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Kitten wearing a tiny hat. Tiny plaid ninjas [Flash]. Tiny houses and tiny apartments. Tiny train set. Tiny horse. Tiny wind turbine. Tiny food [slideshow]. Tiny Breakout [Flash]. Tiny plastic soccer players and tiny streakers. Tiny Obama family. Tiny car. Photographs of really tiny things. Tiny trucks pulling realistic sushi rolls. Tiny actual cupcakes, tiny knitted cupcakes. Tiny fingernail art. [more inside]
posted by NoraReed at 11:03 PM PST - 28 comments

Streets of Fire (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) is a 1984 film directed by Walter Hill and co-written by Hill and Larry Gross. It was described in previews, trailers, and posters as "A Rock & Roll Fable." It is an unusual mix of musical, action, drama, and comedy with elements both of retro-1950s and 1980s. ... The film was promoted as a summer blockbuster but failed critically and commercially, grossing only USD $8 million in North America, well below its $14.5 million budget. Its dynamic musical score by the likes of Jim Steinman, Ry Cooder, and others, as well as the hit Dan Hartman song "I Can Dream About You", however, has helped it attain something of a cult following among fans.
posted by Joe Beese at 9:27 PM PST - 59 comments

Psycho Killer dance - Tengobaila sure does like improvisational, spontaneous, informal, interpretive, freestyle dancing ... and she has uploaded 857 videos to prove it, find your fave. (Via B3TA) [more inside]
posted by madamjujujive at 9:03 PM PST - 27 comments

Meet the Gifford Children's Choir out of Racine, Wisconsin as they perform Still Alive from Portal. [more inside]
posted by Evilspork at 7:48 PM PST - 42 comments

digitalculturebooks is an imprint of University of Michigan Press which releases scholarly books under a creative commons license. They've got 19 books published already and more on the way. Among those on offer are poet and English professor Kevin Stein's Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age, anthropologist Bonnie A. Nardi's My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft, English professor Buzz Alexander's Is William Martinez Not Our Brother?: Twenty Years of the Prison Creative Arts Project and English professor Elizabeth Carolyn Miller's Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle. If you don't want to read a whole book they also have essay collections, such as Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina and Best Technology Writing 2008, which includes pieces by, among others, Cass Sunstein, Robin Meija and Walter Kirn. [previously, Rock Paper Shotgun scribe Jim Rossignol's This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities]
posted by Kattullus at 7:35 PM PST - 6 comments

The most detailed photo of the surface of the sun looks like this. It was taken by the team at CA's Big Bear Solar Observatory. They have some other neat images of our nearest star at their website. [more inside]
posted by fantodstic at 5:02 PM PST - 46 comments

My brother often informs me that I live 'the life of Riley'. The other night while re-reading Bill Bryson's Made in America I noted he mentioned the origin of the phrase was a popular 1880s song (possibly 1883) Is That Mr. Reilly? by Pat Rooney, in which "the hero speculates on what he would do with a fortune", and revived for use during WWI. Curious, I found several possible origins, though the song remains the top contender. Dictionary.com defines life of Riley as "a carefree, comfortable, and thoroughly enjoyable way of living. The term became popular and eventually 'The Life of Riley' was used as the title of an American radio sitcom (Wiki), followed by a movie and television series. It was used again with the alternate spelling 'The Life of Reilly' in 1995 as the title of a short film from Ireland, and in a 2006 movie starring Charles Nelson Reilly. In 2009 'The Life of Riley' was the name of a British television comedy. Now that's a phrase with staying power. It's the name of an Irish band, an online store in the UK, it was used by a sign maker, and quite obviously, as the moniker of several drinking establishments, such as the Life of Riley Tavern in Portland, Oregon; The Life of Reilly - Irish Pub & Restaurant in Baltimore, in the United Kingdom as the 'Life Of Riley' in Glasgow, Lanarkshire; and 'Life of Reilly Pub' in Harrow, Middlesex; and with a strange possessive at the 'Life of Reilly's Pub and Grill' in Long Beach, New York. Let's also not forget the mysterious MeFite LifeofRiley, whose stats stand entirely at zero. My main reason for writing all this is to ask: how many Mefites use this term? I do, but unfortunately my brother is wrong: I don't live the life of Riley. I might one day, if I win the lottery . . .
posted by bwg at 5:00 PM PST - 29 comments

Fantastic weekly music news and interview program Sound Opinions presents the 2010 edition of their annual Holiday Christmas Spectacular, featuring weird and wonderful holiday tunes curated by record collector Andy Cirzan. [mp3 link to show, approx 1 hour] This year, they're also offering a limited time download of Andy's 2-disc compilation. (Get it quick -- download disappears Jan 1.)
posted by hippybear at 3:28 PM PST - 4 comments

