Displaying post 1 to 50 of 184
Twenty years ago this week,
the biggest escape ever over the Berlin Wall took place, but the
event went nearly unreported outside of the two Germanies. The 182 persons who jumped over the Wall in the early morning hours of 1 July 1988, instead of leaving East Germany,
fled in the opposite direction (
scroll down to "Wolfgang Ritter") to escape the West Berlin police. East German border guards waited with trucks on the other side of the Wall in the middle of the death strip to pick up the wall-hopping protesters; they were driven to another location, served breakfast, and then taken to the Friedrichsstrasse crossing to West Berlin with the admonition to "use the usual border crossing next time."
posted to MetaFilter by sister nunchaku of love and mercy
at 10:01 PM on July 3, 2008
(16 comments)
Thinking of Joe Cocker's great cover of the Beatles'
"With a Little Help From My Friends", I started wondering: what other cover versions have actually changed the
time signature of the original?
posted to Ask Metafilter by flapjax at midnite
at 9:54 PM on June 21, 2008
(46 comments)
Rare Kishore Kumar Songs
is a website dedicated to the music of legendary Bollywood
playback singer and comic actor
Kishore Kumar. There are hundreds of songs, many with other Bollywood legends, such as Asha Bhosle and Lata Mangeshkar. There are also songs by Kishore's son Amit. All songs and videos are in Real Player format and in low quality.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus
at 8:07 PM on June 16, 2008
(9 comments)
The opening shots of 1920s New York City are wonderful, then you get a zany high-speed Harold Lloyd blazing down the avenues, and that's fun to watch, but the real killer is the horse-drawn trolley absolutely
tearing-ass through lower Manhattan, full gallop. Ends badly. Then it's over to San Francisco for one last bit of homicidal vehicular activity with a bus. Well, they sure don't drive
like they used to!
posted to MetaFilter by flapjax at midnite
at 6:53 PM on May 25, 2008
(37 comments)
Here's a small representation of some of the culture that many Tibetan protesters hope to save from eradication in Tibet:
Heart Sutra, by Geshe Kunkhen.
posted to MetaFilter by flapjax at midnite
at 6:18 AM on May 8, 2008
(18 comments)
Stranded on the island of
New Britain during WWII, Fred Hargesheimer was
rescued by native islanders, who hid him for 8 months from occupying Japanese forces. Fred never forgot the kindness he received, and in 1960, he used his family's vacation money to return to the island to personally thank the people who saved him. Thus began a
48 year relationship between Hargesheimer and the people of New Britain.
posted to MetaFilter by The Light Fantastic
at 8:45 PM on March 8, 2008
(15 comments)
Syd Barrett, the iconic, ephemeral, sadly recently-deceased founder and original frontman of Pink Floyd, recorded several singles and an LP (plus at least one song on their second LP) with the band before his genius was amputated by mental illness and they became an arena rock dinosaur. He also recorded two solo albums, the
making of which was almost as interesting as the gentle, crystalline, almost fractal-like music contained on them. However, as Barrett aficionados have long known, the solo sessions produced many more recordings than were eventually released. Now, though, all known Barrett material that wasn't commercially released has been assembled in a fan-made collection: Have You Got It Yet?,
version 2.0 of which has just been released to the world. More download links inside.
posted to MetaFilter by DecemberBoy
at 12:31 PM on March 1, 2008
(39 comments)
And here we have a couple of YouTube productions, screensaverish animations of photos and lyrics to the original recordings:
Robert Petway - Catfish Blues and
Tommy McClennan - It's Hard To Be Lonesome. This is mostly about Petway and
Catfish Blues but you can't mention Petway without mentioning McClennan, as they ran together in their time and as both did versions of
Catfish, a song canonical in Delta Blues, recorded and performed by nearly everyone--
Muddy Waters - Rolling Stone, for example. Petway just happens to be the first person to record
Catfish, and quite possibly the person who wrote it and certainly. to my mind, at least, the person who nailed it... in the uptempo version at the very least.
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 9:03 PM on February 28, 2008
(8 comments)
How does Facebook handle or simplify the presumably complicated DB queries involved so that me loading my page doesn't bring it to its knees?
posted to Ask Metafilter by bonaldi
at 9:49 AM on February 4, 2008
(30 comments)
While the US equities markets were closed on Monday for Martin Luther King Day, stock markets around the world took a nosedive,
losing billions in equity; the markets in
Australia,
South Korea,
Japan,
China,
Indonesia, Hong Kong,
Germany,
France,
the UK, and
more countries have dropped at least 5% each (
Canada only fell 4.75%), even though most of those markets had already been seriously down for several days prior.
