MetaFilter

"Alcohol makes fans fight. But cannabis smokers will be shaking hands and singing along together.” Confronted with the dangers of English soccer hooligans, Portugese police have found an incredibly pragmatic way to reduce crowd violence: crack down on booze and encourage the fans to smoke out. It's not some crazy new-fangled idea - it's been used successfully in the Netherlands. How does this reflect on US drug policy? More importantly, how does it reflect on the state of English soccer hooliganism?
comment posted at 5:01 AM on Jun-11-04

Gmail is too Creepy "Dear Gmail user: Due to privacy considerations, we cannot respond unless you resend your email from a different account."
comment posted at 9:06 PM on Jun-10-04

Park. Gentlemen, stop your engines. [Flash.]
comment posted at 7:52 PM on Jun-10-04

So, you want some hot mp3's? Well, this is the place (Russian, but English cookie-set option in top-left). Huge repositories of legal music, yours to download for only $0.01/Mb! If that's not enough, they'll even serve it up to you in any format or bitrate you require (MP3, AAC, FLAC, OGG, WMV). Add on to that the fact there's no DRM built into the files downloaded, and the option to pay with Paypal is a nice touch too. So, I ask you, MetaFilter, what is the catch?
comment posted at 12:37 PM on Jun-10-04
comment posted at 1:38 PM on Jun-10-04
comment posted at 8:07 PM on Jun-10-04
comment posted at 8:28 PM on Jun-10-04

As if mad cow wasn't enough. The UK has pulled saskatoon berries from store shelves while they decide if the berries are safe to eat. If not, my family in Saskatchewan should be dead by now. The UK Food Standards Agency is looking for your views on these cute little berries. So juicy, so tasty, so purple. How can you say no?
comment posted at 8:10 PM on Jun-8-04

The 50 Coolest Song Parts [RetroCrush] As always, bringing up our favorites... um... song parts... will be more constructive and fun than destroying the list.
comment posted at 3:20 PM on Jun-8-04
comment posted at 10:46 AM on Jun-9-04
comment posted at 8:36 PM on Jun-9-04

South Park does the "Aristocrats" joke. (WARNING! Windows Media file, very very not safe for work.) "The Aristocrats" is a long-lived comedians' in-joke--or, rather, an extraordinarily filthy joke that's not really a joke. (Gilbert Gottfried knocked 'em dead with it shortly after 9/11.) Now it's going public (sort of): Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza are making a movie featuring over 100 comedians telling their own versions. The South Park version linked above is "not even in the top 5 for dirtiest." Yikes!
comment posted at 9:34 AM on Jun-9-04

Bag Tag "We are sorry that our President is an idiot"
comment posted at 9:03 PM on Jun-7-04
comment posted at 9:06 PM on Jun-7-04

Full size associated press photos from a member of SomethingAwful who supposedly works for AP. We get to see very large sized photos that are normally only seen by those on the inside.
comment posted at 8:39 AM on Jun-7-04
comment posted at 8:41 AM on Jun-7-04
comment posted at 9:47 AM on Jun-7-04
comment posted at 10:59 AM on Jun-7-04

Let's have a moment of silence to remember Creed, the widely reviled band whose attorney once offered this inspired defense to a fan lawsuit: "You can't bring a lawsuit against a band for sucking."
comment posted at 11:55 AM on Jun-6-04
comment posted at 11:28 PM on Jun-6-04

Breaking History: Ronald Reagan dead at 93.
Will today be marked as the culmination of his achievements or the "end of the Reagan Era"?
MeFites are advised to please avoid piling onto the subject or the messenger
comment posted at 11:25 AM on Jun-6-04
comment posted at 11:26 AM on Jun-6-04

How it feels to get shot. [via waxy] Each year, roughly 55,000 Americans survive firearm injuries. "People don't even get knocked backward when they get shot.. Unless hit in the head or the spine, the most common [immediate] reaction to getting shot is no reaction at all."
comment posted at 11:39 AM on Jun-5-04

Petals Around the Rose This little puzzle took my genius son over an hour to figure out. It took me two seconds. They say the smarter you are the harder it is...shut up.
comment posted at 11:34 AM on Jun-5-04

Bishop Castle. A lone man has been building a 160 foot tall castle in the Colorado mountains for the past 34 years.
comment posted at 11:35 AM on Jun-3-04

Storm Chaser Blogs - it's prime time for tornado hunting.
comment posted at 10:05 AM on May-27-04

"In the long run, motherhood is the greatest influence a childbearing woman will ever have in the human race." So says Rev. Ralph Drollinger, president of Capitol Ministries, in a recent lesson (PDF) for his legislative bible study class. [more inside]
comment posted at 7:41 PM on May-25-04

