MetaFilter

Wall Street Journal owners officially considering joining the Borg
Minority owner Jim Ottoway vehemently opposed. One wonders what the opinion of a Senator from New York is?
posted by specialk420 at 11:01 PM PST - 27 comments

Associated Press reports Nessie caught on tape! News rockets around the world! Surprise: Amazing footage of mythical creature turns out to be a blob. In that same link, the BBC interviews the guy who filmed the tape and saw the monster. Nessie spotter: "I surmise it's going to be 45 feet long." Interviewer: "Could it be an otter?" Nessie spotter: "It could be an otter."
posted by bicyclefish at 10:02 PM PST - 36 comments

Happy Blue Moon! A dear friend IM'd me today, and told me it was blue moon... which was funny, because we had just been talking about it the day before — oblivious of tonight's occurance. Don't know what a blue moon is? Well, wikipedia has the answer, of course... In the mood for a little music? Well, you can always download the The Marcels classic or just sing the song yourself with a little help... or throw caution to the wind, and listen to Pink Moon instead.
posted by silusGROK at 9:36 PM PST - 21 comments

Gogol Bordello describe their music as "Gypsy Punk." Formerly the Bela Bartoks, singer Eugene Hutz was in the movie Everything Is Illuminated, as was their song Start Wearing Purple.
posted by homunculus at 9:30 PM PST - 45 comments

As Wolfdaddy put it last time we did this: "Yeah, like we didn't know that already." - So as the Glass Closet gets a tad smaller, might we be rapidly approaching that long hoped-for "tipping point" where those inside the glass no longer feel the need to play word games and dance around who they are, instead of standing up to be counted?
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 9:09 PM PST - 65 comments

Would you pay $22K for a designer Ashera "lifestyle" cat? ($6,000 extra if you don't want to wait 9-12 months for delivery)
posted by growabrain at 8:24 PM PST - 73 comments

The Internet Library of Early Journals :: A digital library of 18th and 19th Century journals
posted by anastasiav at 7:08 PM PST - 24 comments

Lumosity Brain Games [via mefi projects]
posted by iurodivii at 6:54 PM PST - 12 comments

LOLfeeds turns any RSS feed into cat macros. For instance: this place, MetaTalk, or Craigslist personals.
posted by mendel at 6:40 PM PST - 76 comments

'Google Gears' is program interface for AJAX application developers. * A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server * A database, to store and access data from within the browser * A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background
posted by acro at 5:58 PM PST - 20 comments

How to Swear in any language.
posted by hama7 at 3:32 PM PST - 58 comments

The Western Tradition, an outstanding 52-part instructional video series about the history of western civilization, is available as free streaming video.
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot at 3:13 PM PST - 13 comments

Terra-cotta (Italian for "earth-cooked") was once a versatile material for architecture ornamentation. (A short video about the process) [QuickTime] It was generally used to supplement brick and tiles of similar colour in late Victorian buildings. The Natural History Museum in London has been called architect Albert Waterhouse's Terracotta Menagerie. (Take the Terracotta Tour.) Examples of architectural terracotta in America: Buffalo, NY, St. Louis, MO, Washington State, and many, many buildings in NYC (including 200 Gargoyles and Chimera salvaged from lost buildings). Just when you thought the past might be vanishing a little too quickly, terra cotta is coming back in new ways. See also: Understanding and Concerving Terracotta and The Preservation of Historic Glazed Architectural Terra-Cotta.
posted by spock at 2:10 PM PST - 8 comments

The first 3 months of a panda's life, in photos (courtesy of the World Wildlife Foundation). Bonus link: a gaggle of pandas make for the most adorable news outtakes ever.
posted by jonson at 1:50 PM PST - 34 comments

SlitherLink - a little spatial-numerical puzzle. Here's a better exposition of the rules from the puzzle's inventors, and another collection of puzzles. Oh, and a little survey of other sneaky, snaky puzzles.
posted by Wolfdog at 1:18 PM PST - 18 comments

Influenced by two related news items...
Were you a Blue Peter or a Magpie kid ? And on Saturday morning: Swap Shop or Tiswas ?
posted by Webbster at 11:53 AM PST - 29 comments

