MetaFilter

The first episode of season four of Mad Men (so much previously [meta-previously]) aired tonight. Shortly after, the first "Mad Men"': A Conversation blog entry was posted on the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog. There will be a post for every episode. [more inside]
posted by silby at 9:51 PM PST - 113 comments

"America's greatest quadriplegic, recovering alcoholic cartoonist" (prev.) has died at 59. John Callahan drew irreverent cartoons (some too irreverent - scroll down), created one cartoon series for kids and another for adults (plus animated versions of many of his comics), wrote and performed songs, and collected his hate mail. He was a local celebrity in Portland, Oregon, the subject of a Dutch documentary and an unlikely role model. "The odor of mortality (was) hard to avoid around Callahan," and now it has caught up with him.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:55 PM PST - 90 comments

Remember "Bergen to Oslo from your armchair"? Last year, Norwegian broadcaster NRK made a 7.5 hour documentary following the train from Bergen to Oslo, for every minute. Here's the sequel: a 27 minute documentary following the new light rail train in Bergen, minute by minute through 9,8 kilometers. [more inside]
posted by iviken at 5:39 PM PST - 22 comments

Starcraft 2 is about to be released, but there is already a thriving worldwide competitive scene. Perhaps the 2 biggest tournaments of the recent public beta were the HDH invitational and the ongoing King of the Beta tournament. Aside from players making a name for themselves, a number of commentators or 'casters' have as well. Links to some of the best played or commentated games of the beta are below the fold. [more inside]
posted by empath at 4:56 PM PST - 109 comments

Googlelittrips is a website that utilizes Google Earth to show readers the important locations in books they are reading. [more inside]
posted by TrarNoir at 4:22 PM PST - 10 comments

The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel have been given access to approximately 92,000 classified Afghanistan war documents provided to WikiLeaks.
posted by lackutrol at 2:59 PM PST - 186 comments

"Although a fan of Led Zeppelin, Stefan [Gates] confesses he has never listened to Houses Of The Holy, which was released in 1973. 'It carries too much significance for me,' he said. 'A part of me wants to go out to the Giant's Causeway with a big pair of speakers, strip naked and play it just to see if I have some kind of great epiphany.'" Gates, a well-known British food writer and television presenter was, with his older sister, one of the children photographed for the album cover which features them naked and covered in automobile paint, climbing over the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 2:28 PM PST - 47 comments

Accidental Penis (via and previous penis).
posted by cjorgensen at 12:56 PM PST - 48 comments

How to Write About Haiti
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:18 PM PST - 37 comments

The Web Never Forgets. Are youthful indiscretion verboten in this digital age? As we grow and move forward - we make mistakes, we say things we later regret, or we change our mind about stuff all the time. But in era where even the things we actrually mean to say, can be taken out of context, posted, and used as a political weapon, is there room for just being silly online anymore?
posted by helmutdog at 12:02 PM PST - 105 comments

Jane Austen's Fight Club. [SLYT]
posted by Tesseractive at 11:47 AM PST - 51 comments

Org-Mode! Need help Getting Things Done(tm) but bogged down by intuitive keystrokes and GUI interfaces? Emacs to the rescue! Here's a Basic Tutorial, an Advanced Tutorial, a Compact User Guide, and a Quick Reference Card to help you get started.
On the Go? No problem! MobileOrg app works with iPhone and iPod Touch, and syncs with dropbox. (an android equivalent is in the works). Org-mode also plays great with remember-mode, which lets you quickly add notes without interrupting your workflow. [more inside]
posted by leotrotsky at 11:40 AM PST - 27 comments

The Love Parade is over. 21 years after the first parade in Berlin, disaster strikes and the electro-pop festival that welcomed millions of dance-happy people from all over the world shuts down after a tragic crush in a tunnel that killed 19 people and injured 340. An investigation into the deaths is underway.
posted by dabitch at 9:55 AM PST - 63 comments

Here is a brief history of the Coors Light Halloween promotions of the 1980s. And here is a more detailed history of the first of those promotions, the Coors Light BeerWolf.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 9:47 AM PST - 12 comments

The Rehabilitation of Ernest Gellner - It is easy to imagine why Ernest Gellner would be one of the universally known figures in Anglophone intellectual life. A polymath whose work ranged across anthropology, history, philosophy, and sociology, his mind wrestled with an encyclopedia's worth of nagging questions about nationalism, modernity, civil society, imperialism, Islam, psychoanalysis, ethics and epistemology ... All of this, to repeat, should explain Gellner's monumental prominence – except for the fact that he has no such prominence. (via mr) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 9:45 AM PST - 7 comments