Meet Rob Pongi (sometimes known as Evil Pongi) an american, doing something different in Japan. Sometimes he's chillin with some sexy and beautiful Japanese women enjoy a very exciting Tokyo dance party! Other times he translates North Korean soap operas into english for our edification. He just finished his first Hollywood movie, and he's very proud of it. Join his fan club here. You can watch all of his videos here.
posted by bigmusic at 10:29 PM PST - 21 comments

New Stereotypes
posted by lalochezia at 9:43 PM PST - 44 comments

Badass motherfucking Richard Johnson has won the National Book Award for Tree of Smoke.
posted by four panels at 8:41 PM PST - 31 comments

Idiot Legal Arguments: A Casebook for Dealing with Extremist Legal Arguments: A minimal compendium of legal citations to frivolous arguments.
posted by Falconetti at 8:09 PM PST - 31 comments

Creative Destruction: The Best Case Against Universal Health Care. [Via The Mahablog.]
posted by homunculus at 7:05 PM PST - 82 comments

Almost 100 audio segments of David Greenberger's The Duplex Planet are available on PRX (site requires registration -- Bugmenot). More about The Duplex Planet and a lengthy audio clip are available here. Interviews with David Greenberger here (transcript only), here (second one down, click the headphones) and here (~10 MB mp3 file, 45 minutes long). The infrequently updated Duplex Planet blog is here. Previous Metafilter post on Duplex Planet here.
posted by cog_nate at 6:14 PM PST - 6 comments

In 1917, Dashiell Hammett, working as a Pinkerton detective in Butte, Montana, was offered $5000 to murder union organizer, Frank Little. Or was he? Maybe not. Anyway, Hammett quits being a detective and starts writing fiction. He draws on his Butte experiences to write Red Harvest about a lone detective who sets opposing factions in a corrupt city against one another and watchs the bodies pile up. Lots of people have wanted to make movies from Red Harvest. Akira Kurosawa did. Or did he? Maybe not.
posted by CCBC at 6:04 PM PST - 25 comments

50 Ways to Take Notes. Brian Benzinger (previously) apparently often finds himself without paper and pencil, but with access to a computer. He's linked to dozens of places online where one can Get It Down (for free!), from public pages to note-taking software to voice recording.
posted by Rykey at 5:29 PM PST - 9 comments

Don't want the flu? Wash your hands! Washing your hands is not the only way to prevent the flu, but it's clearly important.
posted by tarheelcoxn at 4:24 PM PST - 44 comments

CARMA, released today, is a map/database that shows the carbon emissions of more than 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies in every country on Earth, showing not only the worst but the best. Find out how much CO2 comes from electricity plants in a particular city, county, congressional district, company, town, ZIP code, or an individual plant.
posted by stbalbach at 4:19 PM PST - 13 comments

Have these fellows whetted your appetite for Southern Hemispherical comic singer-songwriters who care about The Issues? Barefoot Australian Tim Minchin ought to satisfy that hunger with an environmental anthem and a peace anthem. But aside from his social activism, he's also vulgar, poignant, dark, and of course, rock.
posted by doift at 4:16 PM PST - 3 comments

With winter's cold touch around the corner, some of us may need a little something to keep us busy by the fireside on those chill winter evenings. With the abundance and variety of craft blogs to be found, everyone from the novice to the expert should be able to find inspiration (and even great tutorials!) for a fun and cute project. Enjoy!
posted by honeyx at 3:26 PM PST - 11 comments

Entoptic phenomenanotographs [via Flickr]. Entoptic phenomena are visual effects whose source is within the eye itself. This is a photo set of nothing but entoptic phenomena... as well as a few invisible men.
posted by psmealey at 3:25 PM PST - 18 comments

Woody Allen watches Shane
posted by vronsky at 1:05 PM PST - 33 comments

Jeff Lew, the lead animator on Matrix Reloaded, has after 4 long years of 14 hour days and 7 day work weeks finally completed his masterpiece: Killer Bean Forever. This is a momumental follow-up to the previous two short films, which were impressive projects on their own.
posted by ducksauce at 12:57 PM PST - 103 comments

A Look Back at Jon Stewart's Greatest Gay Moments. "There's a whole lotta gay going on in the brand-spanking-new archive of The Daily Show video clips."
posted by kirkaracha at 12:55 PM PST - 26 comments

Everybody has heard a story of someone being struck by lightning. People who survive such a strike can even join a support group. But if you do survive a strike, beware, as you will undoubtedly suffer adverse side effects!
posted by newfers at 12:14 PM PST - 21 comments

QI transcripts and annotations.
posted by Wolfdog at 12:06 PM PST - 31 comments

Turkish-German singer Muhabbet (Murat Ersen) is on the books as a veritable poster child of German immigration, what with singing integration-promoting songs with the German and French foreign ministers and all. [mp3, youtube]

