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Donegal+Unbridled Enthusiasm+Lots and Lots of Balls=Fun With Balls
posted by Diablevert at 9:35 PM PST - 52 comments

In disaster after disaster, the fear returns that people — under stress, freed by circumstance from the bonds of authority — will turn on one another. The clear consensus is that this has no basis in reality. [more inside]
posted by latkes at 9:10 PM PST - 42 comments

Teddy Has An Operation (SLYT)
posted by kafziel at 8:37 PM PST - 23 comments

How the Online World Is Fighting the Next Pandemic "The online community of interest that began to form after SARS has matured into a community of practice: groups, professions, and individuals with differing skills but a shared concern for obtaining and sharing reliable information and getting it out all over the world." [more inside]
posted by islander at 8:35 PM PST - 6 comments

Your Swimsuit Jumped Over Its Own Weathercock, You Liar! is "A (questionably) ero visual novel whose text is entirely driven by Markov chains, with the exception of a few strategically-placed ellipses" by Amy Roberts
direct Windows/Mac/Linux download (via RockPaperShotgun/FreeIndieGam.es) NSFW for pixelated nudity.
posted by juv3nal at 7:30 PM PST - 15 comments

It gets better. (Spoilers through S03E09, plus vague references to events in later books.) [more inside]
posted by Jacqueline at 7:02 PM PST - 606 comments

On The Tamms Poetry Committee: "One of the artists' initiatives was "photo requests from solitary." Prisoners on solitary would request photos and professional photographers would then shoot the request and send the photo back. The gallery of prisoners requests is surprising and poignant."
posted by artof.mulata at 6:49 PM PST - 27 comments

Yunupingu, former Yothu Yindi frontman, has died at 56 Yunupingu was the the first Indigenous Australian from Arnhem Land to gain a university degree. He Co-founded Yothu Yindi in 1986. Yothu Yindi released six major albums, from 1988 to 2000. The band was nominated for 12 ARIA music awards between 1992 and 1997. They won eight awards, including Song of the Year for Treaty. Yunupingu was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2012 Yunupingu was named Australian of the Year in 1992 for his role in building relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. He died aged 56 at his home in Yirrkala, NT, after fighting kidney disease for over 5 years.
posted by greenhornet at 5:12 PM PST - 29 comments

What if people told European history like they told Native American history?
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:34 PM PST - 78 comments

The Secret Life Of The Love Song: Nick Cave’s amazing lecture on songwriting.
posted by homunculus at 4:24 PM PST - 15 comments

Although ethnic Mandi women share power with their male counterparts and are able to own property, the custom of mother-daughter joint marriages continue. [more inside]
posted by lovelygirl at 4:12 PM PST - 6 comments

A look at the post-war middle class, brought to you by the editors of Life, and Fortune Magazines.

Opportunties Unlimited (via)
posted by timsteil at 2:29 PM PST - 1 comments

Hexagonal Grids. For when you have a game that needs grids that are made of hexagons.
posted by curious nu at 2:17 PM PST - 30 comments

Cinematic historians trying to pinpoint the place where Shyamalan's hubris outgrew his oeuvre would be well advised to hit up YouTube; there, they'll find a weird, misbegotten 2004 Sci-Fi channel pseudo-documentary titled The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan that hints at the problems to come. Built to lead up to the heavily hyped release of Shyamalan's film The Village, this bizarre special follows documentarian Nathaniel Kahn as he begins to profile Shyamalan for what’s ostensibly an authorized puff piece ... [more inside]
posted by philip-random at 1:34 PM PST - 231 comments

On a gloomy Veterans Day in 1998, Janice Pottker answered an unexpected knock on the door of her home in Potomac, Md., a woodsy, upscale suburb of Washington. Standing there was a man she’d never seen before, a private detective who introduced himself as Tim Tieff. He told Pottker, a freelance writer married to a senior government official, that he had a discreet message from Charles F. Smith, a former top executive with Feld Entertainment, owner of the Ringling Brothers-Barnum & Bailey Circuses, Disney Shows on Ice, and other subsidiaries that make it the largest live entertainment company in the world. Smith wanted to see her, he said. [more inside]
posted by marienbad at 1:09 PM PST - 15 comments

