You guys know about BBC Radio 4's In Our Time, right? Each week, the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg hosts a 45-minute discussion on some aspect of culture, history, philosophy, religion or science. His guests are always three academics with expert knowledge of the chosen subject, and the tone is serious and detailed but never inaccessible. By respecting his audience's intelligence, Bragg delivers a programme of unrivaled interest, depth and educational value. The topics covered this year alone include The Frankfurt School, The Glencoe Massacre, Silas Marner and Ibn Khaldun. Eclectic, yes, but never less than fascinating. The good news is that the programme has just redesigned its website, making all 440 episodes to date available for your listening pleasure in its eminently browsable archive. In the dumbed-down 21st Century, it's a miracle that a programme like this still exists, so let's all make the most of it while we can.
posted by Paul Slade to MetaFilter at Feb 4 at 9:19 AM
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He invented or popularized a startling array of the fundamental elements of film: the dissolve, the fade-in and fade-out, slow motion, fast motion, stop motion, double exposures and multiple exposures, miniatures, the in-camera matte, time-lapse photography, color film (albeit hand-painted), artificial film lighting, production sketches and storyboards, and the whole idea of narrative film.

By 1897, in a studio of his own design and construction – the first complete movie studio – his hand forged virtually everything on his screen. Norman McLaren writes, "He was not only his own producer, ideas man, script writer, but he was his own set-builder, scene painter, choreographer, deviser of mechanical contrivances, special effects man, costume designer, model maker, actor, multiple actor, editor and distributor." Also, his own cinematographer, and the inventor of cameras to suit his special conceptions. Not even auteur directors such as Charles Chaplin, Orson Welles, John Cassavetes, and Stanley Kubrick would personally author so many aspects of their films."

Inside: 57 films by Georges Méliès, the Grandfather of Visual Effects.
posted by Paragon to MetaFilter at Feb 3 at 9:47 AM
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Perhaps you were there in 1991 when someone spun We Are i.e. for the first time. Maybe you were a suburban rebel in the mid 1990s, listening to British pirate radio and taping the broadcasts. Or you kept it legit and heard Fabio and Grooverider on Kiss FM or BBC Radio 1. Perhaps you only caught wind of it when Goldie was on BBC's Maestro (prev). You might spend your time figuring out which breaks were used, from the well-known Amen, Brother sample (prev), to Both Eyes Open by Lucille Brown & Billy Clark. Or maybe you don't know the difference between clownstep and liquid funk, but it sounds like something you want to know more about. Step inside, junglist, and embrace the bass.
posted by filthy light thief to MetaFilter at Feb 9 at 7:28 AM
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How do you keep your sense of adventure when you sit in a cubicle and have to pick up the kids at 5 o'clock? I love my wife. I love my kids. I like the fact that my soul-sucking job allows me to use my brain while paying for piano lessons, vacations, and an educational trust. I am not looking to get rid of said wife, kids, or job. What I am looking for is a renewed sense of adventure within my current 'constraints'.
posted by kaizen to Ask MetaFilter at Feb 4 at 8:04 AM
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What are your tricks for making everyday chores exciting?
posted by sallybrown to Ask MetaFilter at Feb 5 at 4:38 PM
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Seeking artsy electronic music recommendations like Moby and Air.
posted by Dukat to Ask MetaFilter at Feb 3 at 10:03 PM
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"If I thought, had any idea, that I’d ever be a slave again, I’d take a gun and just end it all right away." Audio recordings from interviews with former slaves, conducted by WPA folklorists and others, including the Lomaxes and Zora Neale Hurston. Only these twenty-six audio recordings of people formerly enslaved in the antebellum American South have ever been found.
posted by Miko to MetaFilter at Feb 7 at 1:25 PM
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Recently I have come to the conclusion that I am an extremely ignorant American. I know very little about American politics and world issues and politics. I've been living in my safe little American bubble for 18 years and I want to get out! I want to get educated but it's overwhelming..where should I start? Textbooks (but should I bother reading an American textbook?), websites, blogs, essays, CNN, BBC, Google? I also want to be aware of things people think Americans are usually ignorant of, and I would like to learn little things about cultures that aren't in guidebooks. Email me at throwaway.email20 (at) gmail (dot) com
posted by Anonymous to Ask MetaFilter at Feb 2 at 9:01 PM
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For the past 21 years, across the limitless expanse of the North Pacific, a lonely whale has been singing, calling for a response. There has been none, and there never will.
posted by Cobalt to MetaFilter at Feb 6 at 9:11 AM
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Prophetic Pictures from Menominie, Wisconsin. In 1905, high school senior Albert Hansen took photogaphs of his graduating classmates at Menominie HS. Not as they were -- but as they believed, or hoped, or feared they would be in the decades to come. Dorothy M. Jesse was going to be a mathematician, and Fred Quilling a pharmacist. Alice M. Tilleson would be a prominent socialite, whose "eccentric ideas with reference to danger, force her to cling to that old fashioned vehicle, the automobile, instead of the new wheel-less aerial motor car." William C. Klatt, a future physician, would operate on disembodied heads. And Hansen himself was destined for the hobo's life. The Wisconsin Historical Society has the whole collection available online, together with the text from the yearbook and the truth, as best the Society could learn, of how the graduates' actual future compared with prophecy. (Spoiler: Fred Quilling really did become a pharmacist.) Just one of the many remarkable collections at Wisconsin Historical Images.
posted by escabeche to MetaFilter at Feb 7 at 11:44 PM
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Form, not content: What blogs are rethinking how they lay out their material and really pushing the boundaries?
posted by history is a weapon to Ask MetaFilter at Feb 4 at 10:37 AM
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Tell me your recipes that include rice.
posted by Mutant to Ask MetaFilter at Feb 7 at 5:36 AM
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Future noir. Please recommend detective fiction in a scifi setting.
posted by porpoise to Ask MetaFilter at Feb 8 at 9:54 AM
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Either they are high as a kite, or tired and giddy from a long day of interviewing, but either way -- Jason Segal and Paul Rudd can barely hold it together in this promotional interview for "I Love You, Man."
posted by empath to MetaFilter at Feb 8 at 12:10 AM
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I'm getting tired of the music that I play on my mp3 player during my workout. I haven't been taking notice of the energetic music of the last 2 - 3 years. So; please provide me with suitable recent workout music. Youtube links are appreciated.
posted by joost de vries to Ask MetaFilter at Feb 9 at 5:31 AM
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Learnable Cool Skills? I'm looking for either Gladwellesque stuff along the lines of Ekman's Facial Action Coding System for human emotion, or James Bond type stuff like that described in Cracked's '6 most badass skills you can learn in a week.'
posted by leotrotsky to Ask MetaFilter at Feb 5 at 10:28 AM
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43 ways to simplify your life.
posted by kenko to MetaFilter at Feb 7 at 3:52 PM
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"Back in 1993 I was tutoring my sister in algebra. Her quizzes and tests were always made of word problems with a running storyline involving many recurring places and characters. I tied the fate of the main characters to how well she did on the previous quiz, so a good performance brought them good fortune. Unfortunately, one test she completely bombed, and, well, this is a transcription of the quiz she got next."
posted by Iridic to MetaFilter at Feb 3 at 3:05 PM
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How do you like your snow white pillow? How do you like your sheet?
And how do you like the fair young bride that's lying in your arms asleep?

