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Here's a dot ^. an octave and a half above high C for the legendary jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, who has passed away at 78. Building on the experimental wanderings of Miles Davis, Ferguson fused jazz and rock in creating what is quite probably the signature big band sound of the psychadelic and disco eras. (See, e.g., "Rocky" (.wav).) He was well-known for astounding technical proficiency and his tight-lipped embochure created one of the largest ranges of any trumpeter. (Here's Ferguson playing and conducting "Round Midnight" in a very early clip [youtube]). But legions of former high school trumpet geeks full disclosure: I am one will remember him best for his commitment to signing promising young players for his tours and his reaching out, with tireless touring at tiny venues, to high school and college bandies and drum corps-types who at one time or another came across his repertoire.
posted by Saucy Intruder at 11:00 PM PST - 32 comments

Not Fooling Anybody. You know that new Chinese Restaurant that still looks like the Pizza Hut that shut down last year? How about that sandwich shop that still has a Taco Bell-shaped sign in front of it? Ever feel like a family-sized bucket of back repair? Find all of these, plus a guide to identifying them in your own home town.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 9:15 PM PST - 44 comments

Neutral Moresnet - a wedged-shaped, almost Esperanto speaking, janiformed currency using, one-step anthem playing, created because of a zinc mine, mini-state, that is now nothing more than some border markers. [more inside]
posted by tellurian at 9:00 PM PST - 25 comments

In a small-town jail in the upper Midwest sits a once highly-paid informant the U.S. government would probably rather you not know about. Guillermo Ramirez-Peyro, AKA Lalo, sits in prison without being charged. He's a former Mexican Highway Police Officer that found himself incahoots with the drug trade on the Juarez-El Paso border, but then received more than $200K from the U.S. Federal Government for information. The same U.S. agency that paid him, however, now wants to deport him back to Mexico and an almost certain death.
posted by Ufez Jones at 8:38 PM PST - 8 comments

Book. For thirty-six weeks, a sketchbook was sent in random order between four artists: two in Brooklyn, two in Belfast. Every Wednesday, one participant would receive book. In order to maintain schedule, it was sent out the following Monday, giving each artist five days to complete a spread in response to the one that preceded it. A small portion of each entry extends on to the following page. Beyond this, there was no communication between the artists concerning the content of book during its making. Book's first trip across the Atlantic was on 2 June, 2003. Its final trip was on 2 February, 2004. By the time it was completed, book had travelled over sixty thousand miles.
posted by amro at 8:12 PM PST - 12 comments

Shortly before his cancer diagnosis, Peter Jennings started work on a one-hour documentary devoted solely to the issue of AIDS in Black America. ABC News has now finished his work in a one-hour Special Edition of "Primetime," reported by Terry Moran. "In America today, AIDS is virtually a black disease, by any measure," says Phill Wilson, executive director of The Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles. Black Americans make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but account for over 50 percent of all new cases of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. That infection rate is eight times the rate of whites. Among women, the numbers are even more shocking—- almost 70 percent of all newly diagnosed HIV-positive women in the United States are black women. Black women are 23 times more likely to be diagnosed with AIDS than white women, with heterosexual contact being the overwhelming method of infection in black America.
posted by jennababy at 7:49 PM PST - 50 comments

Hydrogen fuel has been discussed many times on MeFi, but I wasn't able to find a previous link to this video clip (Google Video warning) showing Jack Nicholson, circa 1978, showing off his hydrogen powered car. The accents of the broadcasters, in case you're wondering, are east coast Canadian, possibly Newfoundland.
posted by Zinger at 7:21 PM PST - 21 comments

Will Vinyl Survive? Is vinyl on its last legs? Or like Gloria Gaynor, will it survive? Most home listeners chucked out their turntables years ago, but are DJs finally giving in and following suit? DJs face off in a pair of articles discussing the merits of vinyl vs. digital...
posted by bunglin jones at 6:00 PM PST - 68 comments

Roof Sex (amazing stop-motion animation: NSFW??? - sound warning: definitely NSFW!) Also a must-see: The Making of Roof Sex.
posted by spock at 5:00 PM PST - 31 comments

Every issue of the New Yorker on a portable hard drive. For $299 you get an 80GB hard drive loaded with every article, poem, short story, advertisement and lame cartoon that has appeared in the over 4,000 issues of The New Yorker Magazine since February, 1925. The vintage ads alone MIGHT be worth it (depending on res/format) but does anyone really WANT every one of those unfunny cartoons? Does anyone outside NYC even care that this magazine is still being published?
posted by Dome-O-Rama at 3:34 PM PST - 108 comments

