October 22, 2009

Soup's Gone

Soupy Sales has died. Mark Evanier explained his appeal years ago, adding a bit more today. An entire live Soupy Sales Show from 1965 on YouTube: part 1, part 2, part 3.In his honor, throw a pie or two (filled with shaving cream, of course, let's not waste food). [} [} [} [more inside]
posted by wendell at 10:01 PM PST - 72 comments

Storytime, Kids!

Rob Zombie's Where The Wild Things Are
posted by empath at 9:14 PM PST - 39 comments

Jean Fouquet

Jean Fouquet, peintre et enlumineur du XVe siecle is an exquisite French-language exhibition devoted to the fifteenth-century painter Jean Fouquet. Fouquet--known, among other things, as the painter of (possibly) the first stand-alone self-portrait--is best remembered for the Melun Diptych, now split between two museums. His illuminations include the Book of Hours of Étienne Chevalier and contributions to the Book of Hours of Simon de Varie, among others.
posted by thomas j wise at 8:25 PM PST - 7 comments

Exploring Color

Rachell Sumpter takes color and detail to the extreme in her art exhibits, reminiscent of Fantasia in a sense. Sumpter is developing quite the portfolio as demonstrated at the Richard Heller Gallery. [more inside]
posted by netbros at 7:38 PM PST - 9 comments

LIMA PERU

CARLOS JIMÉNEZ CAHUA : "This young Peruvian photographer, now based in New York, returned to Lima to document the city’s unchecked sprawl into the desert, where flimsy plywood houses huddle together, as if for warmth. Jiménez Cahua takes the long view, typically framing broad landscape vistas from an omniscient, elevated perspective, so teeming neighborhoods appear unpopulated, toy-like." NYer (alt view)
posted by vronsky at 5:45 PM PST - 11 comments

Goodbye, "Leih Hou Ma," Hello "Ni Hao Ma!"

"Chinatown" communities across the United States (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco) are undergoing a shift in linguistic identity, as recent immigrants are more likely to natively speak Mandarin (the official spoken language of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan,) instead of Cantonese. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 2:57 PM PST - 56 comments

Totality - 'The Vance Vocabulary Search Tool' - As in [Sean Connery] ''Vance, Jack Vance...[/Sean Connery]

...chotz: that music with which an Eisel surrounds himself, to project his mood, or to present an ideal version of his personality... The 'personal music' is produced by an ingenious mechanism programmed, not by musicians, but by musicologists--so, the word chotz appears ten times. As in ..Jubal, becoming aware of the now irrelevant chotz, in irritation switched to Far Clouds in Stately Formation. The chotz setting Far Clouds in Stately Formation appears but once. Mordant appears 23 times, Cognomen, eight. Put in Emphyrio and one finds that it appears 70 times and thus--Too many results (more than 50). Your question is nuncupatory. Please refine your query... while amber appears 65 times to the same response.
Totality - 'The Vance Vocabulary Search Tool'
You will be given 500 sols to begin with--use them wisely. [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 2:52 PM PST - 5 comments

Prisencolinensinainciusol - Ol Raight!

Sung in incoherent pseudo-English, Adriano Celentano's Prisencolinensinainciusol (1973) could be thought of as an early example of rap.
posted by dunkadunc at 2:25 PM PST - 64 comments

Good Night and Tough Luck

Good Night and Tough Luck "Getting a good night’s sleep is actually a lot more complicated than one would think." An amusing look at the problems involved in getting a good night's sleep.
posted by nooneyouknow at 1:55 PM PST - 62 comments

Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan

There was a rivalry between the parties, of course, but in Potter's account, it was more like the rivalry between Cal and Stanford than that between today's Republicans and Democrats. The parties had somewhat different constituencies and pledged fealty to a different set of men, but each attempted to encompass as much of the political spectrum as possible rather than merely half of it. The story of the 1850s, by these lights, is about how this changed.
With reference to David M. Potter's The Impending Crisis, Adam Cadre surveys the four antebellum presidents. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 1:49 PM PST - 23 comments

Fun STD Facts

More than two dozen bacterial, viral or parasitic infections are known to be transmitted largely or exclusively through sexual contact. U.S. public health authorities focus on a limited set of these STIs. Read more about it in "Facts on Sexually Transmitted Infections in the United States" published by the Guttmacher Institute. [more inside]
posted by pick_the_flowers at 12:49 PM PST - 38 comments

Celebrating 50 Years Of Less-Ugly Hockey Players

The Face Of Hockey: November 1st will mark the 50th anniversary of Jacques Plante - subject of an upcoming biography - skating onto the ice wearing a goalie mask. A new style was born, one that would later be carried into the mainstream by another prolific slasher. And to celebrate the anniversary, TSN is running a poll asking which current goaltender has the most original mask. (gallery) [more inside]
posted by mannequito at 12:37 PM PST - 31 comments

