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"I mean, seriously we're adorable. How could we have a blog that didn't feature us up front and center? ;)" Meet Adam and Andrew. They blog about the aesthetics of Disney. Those little details that are found in all aspects of Disney parks (and related materials): bathroom signs, murals (bathrooms again), vintage Dumbo book illustrations, Epcot's UK (part of their Shake to Randomize series), Theming At Animal Kingdom's Serka Zong Bazaar, and Six Things I DON'T Hate About The Italy Pavilion At Epcot. (In fact The whole month of June 2012 is a treasure.) There's also a podcast.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:40 PM PST - 21 comments

Joaquin Phoenix's Forehead (SLYT)
posted by EXISTENZ IS PAUSED at 8:12 PM PST - 21 comments

Two 30 year old guys lip syncing a conversation between two 60 year old women: "I recorded a random conversation between my mom and my aunt and we acted it out."
posted by bookman117 at 7:43 PM PST - 17 comments

A three-part series looking at the history of France's black community and their long struggle for recognition. French President Francois Hollande ran on a platform promising to eliminate the word 'race' from France’s constitution. But critics were quick to point out the disparity between constitutional reform and actual practice. [more inside]
posted by whyareyouatriangle at 7:41 PM PST - 6 comments

"Moby Dick" can be an intimidating read, so why not whet your appetite with some source material? "Mocha Dick" was a giant sperm whale in the early 1800's who destroyed over 20 whaling ships. You can read the original 1839 article written by explorer Jeremiah Reynolds that helped inspire Herman Melville in the creation of his masterwork. If even that is too much for you, author Brian Heinz and artist Randall Enos have created a striking children's book based on the original story.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:22 PM PST - 32 comments

Sometimes the best thing about David Blaine's magic tricks are the reactions he elicits. A rather Regarding Henry-ish Harrison Ford: "Get the fuck outta my house." A predictably overwrought Ricky Gervais: "Oh for fuck's sake!" Or maybe you just enjoy seeing someone manhandling George W. Bush while the President maintains a look of childlike wonder.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 5:43 PM PST - 64 comments

Attack of the purse snatchers: gender and bag policies in U.S. comic book stores

What could a clerk at a comic book store possibly say to a new female customer to make her feel as alien and unwelcome as possible? Would it be some sort of overtly sexist slur, or an inappropriate comment about her appearance? Or could it perhaps be something as presumably innocuous as: "I’m going to need to take your bag before you go any further."

posted by Lexica at 4:33 PM PST - 132 comments

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, is a system of three cameras mounted on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that capture high resolution photos of the lunar surface . . . .The LROC team assembled 10,581 NAC [narrow angle camera] images, collected over 4 years, into a spectacular northern polar mosaic.
posted by insectosaurus at 4:28 PM PST - 5 comments

A federal judge declared California's death penalty unconstitutional Wednesday, saying delays of 25 years or more in deciding appeals and carrying out occasional executions have created an arbitrary and irrational system that serves no legitimate purpose. Executions in California have already been on hold since 2006, due to problems with the procedures associated with lethal injection. If the ruling is upheld, California will join 18 other states (plus D.C.) that have abolished capital punishment. (Read the court's opinion here.)
posted by scody at 4:22 PM PST - 47 comments

[PATRYK FILMS] is video artist Patryk Ludamage making videos for some of his favorite music, spinning gold from fuzzy videotape footage.

Oneohtrix Point Never: Sleep Dealer • KGB Nights • Remember • Power of Persuasion

Chuck Person (0PN's Daniel Lopatin): Eccojam A3
[more inside]
posted by porn in the woods at 4:14 PM PST - 3 comments

The Mirror Man Surgery and medication have been found to be only slightly or not at all effective when dealing with phantom pain... In 2008, Stephen ... had a particularly agonising bout of phantom pain. “I was not presentable for 72 hours,” he says. He was aware of mirror therapy from having looked online for treatments, and he decided to give it a try. He got into his truck and drove two-and-a-half hours to the nearest Home Depot to buy a mirror. He tried it right there in the parking lot, and in five minutes the pain was gone. [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 2:55 PM PST - 19 comments

Haunting Surreal Photographs from the 60s Inspired by Children’s Nightmares

Noted American photographer Arthur Tress is known for his strangely posed and articulated surrealist work. Born in November of 1940, he was merely in his twenties when one of his most poignant collections of work came to life. Depicting the dreams of children in the eeriest of forms, he dives into the subconscious side of children’s minds and draws out their biggest fears in the haunting photos that follow.