What banks, what banks, are those, my love,
that rise so dark and cold?

And every jow that the dead bell gave
Cried: Woe to Barbara Allen.
posted by Countess Elena to MetaFilter at Feb 6 at 12:35 PM
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Your most unusual Bisquick recipe?
posted by John Borrowman to Ask MetaFilter at Feb 6 at 4:46 PM
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Have you read any of those articles in the news about backyard chickens? I'm one of those folks who read about how great chickens are and decided to get some. Only problem, the only place I could keep the chickens was at my parent's house. I convinced them that chickens would be the most wonderful addition to the family. I sold them on fresh eggs, ...
posted by JimmyJames to MetaFilter at Feb 3 at 4:51 PM
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I think maybe part of the reason you're so angry is you keep demanding that you get screwed and then, not surprisingly, you keep getting screwed — A Message for the Teabaggers About Health Insurance Reform 13. I wish I could tell you that this was just a worst-case scenario, that this was only something that might, maybe happen, but that w...
posted by netbros to MetaFilter at Feb 4 at 2:17 PM
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When Michele Bachman backs out of your event because it might have a dodgy PR outcome... something something demon sheep.
posted by Babblesort to MetaFilter at Feb 4 at 2:13 PM
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I'm no feminist, I'm not a big fan of political correctness, but by half-time (if not before), I was really cringing at how sexist the ads were. I kind of wonder why you aren't a feminist if things like this make you uncomfortable. I consider myself a feminist mostly because I get mad about things like this, and it somewhat irks me when people ...
posted by The Devil Tesla to MetaFilter at Feb 8 at 4:04 PM
94 users marked this as a favorite