Recycle your computer junk. A large US office supply retailer just became the first to offer everyday, in-store recycling for computers & other office technology, and will recycle them using EPA guidelines. Only $10 an item (smaller stuff like mice and keyboards are free).
posted by Dave Faris at 11:27 AM PST - 52 comments

Inner lip tattoos
posted by GuyZero at 11:18 AM PST - 39 comments

Although Industrial Musicals and their jaunty odes to corporate pride and brand loyalty have seen the same fate as the values they espoused (mostly), goofily earnest and undeniable catchy tunes like Exxon's Up Came Oil♫, General Electric's Make a Woman Out of Your Wife♫, and The Monroe Calculator Company's 1660 & 65♫ are still as potent as all get out! [More songs and albums to help you get your gray flannel funk on inside]
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 11:08 AM PST - 24 comments

Atomage Magazine, possibly the first fetish magazine, produced by clothing designer turned photographer John Sutcliffe, who clearly had a special place reserved in his heart for head-to-toe rubberwear.
posted by serazin at 10:50 AM PST - 6 comments

Galloping Gertie for the 21st Century. A friend sent me a link to this photo set. Quite something. Let's hope this doesn't happen again.
posted by humboldt32 at 9:37 AM PST - 40 comments

Dinos' might in army sights. The Comanche National Grasslands located near The Sex Change Capital of the World is under threat by an expanding Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site [attached to Fort Carson]. Home to countless fossils, and Native American cave art, the Purgatoire River could end up like The Stronghold Unit of the Badlands in South Dakota with one of the largest dinosaur tracks site in the world damaged or destroyed and rendered inaccessible to scientists.
posted by Stynxno at 8:15 AM PST - 12 comments

Escape from Real Bitch Island -- Nineteen and gay, too effeminate to hide, and persecuted by haters in his small town, Chris Crocker turned to the web to vent. Now he's a huge YouTube celebrity. Is the internet Chris Crocker's ticket out?
posted by ericb at 8:09 AM PST - 128 comments

Le Conversazioni: Last summer a group of writers including David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, and Jeffrey Eugenides gathered on the Isle of Capri to discuss language and identity. This year's lineup includes Ethan Coen, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Claire Messud, and Chuck Palahniuk.
posted by mattbucher at 7:53 AM PST - 8 comments

1986 Mac Plus vs. 2007 AMD Dual Core "When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity." Factor in the internet, and the technological advances have brought me negative productivity.
posted by jdroth at 7:23 AM PST - 77 comments

"Twittering the first lines of books so you don't have to"
posted by Lezzles at 7:06 AM PST - 16 comments

The Days They Changed the Gauge. Early in the development of railroads in the American South, the builders departed from the standard 4' 8 1/2" gauge and built their railroads with the rails 5 feet apart. As part of a trend of increased government standardization, between May 30 and June 1 1886, workers moved over 11,000 miles of track 3 inches to the new standard gauge of 4' 9". [more inside]
posted by marxchivist at 4:28 AM PST - 29 comments

This time, it was a fax. Last time, it was Mooninites.
posted by davy at 4:06 AM PST - 35 comments

"Anonymous" bloggers, don't be stupid. A physician blogs about his malpractice suit during the trial, using an alias, and is unmasked in court. He settles the next day.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 3:14 AM PST - 35 comments

The Bush administration has vowed that it will fight to keep meatpackers from voluntarily testing all of their cows for mad cow disease. Currently, the Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1 percent of slaughtered cows. Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of their cows, but larger meat companies have objected, fearing that they might need to test their own cows to stay competitive. The Agriculture Department has also argued that potential false positives could harm the meat industry. Meanwhile, the president, under pressure from the cattle industry, is serving more beef to various visiting foreign statesemen and lamenting that mad cow fears are preventing the Chinese from enjoying American beef: “They need to be eating US beef. It's good for them. They'll like it.” When China rejects our food, shouldn’t we be worried?
posted by kyrademon at 12:56 AM PST - 100 comments

Find the star in each stage. [flash]
posted by churl at 12:33 AM PST - 29 comments