The Clock is a film that is also a clock. It runs for 24 consecutive hours, and is made of thousands of samples, some lasting only seconds, others minutes, from hundreds of films and videos. All of it edited into a seamless whole by video artist Christian Marclay. When it is shown, it is synchronized to the real time, so if it's 2:15 on a clock shown on-screen, it's 2:15 in real time. Harrison Ford is in it. So is John Cusack, Humphrey Bogart, Michelle Pfeiffer, Lon Chaney, Roger Moore(and all the other James Bonds), John Cleese, Peter Sellers, Orson Welles, the Beatles, Jody Foster, Gregory Peck, Nicole Kidman, Nick Cage and a few hundred others. You'll see The Simpsons and The Office. You'll see The Avengers. You'll see stuff you have no clue about.
Here's what it feels like to watch all twenty four hours of it in one sitting.
posted by storybored at 9:49 PM Feb 8 2012 - 45 comments [71 favorites]
If you'd like to know a bit about medieval life in Europe,
History on the Net has some information on life in medieval times, prepared as educational summaries for students. If you'd like to know more,
Medieval Life And Times has a broader scope, and the surface links often have a number of subsequent links to even more information on sub-topics. If you want even more specifics,
here is a list of medieval occupations,
some information on buying, selling and bartering in medieval times, and
a history of horses in Europe.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:02 PM Feb 8 2012 - 19 comments [67 favorites (61 in the last 24 hours)]
In placing before my readers in the following pages the results of my twenty-five years’ experience of Rat-catching, Ferreting, etc., I may say that I have always done my best to accomplish every task that I have undertaken, and I have in consequence received excellent testimonials from many corporations, railway companies, and merchants. I have not only made it my study to discover the different and the best methods of catching Rats, but I have also taken great interest in watching their ways and habits, and I come to the conclusion that there is no sure way of completely exterminating the Rodents, especially in large towns. If I have in this work referred more particularly to Rat-catching in Manchester that is only because my experience, although extending over a much wider area, has been chiefly in that city, but the methods I describe are equally applicable to all large towns.
Yours truly,
IKE MATTHEWS.
PROFESSIONAL RAT-CATCHER,
PENDLETON,
MANCHESTER.
posted by timshel at 3:02 PM Feb 8 2012 - 33 comments [36 favorites]
"Risk" is a free podcast for storytelling junkies, hosted by Kevin Allison (formerly of
the State).
In episodes
229 and
230 (obviously NSFW), the host himself shares an unusual tale of being a gay man at a hetero "kink" camp.
posted by The ____ of Justice at 3:25 PM Feb 8 2012 - 11 comments [34 favorites]
Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark is a 13-part documentary produced by the BBC that was first aired on in 1969. It is considered to be a landmark in British Television's broadcasting of the visual arts.
Here's the entire series (13 one-hour episodes) on
YouTube. This is a treat for those of you who like History of Art, especially so if you haven't yet got around to seeing it.
posted by baejoseph at 5:16 AM Feb 8 2012 - 24 comments [88 favorites (33 in the last 24 hours)]
After years of work, New Zealand scholar Sally-Ann Lambert just released volume 2 of her 9-volume linguistics series.
“Hlingit Word Encyclopedia: The Origin of Copper” is a 630-page encyclopedia of the SE Alaskan native language Tlingit. She traveled to Sitka for a mid-January book release and found one little problem: none of the Tlingit native speakers or scholars there recognized the language in it.
posted by msalt at 12:36 PM Feb 8 2012 - 93 comments [25 favorites]
Alan Turing, British
code-breaker during WWII, imminent
computer scientist, and
much else has been
denied a
posthumous pardon from the British government for his 1952 conviction on charges of
"Gross Indecency" because of his homosexuality.
posted by clavier at 3:09 PM Feb 8 2012 - 89 comments [20 favorites]
In 1962, the Mansfield (Ohio) Police Department stationed officers armed with a movie camera behind a two-way mirror in a public restroom known for its "cruisy" atmosphere. With the help of the footage shot, dozens of men were arrested, prosecuted, and convicted on
sodomy charges, which at the time carried mandatory minimum sentences of a year in prison. In 2007, the original surveillance footage was obtained by filmmaker
William E.
Jones. He's screened the unedited 56 minute film as
Tearoom at festivals and museums the world over, providing a clandestine look at the scrutiny small-town Midwestern gay men faced in the 1960's. [
warning:
explicit,
NSFW material lies beyond most links]
posted by item at 6:51 AM Feb 9 2012 - 63 comments [20 favorites]
Google is quietly launching a new program called
Screenwise aimed at collected more data from users than is possible from monitoring activity across Google-owned sites. The program comes in two flavors: a browser-based extension that will share with Google the sites you visit and how you use them, and a Cisco-made, Knowledge Networks-managed "black box" installed on your home network to measure Internet use. The first program pays users up to $25 in Amazon gift cards, the second pays $100 for signing up, and an additional $20 every month the device is installed up to a maximum of one year. To be eligible for the programs users must have a Google account, install and use Chrome, and be 13 or older. Ars Technica has
excerpts from leaked sign up process documents:
According to legal agreements displayed during signup, Google will share the aggregated data with third parties, including "academic institutions, advertisers, publishers, and programming networks." The agreement notes that the data collected will be personally identifiable, with some exceptions: https addresses and private browsing windows of people using the router will not be tracked. The browser extension, however, will track private or incognito browsing, though the data will not be personally identifiable. For all other collected data, Google will "attempt" to remove that identifiable info before sharing it—no guarantees, though.
posted by 2bucksplus at 6:05 PM Feb 8 2012 - 78 comments [18 favorites]
"Portia Simpson Miller, the former and newly re-elected Prime Minister of Jamaica and representative of the People's National Party,
recently took an historically significant position by openly supporting GLBT legal protection in Jamaica, a country internationally notorious for a "
culture of homophobia." Miller's statements come at a time of great cultural change in both Jamaica and dancehall music.
This is for her." This is a mixtape of dancehall music and some of it is NSFW.
posted by Kattullus at 3:04 PM Feb 8 2012 - 8 comments [17 favorites]
Railfans love it. Model Railroaders adore it. Economics people study it. The Tropicana Corporation runs between 10 and 12 30-to-50-car trains of it every week.
Behold, 5000 tons of Orange Juice on the move.
posted by pjern at 8:40 PM Feb 8 2012 - 29 comments [17 favorites]
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