Active in the years before padded jungle gyms (and class action lawsuits), Action Park was a sometimes bloody rite of passage for many New Jersey kids. Infamous for its gravity-and-friction-defying looping waterslide and beer gardens, it eventually produced so many injuries that the park bought the surrounding city extra ambulances to cope. It still is alive in many New Jersey hearts today.<-video.
posted to MetaFilter by concreteforest at 5:09 PM on July 21, 2008 (70 comments)

Mashup artist Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, is another artist to try the 'pay whatever you want' Internet release model. However, his 55-minute album consists of over 300 samples from other artists, with many current and past hits. No stranger to current controversies in copyright, Gillis also appeared in the documentary Good Copy Bad Copy. Previously.
posted to MetaFilter by uaudio at 2:32 PM on June 20, 2008 (44 comments)

Two Spanish women meet in their late twenties and realize that they're identical twins. The hospital had accidentally swapped one with another random newborn, and each family had unknowingly taken home the wrong baby. Now all three women - the two actual twins, and the one fake twin - are suing the hospital, who seriously did not have their act together. But there are all sorts of ways this could happen. For example...
posted to MetaFilter by granted at 11:20 PM on June 1, 2008 (28 comments)

Edinburgh author Iain M. Banks, creator of the post capitalist space faring society The Culture and it's oddly named ships, has long been the UKs top science fiction writer, but has never had more than a toehold in the US (in part through lack of availability, in part due to lack of promotion and in part due to some pretty awful covers. That could change: Matter, his latest, has been heavily promoted in the US and sports a cover nearly identical to the UK edition. This week Orbit are releasing US editions of the two earliest Culture novels, with the third following in July, which could mean a complete release of all the novels in the US in order.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 11:00 PM on March 23, 2008 (160 comments)

Since 1993, Pete Tong has been hosting the Essential Mix on BBC Radio 1. A group on imeem seems to have uploaded them all. Tracklistings here. Some of the best of all time: Carl Cox - 1996 (tracklisting), Paul Oakenfold - 1994 - (The Goa Mix) (TL), Leftfield - 1994 (TL). A few good ones from the last couple of years: Justice, (TL), Soulwax (TL), Eric Prydz (TL). And one of my personal favorites -- Scott Bond - 2000 (TL)
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 11:48 AM on February 23, 2008 (61 comments)

A BBC Horizon documentary, asks "Is alcohol worse than ecstasy?" (iPlayer link valid for UK users until 11 Feb). Here comes the science...
posted to MetaFilter by Jakey at 6:37 AM on February 6, 2008 (71 comments)

For the past 50 years, The British have made some of the funniest Comedy TV Shows. Come inside for A Video Chronology of The History of British TV Comedy.
posted to MetaFilter by Foci for Analysis at 1:38 AM on January 24, 2008 (96 comments)

What’s the best question you’ve heard on AskMe?
posted to MetaTalk by hadjiboy at 4:46 AM on September 23, 2007 (73 comments)

NickCaveFilter: Fifty years ago this very day, Nicholas Edward Cave [previously] crawled from the womb and started to plot.  At 16 he formed his first band which evolved quickly into the Boys Next Door [Shivers].  This in turn mutated into the Birthday Party (1980) who terrorised the post-punk soundscape in Australia and the UK [Release the Bats | Nick the Stripper].  The Birthday Party relocated to England and in 1984 the band imploded in an orgy of drugs and booze.  Shortly after Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were born [The Ship Song - video & solo live | The Mercy Seat - video & live | Where the Wild Roses Grow], and 23 years and 11 studio albums later (not to mention a best selling book, a great screenplay, some acting and several soundtrack projects) he is still going strong.  But, instead of sitting on his musical laurels he decided to get back to basics and, in 2006, grew a huge moustache and formed Grinderman – a four piece with a primeval hybrid Birthday Party/Bad Seeds sound [No Pussy Blues | Honey Bee].  Fellow Mefites, I ask you to raise a glass to Mr. Cave… And, especially if you are not familiar to his work, don’t forget to “look inside” for my primer on the enigma that is Nick Cave, one of the finest song-writers on the face of this miserable planet.
posted to MetaFilter by the_very_hungry_caterpillar at 4:59 PM on September 22, 2007 (98 comments)

With a grand prize of $50,000, the Build a Better Burger Contest is the biggest hamburger recipe contest in the world; with the upcoming contest being judged on Sept 29th, you can take a moment to stroll through hamburger history, with recipes for all 17 years worth of prizewinners. Not enough burger for you? Then try making any of the 10 runner ups from 2005 & 2006. Still more, you demand? Peruse the database of over 5,000 contest entries broken out by category, even the most jaded burgermeister is sure to find something original & delicious to try.
posted to MetaFilter by jonson at 4:28 PM on September 4, 2007 (77 comments)

Derinkuyu wasn't discovered until 1965, when a resident cleaning the back wall of his cave house broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he'd never seen, which led to still another, and another. Eventually, spelunking archeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people. [flickr]. [wiki].
posted to MetaFilter by dersins at 8:21 AM on August 31, 2007 (48 comments)

