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Roger Ebert remembers Joel Siegel (1943-2007) - "A Brave Man and a Hell of a Nice Guy."
posted by Guy Smiley at 10:35 PM PST - 21 comments

Destroying a perfectly good cellphone. The inner workings and guts of the biggest new toy this year. Is it more reliable then an iPod? How many screws does it have? Is it powered by nerds wishes and dreams? The answers to these questions are maybe, 16, and you bet your sweet ass.
posted by Derek at 10:28 PM PST - 53 comments

Talking Moose lives.
posted by rxrfrx at 7:23 PM PST - 27 comments

For four months, the Kuykendalls, the Prices and the McKays say they’ve been harassed and threatened by mysterious cell phone stalkers who track their every move and occasionally lurk by their homes late at night, screaming and banging on walls. Police can’t seem to stop them. The late-night visitors vanish before officers arrive. The families say investigators have a hard time believing the stalkers can control cell phones without touching them and suspect an elaborate hoax. Complaints to their phone companies do no good – the families say they’ve been told what the stalkers are doing is impossible.
posted by daninnj at 7:06 PM PST - 99 comments

I love my friends...My friends love me...We're just as friendly...As friends can be...And just because...We really care... Whatever we get, we share.
posted by jfuller at 7:00 PM PST - 24 comments

Personal safety? Or accidents waiting to happen? (Warning, last link has immediate audio.)
posted by The Deej at 6:38 PM PST - 25 comments

The Order of Canada, Canada's highest civilian honour, is forty years old this year. Some of its Members, Officers, and Companions include people like John Kenneth Galbraith, Dan Aykroyd, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Jean Chrétien, Northrop Frye, Pierre Trudeau, Bryan Adams, Roberta Bondar, Bruce Cockburn, Wayne Gretzky, Mary Pratt, David Cronenberg, and current Governor General Michaëlle Jean, who is not only haute, but hawt.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 5:04 PM PST - 33 comments

The Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-engraved Illustration (Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, Cardiff University) hosts well over eight hundred images from Victorian texts; you can browse the site by iconographic themes and features (tools, religion, etc.) or conduct more specific searches by author, publisher, and the like. For more overviews of Victorian book illustration, visit Bob Speel's nineteenth-century art website, which features a number of pages devoted to various topics in book illustration, and the Victorian Web. Illuminated Books features a small collection of digitized illustrated works, many of them Victorian; there's a larger collection at Children's Books Online. The Victorian novelist we most closely associate with book illustration is Charles Dickens, and David Perdue has brief biographical sketches of his various illustrators, with examples of their work. Famous illustrators with their own websites include Sir John Tenniel, Arthur Rackham, and Randolph Caldecott. (Main link via VICTORIA.)
posted by thomas j wise at 4:51 PM PST - 14 comments

The late great Post-Punk Junk was once the smartest, best curated music blog on the net. Then it disappeared. Now it has been reborn as a cable access style tv show. Anyone interested in what was happening with music during the years 1979-1985 (roughly) should definitely check this out. Yaheardme? Episodes collected here and here. Check out a spooky looking Nico and Cabaret Voltaire and PIL and Gang of Four and Yellow Magic Orchestra.
posted by vronsky at 4:43 PM PST - 9 comments

Totally rad Frontline video about Hero Rats who sniff out unexploded land mines in rural Tanzania. Not only a great idea, but this story had me on the edge of my seat: are the rats on a suicide mission or not?
posted by dydecker at 4:15 PM PST - 17 comments

All This and World War II [trailer; IMDB] is a 1976 musical documentary that mixes World War II newsreels and movie clips with Beatles covers. Looks like Hitler disapproved. [lots more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 3:46 PM PST - 6 comments

The Etch-A-Sketchist draws pictures on a travel etch-a-sketch. Examples: Street Fighter II, Chewbacca and Han Solo, Iwo Jima, Optimus Prime, & MegaMan.
posted by puke & cry at 2:57 PM PST - 16 comments

Here is Uncle John Scruggs singing and playing Little Log Cabin Round the Lane in RealAudio Dial Up and DSL format. The dancing is great and I do like the walk-on kitten part, myself.

That's from the Center For Southern African-American Music Video Link Page. Their audio link page is a wonder, too with individual artists galore. But, for the real deal, check out the Various Artist compilation album pages. Those may be 20 second of so mp3 clips but, still, those Yazoo, Document and Folkways albums are the bomb and there you get a taste of what they offer. And anywhere you can hear, for example, even a few bars of Blind Alfred Reed's How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live ? or Estil C. Ball and Lacey Richardson's Trials, Troubles, Tribulations rules in my world.
posted by y2karl at 2:13 PM PST - 9 comments

Before the iPhone there were devices known as telephones.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:16 PM PST - 60 comments

There's been much talk about the Supreme's decisions on desegregation and free speech, but another ruling with broad consumer impact has gone relatively unnoticed. In a 5-4 decision [PDF], the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a 96-year-old ban on minimum pricing agreements between manufacturers and retailers. Dissenting opinion believes that this ruling will hurt consumers, raise prices and keep new retailers out of the marketplace. The 1911 ruling that was overturned was Dr. Miles Medical Co. vs. John D. Park & Sons which decided that it is always illegal for a supplier to dictate minimum prices to a retailer.
posted by dejah420 at 12:13 PM PST - 47 comments