Dear diary, I have yet to see my dearest human poop anywhere. I suspect he may not know how. I have resolved to try and teach him when we patrol the neighborhood each day in search of men with hats and beards. [more inside]
posted by lunasol at 11:47 AM PST - 29 comments

There was a time when New York was next to Casablanca.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:39 AM PST - 29 comments

Tornado chaser Tim Samaras, who was the first to get a camera probe inside a tornado, had headed up the TWISTEX experiment, and was featured on the Discovery reality TV series Storm Chasers, was killed Friday, along with his son and chase partner, in an EF-3 tornado near El Reno, Oklahoma. The tornado they had been chasing took a sudden and very sharp turn directly towards their position, and there was not time to outrun it.
posted by smoothvirus at 10:09 AM PST - 72 comments

"A Gazette investigation shows an increasing number of soldiers, including wounded combat veterans, are being kicked out of the service for misconduct, often with no benefits, as the Army downsizes after a decade of war."
"Disposable: Surge in discharges includes wounded soldiers"
"Left Behind: No break for the wounded"
"Locked Away: Army struggles with wounded soldiers"
posted by andoatnp at 9:26 AM PST - 26 comments

Who owns Marvelman? Part I and part II - the concluding chapters of Padraig O Mealoid's epic 16 part history of one of comic's most disputed characters. meanwhile another hole in comics history is about to be filled in as Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell's Zenith finally gets collected in full.
posted by Artw at 9:26 AM PST - 15 comments

Jail for sharing HBO Go passwords New York Times tech journalist Jenna Wortham made a confession that could be used to send her to prison for a year or more. What was the startling criminal admission? She uses someone else’s password to sign into the cable-subscriber-only HBO Go app to watch ‘Game of Thrones.’
posted by sona at 8:56 AM PST - 90 comments

In 1977, Lamont Dozier, Motown veteran, released his album Peddlin' Music on the Side, featuring "the Afro-centric disco hit" Going Back to My Roots. That sound was popular in the US, and also in South Africa, where veteran alto player Teaspoon Ndelu covered the song with his group Teaspoon & the Waves as Oh Yeh Soweto, "changing the lyrics and toughening up the beat, but with the same killer riffs!" The one fault with the song could be that it's only half as long as Lamont's original. Fear not, Dr. Horn has edited the track into an extended form, which you can stream or download from Soundcloud. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:09 AM PST - 12 comments

"Popular privilege is the privileges entitled to those who are considered to be 'popular' or well liked," according to the mission statement of a Tumblr called "This Is Popular Privilege." The site's author says that she is 14, gay, a high school student, and an enthusiast of cats and anime. [more inside]
posted by RJ Reynolds at 7:19 AM PST - 104 comments

Teaches You How to Pronounce Their Products via
posted by infini at 7:19 AM PST - 16 comments

For decades the sciences and the humanities have fought for knowledge supremacy. Both sides are wrong-headed
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:18 AM PST - 49 comments

After more than 25 years of studying the calls of prairie dog in the field, one researcher managed to decode just what these animals are saying. And the results show that prairie dogs aren't only extremely effective communicators, they also pay close attention to detail.
posted by cthuljew at 5:45 AM PST - 33 comments

Why did an American counterterrorism agency map the entire Muslim world as a terror zone? And why was their map 500 years out of date.(via)
“The United States is not at war with Islam,” President Obama said last week at the National Defense University, in a speech that declared an end to America’s “wartime footing” in the fight against terrorism.
Meanwhile two weeks ago "Asked at a Senate hearing how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, 'At least 10 to 20 years.' . . . A spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today - atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted.
posted by adamvasco at 3:03 AM PST - 47 comments