C86: Side A and Side B.
posted by jack_mo at 3:06 PM PST - 29 comments

Long .pdf paper on the state of mainstream "analytic" philosophy. In a recent thread, we discussed the current state of philosophy departments in English-speaking countries. Philosophers are often asked why we don't take Ayn Rand seriously as a philosopher, or why we aren't up on literary Theory or deconstruction, etc. The short answer is that most academic philosophers in universities in the English-speaking world are engaged in a broad consensus (about how to do philosophy, what counts as a good question, etc) that's called "analytic philosophy" for short. Here is a long, informative encyclopedia entry by Scott Soames describing the history and current state of play in analytic philosophy. If you want to understand the background of the currently dominant school of philosophy in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, this will explain it. Link goes directly to a 44-page .pdf file.

Here are a few bonus bits: Jerry Fodor on Why no one reads analytic philosophy. One of the Philosophy talk podcasts from the Stanford philosophy department, on The Future of Philosophy. Some answers at askphilosophers.org -- a site where you can ask questions directly of professional philosophers -- that say the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy should be retired. (In a way, I agree, but the terms are used so widely that it's useful to get a sense of what they're meant to describe.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on what different philosophers have meant by "analysis".
posted by LobsterMitten at 2:33 PM PST - 56 comments

Anti-terror. A great little common sense article from Bruce Schneier. via
posted by ObscureReferenceMan at 2:01 PM PST - 45 comments

Pull My Finger
posted by y2karl at 1:41 PM PST - 34 comments

News of stupidity in the fight against terrorism: Up to three years in jail for not loudly enunciating, in front of his mom, that he had a penis pump. If you do not know that you are an American citizen, it's your fault and you may be deported as an illegal alien. Manhattan train stopped because of some woman's bottle of iced tea? BC Ferry delayed 3 hours because of a forgotten briefcase (my coworker lives next to the terminal and has learned that this was an RCMP officer's briefcase, though that detail has not made the media). There are so many of these stories...we really need one place to group them all together.
posted by Kickstart70 at 12:04 PM PST - 87 comments

Salon Convention is not geared towards any one particular subset of people, but anyone who is interested in pursuing salons and leisure activities typically associated with the Victorian time period.
posted by Squid Voltaire at 11:22 AM PST - 7 comments

Reposted to Forbes.com after a massive backlash from bloggers and writers, this article by executive editor Michael Noer has now been given a counterpoint article by one of the sites' women writers. In the original article, Noer urged men not to marry "career girls," lest they leave you for greener pastures, and other misogynistic nonsense. Slate chimes in with a painfully adolescent rebuttal while Salon lets him have it with juicy quotes from women execs and more.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 10:33 AM PST - 95 comments

Craig Mullins is a commercial photoshop artist & videogame fan. In the mid 90s, after a couple amateur pieces of fan art he created for the game Marathon made their way to the folks at Bungie, he was hired to create a series of Halo themed art for the company. His full portfolio of commercial & personal work is interesting.
posted by jonson at 10:30 AM PST - 14 comments

A previously unheard of group, The Sufi Muslim Council, claims to speak for the silent majority of Muslims. Others see it as an attempt to co-opt Sufi-ism to push neoconservative ideals. One of the main authors, Zeyno Baran has even authored a report for the conservative think tank, The Nixon Center, suggesting just that. Other think tanks have also made similar suggestions [pdf] in their publications. ( via Craig Murray )
posted by mulligan at 9:55 AM PST - 19 comments

2006-2007 Doomsday Calendar. Plenty of Neocons went to bed on the 21st, anxiously awoke on the 22nd, and stayed awake through the 23rd, disappointed that their ongoing vision of the New American Century had been spoiled - Iran had not triggered the Apocalypse as some had hinted, breaking the sixth seal, making the 12th Iman ride across the skies, testing their first nukular weapon, etc. No, they wanted to talk. Fortunately, others are picking up the slack, since the prophesies for 5/25/06, 6/6/06, and 8/22/06 have not been fulfilled. Next date up to the plate for a vengeful God? BoingBoing reports that Yisrayl Hawkings says 9/12/2006 (youtube). The Doomsday Google Calendar is available here (XML/iCAL/HTML).
posted by rzklkng at 9:13 AM PST - 28 comments

