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Boasting 166 canned meats, the Potted Meat Museum.
posted by mexican at 11:38 PM PST - 10 comments

"The left cheek is the cheek of the future. The right cheek is the cheek of the present."
posted by gimonca at 9:27 PM PST - 19 comments

President Bush gave a Press Conference yesterday, and it was only his 17th to date. According to Editor & Publisher, this compares to 43 for Bill Clinton, 84 for George H.W. Bush, and 26 for Ronald Reagan at similar points in their presidencies. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has an analysis of yesterday's rare event, calling him "elusive". (Milbank was the same reporter who shredded Dubya a couple of years ago for granting an exclusive interview to Rupert Murdoch's trashy UK Sun while snubbing reputable US newspapers that would have been more likely to ask hard-hitting questions.) (The WashPost links require registration, which can be bypassed with BugMeNot.) Don't want to read the entire transcript? Try the poem "Man Date", instead. RudePundit took text from Bush's statements and turned 'em into poetry.
posted by zarq at 8:16 PM PST - 28 comments

As two thirds of Americans polled cannot name any Supreme Court justices, these "Ten Things . . . About Scalia and Thomas" may not affect many people.
posted by orange clock at 8:14 PM PST - 36 comments

The real-life Edna Mode - If you aspire to cartoonish superhero proportions, where your massive muscles and barrel chest allow you to leap computer-generated buildings with single, animated bounds, you should take a lesson from Mr. Incredible: Sew your underwear to your shirt. Salon link; advertising supported free access
posted by GriffX at 6:44 PM PST - 15 comments

They Knew It Couldn't Last Forever Twenty one hours ago, Australian Police Officer Adam Dunning was shot twice in the back and killed, becoming the first casualty in the Solomon Islands assistance mission. With the Australian government's quasi-imperialistic intentions towards their closest neighbours and its refusal to sign a non-aggression treaty with ASEAN nations, how long can Australia ride the line between East and West? [MI]
posted by cosmonik at 5:24 PM PST - 24 comments

" Fifty years ago, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or Mormon Church, began a foster care program for American Indian children. Between twenty and fifty thousand children, mostly Navajo, participated in what was called the Indian Student Placement Program....Through Placement, children had the opportunity to grow up in families – white Mormon families – while attending day schools in Utah and across the West. Placement also had a theological motivation. Championed in the ‘50s by an LDS Church leader named Spencer W. Kimball, Placement grew from a sense of commitment to the Indians – then regarded as descendants of the original people of the Book of Mormon. Listen to the amazing story, full of first hand accounts from both sides here
posted by BrodieShadeTree at 4:25 PM PST - 18 comments

Festivus going mainstream.
posted by semmi at 4:05 PM PST - 41 comments

Girl Kicked Out Of Prom For Wearing Confederate Flag Sues A girl who says it was always her dream to wear a confederate-themed dress to her prom arrived in a self-designed gown which incorporated the Confederate battle flag into its design. The school promptly removed her, and she is suing. The fate of her suit is somewhat uncertain. Lower federal courts have applied the Tinker test, which says that a school may restrict student expression when that expression may be disruptive. To win her suit, the girl will need to show that wearing a Confederate flag to your high school prom is not a disruptive act.
posted by expriest at 3:14 PM PST - 172 comments

Mirrors. Documentarian Bruce Jackson found "a group of about two hundred 3x4" identification photographs made between 1914 and 1937... in a drawer in the Arkansas penitentiary in the summer of 1975"; this (slideshow) is the online record of an exhibition.

It is impossible to look at these images and not think about the persons depicted there. But, save for one fact that is a given—and what we find in or infer from these images—we know nothing about those persons, and never will. The given is that they are all prisoners: for whatever reason, they have been deprived of liberty, the single piece of enduring proof of which is the image at which we presently gaze. The conclusions we draw, the feelings we have, the narratives we suppose—they are all our own. The images are mirrors, resonating with aspects of our selves we perhaps never before encountered.

Many of them are haunting; this one has been turned by time into a work of art. (Via Ramage.)
posted by languagehat at 3:08 PM PST - 34 comments

The original plates for the famous parody work (that was never sued over) Disneyland Memorial Orgy, is on sale at eBay. Here's the whole story on the piece, which ran in 1967 in a small underground newspaper and was created by Paul Krassner. I bet a copyright/trademark lawyer with a sense of humor buys this to mount over his desk soon.
posted by mathowie at 2:53 PM PST - 28 comments

The automated signature machine would like to express it's sincerest condolences..."Rather than personally signing letters of condolence to the families of service members killed in action, Rumsfeld has been letting office workers affix his signature with a stamping machine."
posted by thisisdrew at 1:37 PM PST - 95 comments

Mobile-phone radiation damages lab DNA. Sure to be controversial and certainly not the last word, but it raises some interesting points of conversation. Government surveillance becomes much easier with wireless communications and there is a huge corporate financial investment in the infrastructure. Could we really trust the government(s) to tell us if this particular technology was harmful? And at what point would you give serious consideration to giving up a technology that had proved to be such an intrinsic part of your life? Are you addicted beyond the point of no return?
Other media carrying the story via Google News.
posted by spock at 12:50 PM PST - 28 comments

