Frozen seas. A brief but kind of amazing collection of photos of the deck of a fishing trauler in fridgid conditions, where every exposed surface has layers of frozen saltwater accumulated. This condition can cause the boat to become topheavy and capsize, as well as just plain making life more miserable for those that work on the deck.
posted by jonson
on May 3, 2004 -
12 comments
News 14 in North Carolina had an online system where people could post school closings, etc that would scroll on the screen. The postings all got reviewed before they went live, but after they’d been reviewed/approved, the system was open for the original poster to go back and
change the copy, so you could essentially submit something benign, then go back and monkey with it.
Screen shots of the results.
posted by jonson
on Mar 9, 2004 -
44 comments
Slightly ominous, slightly beautiful collection of ePostcards (and photographs) of Streatham Cemetery, rendered in the subtlest use of Flash I've ever seen (gentle animations on small portions of each image. Be sure to view the cemetery in all four seasons, multiple pix of each.
posted by jonson
on Sep 13, 2003 -
26 comments
If you've ever wanted to own a Subterranean Fortress in the Pacific Northwest but didn't want to spend
14 years digging out and building one, your opportunity has arrived at last, priced at
only $259,000. Conveniently located underneath a
nondescript suburban home, you can use the shelter for fun, play, or surviving nuclear holocaust. Or, if you've seen Silence of the Lambs, you may have other ideas for possible uses.
posted by jonson
on Sep 4, 2003 -
33 comments
The latest Honda television commercial, "
Sense" being shown in the UK, is the follow up to the
widely discussed "Cog." It's quite not as cool as its predecessor, but still, an elegant, interesting concept. Apologies for the somewhat low quality of the java video stream.
posted by jonson
on Jul 10, 2003 -
23 comments
Ever since I became a TiVo addict, I've found myself wanting to use its features in real life, wishing I could rewind & replay moments of random comedy & chaos, usually involving my pugs. Soon, thanks the good folks at Deja View, I will be able to, with the help of a
head mounted micro video camera unit that is always on, recording a 30 second buffer of real time, and up to four hours of manually recordable space for once you activate the record button. The scourge of ephemera will be wiped out in our lifetime.
posted by jonson
on Jun 19, 2003 -
13 comments
Homemade ice cream, in 30 seconds. All you need is cream, sugar, eggs, flavorings (strawberries, vanilla, kittens, whatever your preference) and access to liquid nitrogen. And there the plan goes south, at least for me. Where can the average joe score this crucial timesaving ingredient? Seriously. Also, I want to try the cool "shatter a flower" trick that they reference.
posted by jonson
on Jun 17, 2003 -
23 comments
Short of finding your spouse from
Jailbabes, the "mail order bride" has to be the worst notion in the proud tradition of horrible spousal selection. But for too long now, the lonely women of the world have been shut out from this marketplace of love. Not anymore, thanks to
MailOrderHusbands. Order
now, going fast!
posted by jonson
on Jun 4, 2003 -
8 comments
Justice is served. A career criminal, high on cocaine breaks into a bar that has been fitted with a security system that turns out to be lethal. The bar owner installed the system after the 3rd break in in the past month, and posted numerous signs outside warning of the danger. The criminal is electrocuted to death, and this being America, the widow of the bar's owner (who has passed away during the years of litigation over this issue) is forced to pay $75,000 to the family of the robber, who understandably need the money now that the breadwinner is no longer around to provide for them via a life of robbery.
posted by jonson
on Feb 26, 2003 -
129 comments
It's all about shareholder value. Steve Jobs has received tremendous positive press for only accepting one dollar per year as payment for his CEO services at Apple. How does he do it, you ask? Well, he supplements his income by a) being a billionaire, and b) renting out his corporate jet to Apple, at a cost of over 1.2 million dollars, over the past two years. Which is an exceptionally generous rental fee considering that Apple itself paid $90 million for the jet, which it bought for Jobs in May of 2001. This data was disclosed along in the most recent quarterly report in which Apple announced layoffs of 260 employees, none of whom were given a jet.
posted by jonson
on Feb 14, 2003 -
13 comments
Handy tips for those new to the bomb threat call in line. This "FAQ" from the LAPD's website is actually a checklist of things novice police phone operators are instructed to ask anyone calling in to leave a bomb threat. Useful information being collected includes tone of caller's voice (raspy? pleasant?), background noise (party atmosphere?) and important personal data about the soon to be bomber (what is your name? what is your address?). Sleep soundly, Los Angeles, your days of random explosions are a thing of the past.
posted by jonson
on Feb 6, 2003 -
11 comments
Japanese create "invisible" cloak. Well, not really. Technically, just a two sided cloak, the front of which is a projector, and the back of which is a camera. Only works, one would imagine, if you're looking at a person straight on, and even then it would help if you were partially blind, or at the very least, raised in the wilderness & easily fooled by modern technology.
posted by jonson
on Feb 5, 2003 -
55 comments
The future of music retail... will be nothing like this. Echo Networks, a Los Angeles based "digital venture", in partnership with Best Buy, Tower, Wherehouse, Virgin & FYE, has launched an instore downloadable purchase initiative whose chances of failure are only exceeded by the extreme vagueness surrounding the announcement.
For more, read the news article at
CNET.
posted by jonson
on Jan 27, 2003 -
14 comments
What a bunch of little nazis. A scout leader in Denmark has been reprimanded for leading the kids (ages 11-14) in a theme based game of tag, with the theme being Nazi's vs. Jews. This included dressing the Jews in yellow Star of David outfits and a sign with the words "Arbeit macht frei". Danish Metafilter members, explain yourselves!!
posted by jonson
on Jan 24, 2003 -
64 comments
Memeufacture is a url aggregating service, such as Blogdex, but with human intelligence applied to the collection & categorization, such that links aren't merely ranked by popularity, but divided into categories such as Law, Politics (broken out by left & right), Design etc. There's no Religion (unless you count Apple), nor is the burgeoning world of sex blogs taken into account, but still, intriguing.
posted by jonson
on Jan 13, 2003 -
3 comments