[more inside]
posted by aka burlap at 1:28 PM PST - 16 comments

This Makes Me Uncomfortable - A Pinterest Board for innocently disturbing things (Slightly Not Safe For Work, Certainly Not Safe For Sanity)
posted by The Whelk at 1:03 PM PST - 81 comments

When the Boss Says, 'Don't Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid'
posted by yeoz at 12:37 PM PST - 73 comments

JIBO: The World's First Family Robot [more inside]
posted by overeducated_alligator at 11:53 AM PST - 82 comments

Maestro Lorin Maazel died at his home in Castleton, Va. on July 13, following a brief illness. Called to the podium and handed the baton by the great Toscanini as a child, Maazel's career spanned decades and saw him to the podium of most of the world's great orchestras. Maazel was legendary for his ruthlessness of the execution: "A conductor must lead, and people want to be led; that's why they're there."
posted by Dashy at 10:59 AM PST - 17 comments

A viral video series uses role reversal to humorously highlight casual insensitivities & stereotyping: If Asians Said The Stuff White People Say - If Black People Said The Stuff White People Say - If Latinos Said The Stuff White People Say (YouTube; each video ~2 min.) [more inside]
posted by flex at 10:42 AM PST - 225 comments

"We sort our kids. We rate them. We chart them, and we measure their progress against the rest of the country and pray that they come out on the high end of the curve. And frankly, it's all horseshit. Every last bit of it. The competition industry is crushing us all." Drew Magary, at Deadspin, unloads on the idea that "these kids today" are little ninnies made soft by participation trophies and unscored soccer games. [more inside]
posted by escabeche at 10:41 AM PST - 49 comments

"If I had done this in either of New York's baseball stadiums I would have bankrupted myself by the sixth inning."
posted by snottydick at 10:40 AM PST - 29 comments

While the New Republic praises Orphan Black for its portrayal of the Female Gaze and avoidance of the usual male orientated titillation:

As a show chiefly concerned with the ways women’s bodies are commodified and controlled, “Orphan Black” is careful not to view its female characters with that same hungry eye. This is a triumph: On so many shows, the camera works at cross-purposes to the high-minded themes. “Game of Thrones” depicts women and girls straining against a world that abuses and sexualizes their bodies—then it glamorizes and fetishizes that abuse. “True Detective” criticizes men who violate girls, then lovingly reduces women to bouncing breasts or artfully posed corpses.

(Spoilers inside) [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 10:36 AM PST - 47 comments

How New World Wine Resurrects Old Religion

I used to be a regular at a wine bar in San Clemente, a beach town in California where my wife and I lived when we were first married. The ‘Tuscan’ decor of the place was a little too vivid for my taste, but the wine was priced right and the owner was a great conversationalist. He would tell us stories from behind the bar about his travels to vineyards in Chile and New Zealand, and he had a charming populist streak. When people got too pretentious about the wine, he would roll his eyes and say: ‘Relax, it’s just a beverage.’ He was wrong about that, of course. Since its invention more than 8,000 years ago, wine has always been more than just a beverage.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:34 AM PST - 11 comments

An enormous hole has appeared (YouTube, 0:34) in Russia's Yamal Peninsula, near the Bovanenkovo natural-gas field. 'We can definitely say that it is not a meteorite. No details yet,' said a spokesman.
posted by theodolite at 10:11 AM PST - 148 comments

What may help lower the incidence of rape in Darfur? Stoves. "Collecting firewood for cooking puts women in Sudan's conflict-plagued and impoverished Darfur region at risk of rape. But a simple stove that replaces traditional open fires has cut the time they spend on potentially dangerous missions looking for wood, while also helping the environment and boosting their finances, the United Nations World Food Programme says." However, scholar Samer Abdelnour criticizes "the role advocacy can play in transforming far-away crises into “manageable problems” that can be solved through simple technical solutions. A telling example is the portrayal of efficient cookstoves as a tool for preventing rape and other forms of gender-based violence, first in Darfur and now globally." [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:42 AM PST - 43 comments

The new issue of the journal The Good Society is about "Democratic Theory and Mass Incaceration." All articles are available online.

