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Happy Mardi Gras! Originally a serious protest march, the annual Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, to be held this Saturday, is now a riotously festive celebration of queer pride & probably Sydney's largest & most fabulous party all year. For the first time, this year the event will also be streamed across the web, for all those who cannot come down under.
posted by UbuRoivas at 11:12 PM PST - 46 comments

OpenCongress.org is a site that aggregates data about the United States Senate and House. Keep track of your senators or representatives through rss feeds, read bills on topics that are important to you, and find out what industries are behind the scenes providing money to your politicians in Washington among many other uses of this new resource.
posted by rfbjames at 10:55 PM PST - 18 comments

Nkosi Sikelel'iAfrica
Sounds the call to come together,(youtube)
And united we shall stand,(audio)
Let us live and strive for freedom, (wmp)
In South Africa our land. (scroll down for writer Sol Plaatje performing the first recorded version of the song.)
posted by serazin at 10:28 PM PST - 7 comments

Secret Fun Blog. A mixture of pop-culture artifacts, retro goodness and childhood nostalgia. Don't miss the audio and video offerings. [Secret Fun Blog is an auxiliary of Secret Fun Spot, which appeared on Metafilter in 2002 and is worth revisiting as it has been greatly expanded and updated since then.]
posted by amyms at 10:25 PM PST - 10 comments

Need more cowbell?
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:45 PM PST - 23 comments

December 2006: carbon credit market to crash-land? One problem, most of the countries submitted emissions plans that allocated permits for more than is currently being emitted--in other words, instead of reductions, they proposed increases. Collectively, EU countries have allocated permits allowing emissions 15 percent higher than actual emissions. February 2007: Splat. The collapse in the price of a tonne of carbon dating back to May last year when it emerged that most countries in the scheme had set their carbon caps far too high, resulting in fewer firms than expected having to buy credits and causing the price of a tonne of carbon to plummet from over €30 to less than €10. SPLAT!: A year ago, CO2 was changing hands in the ETS at 30 euros (33 dollars) a tonne, triple that at the market's launch in January 2005. Today, a tonne of CO2 can be bought for little more than one euro. I'm a good greenie, I'm buying enough credits to offset my coal-fired barbie and my Bradley Shopping Vehicle for the rest of eternity. That should cost me about fiddy cents. (Buy yours here.)
posted by jfuller at 8:11 PM PST - 18 comments

Jen Stark creates sculptures from construction paper.
posted by solistrato at 7:28 PM PST - 31 comments

Is Porn out of Control? As the internets exploded, Clinton didn't seem to care.. Should the government now focus on shutting down the industry? Some loudly think so.
posted by UseyurBrain at 6:14 PM PST - 80 comments

I'm sorry to do this to you, but you must share my agony. Let me know if you get #41 (I have to skip it every time).
posted by Rock Steady at 5:34 PM PST - 83 comments

Let's not do that again, okay? Little Miles gets hung up in a cat door. [Quicktime requiring ActiveX] via
posted by onlyconnect at 4:51 PM PST - 42 comments

Esquire sends out 250 napkins to writers across America - from prolific novelists to those finishing off first works. Nearly a hundred respond back - from sex to frustration, poetry to twisted liaisons, even a mini book and plans for murder.
posted by divabat at 4:12 PM PST - 22 comments

Super Indian: Superhero comics from the culture that invented the genre. Check out Nagraj (and Nagrani?), Tiranga, and Shakti. The somewhat less muscular Chacha Chaudhary. And... whatever is happening here. Meanwhile fun British rich guy Richard Branson brings you Indian-themed comics Ramayan 3392 A.D., Snake Woman (another Naga), Devi and The Sadhu. previously. Dishoom!
posted by Methylviolet at 4:04 PM PST - 16 comments

Mach 20- O Superman- PSA- Soho 1982
posted by vronsky at 3:57 PM PST - 34 comments

New Media from the future... a look at infographics and commercials from 2027, courtesy of a the movie Children of Men. (qt, sound)
posted by Dave Faris at 3:00 PM PST - 88 comments

Dylan Hears a Who! Bob, that is. Caution: autoplaying audio. (Via)
posted by staggernation at 1:11 PM PST - 43 comments

