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A man, just back from a trip abroad, went to an incompetent fortune-teller. He asked about his family, and the fortune-teller replied: "Everyone is fine, especially your father." When the man objected that his father had been dead for ten years, the reply came: "You have no clue who your real father is."--that's one of the jokes from The Laughter Lover (Philogelos), an ancient Greek joke book published in the 4th or 5th century AD. The New Yorker commented on it, and other old jokes here, stating about one of the possible authors: ... there is some scholarly speculation that the Hierocles in question was a fifth-century Alexandrian philosopher of that name who was once publicly flogged in Constantinople for paganism, which, as one classicist has observed, “might have given him a taste for mordant wit.”
posted by amberglow at 9:45 PM PST - 12 comments

120 Years of Electronic Music. Electronic musical instruments 1870 -1990.
posted by the fire you left me at 6:20 PM PST - 12 comments

MP3 Blog Roundup • A far-flung variety of free mp3 singles posted almost daily. Without Sense's roundup I would have never stumbled across the excellent Enchanted Sounds of the Islanders. Equally worth bookmarking: Fat Planet, NewFlux, Pop77, ScissorKick, TangMonkey, TtIKtDA, Tofu Hut, Cocaine Blunts & Hip-Hop Tapes, Music for Robots, Soul Sides, MoistWorks, A Million LoveSongs, Copy Right?, The Big Ticket, TalkieWalkie, Bubblegum Machine, Fingertips, #1 Songs in Heaven, Mythical Beast, Fruits of Chaos, Moebius Rex...
posted by dhoyt at 6:11 PM PST - 43 comments

Chinese Elvis.
posted by reklaw at 5:16 PM PST - 17 comments

The Ice Hotel, a working 5,000 square metre hotel made entirely of 30,000 tons of snow and 4,000 tons of ice.
posted by bluedaniel at 2:37 PM PST - 12 comments

Fun with your tracheostomy.
posted by Wet Spot at 1:28 PM PST - 9 comments

“I bid you peace…” Jeff Smith, The Frugal Gourmet, dead at 65. One of television’s most popular cooking shows throughout the 80s and 90s, The Frugal Gourmet defined the genre. An ordained United Methodist chaplain, Smith lost his PBS show in 1997 after eight men accused him of sexual assault during the 1970s. Denying the allegations, Smith nonetheless settled the cases out of court. Did the Frugal Gourmet do the ultimate shark jump? Maybe someone should ask Elmo.
posted by wfrgms at 1:20 PM PST - 28 comments

Fork-you! :: spend a rainy Saturday afternoon learning how to bend forks with your mind. Sort of.
posted by anastasiav at 12:53 PM PST - 4 comments

Blast Off to Democracy! [dialup or broadband, Quicktime req'd]
The second installment of the Partisan Jab project- first episode discussed here.
posted by moonbird at 7:18 AM PST - 6 comments

Friday Saturday Flash Fun - MorrisseyDance (warning - cheesy audio)
posted by triv at 3:58 AM PST - 19 comments

Europeans on Europeans. Reader's Digest dispatched researchers to 38 towns in 19 countries across Europe, from the UK to Russia, inviting nearly 4,000 respondents to comment on any country but their own. Italians finished as "most liked," Germans as "least liked," Belgians as the "least sexy," and Paris triumphed as "favorite European city." The full results can be seen here. (PDF)
posted by Ljubljana at 1:47 AM PST - 39 comments

Brain implants 'read' monkey minds. (No, not that monkey mind.) A group of CalTech neuroscientists have been able to predict the actions of monkeys by observing neural activity in the parietal and premotor cortices related to planning and motivation (PDF.) Other research previously allowed monkeys to control a robotic arm with their minds; this observed the higher-level goal and value signals, and could lead to more natural thought-activated prosthetic devices for people with paralysis. [Via MonkeyFilter.]
posted by homunculus at 12:23 AM PST - 29 comments