February 9
Louis Virtel is an editor over at
AfterElton.com and an avid
twitterer. For the last few months he has been making an hilarious web series called Verbal Vogueing in which he rants about celebrities and pop culture. Still ongoing, there are currently ten installments; here is episode one:
"The Immaculate Conniption".(NSFW audio)
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posted by aldurtregi at 5:36 AM - 0 comments The
Laberinto of Andrea Ghisi is a 17th-century magic trick in book form. Pick an image from the 60 arrayed in front of you, and tell the magician only which quadrant it appears in. Repeat the process twice on different pages, and he can tell you what image you chose. You can see the trick performed at around 2:20
in this video,
play a simulation, or see the book
digitized in its entirety.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:05 AM - 8 comments "I learnt this song in Grimsby over in England about 1987. It was during the Thatcher era. There was all kinds of things happening, over in England. But I'll say one thing about Thatcher, some fantastic songs were written during her reign."
Christy Moore -- Ballad of an Ordinary Man (SYLT)
posted by Mister Bijou at 3:54 AM - 8 comments February 8
Normally, when you buy stolen goods, you don't legally own them. The person they were stolen from still does. Unless: Until 1995, if you bought them in
Bermondsey Market, London, between the hours of sunrise and sunset, they would then belong to you, even if
clearly stolen.
posted by Zarkonnen at 10:43 PM - 21 comments 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. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 9:49 PM - 31 comments
You probably already know that mascots wearing
over-sized caricature foam heads of the four Mount Rushmore presidents race around the bases during home games for the Washington Nationals. You also probably know that
Teddy has never officially won a single race.
Did you know that if you are over 18, 5'7" to 6'6", can run from center field to home plate in 40 seconds, dig the costume, and are available for 35 home games in Washington, DC, that
you can become one of them?
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posted by juliplease at 8:42 PM - 20 comments 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. [more inside]
posted by pjern at 8:40 PM - 20 comments Björk explains her interactive touch screen album to Stephen Colbert. The longtime boundary-pushing,
Icelandic musician (and ever-fascinating
fashionista) released
Biophilia in October. It is the first album created entirely
on touch screens and subsequently released as an album
for touch screens with interactive apps for each song. Her interview (and
performance in an inflatable dress) support her desire to
educate kids about science through the album and its apps.
Is this the future of music?
posted by achpea at 8:04 PM - 24 comments
Kristina Killgrove, a biological anthropologist, has started a series of blog posts titled
A Brief History of Bioarcheology.
Part 1: America
Part 2: Italy
posted by Cloud King at 7:54 PM - 3 comments
Fortune favors the bold. In 2005, then Facebook's president Sean Parker asked
David Choe, an LA-based graffiti artist, to paint the walls of his Palo Alto office. Choe - who had just finished a prison stint in Japan - says Facebook offered him stock options or $60,000 cash. For some reason, he chose stock options. Seven years later, that stock is said to be worth around $500 million.
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posted by phaedon at 7:37 PM - 37 comments
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.
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posted by 2bucksplus at 6:05 PM - 70 comments Felix Salmon muses on why art prices keep rising. On the way, he discusses why some art becomes super-popular:
"Fine art has become the billionaire’s-club equivalent of a Louis Vuitton bag, slathered in logos. It’s not connoisseurship which drives values, so much as recognizability. Which in turn helps to explain why the most prolific artists (Picasso, Warhol, Hirst) are also the most expensive: the more of their work there is, the more exposed to it people become, the more they’ll recognize it, and therefore the more desirable it is."
posted by benbenson at 4:55 PM - 20 comments
"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 - 11 comments
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.
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posted by clavier at 3:09 PM - 84 comments
"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 - 8 comments 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 - 31 comments Nello Ferrara, chairman of Ferrara Pan Candy Co (
previously), died Friday at his home in River Forest at age 93.
The Chicago Sun Times has an excellent obituary profiling his rather interesting life.
posted by hippybear at 2:20 PM - 29 comments Is The Shining really about the gold standard? Using unpublished info from the Stanley Kubrick Archives as a key source,
Kubrick's Gold Story [part 1 of 4] is a film analysis that uncovers economic themes encoded in The Shining with regard to gold vs fiat monetary systems. Written, narrated and edited by
Rob Ager [
Previously].
posted by albrecht at 12:47 PM - 69 comments 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.
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posted by msalt at 12:36 PM - 93 comments 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.