The World's First Skyscrapers. "The clay-formed houses... rise high up the sky clouds by thirty to forty meters lengths, whilst its floors vary between five to sixteen." "One of the oldest and best examples of urban planning." Another amazing Yemeni city.
posted to MetaFilter by desjardins at 2:00 PM on August 27, 2007 (33 comments)

Underfire; images from the Vietnam war. Some photographers never made it out: Dana Stone, Henri Huet, Sean Flynn. Tim Page is still alive and his photos tell the story of 'Fire in the Jungle". Several of these almost forgotten legends hung out at Franki's House at one time or another. Page, Stone and Flyn were all friends of Michael Herr who wrote about them and the war in Dispatches which was widely acclaimed and acknowledged by Hunter S. Thompson as puts the rest of us in the shade.
posted to MetaFilter by adamvasco at 2:37 AM on August 8, 2007 (14 comments)

'Enemy Contact. Kill 'em, Kill 'em'. The Price of Valor. Invisible Casualties. The Psychological Effects of Combat. The Psychological Consequences of Killing: Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress. Soldiers, Self-Defense, and Killing in War - (PDF). Psychological and Psychosocial Consequences of Combat and Deployment with Special Emphasis on the Gulf War. Military Leaders’ Obligation to Justify Killing in War. And, from last year, come The Killer Elite, From Hell to Baghdad - The Killer Elite Part II, and The Battle for Bagdhad - The Killer Elite Part III--Evan Wright's Rolling Stone articles recently published as Generation Kill. They are well worth re-reading in this context.
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl at 2:11 AM on July 21, 2004 (51 comments)

"Something woke her in the night." Genre fiction is rising from the dead to terrorize serious literature! In response to Michael Chabon’s (previously) new book, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Ruth Franklin wrote a review in Slate beginning with the line “Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.” Well, that didn’t go over too well with Ursula K. Le Guin, who bent her considerable imagination and skill to the task of envisioning the zombie corpse of genre fiction and wrote an entertaining response, which was then given a suitable cover. The whole thing is also available as a pdf linked to from Le Guin’s website. via
posted to MetaFilter by gingerbeer at 3:58 PM on July 20, 2007 (65 comments)

200 Bad Comics.
posted to MetaFilter by Prospero at 6:44 AM on July 20, 2007 (58 comments)

Where can I find affordable trendy/modern furniture in the UK?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Sevenupcan at 2:49 PM on July 5, 2007 (7 comments)

Helix — a 1D skyscraper with a single corridor. The principle is a cylindrical building with a helical shape for the floor. The slope of the floor is 1.5% (it rises by 1.5 cm every meter), thus hardly noticeable. The height of each ’storey’ is 3 meters, so that when you walk 200 meters along the corridor, you have walked a full circle, but you end up one ’storey’ above or below your starting point.
posted to MetaFilter by psmealey at 2:30 PM on May 21, 2007 (50 comments)

I'm looking for SF books that may not be classified as sci-fi, but instead as standard adult fiction "literature" at my local library. Examples would be Mary Doria Russell's "The Sparrow" or David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas"
posted to Ask Metafilter by Dag Maggot at 5:55 PM on December 12, 2005 (40 comments)

The legendary and influential DJ Shadow has been discussed here several times before. His latest album, The Outsider, dropped earlier this week. It dropped hard. Its embrace of hyphy and schizophrenic genre spanning has been met with near-universal disappointment, shock, anger, and sadness by his fans. Josh Davis, aka DJ Shadow, explains himself here. As Shadow seems to be a long-standing favorite among Mefites, what do you think of it?
posted to MetaFilter by ghastlyfop at 10:01 AM on September 21, 2006 (68 comments)

EnglishMajorFilter: Why can't I stand much of the canon? How can I learn to appreciate it?
posted to Ask Metafilter by SansPoint at 8:36 PM on April 3, 2007 (35 comments)

The premise of Marvel Comic's Civil War storyline is that after a hero-related disaster, the government decides to force all superheroes to register, causing a split in the hero community. While heroes debate and decide which side to join, fans debate whether or not the cross-over series is actually any good. Clearly, Christopher Bird falls squarely on one side and has attempted to "improve" the story by starting a project to edit the dialogue of the series. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
posted to MetaFilter by robocop is bleeding at 6:21 AM on February 9, 2007 (53 comments)

Architectures of Control in Design. A blog examining product designs intended to restrict or enforce behavior. In the built environment, we see speed bumps and roundabouts with intentionally obscured visibility; in the digital environment, we see various species of DRM and trusted computing; and in other commerical products, we see car hoods only openable by licensed dealers, printer cartridges for only one sort of printer, and a set of shoes for children which detects the amount of steps they take in a day and translates that activity into the amount of TV they may watch. The control may be for economic reasons, for reasons of safety, or even simply to enforce social nicety - and for each of these reasons are the implications worth regarding . [via the excellent things]
posted to MetaFilter by Sticherbeast at 4:44 AM on September 14, 2006 (27 comments)