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A walk in the park? How about 250 km (150 miles) over Sahara sand dunes in temperatures reaching 44°C (111°F) carrying all your food and gear. Stage 4 was a 52 mile double marathon. Today it was just a simple 26 miler. 4800 masochists have done it since 1986, ranging in age from 17 to 78. The Ahansal brothers took 7 hours 33 minutes to finish the 84 km leg. Slower than last year because of the strong winds and blowing sand. Luke Cunliffe has been blogging his experience at the end of each day. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I guess. Shall we form a MeFi team for next year?
posted by Geo at 11:17 PM PST - 5 comments

Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Yo-Yo. Health officials in New York are concerned about "water yo-yos", a hot new toy imported from Asia filled with a "foul-smelling liquid" that has made some kids ill. So far, they haven't been able to figure out what the liquid is, who manufactures the toys, or who brings them into the United States.
posted by jjg at 9:06 PM PST - 30 comments

Still a few days left for peace. Peace Poster design contest ends April 17th.
posted by crunchland at 9:06 PM PST - 2 comments

Last week some friends of mine launched terroristidkit.com to, as they put it, "[poke] fun at the racial profiling, loss of civil liberties and terrorist paranoia that is sweeping the US." Five days later Register.com seized their domain and refuses to explain why, despite the fact that they complied with two requests for identity verification and even called Register.com to talk about it; after putting them on hold for twenty minutes, Register.com put the phone down. Today the domain is now owned by Register.com. What the hell is going on?
posted by lia at 6:28 PM PST - 52 comments

Dealing With Saddam What's in the cards for the missing members of the Iraqi high command? According to Reuters AlertNet "The United States will soon deliver Iraq's deposed president Saddam Hussein and his inner circle into the hands of its own troops -- as a deck of playing cards...Brigadier General Vincent Brooks held up one of the first examples of the card packs at a Central Command briefing on Friday, explaining that each card depicted a character the United States wanted pursued, killed or captured." Checking the deck quite predictably we find that Saddam is portrayed as the Ace of Spades, and his strong-arm younger son Qusay is tricked out as Ace of Clubs. Ironically, elder-psychopathic progeny Uday, who is said to favor the use of rape as a weapon of torture, is imaged as the Ace of Hearts. An Adobe Acrobat PDF image of the full deck is available at Defense Link.

Is this the the new US military card game, Poke-Iman? "Hey, soldiers...gotta catch 'em all!"
posted by Dunvegan at 5:53 PM PST - 27 comments

The (Re)making Project: "There is no such thing as an original play," says playwright Charles Mee. His site offers full-length transcriptions of his own hilarious, profound works and encourages users to plunder them: "Please feel free to take the plays from this website and use them as a resource for your own work: cut them up, rearrange them, rewrite them, throw things out, put things in, do whatever you like with them.." Mee's generous, Classicist approach to his work contrasts sharply with, say, Lars Ulrich.

In helping live theater overcome its marginalization in the U.S., Mee's accessible, re-mixed adaptations of Greek tragedies seem like a positive contribution. But why does live entertainment like sports and music draw Friday-night crowds while theater plays to a tiny national audience?
posted by dhoyt at 3:09 PM PST - 21 comments

Is Cuba Next? As long as you're cleaning up for Poppy, why not clean up for the Democrat's martyred Sun King at the same time?
posted by alms at 2:00 PM PST - 29 comments

Jason Pettus is back online. While offline, he was stood up by a swinger, tried out for a reality tv show, had his book courted, then rejected by a publisher, and had six teeth removed. Before there was a Blogger, before "weblog" was even a word, Pettus was chronicling his life and (mis)adventures as a novelist, poet, and porn aficionado struggling to geek out a living in Chicago. I can't believe I went 3 months with no daily dose of Pettus. Thank the stars, he hath returned, with a snappy new design.
posted by eustacescrubb at 1:27 PM PST - 14 comments

"Is it a boy or a girl?" This simple, common question can be traumatic for some parents. Approximately one out of every 2,000 babies is born with ambiguous genitals, meaning that it is not clear whether the baby is a boy or girl. What to do in such a case? A new study indicates that "gender-assigning surgery," to give the child more "normal" genitals, may increase sexual difficulties later. [more inside]
posted by soyjoy at 1:08 PM PST - 45 comments

Cow Annoyer. It's just like being back on the farm. Moo. [Flash.]
posted by homunculus at 12:02 PM PST - 10 comments

Let's Just Send Suge Knight In To Do It Right! A radio station thought to be backed by the CIA has been broadcasting a gangsta rap-style parody of Saddam Hussein to Iraq.
posted by turbanhead at 12:02 PM PST - 16 comments

We all know that a number of journalists have quit the embedded roles they were playing. And while Saddam's regime may have been quite brutal to the press and others, some claim the recent loss of a few journalists was no accident.
posted by woil at 11:26 AM PST - 17 comments

I yearn for your tasty flesh

[ Gene Study Finds Cannibal Pattern ] - "Deep in the recesses of the human heart, lurking guiltily beneath the threshold of consciousness, there may lie a depraved craving — for the forbidden taste of human flesh. The basis for this morbid accusation, made by a team of researchers in London, is a genetic signature, found almost worldwide, that points to a long history of cannibalism" (NYT)
posted by troutfishing at 11:10 AM PST - 45 comments