The Onion presents: The People Who Mattered In 2010 [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 3:08 PM PST - 84 comments

People who enjoyed Rap News 5 - Wikileaks & the war on journalism which covered the Iraq War Logs (featuring, er, Donald Rumsfeld and Bill O'Reilly) will probably enjoy the new episode Rap News 6 - Wikileaks' Cablegate (featuring, er, Hillary Clinton, Alex Jones and others). [more inside]
posted by memebake at 2:59 PM PST - 11 comments

Katja's Aurora Page. Katja Gottschewski, German expat somewhere in Norway, posts an immense amount of awesome aurora pictures on her blog-homepage. [more inside]
posted by Namlit at 2:50 PM PST - 4 comments

This post is a) NSFW or grandmothers, b) Derivative of previous stuff on Metafilter. Having said that, here goes: Canada is a Spanish production company. They do ads, fashion and the best videos I've seen in a very long time. You'd do well to start here. [more inside]
posted by Cobalt at 2:09 PM PST - 28 comments

"The message to [t]his generation is very clear: don’t get any fancy ideas about being an engaged citizen. Go back to your X-Box and X-Factor, and leave politics to the millionaires in charge." - Johann Hari of the Independent reporting on an unnerving trend in the UK. [more inside]
posted by rubyrudy at 1:35 PM PST - 53 comments

Your apps are watching you
posted by peacay at 12:31 PM PST - 79 comments

Jessica Harper, whom most mefites will recognize as the star of Phantom of the Paradise and Suspiria, has reinvented herself as The Crabby Cook and recently released a book full of recipes and survival tips. Among the treasures on her YouTube channel: fun with her young relatives in "Christmas Cookie Crisis."
posted by hermitosis at 12:01 PM PST - 16 comments

Atheist Camille Paglia slams atheist Christopher Hitchens for not doing his research and suggests we should value the bible like literature.
posted by aunt_winnifred at 11:52 AM PST - 101 comments

Daniel Mustard has had quite a year. From homelessness on the streets of New York, to singing Creep on Opie and Anthony's homeless shopping spree, to getting sober, to getting a record contract. Is this the American dream?
posted by Xurando at 11:10 AM PST - 10 comments

In the 1920's, there was a series of race cars developed by Count Louis Zborowski, Chitty Bang Bang I through IV. Though in the film version of Ian Fleming's book the name came from the sound the cars made, there is some conjecture that the name is based on a bawdy WWI song. Zborowski died before finishing Chitty Bang Bang 4, (also known as the Higham Special). The car killed its next owner in a particularly grisly fashion and was buried on the spot by his horrified friends. [more inside]
posted by 445supermag at 11:10 AM PST - 21 comments

Videogames reach the uncanny valley with the facial animations (yt video) in Rockstar's L.A. Noir, their 1940s Los Angeles set detective game.
posted by Artw at 10:24 AM PST - 77 comments

Fried GnoccAAAAH! (SLYT, fun starts at about 1:00.)
posted by griphus at 9:52 AM PST - 36 comments

TEH GOOGLE IS KILLING TEH CAPSLOCK OMG
posted by macadamiaranch at 9:45 AM PST - 98 comments

Tim Heidecker of Tim and Eric and Davin Wood (composer on "Awesome Show, Great Job!") are going to release an album as Heidecker & Wood. It includes an eight minute Christmas suite that they just released for free. It straddles the line between parody and nostalgic tribute kinda amazingly.
posted by The Devil Tesla at 9:17 AM PST - 16 comments

The Senate has cleared the way for a final vote to repeal the U.S. military policy, 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.. [more inside]
posted by ericb at 8:53 AM PST - 786 comments

"What do we see when we look straight at the sun and then close our eyes? That's right, a bright moving disk that lasts several seconds. Every child knows this afterimage effect. We use the afterimage effect for a completely new brand experience, for the first advertising commercial that doesn't use a directly visible logo, but by doing so generates a more intensive connection to the target group. We developed a cinema ad for BMW motorcycles that turns spectators into astonished fans. It does this by using an afterimage of the brand to literally get inside people's heads."
posted by grouse at 8:41 AM PST - 55 comments

Teeny tiny apocalypse. [more inside]
posted by rtha at 8:26 AM PST - 23 comments

Open.mapquest.com uses OpenStreetMap (previously, -er, -erer, -est) data served through MapQuest's own server, and any edits feed back into the main OpenStreetMap database. [more inside]
posted by scruss at 8:18 AM PST - 13 comments

This year the IceHotel, built out of 30,000 tons of snow and 4,000 tons of ice, features a Tron room. Cool does not even begin to describe it. [more inside]
posted by dabitch at 7:34 AM PST - 15 comments