Rock and Roll, Baby! (video)
posted by empath at 12:09 PM PST - 23 comments

This weekend marks the 10th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong to the mainland Chinese after 155 years of colonial British rule. Memories of the day are still online, showing the fear that the promised "One Country, Two Systems" policy was a trojan horse. Ten years later, the promise seems intact. Though universal suffrage seems a distant dream, religious and political freedoms are almost on par with Western standards and the economy has survived shipping its industry north. People are marking the day in different ways, while some just want to offer advice.
posted by trinarian at 11:56 AM PST - 12 comments

This next Monday, watch for the first race of Il Palio Di Siena. For several weeks before the race the streets are filled with parading, feasting, practice races in the afternoons and lots of hyped up Italians. Each neighborhood of the city trains a horse to represent it and is much rivalry that stems back to medieval times. A riderless horse can win, unless the feather on top of the bridle is knocked off, there are no rules once the race begins, may the Madonna let the best horse win.
posted by Viomeda at 11:55 AM PST - 16 comments

Need a new desktop wallpaper? Here's a gorgeous collection from Germany. Bridges, clouds, refineries, spiders, architecture, wildlife ... many of them with truly excellent color. My favorite. (And this one's begging for a drop-shadowed caption.)
posted by jbickers at 11:48 AM PST - 21 comments

The Florida Memory Project has a great audio section. In addition to podcasts and lots of individual files, they've compiled three mix cds of their offerings (Music from the Florida Folklife Collection, More Music, and Shall We Gather at the River). The real gem of the collection, though, may be the WPA recordings Zora Neale Hurston made while she was collecting folk tales in Florida. (Previous y2karl omnibus folklife post)
posted by OmieWise at 11:09 AM PST - 7 comments

That dream home isn't shaping up the way you'd hoped? Build one from scratch! You could start with a lovely thatched hut. Here's some more. Here's an African one. No vegetation up there where you live, above the Arctic Circle? You can build an igloo. For somewhat warmer areas, a yurt. No Asian import for you? There's the tipi. Need more space? A longhouse is just the thing. For more substance, a sod house. Even better - adobe. Have a look at these "Cave" houses. More ambitious? Build a castle. Whatever you put up, you'll probably need an outhouse. Unless you live on a boat.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 11:07 AM PST - 18 comments

A few cool shelves: a skull shelf and another, made of books by Jim Rosenau, invisible shelf, secret stash shelf, accordion shelf by Thut Möbel, maze shelf and broken shelves.
posted by nickyskye at 10:46 AM PST - 27 comments

MusicMoose wants "to provide the world with free, useful music lessons, and a community based site to help back it all up." The site contains hundreds of free video music lessons (often containing notation and/or tablature) with a distinct focus on acoustic and bluegrass music, all taught by some pretty badass pickers (including the astonishingly good mandolin shredder Anthony Hannigan). There are also obligatory but very useful forums. Takeaway: the whole thing is free and you don't have to register to watch the lessons.
posted by kosem at 9:51 AM PST - 15 comments

GIANT PENGUINS! The discovery in 2005 of fossils in Peru is challenging previous views about the evolution of penguins. They were tall, fast, and enjoyed being smacked by cavemen*.

* may not be true
posted by Stynxno at 9:09 AM PST - 31 comments

Crayon Physics, the delightful latest game from independent game developer Petri Purho at Kloonigames, a sort of finnish Ferry Halim. Draw objects with your crayon to get the ball to the star. The site is also home to other made-in-a-week games such as Cacodemon, which is as frustrating as it is addictive. If Crayon Physics seems too short, check out the small level pack or hack the xml to make your own. Windows only, works in Wine too
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 8:14 AM PST - 20 comments

FFF via Phit. Yeah, it's stolen from Digg, but that's a good thing. I read Digg so you don't have to.
posted by humblepigeon at 6:49 AM PST - 28 comments

Planet Earth, the new Prince album, to be given away for free as a newspaper insert. Music industry bigwigs splutter, fume.
posted by hermitosis at 6:46 AM PST - 82 comments

The Splasher: Caught? (bugmenot) The Splasher(s?) has defaced graffiti in NYC for the last seven months, focussing on graffiti artists who have found commercial success often posting pieces of a growing Manifesto. The Manifesto calls for a new radicalism in graffiti and art in general, apparently inspired by Jeanette Winterson, Guy Debord, and Sixties anarchists. Is Cooper the Splasher? Now that he's caught, is this the end, or is there more yet to come?
posted by rottytooth at 5:14 AM PST - 30 comments

Learn the 5 basic survival skills Planning that hike through the Northwest Territories this summer? You will need survival skills. Learning survival skills is an ongoing process that will last for your entire life. There is always more to learn and experience, which is part of the fun of being a survivor. And as your expertise grows the knowledge and abilities you gain is often useful in other areas. For example survivors prepare ahead of time, and they are experts in the art of ingenuity and inventiveness. Need more? Well try the survival blog for helpful answers to such questions as "How Long can I survive without food or water?" or "How can I maintain water discipline?"
posted by psmealey at 4:25 AM PST - 47 comments

Whole Foods takes London. This South Kensington flagship store is the "quasi-messianic" company's biggest ever, comprising 80,000 square feet spread out over three floors offering 10,000 grocery items. In true American style, shoppers can choose from 1,000 different wines, 425 cheeses, 40 types of sausage, 55 in-store chefs, a pub called The Bramley, a sushi bar, a champagne and oyster bar and a DJ-booth to play music for late-night shoppers. The locals seem overwhelmed by it all.
posted by chuckdarwin at 3:06 AM PST - 86 comments