Washington Post Buys Slate.
posted by me3dia at 12:30 PM PST - 26 comments

Static Calendar Proposal as seen on Slashdot This is something I found on Slashdot and thougt was interesting. Judging by the savvy website of the new calendar's creator, I doubt we'll be having "Newton" months anytime soon. Check it out.
posted by Glibaudio at 11:58 AM PST - 31 comments

Community Values, Corporate Profit and Pornography
"Popular culture isn't popular because members of the "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving left-wing freak show" (to borrow a line from a campaign ad this year) are the only customers. It's because there is an unquenched thirst for it, and the corporate profiteers (who are members of and contributors to both political parties) see a nationwide market for it." What will we tell the children?
posted by nofundy at 11:46 AM PST - 20 comments

Meet the Beastles - The Beasties mashed up with that obscure quartet from Liverpool. Let the countdown to the C&D letters commence!
posted by shawnj at 11:24 AM PST - 39 comments

Oulipo. Originally founded by author Raymond Queneau and mathematical historian François Le Lionnais, this group (literally the Workshop for Potential Literature- Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle,) sought to create and incorporate restrictive techniques and methods into their writing. The circle has since expanded, welcoming those outside of France and beyond literary genius. Oulipo and its effects upon the literary world still exist today.

Some products of this group's eccentricity are a novel lacking the letter "e" (in both original French and its English translation) (by Georges Perec, who also needs a direct link here), a novel both self-referential and circular, and 100,000,000,000,000 sonnets made from interchangeable lines.
posted by hopeless romantique at 11:17 AM PST - 13 comments

The Evolution of Manufacturing is a collection of New York Times articles, providing a historical perspective on manufacturing operations in the U.S. The collection consists of 12 articles published between 1909 and 2000. It includes an article by Henry Ford himself, and an article by Thomas Edison based on his interview of Henry Ford. Interestingly, the collection is an advertisement for Peoplesoft.
posted by tuxster at 10:15 AM PST - 9 comments

The Mathematics Genealogy Project. A service of the Department of Mathematics at North Dakota State University, the project intends to "compile information about ALL the mathematicians of the world. [...] It is our goal to list all individuals who have received a doctorate in mathematics." Seven generations from one of my recent professors back to Gauss, six back to Felix Klein (of Erlangen Program and bottle fame), eight back to Jacobi, and nine back to Poisson and Fourier, then Lagrange, then Euler, then the Bernoulli brothers, then Leibniz, and then it blew up at infinity.
posted by gramschmidt at 9:30 AM PST - 5 comments

White House Considering Product Placement Deal All I can say is, I really, really hope this is a spoof article.
posted by FormlessOne at 9:29 AM PST - 23 comments

7,000 Years of Religious Ritual Is Traced in Mexico Archaeologists have traced the development of religion in one location over a 7,000-year period, reporting that as an early society changed from foraging to settlement to the formation of an archaic state, religion also evolved to match the changing social structure. This archaeological record, because of its length and completeness, sheds an unusually clear light on the origins of religion, a universal human behavior but one whose evolutionary and social roots are still not well understood.
posted by Postroad at 8:24 AM PST - 33 comments

"Sushi pants" and other stories... Possibly not the "best of the web", but not political and damn funny. Of late I have been enjoying a number of "story" sites recounting the kind of tall tales of questionable accuracy you usually only hear from genuinely funny friends. Many, many chuckles to be had out there. Some of the stories seem superficially mean but are actually interesting looks into difficult situations you might otherwise never glimpse. "A few days later he put a tarantula in my bedsheets while I was sleeping. Thankfully I wasn't bitten, but I was freaked out and still sometimes jump out of bed in the middle of the night for no reason and attack my sheets." - from thingie.net
posted by soulhuntre at 7:41 AM PST - 13 comments

The Church Awakens "The AIDS pandemic is the greatest humanitarian crisis," Casey said. "It just begs a reaction from the church." The church is now in full reaction mode. More than 2,000 Christian medical professionals, church leaders, and students gathered for the ninth annual Global Missions Health Conference, November 11-13, at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky. They spoke not only of statistics that confirmed the extent of the pandemic (43 million people living with HIV/AIDS; 8,000 deaths each day; 14 million orphans), but of working together.
posted by halekon at 5:53 AM PST - 62 comments

Behzti (Dishonour) a play by sikh author Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti has been dropped because of violent protests from members of the birmingham sikh community.

Catholic archbishop feels that violation of the sacred place of the Sikh religion demeans the sacred places of every religion.

As an aside at least enoch was wrong.

Once again folks - in the right corner it's religion , erm.. running round in circles like a scared fool its freedom of expression.
posted by dprs75 at 3:49 AM PST - 47 comments

Hack a fibre optic display. Blow up smarties. Make a lava lamp (that actually works). Things to make and do from Big Clive.
posted by nthdegx at 2:46 AM PST - 12 comments

King William's College Quiz 2004-2005 (PDF) has the reputation for being the hardest quiz in the world. It's also the hundredth edition, and they've made it extra hard this year! For what it's worth, here's last years Questions and Answers.
posted by BigCalm at 2:24 AM PST - 41 comments