Yahoo's new BravoNation brings Xbox Live type achievements to the world outside of gaming. You can send or receive homemade awards from any user. They are banking on third party sites using their API to hand out bravo awards to people for doing various things. Our own waxpancake has the exclusive first look.
posted by riffola at 9:53 PM PST - 22 comments

The Most Expensive Drink at Starbucks.
posted by dhammond at 9:37 PM PST - 70 comments

The man with blue skin. No, not these posers, but this guy. Fifty-seven year old Paul Karason has blue skin. He drinks colloidal silver which can cause a medical condition called argyria.
posted by MaryDellamorte at 8:44 PM PST - 70 comments

This Flash tool from the New York Times shows you how many times each candidate has named each of the other candidates, suggesting which candidates the others perceive as worthy of addressing. It's a very neat and efficient visualization tool. Guess who everyone can't stop mentioning?
posted by Brian James at 5:21 PM PST - 39 comments

Stand and Deliver! Dick Turpin was the quintessential highwayman, perhaps not as flamboyant as "Swift Nick" Nevison or as low profile as Jerry Abershaw, but legends abound about his exploits. He was buried (several times) in York after throwing himself off the gallows. 'Course, he's got his own heavy metal band, and his own swashbuckling t.v. adventure series (from 1979 to 1982) in which breathless maids said with heaving breasts "Dick 's been taken" (but of course, you can't hold Dick for long).
posted by Smedleyman at 4:44 PM PST - 12 comments

Best list of Best of 2007 lists of 2007.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 2:55 PM PST - 25 comments

The Daily Colbert Show Report returns January 7th! ...sorta. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 2:36 PM PST - 135 comments

Like Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron (made famous through François Truffaut's film L'Enfant Sauvage), a modern-day feral child, known as 'werewolf boy ' "who snarls and bites [has] escaped from a Moscow clinic just a day after being rescued from the wild." "The boy, who looks about ten, moves around with his legs half bent and 'was running with wolves and searching for food with them.' Police, who named him Lyokha, said villagers found him in a lair made of leaves and sticks in freezing temperatures." ^* [Feral Children previously on MeFi - 1, 2]
posted by ericb at 2:30 PM PST - 15 comments

The Alvin Show, 1961. The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late). The Witch Doctor, Pop Goes The Weasel, Chipmunk Fun and The Alvin Twist
posted by R. Mutt at 2:22 PM PST - 16 comments

Armed guards in church? Colorado's New Life Church: "The church's undercover security force is made up of an undisclosed number of volunteers with military or law-enforcement backgrounds, who carry radios and concealed weapons when they attend services." One of these guards recently shot a deranged gunman. [more inside]
posted by CCBC at 1:57 PM PST - 126 comments

The Dec. 13th cover of the Lewiston Tribune [pdf] features an "unidentified thief" under a picture of a familiar looking window decorator [via waxy via vsl] [more inside]
posted by null terminated at 1:39 PM PST - 22 comments

"When we're running, you can't tell. When people look at us, they don't point and go, 'Yeah, he's homeless, she's not, she's educated.'" Mahlum explained, "You look and say, 'Oh, look at the runners.' That's a positive association, because there's no separation." [more inside]
posted by stagewhisper at 1:34 PM PST - 8 comments

Christopher Walken riffs on a Christmas classic.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 12:58 PM PST - 23 comments

Just in time for Flash Friday, Slate lists the best free online games. The first one they mention, The Tall Stump, has been on MeFi previously, but there's more—even an Infocom-style text-based game.
posted by cerebus19 at 12:29 PM PST - 9 comments

"Lex has had two tours in Iraq," Jerome Lee said. "He's been through a lot, and we just want to get Lex home to our family and let him have a happy life." It is the first time a working dog has been granted retirement to live with a handler's family. [more inside]
posted by miss lynnster at 12:21 PM PST - 19 comments

In a small triumph of humanity/common sense over technology, a supermarket experiencing a computer crash gives customers their "purchases" free of charge until the cash registers are up and running again.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 11:57 AM PST - 40 comments

Invaders from the Ice World is a Silver Age DC Comics story (available here as a PDF in its entirety) about the time living Snowmen who shoot lasers from their eyes came to attack the Earth. Merry Christmas!! (found via I'm Learning To Share)
posted by jonson at 10:41 AM PST - 10 comments

Fairytale of New York... censored! No, not now... Shane will make 50 this Christmas... Sadly not Kirsty.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:06 AM PST - 92 comments

Send messages to friends with fun, bureaucratic fill-in forms! Bureau of Communication has funny faux-bureaucratic forms that you can send to your friends. Whether you need to communicate a problem, send an invitation to an event, or simply apologize for a transgression, our easy-to-use forms will ensure that your message is clearly conveyed.
posted by lsemel at 9:24 AM PST - 30 comments

He keeps his white gloved hands where parents can see them. And buys liability insurance, just in case.
posted by chlorus at 7:40 AM PST - 59 comments

Arabella Spencer Churchill, granddaughter of Winston Churchill and co-founder of the Glastonbury rock festival is dead at 58. Sadly, on this very same day, her son was sentenced to three years prison in Australia on drug charges.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:51 AM PST - 22 comments

Dingle Bells - Friday Festive Fun. Not very entertaining without speakers. [more inside]
posted by armoured-ant at 4:15 AM PST - 5 comments

After inventing the autojector, the worlds first artifical heart-lung machine, Sergei Bryukhonenko began to experiment on keeping severed dog heads alive and bringing dogs back from the dead, as shown in the film Experiments in the Revival of Organisms (some links contain mildly ghoulish stills from film).
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:37 AM PST - 43 comments

An Advent Calendar of games
posted by No Mutant Enemy at 12:04 AM PST - 5 comments