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The Cutty Sark burns. Nineteenth century tea clipper, preserved as a museum-ship in Greenwich since the fifties, is currently ablaze.
posted by hydatius at 10:58 PM PST - 48 comments

Homo sapiens enjoys carving big pictures of himself in the ground. Exhibit A: The Wilmington Long Man, a geoglyph associated with a Morris dancing squad, and curiously similar to an Andean carving at the Tiwanuku site. Exhibit B: The rude giant of Cerne Abbas, an impressively well-endowed figure of similarly unknown origin. (aerial photo) Over in Chile, they've got El gigante de Atacama. Oh, and there's also a 3,000 year old white horse. The hill on which it was carved was featured in the video for Kate Bush's Cloudbusting (obligatory Kate Bush/Donald Sutherland Youtube goodness).
posted by greatgefilte at 9:46 PM PST - 23 comments

Sure, you probably know in France that McDonald’s serves the Royale with cheese (thanks to the famous scene in Pulp Fiction) but did you know that McDonald’s all around the world offer a number of different items catering to their cultures? Ok, you might’ve known. But you might not know exactly what they serve. Here are some of your McDonald’s options in countries all over the world.
posted by ColdChef at 8:01 PM PST - 105 comments

Chicken chicken chicken, chicken chicken? Chicken chicken chicken chicken—chicken chicken chicken-chicken chicken chicken chicken. Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken?! (Chicken chicken.)
posted by grouse at 1:57 PM PST - 104 comments

Perfect Scrambled Eggs | Really Fresh Venison | Pork Chops | Broccoli Soup | Gordon Ramsey Hates Liars
posted by sluglicker at 1:12 PM PST - 92 comments

WagnerFilter: Tomorrow, Monday May 21st, CBC 2 broadcasts the Canadian Opera Company's performance of The Ring in its entirety, starting at 8 a.m (in all time zones) and running until midnight. Grand opera at its grandest; tune in for one of Western music's greatest achievements.
posted by jokeefe at 11:09 AM PST - 34 comments

Mass Grave Ghosts [NY Times BugMeNot]
posted by trinarian at 10:44 AM PST - 30 comments

The comic-opera Huey Long: Journalist, teacher, legal advisor to the abortive American-Indian-run state of Sequoyah, ‘Alfalfa Bill’ Murray (wiki) ran Dust Bowl Oklahoma with an iron fist - calling out the National Guard forty-seven times in four years and setting off a three-day armed standoff with the state of Texas. In 1932, his “Bread, Butter, Bacon, and Beans” Presidential platform was so badly eclipsed by The New Deal, his delegates officially threw their votes to a joke candidate (balloting). Unlike his fellow Depression-era populists, Murray continued as a public figure post-war, campaigning for worker’s rights, the United Nations, segregation, exporting the Jews to Madagascar, and winning the Cold War by putting ethnic Russians in internment camps. Seventy-five years on, he was honored by the Oklahoma legislature for the only bit that actually mattered, aretheyrite?
posted by ormondsacker at 9:51 AM PST - 7 comments

Christian Domestic Discipline: "[W]hen you cook a steak, and use high heat to seer the top, and then try to eat it you will find the steak cold and unsatisfying, just like a woman might feel after a very brief but hard spanking, yes she cried but only out of pain and learned only pain from the spanking. But slowly warming her bottom up, you will be able to spank her longer." Be sure not to miss the Crotchless Pantaloons!
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 9:29 AM PST - 110 comments

Learn Spanish with podcasts from SpanishSense.
posted by klue at 6:54 AM PST - 14 comments

How to improve your voice and speech. Also, other helpful tips to help make life easier, such as how to tell if someone's lying to you, how to make people like you, how to handle yourself in a stupid argument and most critically, how to control your ejaculation pic NSFW.
posted by psmealey at 5:00 AM PST - 59 comments

Putins spy war on the West White House intelligence advisers believe no other country is as aggressive as Russia in trying to obtain US secrets, with the possible exception of China. In particular the SVR, as the former KGB’s foreign intelligence arm is now known, is using a network of undercover agents in America to gather classified information about sensitive technologies, including military projects under development and high-tech research.
posted by jouke at 4:54 AM PST - 30 comments

Chicago based designer & music fan J Tyler took it upon himself to craft a music video for The Arcade Fire song "My Body Is A Cage" using clips from the classic Sergio Leone film Once Upon A Time in the West. The clips evoke the elegaic, reflectively somber beauty in the song remarkably well - so well that the video reached the attention of someone in the Arcade Fire's camp, who emailed Tyler and requested his permission to post his work on their official site. If you have the bandwidth, I highly recommend this direct download link to a high-res quicktime version, it's much, much better than streaming flash.
posted by jonson at 12:25 AM PST - 72 comments