently contrary to expectations, Americans seem to be exercising financial sense and paying down their credit card debt. Well, how about that! :) Anyone else here doing this?
posted by zoogleplex at 4:16 PM PST - 116 comments

For young deserters, refuge is hard to find It seemed like a drastic but simple solution: a step over the border into a country that had offered sanctuary before to Americans fleeing their homeland. Instead, the growing band of US soldiers who have sought political refuge in Canada after defying orders to serve in Iraq have found themselves in a political limbo.
posted by Postroad at 3:53 PM PST - 83 comments

A contrarian review of Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" - "It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans." Having watched Friedman flog this book on seemingly dozens of talk shows in the last month, I can't say I disagree...
posted by GriffX at 3:33 PM PST - 54 comments

When he says "home theater" he means home theater. If you're going to ignore TV Turnoff Week, you may as well do it in style.
posted by LeeJay at 3:26 PM PST - 39 comments

A couple years ago, they did SILENCE! the musical version of Silence of the lambs, now they're working on "RoboCop The Musical" with this track uploaded as a preview entitled "Murphy, It's You" performed by RoboCop and Anne Lewis.
posted by mathowie at 2:44 PM PST - 24 comments

The Velvet is moving! Fred Anderson's Velvet Lounge, one of the best places in Chicago to see avant garde jazz, has to move. To help fund the construction of a new club, they're having a couple of fundraisers (pdf) at the Hot House and at the Velvet in late May. If you don't know Fred, you should get to know him. If you find yourself in Chicago in May, check him out at the 40th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which he helped found. If you find yourself far from Chicago, a lot of his music is available on CD, including my favorite, the 2003 disc Back at the Velvet Lounge.
posted by goatdog at 1:38 PM PST - 11 comments

Learning English with the CBC. Learn about Canadian history and improve your English skills with a series of audio and video clips, as well as quizzes and exercises. Topics include Terry Fox: A Marathon of Hope, Arctic Winter Games: The Olympics of the North, and Maple Syrup: A Taste of Canada, among others.
posted by livii at 1:30 PM PST - 9 comments

"Declining by Degrees:" Five Univeristy of Arizona students try to survive the megauniversity
A provocative NYT article summarizes an upcoming PBS special (1, 2) on undergraduate education at large public universities. The average time to complete the BA is 4.7 years. Students describe acquiring "maze smart" skills for navigating institutions where they are completely anonymous. Professors are castigated for striking a grade-inflating "bargain" with underachieving students so they can attend less to teaching and more to research. Assistant coaches patrol the campus in golf carts looking for student athletes playing hooky. Millions of high school grads humiliated every year across the country--should they even bother with the "paper"?
posted by ~rschram at 1:22 PM PST - 84 comments

Experiments in the Revival of Organisms 'Of course technique is everything...' Introduced by renowned Marxist scientist and geneticist JBS Haldane, this Soviet film depicts the artificial maintenance of individual organs, a severed dog's head, and finally a dog in toto (excuse the pun).
posted by derangedlarid at 1:04 PM PST - 8 comments

The Scopitone, the 1960s French video jukebox, has been mentioned before on MeFi, but I don't think this site from New York's Spike Priggen was up and running then. He's collected many Scopitone and Cinebox vids from the likes of Nino Ferrer, Francoise Hardy, Procul Harum and - naturellement! - Serge Gainsbourg. It's a marvellous well of '60s chic kitsch. (Navigation can be a tad confusing as there are numerous sections to the site and many links are duplicated throughout, but it's well worth clicking away to see where you end up.)
posted by TiredStarling at 1:01 PM PST - 7 comments

The Nuclear Option is a tool Sen. Frist would like you to believe is a plan of the Democrat Party to bring chaos to the Senate. In fact, it is a tool coined by Republicans. Republicans are, as we speak, pressuring news media to claim that “the nuclear option” is a Democrat term. Some have already fallen in line. Some Republicans are pissed. Nearly all Dems are as well. Luckily, the Republicans plan, won’t work.
posted by futureproof at 12:48 PM PST - 26 comments

"I just read about CNN Headline News in us weekly. Those guys at the football game were total jerks." --Thoth
posted by jca at 12:00 PM PST - 42 comments