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posted by filthy light thief at 12:02 PM - 16 comments The
WALL-E Builders Club formed in October 2007 as an offshoot of the R2 (yes that one) builders club, to create their own WALL-E replica. This is their
current progress on the project.
posted by mrzarquon at 9:49 AM - 16 comments Canada's Exclaim magazine former cartoonist Fiona Symth's new art. CHEEZ was originally a monthly comic/drawing published in Canada's Exclaim Magazine over a ten year period from 1992 to 2002. There were no editorial restrictions on the work apart from the monthly deadline and the colour restrictions of the paper (the art work had to be black and white). Each strip was created shortly before the deadline and numbered in chronological order. This CHEEZ will be drawn weekly and will continue with the same numbering sequence and restrictive palette. A collection of the first one hundred strips was published as CHEEZ 100 by Pedlar Press in 2001.
posted by Ark_Light at 9:02 AM - 9 comments
"The idea that a species domesticated itself is a bit crazy, but there are some species that outcompeted others by becoming nicer."
Wired examines the phenomena of self-domestication.
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posted by quin at 8:59 AM - 38 comments There are
several groups trying to pass bills in different states to ban the application of
foreign laws in a
US court, especially Sharia law. These groups are almost
all using
model legislation drafted by
anti-Muslim activist David Yerushalmi.
posted by reenum at 8:36 AM - 90 comments Tom Murphy is an Anchor/Reporter/Producer and
Weather Man on Channel 11 in Alpena, Michigan.
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posted by cashman at 7:50 AM - 31 comments "Lin is saving the Knicks with super-human play, but he's dispelling myths about Asian America by being otherwise hyper-normal and I thank him. He doesn't have a duty to embrace Asian America, speak for Asian America, or represent Asian America because right now he IS Asian America." --
Eddie Huang on Yao Ming, Jeremy Lin, and being Asian in America.
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posted by mathowie at 7:38 AM - 43 comments John Williams turned 80 today! The American composer is best known for the themes from
Star Wars,
Jaws,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and
Indiana Jones, but starting with the score adaptation for
Valley of the Dolls, he's racked up 47 Oscar nominations in a 44-year span, including 5 wins.
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posted by troika at 7:26 AM - 52 comments Nicole Cliff has been reviewing
Classic Trash fiction for The Awl, with a recent exposition on
Clan of the Cave Bear. Jeffrey Sconce reviewed 100 obscure and largely unloved books last year on
Consumed and Judged, and shows no sign of slowing down.
Pop Sensation profiles the cover of one, generally trashy, paperback, three times a week, (and includes a seemingly random quote from the book).
posted by latkes at 6:48 AM - 18 comments "Muslim-American Terrorism in the Decade Since 9/11" (PDF) is a report by Professor Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina, published by the
Triangle Center for Terrorism and Homeland Security. The TCFTHS is a collection of experts in the "Research Triangle" of North Carolina, associated with Duke, UNC and NC State and RTI, the independent research institute dedicated to aggregating and marketing the research resources of these three institutions.
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posted by running order squabble fest at 6:44 AM - 22 comments
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.
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posted by baejoseph at 5:16 AM - 23 comments
How do people read menus? [
More] Apparently we read them top-to-bottom and left-to-right, just like books! For your reading pleasure, here's a selection of menu items from the
New York Public Library, the
University of Washington, the
CIA,
Derrick Bostrom,
Rusty Thomas,
Johnson & Wales,
Mark,
Los Angeles,
Las Vegas,
Colorado,
Italy, and other places...
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posted by twoleftfeet at 3:29 AM - 24 comments
February 7
The Supreme Court of the United States has held only one criminal trial in its history:
United States v. Shipp.
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posted by jedicus at 9:52 PM - 29 comments THE HISTORY (AND MYSTERY!) behind
Action 52 and
Cheetahmen, FINALLY REVEALED! And, if you have five hundred bucks to spare, NES cartridges of the newly unearthed(?)
CHEETAHMEN: THE CREATION is available for sale! VINCE PERRI AT HIS DESIGN BEST, the web site proclaims, though it's unclear what this is expected to mean to us!
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:32 PM - 15 comments
Rick Santorum predicted winner in Minnesota & Missouri. Mr. Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator best known for his
feud (and subsequent
google-bombing) with
Dan Savage over
his comparison of homosexuality with bestiality, is the predicted winner of Republican primaries in Minnesota and Missouri, and is currently leading in the third, Colorado.
posted by leotrotsky at 7:46 PM - 348 comments
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