India has been hit particularly hard, at one point down a whopping 11%, tripping their markets' automatic
"circuit breakers" for a mandatory time-out period, before scraping back up to close at
8% down. US futures markets are
currently predicting a 650+ point drop just at the open Tuesday morning, before even a single trade goes through.
posted to MetaFilter by Asparagirl
at 12:18 AM on January 22, 2008
(311 comments)
A primer on the global derivatives market, the City of London, and the credit crunch:
"In 2003 the total size of the world economy was $49,000,000,000,000. The total size of the derivatives being traded was $85,000,000,000,000. In other words, derivatives today are worth far, far more than the total economic activity of the planet. More than $1,000,000,000,000 of derivatives are bought and sold every day. Every single thing that can be traded through derivatives, is."
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 1:44 PM on January 2, 2008
(30 comments)
Written in 1967 by Bob Dylan, it was originally
quiet, lowkey... and vaguely menacing. But when Jimi Hendrix
redefined it the following year, even
Dylan knew that the song had changed forever.
Since then, it's been
covered (
over and over again),
praised almost as often,
analyzed,
referenced, and, of course,
found to be encoded in the minds of Cylons.
Originally released 40 years ago, erm, yesterday: All Along the Watchtower.
posted to MetaFilter by John Kenneth Fisher
at 7:16 PM on December 28, 2007
(41 comments)
The 1960's and early 70's saw an explosion of creativity and an astonishing variety of stylistic influences coming together in the pop and rock music of Cambodia.Tragically, almost all of the artists of that era were executed (or otherwise perished) during the nightmarish Khmer Rouge years. The following
MySpace Music pages will help you to get acquainted with some of the wonderfully eclectic and adventurous music of this fertile period:
Pen Ron,
Yos Olarang,
Rous Sareysothea,
Sin Sisamouth,
Vor Sarun,
Houey Meas,
So Savoeun,
Eng Nary,
In Yeng,
Choun Malai,
Mao Sareth,
Sem Touch,
Chea Savoeun,
Toche Teng,
Teth Sombath,
Pen Rom,
Em Songserm and
Choun Vanna. Also, these related pages:
Cambodian Rock,
Radio Khmer Sitya,
Cambodian Style and
Cambodian Soundtracks.
NOTE: For personal recommendations, check the hover-overs accompanying each link.
posted to MetaFilter by flapjax at midnite
at 2:07 AM on December 15, 2007
(38 comments)
Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to seven introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University:Astronomy, English, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, Religious Studies: a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video, syllabi, suggested readings, and problem sets.
posted to MetaFilter by nickyskye
at 7:43 AM on December 14, 2007
(30 comments)
Language log has
uncovered the reason for the inappropriately common appearance of the word
fuck in English translations on Chinese signs. One more
Chinglish phenomenon explained.
posted to MetaFilter by hindmost
at 12:47 PM on December 9, 2007
(72 comments)
Bytecode-based virtual machines are the Next Big Thing in programming. You can run
Lisp,
Ruby,
Python,
OCaml, and yes even
COBOL on the JVM. Or if you prefer your languages to be a bit more melodic there's
J#,
A#,
P# and
F#. Even C/C++ has a
bytecode compiler now. That's not to mention languages that have their own VMs like
Erlang or that are writing their own like
Parrot or
PyPy.
posted to MetaFilter by Skorgu
at 7:57 AM on December 4, 2007
(62 comments)
In 2008,
China will fail to ride the Olympics wave and improve its worldwide image,
the US will vote mainly on
health (barring a terrorist attack or a recession),
usher in a period of pragmatic caution and toast to it
over a nice Merlot, the
culture wars will go global,
Israel may decide that it must act alone against Iran,
African gangs will prosper,
UK politics will be re-established as a spectator sport,
we will finally quit oil - and want yet more of it,
the potato will make a comeback,
an island will be moved for the sake of the Euro,
we will rush to give for free what others charge for,
U will HAV CASH,
robots will explore the seas of Earth,
which is round, by the way,
pigs will fly, and we will
like totally love it (
don't we?).
The Economist: The World in 2008.
posted to MetaFilter by goodnewsfortheinsane
at 5:46 PM on November 28, 2007
(35 comments)
Jeff Lew, the lead animator on Matrix Reloaded, has after 4 long years of 14 hour days and 7 day work weeks finally completed his masterpiece:
Killer Bean Forever. This is a momumental follow-up to the
previous two short films, which were impressive projects on their own.
posted to MetaFilter by ducksauce
at 12:57 PM on November 14, 2007
(103 comments)
Jonah Lehrer is becoming one of the most interesting science writers around. The 26-year-old Rhodes scholar and former Le Bernardin cook just published his first book,
Proust Was a Neuroscientist [
first chapter excerpt - NYT], an investigation of the ways poets, novelists, and artists accurately modeled the brain and memory before science did. This week he
hilariously reenacted Escoffier's distillation of umami-rich veal stock [hit the audio link] with NPR's Robert Krulwich of Radio Lab. He also just published a very insightful
profile of Oliver Sacks in SEED (addressing the pioneering neurologist's own recent struggles with an eye ailment) and writes a wide-ranging
science blog. A new writer to watch.
posted to MetaFilter by digaman
at 12:16 PM on November 9, 2007
(46 comments)