"A reversal of soldiers' fortunes" describes how the first solider to be court-martialed for Abu Ghraib is greeted as a hero, while the soldier who brought these activites to light is treated as a villain.
comment posted at 12:19 PM on May-24-04
comment posted at 4:27 PM on May-24-04

Ban on Camera Phones in Iraq Q: What do you do if your troops take pictures of physical and sexual abuse in American-run prisons in Iraq? A: Ban cameras, of course. What the people can't see don't happen.
comment posted at 9:22 AM on May-24-04
comment posted at 12:32 PM on May-24-04

Why $2 Gas Is Amazing Gasoline is now selling at more than $2 a gallon, which, after inflation, is higher than it's been since 1981. But that's not the amazing part. Actually, there are three amazing parts.
comment posted at 9:01 AM on May-23-04
comment posted at 12:52 PM on May-23-04

Monsanto Wins Fight to Control Plant The Canadian Supreme court sets international precedent by ruling that since Monsanto holds a patent on a gene, it can control the use of the plant. So does this mean that in the future that an engineered human gene could be patented, and therefore if you receive this gene you will have to make royalty payments? And if you renege on paying can they repo the gene?
comment posted at 2:20 PM on May-21-04

Bitch Hit My Truck: Is this for real?
comment posted at 7:49 AM on May-20-04

The sensationally sordid Staff Ass sex scandal. Young DC congressional staff assistant starts juicy blog. (edited cache). Blog describes carryings on with many men, including a married Bush appointee who pays her for sex. Washington's most amusing and best read new blogger, Wonkette, links to it, picking out choice quotes. Within hours, the blog is gone, the girl is fired. Now another blogger outs the girl's boss as a Republican Senator. Fun!
comment posted at 3:56 PM on May-20-04

Sleep with me, I'm not too young. Backmasking in Britney Spears song?
comment posted at 8:54 AM on May-19-04

The Jesus Landing Pad "It was an e-mail we weren't meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists..."
comment posted at 9:01 AM on May-19-04

A tornado picks up a house while a storm chaser tapes it. Later, he finds himself getting a little too close for comfort. (27 meg download - some swearing) Fortunately, no one was in that house at the time.
comment posted at 9:06 PM on May-16-04
comment posted at 10:08 AM on May-17-04
comment posted at 2:37 PM on May-17-04

Shiver me illegally-harvested timbers! Why dust off a law used only twice, most recently 114 years ago? Because you have a grand jury and you can. The alleged sailor-mongerers have issued a statement on their website.
comment posted at 8:42 PM on May-15-04

The Red Hat Society With an inspired purchase of a red fedora and a reading of the poem Warning by Jenny Joseph, one woman created what is fast becoming a movement around the world for women over fifty.
comment posted at 8:30 PM on May-11-04

Fools for Communism: "the world’s final redoubt of communism is not Havana or Pyongyang but American college campuses. 'The nostalgic afterlife of communism in the United States has outlived most of the real Communist regimes around the world....A sizable cadre of American intellectuals now openly applaud and apologize for one of the bloodiest ideologies of human history, and instead of being treated as pariahs, they hold distinguished positions in American higher education and cultural life.'" Here's also History News Network's interview with the authors of "In Denial: Historians, Communists and Espionage": "The facts of history that they [communist sympathizers] got wrong can be, in their view, rationalized, redefined, minimized, or otherwise set aside in service to the idealized future they seek. Many have learned no lessons from the failure of communism; they will ardently pursue the same goals by the same means, albeit under new names."
comment posted at 8:54 AM on May-8-04

If you can't get enough Sith-on-Sith sexy slashfiction action, you could check out the entire category of such work, broken down to what types of character interaction takes place and who is involved. It's just a tiny sliver of the work indexed by The Slash Page Database Project. Oh, the creativity of sexless nerds...
comment posted at 8:01 PM on May-7-04

Creative, probably not on purpose, trailer trash.
comment posted at 4:24 PM on May-4-04

10.5 If you're like me, you probably just finished watching 10.5, and are still giggling at the "disastrous" screenplay and campy drama. Well, the science is in: Magnitude 10.5 is impossible, brick buildings would collapse long before the Space Needle, fault lines don't follow train tracks, California will not slide into the sea, bottomless pits do not swallow up unfortunate red-shirted extras, and for crying out loud, Lex, don't use nuclear warheads either to blow the tectonic plates apart or weld them shut.
comment posted at 9:24 PM on May-3-04

a hole
comment posted at 9:45 PM on May-3-04
comment posted at 12:28 PM on May-4-04

The gas shortage won't get better. Paid more at the pump recently? I hope you don't drive an SUV -- things could get really painful really fast. Demand is always increasing for gasoline, but now we're hitting a point where refineries can't actually refine enough gas to meet demand, and very few places in the world can supply gasoline that meets our environmental standards.
comment posted at 2:33 PM on May-3-04