The day in posts: 11/23/2007

Defying Demographics: A look at University Park Campus School, a 7-12th grade school located in the poorest neighborhood in blue-collar Worcester, MA. Approximately 73% of students hover at or below the poverty line and 61% are minorities, yet over 80% go on to college and 99% pass the Massachusetts graduation exams. The partnership between Clark University and Worcester Public Schools has created an environment so successful that a number of cities are looking to emulate it. Have they discovered the key to closing the achievement gap?
posted by rollbiz at 8:06 PM PST - 32 comments

Household Hacker offers a growing variety of bizarrely improbable or impossible "hacks" using household items. How many errors can you spot?
posted by loquacious at 7:19 PM PST - 35 comments

Saved By Jesus! Incrediable story out of the Arizona desert. I just feel really bad for the kid in all this. And wonder how both sides of the immigration debate will handle this.
posted by ShawnString at 6:56 PM PST - 80 comments

The Nocturnes Gallery [more inside]
posted by carsonb at 6:50 PM PST - 3 comments

In 1998, he pulled a woman from a burning car. When I first saw him I was going through multiple cycles at a red light in heavy traffic and he was navigating a push lawnmower with no hands, or arms. Via con dios Marty Ravellette.
posted by Huplescat at 4:31 PM PST - 12 comments

I pledge to buy handmade this holiday season, and request that others do the same for me. Why? Better gifting experience, better ethics, better for the environment.
posted by divabat at 3:53 PM PST - 95 comments

Green Team! NSFW language, Will Ferrell and Friends.
posted by lazaruslong at 2:27 PM PST - 45 comments

The Temples of Damanhur. Behold the Eighth Wonder of the World (according to the Italian government). [Via Boing Boing.] [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 2:20 PM PST - 22 comments

Raven and Jason live together in Vancouver's downtown East Side. A touching short documentary about life on the edge.
posted by Flashman at 1:24 PM PST - 73 comments

Verity Lambert dies. Verity was amongst other things the first producer of Doctor Who and essentially co-created the series along with writer Sydney Newman and the pilot director Waris Hussein. She would later have a hand in bringing everything from Minder to Jonathan Creek to the screen. [more inside]
posted by feelinglistless at 12:40 PM PST - 26 comments

David Lynch: Problem Solver [more inside]
posted by Glow Bucket at 10:58 AM PST - 26 comments

"Fascism", in its current hyphenated repackaging, gets bandied about quite a bit these days. So, it may surprise you to learn that the populist appeal of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad depends in part on a Persian concept, "gharbzadegi" ("weststruckness" or "occidentosis") whose roots are located in an Iranian adaptation of Martin Heidegger's proto-fascist concept of "The Darkening of the World" by the intellectuals Ahmad Fardid and Jalal Ali Ahmad.
posted by felix betachat at 10:26 AM PST - 32 comments

Can you say that again? you gurgled it the first time......Or it's simply the language of the zombies via, often full of groans. Since death rattle is a fairly difficult language to understand by word, it is common to understand through body language, and volume. For example, a loud angry "Rahhr!" will usually mean "I'm going to kill you." A soft "Bhrr." with hands in front will usually mean "Please, don't hurt me, I didn't know she was your girlfriend."
But more commonly, over-used to describe movies or fading trends and Russian Death metal...Hear the Rattle!
...otherwise possibly boring FPP's on terminology.
posted by greenskpr at 10:22 AM PST - 12 comments

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw (prev iou sly), he of "Chzo mythos" and "Zero Punctuation" fame, has released a new game: The Art of Theft, a heist adventure in grand retro style.
posted by Iridic at 7:50 AM PST - 17 comments

The Japanese Narrow High Jump
posted by pyramid termite at 7:23 AM PST - 52 comments

The CBC's Stuart McLean (kind of Canada's Garrison Keillor) is obsessed with musicians' home recordings. He recently produced a show asking Canadian musicians to record songs in their own homes. The result is an enjoyable mix (direct link to MP3) of whimsical, occasionally experimental music.
posted by dbarefoot at 6:20 AM PST - 55 comments

unsubscribe-me.org is not what you might first think it is from the name. (SL-non-YTP)
posted by allkindsoftime at 5:37 AM PST - 51 comments

Doctors remove a ten-pound hairball from an 18-year-old girl's stomach. It's still not the world's largest - that one came from a cow and weighed 20 pounds. And this homemade one doesn't count.
posted by jbickers at 5:33 AM PST - 47 comments

On this day in 1889 the first juke box was installed at the Palais Royale Salon in San Francisco. And the rest is history. Take a stroll through Wurlitzer's Jukebox Museum, and check out their 1950's promo film on jukebox manufacture: A Visit To Wurlitzer. Happy birthday, jukebox! [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 1:26 AM PST - 5 comments