How To Write Badly Well

You have a great idea for a novel and it's almost November, so you think now is the time to get cracking. You've decided that hiring a ghostwriter is too easy, but you don't have 100 days to write your novel and the snowflake method seems too frilly. Snowflakes, those delicate little monsters that papered your car when you were stranded on the road in Minnesota. A single snowflake is beautiful, but millions make an avalanche. You were cold, so cold, yet you survived. You're not sure if you have time to read a book on what not to do (UK edition), and the search results are daunting. Forget all that, because you already know how to write, right? Embrace your awesome, magnificent, spellbinding abilities, go forward but never back, ever spinning, shake the rain off your bedspread, and now that you have brewed a delicious pot of steamy, hot, life-giving coffee, you can learn how to write badly well. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:27 PM PST - 35 comments

Every party should be a windows 7 party

Hosting Your Windows 7 Torrenting Party (Previously)
posted by Artw at 11:13 AM PST - 111 comments

On Tender Hooks

On Tender Hooks - New sculptures by Beth Cavener-Stichter on display at NYC's Claire Oliver Gallery. (NSFW: tastefully artistic goat boners.)
posted by hermitosis at 10:14 AM PST - 58 comments

The Greatest Show on Earth

Richard Dawkins, the English biologist and public intellectual well known for his passionate defense of a gene-centered view of biological (organic) evolution, and the introduction and development of the meme-concept and a meme-centered view of social-cultural evolution, to say nothing of his strong stance as an atheist has put out a new book on evolution
posted by JL Sadstone at 9:58 AM PST - 147 comments

Malleus Maleficarum?

"Five women were paraded naked, beaten and forced to eat human excrement by villagers..." [more inside]
posted by jefficator at 9:13 AM PST - 81 comments

Classic Newspaper Comics

I Love Comix. Tons o' galleries of classic and not-so-classic newspaper comics. Essentials such as Little Nemo in Slumberland and Flash Gordon. Also Batman, Conan, Dark Shadows, and Pogo. Also lots of oddball stuff like Myra North: Special Nurse and Chris Welkin, Planeteer. [via] [more inside]
posted by marxchivist at 8:52 AM PST - 18 comments

Man Arrested For Being Naked In Own Kitchen

Eric Williamson was making coffee in his kitchen at his home in Springfield, Virginia on Monday morning. He was home alone. "But a woman [the wife of a Fairfax County police officer] and her 7-year-old son happened to be strolling through his front yard and saw the 29-year-old having breakfast in the buff through his window."* Police were called. Williamson was arrested for indecent exposure. Parents are outraged because there is a school bus stop across the street. [more inside]
posted by ericb at 8:46 AM PST - 282 comments

business as usual

Liquor before Beer... In the Clear
In case you thought anything has changed since the Global Financial Crisis, Greenlight Capital's David Einhorn delivered a remarkable speech at the Value Investing Congress Monday [background, excerpts] wherein he lays out what's still wrong with (the culture that is) Wall Street and Washington: "the consequences will be seen during the lifetime of the leaders who have pursued short-term popularity over our solvency." On a related note, the BOE's Mervyn King concurs with Einhorn: "To paraphrase a great wartime leader, never in the field of financial endeavour has so much money been owed by so few to so many. And, one might add, so far with little real reform."
posted by kliuless at 8:00 AM PST - 26 comments

Everything you wanted to know about Marriage.

But were afraid to ask. A window into the world of Mad Men and our parents. I found this link on a Mad Men message board, but the book is too, too interesting. [more inside]
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 6:44 AM PST - 47 comments

Object Lessons

What Should Museums Throw Out? At a time when controversial moves by major art museums are making the public more aware than ever of how museums collect or discard objects, the University College of London's museum invites visitors to play curator in the exhibit Disposal, viewing some white-elephant objects and determining their fate. The museum also just wrapped up another innovative exhibit on objects and point of vew, Object Retrieval, in which one object was explored and responded to by a rolling team of contributors from varying displines, 24 hours a day, for one week.
posted by Miko at 6:41 AM PST - 22 comments

MétaFiltre!

The Canadian Government’s Translation Bureau recently made its French/English/Spanish technical terminology database, Termium, free to access after over a decade as a subscription-based service. While off-the-cuff translations are often available from free services like BabelFish, Termium focuses on technical terminology such as scientific, medical and legal terms. [more inside]
posted by Shepherd at 6:21 AM PST - 35 comments

The Fox Rox San Diego Archive

Fox Rox was a local music show that ran from 2001 - 2007 in San Diego. Here's the YouTube archive of more than 230 good-quality studio performances from bands as disparate as Electric Six, Blackalicious, Drive-By Truckers, Buzzcocks, Peaches, High on Fire, and many more. [post-mortem || myspace]
posted by milquetoast at 4:53 AM PST - 4 comments

Video on global demand

All TV episodes of This American Life are currently available for free in the U.S. through the main Chinese video sharing site; Youku (here's an episode guide and Season 1, Season 2.) [more inside]
posted by twoleftfeet at 3:47 AM PST - 42 comments

Noble and magnificent creatures of the animal kingdom... humiliated again for our amusement. Yay!

The New Yorker's "Critterati" contest invites you to "take a picture of your pet—dog, cat, ferret, iguana, or any other nonhuman member of the animal kingdom—dressed as a character from literature, and upload it to newyorker.com by October 25th." Gallery | About | Rules | Enter. [more inside]
posted by taz at 2:08 AM PST - 42 comments

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