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September 26, 2011
The Ropes at Disney's - 1943 Employee Handbook. The good old days when women got twice as much sick leave, the Penthouse club was accessible by "men only! - sorry gals...", and a violation of the U.S. Espionage Act could get you fired.
posted by madamjujujive at 7:44 PM PST - 53 comments
An Evening With American Dad! The cast and writing staff of
American Dad! sits down at the Paley Center for an hour to discuss the creative process behind the show, the casting process, why
Critters sucks, if we'll ever see Roger's home planet, how the recent
"Hot Water" episode about a killer hot tub was originally intended to be the series finale, and so much more.
[more inside]
posted by Servo5678 at 3:25 PM PST - 64 comments
After months of struggle to get his family out of Cuba,
Orestes Lorenzo got his response. Raúl Castro, then Minister of the Armed Forces, declared "
If he had the balls to steal one my MiGs, then he can come back and get his family himself!" In hindsight, that was probably the wrong thing to say.
[more inside]
posted by Cobalt at 2:15 PM PST - 70 comments
BBC News asks independent trader Alessio Rastani "
what would keep investors happy, make them feel more confident?" and gets a surprisingly honest answer:
"Personally, it doesn't matter. See, I'm a trader. I don't really care about that kind of stuff. If I see an opportunity to make money, I go with that. So, for most traders, we don't really care that much about how they're going to fix the economy, about how they're going to fix the whole situation; our job is to make money from it. And, personally, I've been dreaming of this moment for three years. I have a confession which is I go to bed every night and dream of another recession, I dream of another moment like this." [SLYT]
posted by finite at 12:06 PM PST - 235 comments
Salve! Do you have trouble finding your way from Brindisium to Antium or planning a vacation at your villa in the Appenines because no one produces an online map with directions in good Latin these days? Well, be of good cheer, friend,
OmnesViae has what you need.
[more inside]
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:56 AM PST - 23 comments
For much of the time since their discovery in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls were the jealously guarded treasure of a select group of scholars. Now, thanks to a partnership between Google and the Israel Museum,
five scrolls have been digitized and made available online.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:24 AM PST - 26 comments
Chris Phillips used to be a journalist and photographer, a public school teacher, and a college instructor with three master’s degrees. Today, at forty, he’s underemployed, deeply in debt, and completely ecstatic about how his life has turned out. While studying for a master of arts in teaching at Montclair State University in 1996, Phillips chanced to pick up Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre
, the seminal collection of existentialist and proto-existentialist texts that Walter Kaufmann compiled in 1956 as a means of preparing humankind for a genuinely philosophical form of life. Something Phillips read in Kaufmann’s introduction to the book soon sent him rocketing across America, visiting jails, hospices, nursing homes, and other public venues — all on his own dime. “I didn’t have any master plan when I started doing this,” he told me recently. (I’d tracked him down in Baltimore, though he lives now in Scottsdale, Arizona.) “I just had this little idea: Let’s give philosophy back to the people.” [more inside]
posted by cgc373 at 6:30 AM PST - 40 comments
Over the last two decades, Harold Hackett has sent out over 4,800 messages in a bottle from Prince Edward Island, Canada's smallest province along the Atlantic coastline. Every message asks for the finder to send a response back to Hackett, and since 1996 he has received over 3,100 responses
from all over the world.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:29 AM PST - 46 comments