ESA's Rosetta probe just flew by Mars en route to a deep space rendezvous with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. During the 200 km close flyby, the Rosetta's Philae Lander camera got this lovely view of the craft's solar panel backdropped by the Martian arc, plus an animation of the moon Phobos' shadow on the Martian surface, and more lovely Mars imagery.
posted by brownpau at 1:03 PM PST - 14 comments

Google [sic] chairman pwned [sic] on business card.
Also, save $$money$$ with typos!!
posted by Terminal Verbosity at 12:20 PM PST - 61 comments

The Integrator is Mathematica's integration capabilities, available over the web. Other online resources from Wolfram include Tones, an automatic music generator, and the venerable Mathworld, an extensive collection of math terms and theorems. (which, yes, has been mentioned previously.)
posted by Upton O'Good at 11:35 AM PST - 29 comments

The Philosophy Podcast seems to be a podcast where great philosophical works are read aloud. Unfortunately you need to pay for the full works, but the bits are fun. For something a little more contemporary, check out Philosophy Talk, hosted by Ken Taylor and one of the funniest contemporary analytic philosophers: John Perry. In particular, check out Perry's light essays in which the power of procrastination can be harnessed (and apparently now put on t-shirts), an ideal desk is a giant lazy susan, and connections are drawn between golf and suffering.
posted by ontic at 10:47 AM PST - 8 comments

The Hillary Show. For those that base their political ideas on poorly drawn caricatures.
posted by four panels at 10:20 AM PST - 68 comments

From Human Rights Watch:

...He had spent a year and a half in captivity without even a glimpse of natural light. One day the Americans opened up a skylight in his building. “They brought me a chair and let me sit under the skylight,” he remembered. “I was so happy. I joked with them, pretending to call outside, ‘Help! Someone help me! Let me out!’” ...One photo that surprised Jabour was of a boy named Talha, who appeared to be nine or ten years old. His father was said to be Hamza al-Jofi, a militant leader in Waziristan. When Jabour saw the photo of Talha, who was apparently in custody, he expressed amazement that the United States was holding someone so young.

The Case of Marwan Jabour
US: Secret CIA Prisoners Still Missing
posted by y2karl at 8:28 AM PST - 71 comments

An illustrated edition of the Ise Monogatari (Wikipedia, review of translation). Yeah, yeah, it's in Japanese, but just keep hitting the forward button (the leftmost of the two on the right, red/brown rather than blue/green) and you'll find lots of pretty pictures. I can't improve on the descriptions by Matt of No-sword, where I found it, so I'll just quote him: "Behold our hero maxin' and relaxin' at his writing-desk, looking like he just got hired as a middle manager at his dad's lighter-flint concern! Thrill to the famous scene where he is visited by the Pineapple of Golden Week Past! Laugh as he is mistaken for a member of Aerosmith! Wonder why everyone is just sitting around smiling contentedly when the building is obviously on fire!"
posted by languagehat at 7:59 AM PST - 23 comments

Batmobile Up for Auction today in the UK. A classic car from 1966.
posted by three blind mice at 6:37 AM PST - 28 comments

"From the first day on pots and pans, I knew what I wanted. I was never cool with being small-time -- that's what got me locked up in the first place: I wanted to be the man."
In 1988 Jeff Henderson landed himself in a federal prison for dealing cocaine. In 2007 he's executive chef at Cafe Bellagio in Las Vegas. Cooked: From the Streets to the Stove, from Cocaine to Foie Gras is his story.
posted by teem at 4:44 AM PST - 15 comments

The effects of weightlessness are most associated with astronauts, but a more practical application can be seen in this dog.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 3:54 AM PST - 39 comments

The Complete Sherlock Holmes, featuring "the largest collection of Holmesian graphics online", a Scholars' Wing featuring essays and articles, pastiche and parodies. Arthur Conan Doyle's champion of logic and reason is the antithesis of the author's spiritualist beliefs. In his will (5.B), Doyle left sums of money to the Spiritualist Alliance of London and the Psychic College stating "...these institutions represent the most important religious movement that this world now holds". His belief in the occult and in particular fairies is surprising, yet somewhat understandable considering the era in which he lived.
posted by sluglicker at 2:37 AM PST - 8 comments

Cheney unharmed. (The closest he ever came to seeing action in battle though)
posted by growabrain at 12:13 AM PST - 156 comments