Make me one with everything One man and his attempt to eat a GINORMOUS FULLY LOADED 5 pound burger with 54 toppings......in under 30 minutes.
posted by ColdChef at 8:59 AM PST - 60 comments

Slo-Mo Home Depot. Improv Everywhere got 250 people to wander around a Home Depot in slow motion. [via]
posted by chunking express at 8:44 AM PST - 77 comments

[NewsFilter] A partial victory for public health over politics. Amazingly, the FDA has finally, after 3 years of wrangling, approved over-the-counter sale of Plan B, an emergency contraceptive pill. The victory is partial because you need to be 18 or older to purchase it without a doctor's note. If you're under 18, you need to still have documentation from your physician (or nurse practitioner). The politics behind the approval process were laid bare in this (sincerely) fascinating GAO report [note: links to .pdf file]. I also hope that OTC approval will avoid this.

Plan B previously discussed on MeFi here.
posted by scblackman at 7:49 AM PST - 65 comments

Taking a cue from the most famous example of (accidental) movie/album synchronization, Dark Side of the Cop is the first in a planned three-disc series of an (intentional) alternate soundtrack to Beverly Hills Cop.
posted by Dr-Baa at 7:35 AM PST - 7 comments

Modern times... suck? Bob Dylan has heavily criticised the sound of modern music recordings, claiming that, There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static, and that, CDs are small.

Not to exclude himself, he's included his own new album in this criticism, saying that, Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded ‘em. Maybe he's just being a curmudgeon, or maybe he actually has a point about modern music production. It's not like he's opposed to all things modern: after all, he seems OK with file-sharing and iTunes. And, umm, Alicia Keys...
posted by chorltonmeateater at 7:34 AM PST - 68 comments

We recently saw people playing at being zombies, which is fun and all, but wouldn't you rather kill zombies than be one? I sure as hell would, so there's [more inside]
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:54 AM PST - 29 comments

My very elegant mother just sat upon ninjas... the textbooks, mnemonic devices and more will have to be changed today. Pluto has been demoted from its status as planet to a dwarf planet. We now have 8 in our solar system. The debate is not at all new, and its apparent resolution may not matter to our everyday lives, but it's just a little weird to think of all of the things that will have to be retroactively edited or amended as a result.
posted by twiggy at 6:47 AM PST - 96 comments

Frank Collin. Just your average everyday half-Jewish Neo-Nazi pederast occult author. Former leader of the Neo-Nazi group that marched through the predominantly Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie in 1977, triggering protests and court battles. Collin himself was half-Jewish, strangely. He later went to jail for child molestation and seems to have turned to writing books about witchcraft since his release. A truly strange story.
posted by jonmc at 6:26 AM PST - 14 comments

There goes the afternoon... Board Dots is an annoyingly simple flash game. Just cover each space on the board with your dot. It's not as easy as it looks.
posted by salmacis at 5:58 AM PST - 17 comments

Gigantic yellow jacket nests perplex experts
posted by madamjujujive at 5:15 AM PST - 71 comments

Multiple orgasms trap benefit cheat is one Times headline that I wish I had written myself. The story is so far as I can tell quite true; The Daily Mail has it too, under a much duller headline. On the other hand, it does have readers grumbling at the end: "The more benefit cheats they find - the better. I have two slipped discs, have to sleep sitting up and am entitled to, yes, you've guessed - nothing." writes one, as if Ms Byron were being subsidised for her orgasms.
posted by alloneword at 4:35 AM PST - 17 comments

Playing cards and tarot cards. An amazing resource about cards with hundreds of scanned decks, and an illustrated timeline of cards through the ages. Cards started in China, but the link to the West was the gorgeous decks of the Marmeluks [Coral cache],which used 52 cards (though the suites were polo sticks, coins, swords, and cups), from there, they spread to Europe and evolved into the tarot and playing cards. Through their history, cards remained art there are many beautiful decks in the past, and 20th century artists like Dali and Hockney created their own decks [coral cache].
posted by blahblahblah at 12:31 AM PST - 14 comments

Have fun with your food! You may never look at fair foods the same way again thanks to this year's ad campaign for the Utah State Fair. (Warning: videos auto-start)
posted by Orb at 12:31 AM PST - 6 comments