Culture by the people, for the people. We all know that there are a gazillion blogs out there, with people talking about anything and everything, frequently to an audience of one. Those same text based blogs are incorporating video as well. People are beginning to organize their internet not through search engine algorithims, but by their own tags. There's also a dedicated cadrey of partisan and non-partisan "amateur journalism" sites. Then you have full fledged communities focused to specific subjects, holding an unbelievable depth of knowledge and opinions. With entire encyclopedias available online, and with smaller topic-centric wiki's available, can the creation and dissemination of audience authored content be far behind? Witness the growth of Flickr, the probable success of Vimeo, people programming their own radio stations and/or shows, the increasing awareness and use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by plain ol' citizens, the courting of TiVo by Google and Yahoo (to share homemovies and pictures, perhaps?), open source news sites like Take Bake the News, NowPublic (for royalty free images to accompany content), Downhill Battle, Our Media ( a place to store your content), and open-source sounds and sights. Could there eventually be enough worthwhile content to break us free of a corporate-delivered culture?
posted by rzklkng at 11:16 AM PST - 35 comments

RAISING NANCIES : "Their most unexpected attribute was a weird, screeching noise they relentlessly emitted — A cross between a high-pitched belch and the sound produced by rubbing the suface of a balloon!" Amonia hazed humor from comics artist Howard Cruse, based on Ernie Bushmiller's classic, odd, and still-subversive character NANCY — who it seems for the sake of conversation was herself based on another (real life) Nancy ...(And as long as the subject is Nancy, here's one other related parody and a very addictive dada-like game).
posted by Peter H at 11:04 AM PST - 16 comments

French In Action is now available for free, online. (click on the "VoD" link to the right of each episode; free registration required ) Long a staple of high school French classes and late-night PBS broadcasts, French In Action is notable for teaching French without translating it; meaning is made clear through context and repetition. It's an approach some people find useless and others consider "so excellent it almost justifies the invention of television ". If you'd rather learn Spanish, there's Destinos and for German, there's Fokus Deutsch--but neither one features Valérie Allain, subject of intense fascination (and occasionally creepy obsession.) ( Unfortunately, free streaming of French in Action doesn't seem to be available outside the US and Canada; Destinos and Fokus Deutsch have no such restrictions.)
posted by yankeefog at 10:35 AM PST - 43 comments

The Alan Lomax Database is a free multimedia catalog of the audio and video recordings and photographs made by Alan Lomax from 1946 to 1994.
posted by liam at 9:39 AM PST - 8 comments

TV Turnoff Week starts today. Read a book, go outside. Sweeps week will be waiting on your TiVo when the week is over.
posted by mosch at 9:09 AM PST - 171 comments

"The main thing was that in West Berlin, we really thought it would've been great to witness the end of the world." A great interview with Einstürzende Neubauten co-founder Alexander Hacke from signandsight.com, a website that translates German arts and letters writing into English. Just part of what seems a larger trend of German outlets wading into the English market.
posted by jasonsmall at 8:42 AM PST - 12 comments

If you own a gas-guzzling SUV, Uncle Sam just might pay for your gas...that is if you use it 100% for business.
posted by C17H19NO3 at 8:20 AM PST - 41 comments

Hubble's 15th Birthday Image Gallery
Reports about birthday.
NASA Hubble site.
(previous) via
posted by peacay at 8:00 AM PST - 12 comments

Shut down the computer, turn off the cell, kick back a minute and see the world in a whole new way.
posted by dfowler at 7:36 AM PST - 8 comments

Looking for that perfect gift for your favorite dog-loving military buff? How about a picture of Rover in uniform?
posted by Katemonkey at 7:28 AM PST - 11 comments

Celebrity Mefi? Arianna Huffington is starting a "celebrity group blog." Contributors will include Walter Cronkite, David Mamet, Albert Brooks, Nora Ephron, Warren Beatty, James Fallows, Vernon Jordan, Rob Reiner, Diane Keaton, Norman Mailer, Bobby Kennedy, Tina Brown, John Cusack, Gary Hart, Mike Nichols...etc. According to a leaked email, Arianna is pitching the "Huffington Post" (ugh) to contributors as "a collective endeavor that can enliven — and possibly even shift — the national conversation."
posted by CunningLinguist at 7:22 AM PST - 104 comments

A comprehensive catalog of airsickness bags from airlines worldwide, Rune's Barf Bag Collection has pictures and descriptions for each one (none are shown used).
posted by breezeway at 7:21 AM PST - 3 comments

Fake or Photo? Can you tell the difference between a photo and a CG render?
posted by crunchland at 5:03 AM PST - 43 comments

Vive la Revolution. Are DVD Copy Protection technologies now illegal in France? (via techdirt).
posted by seanyboy at 4:08 AM PST - 5 comments

Svetlana Alexievich is a Russian writer-cum-journalist who 'constructs her narratives out of "live voices"', and finds her subject matter in Big Events lived by ordinary people. Extracts from her book on Chernobyl appear here.
posted by TimothyMason at 12:42 AM PST - 5 comments