Well until today, at least. Because according to journalist Kamil Taylan [in German; robot English], also a German of Turkish descent and co-author of a documentary investigating the death of Theo van Gogh, Ersen was quoted as saying: "Theo van Gogh was lucky he died as swiftly as he did - I would have locked him up in my basement and tortured him first", adding, "Ayaan Hirsi Ali deserves to die, as well". [in German; robot English]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 11:58 AM PST - 19 comments

Fear of Girls: Episode 2 returns with the aftermath of Episode 1.
posted by a47danger at 11:48 AM PST - 6 comments

The internet is killing the reporter, or at least the investigative journalist. So says David Leigh, the Guardian's esteemed dirty digger. But how right is he? Doesn't "the powerful global conversation", to quote the Cluetrain Manifesto, give investigative journalism new hope. Rather than be centred around the reporter, can communities of interest unite to share and uncover the sort of information that was once the sole property of reporters like Mr Leigh?
posted by MrMerlot at 11:44 AM PST - 49 comments

Vintage Images l Vintage Ephemera l Gallery of Geishas: Art eZine has some interesting visuals, great collection of resources and links to all kinds of cool collages using a variety of vintage ephemera, like Junkyard Dolls or All Wired Up.
posted by nickyskye at 11:15 AM PST - 7 comments

Astronauts in Space, the music video.
posted by blue_beetle at 11:13 AM PST - 8 comments

As the WGA strike enters its second week, the writers have begun to flood the internet with brief videos explaining (and even making light of) their situation. A small collection after the jump.
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 11:07 AM PST - 46 comments

Metafilter's many cat lovers know that many kitties like birds. But bird aficionados aren't so fond of the cats. James Stevenson, founder of the Galveston, TX ornithological society, is accused of using a .22-caliber rifle to kill cats that he claims were stalking endangered birds. He admits to shooting the cats.
posted by bassjump at 10:49 AM PST - 127 comments

Nasty super-bug Clostridium difficile undone by poo transplant! C. difficle, the drug-resistant bum-spelunking organism that's currently the bane of health-care professionals around the world, has been cured. The probiotic treatment, however, has made some medical lab technicians squeamish as it involves liquifying donor faecal matter and then injecting it via enema into the suffering patient.
posted by CheeseburgerBrown at 10:48 AM PST - 49 comments

Apocalyptic Manhattan (in An Apartment). More pictures when you scroll down.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 10:39 AM PST - 12 comments

The Chicago Women's Liberation (embedded video) Rock Band
posted by sleepy pete at 10:32 AM PST - 17 comments

Planet Sydney. Planet Joshua Tree. Planet Kyoto. Sadly, you can't visit any of these worlds, but you can make your own.
posted by Terminal Verbosity at 9:24 AM PST - 10 comments

The Garbage Game. What would you do with 64,000 tons of garbage every week? The Gotham Gazette is a not-for-profit newspaper that reports on New York City politics and policy. On their site is a highly informative game that puts you in the place of a resident and then the Sanitation Commissioner, shedding some light on NYC's garbage problem.
posted by brooklynexperiment at 9:03 AM PST - 14 comments

ukgraves.info has thousands of photographs of cemeteries and gravestones all over the UK, from City of London to the Kirk of Lammermuir, and random points in between.
posted by dersins at 8:49 AM PST - 11 comments

The BBC reports that new research ties ADHD to delayed cortical development.
posted by Fferret at 6:32 AM PST - 57 comments

Sometimes weird things happen. And sometimes there is snark.
posted by butterstick at 6:24 AM PST - 103 comments

A riveting ten-minute interview with playwright and former US Army interrogator Joshua Casteel. He discusses how a particular interrogation with an Iraqi prisoner--and an exchange of views on Islam and Christianity--motivated him to leave the armed forces and become a conscientious objector.
posted by dbarefoot at 4:58 AM PST - 42 comments

Consider Aaron Thibeaux Walker--if anyone ever deserved the title Godfather, King or Present at the Creation, it would be T-Bone Walker. Without T-Bone, there would be no B.B. King, Albert King, no Clarence Gatemouth Brown, no Pee Wee Crayton, Johnny 'Guitar' Watson ad infinitum to every blues guitarist whoever bent a tube amplified string thereafter. For rock and blues, electric lead guitar begins with him--he invented the language and then wrote the book and style manual, too. And he wrote the performance manual as well--dancing, doing splits, playing guitar behind his back while alternating betwen slow and smoky after hour blues and swinging combo and jazzy big band jumps. For examples of him at the height of his powers, give these Coralized mp3s--Cold Cold Feeling and Strollin' With Bones--a listen.
posted by y2karl at 1:38 AM PST - 10 comments

Ever wonder how flaked stone tools such as the famous 12,000 year old Clovis spear points were made? A series of videos from youtube user flintknappingtips leads you through primary shaping, blank preparation, blank shaping, thinning, and fluting of a Clovis point. Total manufacturing time is about 40 minutes. Unscrupulous flintknappers have sold such replicas for tens of thousands of dollars (PDF), leading to a micro-business of stone tool authentication, after which, naturally, fake authentication papers started to appear came to light.
posted by Rumple at 12:19 AM PST - 23 comments