I drove to work this morning listening to Shine on You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V) and came to the conclusion that real, creative, interesting music hasn't been made in decades. It's always the Pink Floyd fans being arsefaces. Okay. Ignoring the proliferation of good songwriting in rap, ignoring the beautiful production of modern factory pop, i...
posted by Rory Marinich to MetaFilter at Feb 9 at 6:42 AM
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yo dogg we heard you like unbearable sadness so we put a lonely whale in your ocean so you can cry while you cry
posted by Greg Nog to MetaFilter at Feb 6 at 10:30 AM
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Federal debt limit was just raised almost 100% with Obama's 2010 budget, to $14.3 trillion vs. $7.8 trillion in 2005. Fucking little limp-dicked lies like this make me see red. Read this. It's from the White House. Obama DIDN'T raise the limit by 100%. Bush raised the debt limit from 7,384 billion in 2004 to 11,315 billion in 2008, in grad...
posted by splice to MetaFilter at Feb 3 at 8:12 AM
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There are two "Coming of Age" periods in life. The first as a young adult when the world seems a vast canvas of potential and you realize you are stepping into an unknown future. You are "becoming." The second "Coming of Age" is this period you are now facing. This time when it seems you can reach out and touch t...
posted by nickjadlowe to Ask MetaFilter at Feb 4 at 8:43 AM
84 users marked this as a favorite

Professor Turley, you are WRONG. Inexcusably, inexplicably, staggeringly and quite tragically wrong. No, actually, I don't think he is and I suspect you didn't actually read his entire post on the topic. This case is, obviously, the very best example of a "think of the children!" shut-off-the-critical-facilities inducing event, but t...
posted by Justinian to MetaFilter at Feb 3 at 5:25 PM
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Does this mean you could potentially pay for it, they take your money, and then they say, "Sorry, bud. You're too liberal. You don't represent our views for the nation."? Sure, why not? That's what the Democrats have been doing with my donations for the last ten years.
posted by Parasite Unseen to MetaFilter at Feb 4 at 2:49 PM
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And a final update: While Mr S was first in the hospital a couple of months ago, I brought him a small framed picture of Henry I had taken the summer before: the cat stretched out in the sunshine on my balcony. That was a bad day for Mr S when I got there -- he was agitated and didn't know who I was, who he was, where he was -- but I gave him t...
posted by Wendy BD to Ask MetaFilter at Jan 18 at 7:44 AM
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I drove to work this morning listening to Shine on You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V) and came to the conclusion that real, creative, interesting music hasn't been made in decades. Also...The Grammys have never been relevant. I read this post and came to the conclusion that you are an elderly white male.
posted by mpbx to MetaFilter at Feb 9 at 6:29 AM
76 users marked this as a favorite

I was most disappointed by the Betty White ad. It was like: "Awesome! Betty White playing football and roughing it up with the guys? Talking shit to that stupid frat guy quarterback? Love this ad! . . . Wait, what? Oh she's the butt of the joke? Being Betty White is a bad thing? WELL THEN FUCK YOU SNICKERS. FUCK YOU IN YOUR TAINTHOLE.&...
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates to MetaFilter at Feb 8 at 3:54 PM
75 users marked this as a favorite

I used to love playing SimCity 2000. It was the last good SimCity game before Maxis decided that I also wanted to control the timing of stoplights, slope of sidewalk ramps, what species of grass a park had, etc. One of the things I used to enjoy doing was using a cheat to get an absurd amount of money, lowering taxes to zero, and then pausing ...
posted by Legomancer to MetaFilter at Feb 2 at 6:19 AM
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Raise your hand if you think Mrs. Clinton didn't do even worse when she was the not-exactly-elected wife of Bill. I welcome the False Equivalences Based On Hypotheticals Brigade with open arms!
posted by DU to MetaFilter at Feb 5 at 8:25 AM
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There's nothing wrong with a two-tier system where the lower tier gets affordable, decent healthcare. The U.S. has a many-tier system where the lowest tier gets nothing.
posted by Slothrup to MetaFilter at Feb 7 at 6:32 AM
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Once while canoeing in the Amazon with a guide and some friends we observed a sloth hanging precariously from a thin branch way out over the water. We paddled to retrieve the sloth so we could give it to the villagers downriver (presumably for dinner). As the guide plucked the sloth from the tree the canoe shifted and took on some water. The gui...
posted by Baby_Balrog to MetaFilter at Feb 4 at 12:34 PM
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I gather from the tone of your question that you own a motor vehicle of some kind.
posted by wreckingball to Ask MetaFilter at Feb 6 at 3:57 PM
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It's the naked ideology of capitalism in a nutshell from Dodge's ad-people there, in all its anti-human let-the-commodity-be-substitute-for-life-and-love horror. You could almost imagine they were actually commissioned in secret by some Machiavellian Maoist tycoon who wants to lay the dark and hollow heart of the Beast bare before us - we have made...
posted by Abiezer to MetaFilter at Feb 8 at 4:32 PM
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Please form a third party. Please form a third party. Please form a third party.
posted by three blind mice to MetaFilter at Feb 4 at 2:44 PM
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