On March 9th, 1987, Wesley MacDonald was a Canadian National Railway engineer. His job for the day was to switch some loaded ore cars at the Brunswick Mine. Due to a communications foulup, he took a terrifying 20 minute ride on a runaway train. There's audio of the incident from start to finish. Transcript of the tape. Photos of the Aftermath More.
posted to MetaFilter by pjern at 9:53 PM on August 23, 2008 (20 comments)

Josh Hamilton was destined to be an all-star baseball player, selected by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays as the #1 draft pick in the 1999 MLB draft. By 2002, though, he was a bust, beset by injuries, spending his days downing an entire bottle of Crown Royal and snorting cocaine.
posted to MetaFilter by dw at 4:47 PM on July 6, 2008 (39 comments)

Improv Everywhere turned a little league baseball game into a major league event. Jumbotron & all.
posted to MetaFilter by prefpara at 1:34 PM on April 7, 2008 (92 comments)

In 1855, Frenchman Joseph Fortuné Petiot-Groffier died. One of the first daguerrotypists, the pioneering photographer was apparently poisoned by his own chemistry. Some 152 years later, in the twilight of chemical photography, his lab, found intact, is viewed in a new light. Via.
posted to MetaFilter by sacre_bleu at 7:53 PM on February 8, 2008 (16 comments)

Everyblock has launched. It's local news culled from (any and all available) services, including photos, news, restaurant inspections, classified ads, and civic announcements. Sounds pretty dry, but looking at my old neighborhood in San Francisco, there's a wealth of hyperlocal information that you can't get in one place. They're currently in three major metro areas of the US with many more to come -- their launch announcement has more. This site was spearheaded by Adrian Holovaty, a pioneer of the intersection between journalism and computer science, and winner of a $1million grant last year to build such sites.
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 2:07 PM on January 23, 2008 (34 comments)

"I edited this short film set to the tune of The Zombies' "This Will Be Our Year" featuring Super 8 footage shot by my parents between 1965-1979."
posted to MetaFilter by ludwig_van at 12:26 AM on December 13, 2007 (48 comments)

Ellsworth Kelley, Bill Blass, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and a host of lesser known but equally talented painters, designers, sound engineers and actors served together during World War II in the Ghost Army – the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, a unit whose existence remained an official secret until 1996. German soldiers referred to them as the "Phantom Army," because one moment they were in one place, and the next, they were attacking their flanks or from the rear. Together, they made rubber tanks and fake Jeeps; their changing unit insignia were designed to fool spies and allied units alike. They recorded the sounds of Allied units building bridges or moving troops and broadcast them from special sound trucks, leading the Germans to conclude that the U.S. Army had more troops in more places than it did. "Guys drew, or painted, all the time," documenting their lives, the lives of their fellow soldiers, and that of the local populations in wartime Europe.
posted to MetaFilter by rtha at 11:35 AM on October 5, 2007 (23 comments)

Fourteen Places to Eat - photos from rural America
posted to MetaFilter by Bighappyfunhouse at 10:22 PM on April 11, 2007 (17 comments)