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Maria Bamford's One-Hour Homemade Christmas Special! by Maria Bamford, stand-up comic and pretty much a native speaker in Pretend Tiger. FYI, if you've heard some of those jokes before... it's a gift! She made it for us, for Christmas, to celebrate her success at selling out this year.
posted by Kattullus at 10:59 PM PST - 49 comments

A long-awaited new recording from Gil Scott-Heron - I'm New Here - will be released in February. Video interview and report by BBC's Stephen Smith. Hear a sample: Where Did the Night Go?. Check out this awesome prior post: Happy Birthday Gil! (via Undercover Black Man)
posted by madamjujujive at 7:01 PM PST - 32 comments

GJ 1214b is the most Earth-like planet ever found outside our solar system. And it needs a name.
posted by Taft at 3:39 PM PST - 174 comments

NASA's MESSENGER team (previously: 1, 2, 3), with help from the U.S. Geological Survey, released yesterday the first global map of the planet Mercury. [more inside]
posted by SpringAquifer at 2:37 PM PST - 15 comments

"In the coming weeks, our team will be working to take the aspects of imeem that users love and migrate them to MySpace Music." [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:04 PM PST - 24 comments

Roy E. Disney, son of Disney Company co-founder Roy O. Disney and nephew of Walt Disney, and the last Disney family member actively involved with the company, passed away today from stomach cancer. While he worked for the Disney Corporation on and off over the course of his life, he produced some of the "True-Life Adventures", and heading the Disney Animation through a second golden age (Little Mermaid, Alladin, Beauty and the Beast, etc). He was also integral in replacing the head of the company not once (his cousin's husband and Walt's son-in law, Ron Miller in 1984), but twice (Michael Eisner in 2006, ironically, the person he helped install in 1984). For those of us born after Walt passed away in 1966, Roy's uncanny resemblance to his uncle helped created a public face to keep the Disney ideals alive for later generations.
posted by Badgermann at 1:48 PM PST - 64 comments

"Did I make it? Is everybody pleased?" (SLYT)
posted by mrducts at 12:52 PM PST - 72 comments

AT&T's recent complaints about its mobile phone customers using too much of its underpowered data service have now expanded this week to open opposition to net neutrality legislation. In response, the satirical blog The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs jokingly "reported" on a fake Apple memo calling for "Operation Chokehold", where customers agree to get together on Friday to overwhelm the company's networks. The joke has gained traction with disgruntled users, enough so that AT&T, in turn, chided the blog for "an irresponsible and pointless scheme", creating a Facebook page to promote "Operation Cuckoo".
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:22 PM PST - 109 comments

A gathering of puzzles including many old chestnuts but also perhaps one or two you haven't met before.
posted by Wolfdog at 12:20 PM PST - 29 comments

A few months back, Jay-Z released the single "Empire State of Mind"[YT] off of his latest album, The Blueprint 3[buy]. The songs features Jay-Z with a supporting chorus by Alicia Keys. Alicia Keys would then go on to release "Empire State Of Mind (Part II) Broken Down" for her new album The Element of Freedom[buy]. Last night Alicia Keys performed this song live on the Colbert Report with a rather surprising special guest[YT].
posted by cavalier at 12:20 PM PST - 69 comments

River County, Disney's first water park has been shut down since 2001 and permanently closed since 2005. It has not been dismantled. It was smaller than the two other (currently operating) water parks, and frequently much less crowded. In only a few years, relatively, weather, growth and neglect have damaged the slides and pools, many of which are still full of water. The entire thread with many more pictures is here [more inside]
posted by FritoKAL at 12:16 PM PST - 30 comments

The best Star Wars: Episode 1 review ever (via techland, possibly NSFW, 7LYT, eponysterical) [more inside]
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 11:16 AM PST - 112 comments

Every Christmas since 1966, the Swedish town of Gävle has built an enormous traditional Yule goat of straw. And almost every Christmas, someone tries to set fire to him. [more inside]
posted by zamboni at 11:15 AM PST - 31 comments

Alice's adventures in algebra: Wonderland solved "Outgunned in the specialist press, Dodgson took his mathematics to his fiction. Using a technique familiar from Euclid's proofs, reductio ad absurdum, he picked apart the "semi-logic" of the new abstract mathematics, mocking its weakness by taking these premises to their logical conclusions, with mad results. The outcome is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland."
posted by dhruva at 11:08 AM PST - 30 comments