Gifted Students Despite her boarding-school education and a personal tutor, Maude Bunn's SAT scores weren't high enough for a typical student to earn admission to Duke University. But Ms. Bunn had something else going for her -- coffeemakers. Her Bunn forebears built a fortune on them and, with Duke hoping to woo her wealthy parents as donors, she was admitted. Afterward, her parents promptly became co-chairmen of a Duke fund-raising effort aimed at other Duke parents. "My child was given a gift, she got in, and now I'm giving back," says Maude's mother, Cissy Bunn, who declines to say how much the family has contributed to the university.
posted by orange swan at 10:31 AM PST - 59 comments

The Dictators Contest "Back by popular demand is the Original Dictators Contest. 16 of the last century's most fearsome autocrats have been selected and pitted randomly against one another to compete for the title Dictator of Dictators". If you don't see your favorite Dictator, try The Second Dictators Contest. Agree with their results? Did they forget anyone?
posted by Mack Twain at 10:15 AM PST - 5 comments

Soaking the Rich This post probably won't be very well received in this forum which is mostly consisted of lefties, but can you really justify stealing such a disproportionate amount from the rich?

Conventional wisdom holds, correctly, that income inequality has been increasing in recent years, though it still isn't as great now as in some past periods. But while incomes are distributed unequally, the federal tax burden is distributed far more unequally.
posted by VeGiTo at 9:35 AM PST - 108 comments

Corporate PR and an obvious parallel? Yesterday, Space Mountain at Disneyland unexpectedly closed for a two year rehab. This was planned for September but a severe maintenance issue seems to have forced their hand. This is a huge things in certain circles, and this guy sees a parallel in the official version of events.
posted by obfusciatrist at 8:01 AM PST - 18 comments

PayPal charged with breaking Patriot Act. Anybody care to explain what does terrorism have to do with glambing? (No, it is not a rescued April fool's joke ...)
posted by magullo at 7:59 AM PST - 10 comments

Hippo Girl [Flash], new from Joel Veitch's rathergood.com. A celebration of accepting whatever hand the universe deals you.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 7:58 AM PST - 6 comments

Friday Flash: Move Your Butt! This Frogger adaptation is a promotion for a new children's book from Scholastic, The Day My Butt Went Psycho! Where does a book like this come from? Australia, of course. (Link via the Spinnoff Forums.)
posted by UKnowForKids at 7:50 AM PST - 5 comments

EyeWitness: History through the eyes of those who lived it.
posted by hama7 at 6:51 AM PST - 5 comments

The idea: A place for posting songs where they might actually get heard -- preferably someone who can help get it published. We've teamed with SuperfastNetworks to create the first song blog**.

Will the the Metafilter Music Channel be next?
**Actually it works with any digital content.
posted by Shane at 6:45 AM PST - 7 comments

1,200 people in the UK die each year due to passive smoking at work.
Following on from New York's tough stance on smokers, the UK is considering banning smoking in all restaurants in order to cut the number of deaths by passive smoking.
posted by Mwongozi at 6:27 AM PST - 52 comments

Apple Reportedly in Talks to Buy Universal Music!
posted by raaka at 5:40 AM PST - 28 comments

Peeps! All about peeps! So sweet and chewy and cute all over. Apparently, they're not just for Easter anymore. They've come a long way since I got the little yellow guys in my Easter basket as a kid, apparently. I had no idea this company had gotten so far flung in its enterprise.
posted by psmealey at 5:38 AM PST - 12 comments

Ough!* I pronounce the English language unpronounceable: Arriba! Arriba! Arriba! Speedy Gonzales here. When will you make up your minds and stop making fun of pestering us poor foreigners? I mean, it's not as if you yourselves can agree on how to pronounce almost anything... [*As in "plough". Not as in through, , thought, thorough, thought, hiccough, lough or enough already!]
posted by Carlos Quevedo at 5:23 AM PST - 84 comments

New 'Matrix: Reloaded' Trailer. Best one yet, .zip, 94mb. Via /.
posted by armoured-ant at 2:11 AM PST - 13 comments

The Bass Museum of Beer. The history of the Black Horse, Findon, West Sussex. A guide to historic pub interiors, from the Campaign for Real Ale. Pub names for all, an amusing pastime. An online guide to pub games. Flash versions of pub games. Unusual pub names of Lancashire. The history of Coaching inns. An interactive map of pubs and clubs of Oxford. Venus and Adonis at the White Hart Inn, St. Albans (you may disagree with the scholarship, but the images are nice). The Star Inn, Bath, an historic pub. A virtual pub crawl of Hull. A virtual pub crawl of Shrewsbury. The Bird and Baby, favoured by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. (More on Tolkien's Oxford). Guide to Gloucestershire pubs. The Crooked House in the West Midlands (more here via the Strangest Pubs in Britain). The World Marbles Championship takes place every year at a pub in Sussex.
posted by plep at 12:29 AM PST - 13 comments

A Sexual Clash of Civilizations? Using data from the World Values Survey, two researchers argue that Samuel Huntington's theory of a clash of Islamic and Western civilizations completely ignores the role of sexual tolerance as an indicator of a democratic society. An interesting point to ponder when Islamic countries and Christian Right activists have teamed up to lobby the United Nations against the expansion of gay rights and family planning.
posted by jonp72 at 12:06 AM PST - 20 comments