From the Introduction: The United States is the “world champion” in incarceration, to borrow Nils Christie's words, and United Kingdom jurisdictions, though some distance behind, are persistently among the European countries with the highest per capita rates of imprisonment [...] This symposium of the Good Society seeks to catalyze an engaged, multi-disciplinary discussion among philosophers, political theorists, and theoretically inclined criminologists on how contemporary democratic theory might help us think beyond mass incarceration. Rather than viewing punishment as a natural reaction to crime, and imprisonment as a sensible outgrowth of this reaction, we will frame these as institutions with deep implications for contemporary civic identity, which present unmet demands for public oversight and reflective democratic influence.

The rest of the issue can be read online here. [via mefi projects]
posted by OmieWise at 9:31 AM PST - 9 comments

CNBC: Apple, IBM in massive enterprise hardware, software partnership Tech behemoths Apple and IBM announced a partnership Tuesday that could make Apple—traditionally a consumer brand—a major player in the business market. IBM said it would create a class of more than 100 business applications exclusively for iPhones and iPads to run on Apple's iOS platform. In return, IBM will sell Apple's products with 100 industry-specific apps to its clients worldwide. [more inside]
posted by Herodios at 9:29 AM PST - 62 comments

If you heard the recent NPR's Codeswitch segment on The Green Turtle, the first Asian superhero created in the United States, you heard descriptions of the 1940s comic. But there's more (so much more!) online. Start with the entire run of The Green Turtle on the amazing Digital Comic Museum, which hosts public domain Golden Age comics (late 1930s until the late 1940s or early 1950s). If you want to know more about Chu F. Hing, the artist behind the original Green Turtle, here's an extensively researched biography on the astounding Chinese American Eyes blog, which covers "famous, forgotten, well-known, and obscure visual artists of Chinese descent in the United States." [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:05 AM PST - 6 comments

When he beat the first bar of a great work, in his mind he was already in the last. In 2011, BBC polled leading conductors about the greatest conductor of all time. The winner? The German-born Austrian conductor Carlos Kleiber. Kleiber was an incredibly hard-working perfectionist. Some of his many seminal performances include a 1992 New Year's concert with the Vienna Philharmonic, a production of Verdi's Otello, and definitive recordings of Beethoven's 5th and 7th symphonies.
posted by shivohum at 8:59 AM PST - 7 comments

Troubadors! [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 8:41 AM PST - 9 comments

Twenty-First Century Fox Inc. is willing to pay more than $85 a share for Time Warner Inc., reports Bloomberg News, which deems it "a sign Rupert Murdoch is undeterred after being rebuffed in an initial offer... To appease antitrust regulators, the companies would sell CNN...since Fox already has Fox News." Murdoch's rationale: "A Fox-Time Warner deal should be allowed to go through given consolidation in the cable industry, including the proposed deal to combine Comcast and Time Warner Cable." [more inside]
posted by GrammarMoses at 7:41 AM PST - 70 comments

"Brandon Sheffield, Gamasutra editor and director of Necrosoft Games, took to Vine last night to show the world what exactly happens when 13 Sonic & Knuckles cartridges are plugged into one another in a Human Centipede-esque disaster." (Warning: 30 Vine videos playing in one browser window.)
posted by griphus at 7:14 AM PST - 24 comments

What's the intersection between Star Wars and the Muppets? Chances are you'll think of Yoda. Maybe you knew that Jim Henson & his creature-makers had nothing to do with the original Star Wars movie. And sure, you probably knew that some of the Star Wars cast were featured on the Muppet Show (watch on YouTube). But wait, there's more. [more inside]
posted by Mchelly at 6:32 AM PST - 24 comments

"In 1972 I created the concept of Mazes & Minotaurs, the world's first roleplaying game. Inspired by my fanatical interest in ancient Greek and Macedonian wargaming, coupled with a love of Greek myth and the 1963 movie, Jason and the Argonauts, it took the gaming world by storm." -- Paul Elliott. [more inside]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 5:09 AM PST - 13 comments

This week's Glenn Greenwald revelation is that Britain's GCHQ JTRIG intelligence organization offers its agents and planners tools with abilities to increase the search ranking of chosen web sites, “change outcome of online polls”, “masquerade Facebook Wall Posts for individuals or entire countries”, and accomplish “amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular multimedia websites (Youtube).” [more inside]
posted by XMLicious at 4:22 AM PST - 54 comments

Stupendo! Meraviglioso! Spettacolare! Stunning synchronized motorcycling! Rome Police Hold Anniversary-1953
posted by flapjax at midnite at 3:31 AM PST - 5 comments

Google Plus apologises and reverses its real name requirements. Violet Blue pots the history of this front of the nymwars. Previously
posted by Sparx at 12:07 AM PST - 81 comments