A wonderful artist, longtime booster of Route 66, and all around good guy, Bob Waldmire died at 8:30 this morning.
posted by timsteil at 11:01 AM PST - 8 comments

I never left the unlockable motorcycle for long on the street and never out of my sight. One day I parked it on the sidewalk in front of the house beside the iron grill that was attached to the house but without chaining it. Broad daylight. A middle-aged man wearing a suit was seen by various neighbors riding down the street on my blue chopped Harley into history, while I sat inside reading Rilke. The neighbors said it was very odd to see a man in a suit riding a big Harley, but then it was my motorcycle, so of course! I never saw the bike again. —Frederick Seidel, About Motorcycles
posted by oldleada at 10:47 AM PST - 28 comments

In April of 2007, College Humor conducted an informal poll of their readership's (ahem) wiping habits. This month, Drew Magary re-examines the results of that "study" for Deadspin, and comes to the same shocking conclusions. (Note: These links contain bathroom-related discussions that those with more delicate sensibilities probably won't enjoy.) [more inside]
posted by juliplease at 10:23 AM PST - 317 comments

Digital Karnak documents and digitally reconstructs "one of the largest temple complexes in the world." The site includes digital models, photographs, a "time map" (allowing you to see alterations to the site under different pharoahs), and video. For projects devoted to more specific areas of the temple complex, see the Karnak Great Hypostyle Hall Project (University of Memphis) and the Mut Precinct (Brooklyn Museum).
posted by thomas j wise at 10:19 AM PST - 6 comments

The Australian Federal Government has decided to implement legislation filtering web content at the ISP level, despite ongoing criticism that the filter will do nothing to protect children and is diversion of funds from more fruitful policies, and is fairly simple to circumvent, and ignores peer-to-peer traffic completely. In light of March's leaked ACMA blacklist, many are understandably concerned about the list becoming a political tool. [more inside]
posted by Jilder at 10:15 AM PST - 23 comments

Rock band reunions normally involve, at minimum, a little live music. But as The Velvet Underground are not your typical rock band, maybe none of us should have been surprised that the reunion of The Velvets at LIVE from the NYPL on Tuesday December 8th had none.
posted by Joe Beese at 9:38 AM PST - 37 comments

The Kitsune Noir Poster Club "feature[s] curated prints by all kinds of artists & designers creating around central themes." Current designs are for Infinite Jest (by Cody Hoyt), Moby Dick (by Mark Weaver), Slaughterhouse 5 (by Frank Chimero), Walden (by Jez Burrows), and The Road by Garrett Vander Leun. From Bobby Solomon's Kitsune Noir Art & Design Blog and Society6.
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 9:11 AM PST - 11 comments

The Maxwell Street Klezmer Band performs a Hannukah Platter Patter. This musical style from a klezmer band shouldn't be too surprising; after all, with productions of Di Yam Galoznim, Di Yidisher Pinafore, and Der Yidddisher Mikado (Danny Kaye and Jerome Robbins appeared in Sylvia Fine's translation), and with translators and adaptors ranging from Miriam Walowit and Sylvia Fine in the 1940s to Al Grand in the present, Gilbert and Sullivan are no strangers to the Yiddish stage.
posted by nonane at 8:35 AM PST - 7 comments

They're back! The Irish Company Steorn -previously previously and previously are streaming live feeds of their Orbo device that's going to save us all. Fingers crossed this time lads, eh?
posted by Wrick at 8:34 AM PST - 61 comments

People hung upside down by their ankles and photographed
posted by h0p3y at 7:28 AM PST - 63 comments

Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge of the Department of Geography, University of Manchester, UK have been scouring archives for maps of Manchester, and have assembled the results in an "intellectually driven" exhibition, Mapping Manchester, at the Rylands Library, Deansgate. [more inside]
posted by beagle at 7:19 AM PST - 8 comments

Sand castle explosions backwards: 1, 2 [more inside]
posted by twoleftfeet at 4:46 AM PST - 23 comments

One Year - Time Lapse Seasons, times and scenery changing over the course of a year at Terrapin Garden Farms. [via mefi projects]
posted by gomichild at 2:19 AM PST - 17 comments

Scientists at NASA will announce the first findings from the Kepler mission next month. The results have caught scientists off-guard but they aren't giving any hints as to what mission co-investigator David Latham "was not prescient enough to anticipate". [more inside]
posted by IvoShandor at 12:29 AM PST - 95 comments