Household Hacker offers a growing variety of bizarrely improbable or impossible "hacks" using household items. How many errors can you spot?
posted by loquacious
on Nov 23, 2007 -
35 comments
"Imagine, if you will, a load of horseshit." John Scalzi with everything you need to know about the $27 million
Creation Museum.
"In the first room of the Creation Museum tour there’s a display of two paleontologists unearthing a raptor skeleton. One of them, a rather avuncular fellow, explains that he and the other paleontologist are both doing the same work, but that they start off from different premises: He starts off from the Bible and the other fellow (who does not get to comment, naturally) starts off from “man’s reason,” and really, that’s the only difference between them: “different starting points, same facts,” is the mantra for the first portion of the museum."
Don't forget the
photo tour. [
previously]
posted by Mikey-San
on Nov 13, 2007 -
76 comments
In 1997,
Todd Phillips and
Andrew Gurland created a film documenting the savagely brutal hazing rituals that take place during Hell Week at U.S. college fraternities.
Frat House was completed and won the Grand Jury Prize for documentaries at 1998's Sundance Film Festival, an award that was later rescinded. HBO was slated to air it later that year, but pulled it for reasons that remain debatable to this day. It has never seen an official release.
Frat House (60 minutes, Google video, )
[more inside]
posted by item
on Nov 8, 2007 -
66 comments
Project Pterosaur The goal of Project Pterosaur is to mount an expedition to locate and bring back to the United States living specimens of pterosaurs or their fertile eggs, which will be displayed in a Pterosaur Rookery that will be the center piece of the planned Fellowship Creation Science Museum and Research Institute (FCSMRI). Although, sadly, it may
not be real.
posted by geekyguy
on Oct 29, 2007 -
20 comments
Pennsylvania polling places regarding September 08 elections to have everything but
voters.
posted by duende
on Oct 26, 2007 -
31 comments
9000 miles by ferry, train, bus, bicycle, horse, foot and car. In a bid to
reduce his carbon footprint, Joseph Tame swapped 11 hours in a plane from Japan to England for a month-long adventure across Eurasia. Along the way he has a
Chinese Imperial Guard hold a penguin, stays in a
Mongolian Yurt, experiences a
"road" trip or
two,
misses some
trains, and
befriends a chipmunk.
posted by Freaky
on Oct 15, 2007 -
25 comments
While other children their age spend their days in school, forming friendships and worrying over their grades, these two young ragamuffins spend long nights camped out in front of hot night spots they won't be able to legally enter themselves for at least half a decade. Please open your hearts, ladies and gentlemen, to
the littlest paparazzi.
[more inside]
posted by maryh
on Oct 8, 2007 -
29 comments
NickCaveFilter: Fifty years ago this very day,
Nicholas Edward Cave [
previously] crawled from the womb and started to plot. At 16 he formed his first band which evolved quickly into the
Boys Next Door [
Shivers]. This in turn mutated into
the Birthday Party (1980) who terrorised the post-punk soundscape in Australia and the UK [
Release the Bats |
Nick the Stripper]. The
Birthday Party relocated to England and in 1984 the band imploded in an orgy of drugs and booze. Shortly after
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were born [The Ship Song -
video &
solo live | The Mercy Seat -
video &
live |
Where the Wild Roses Grow], and 23 years and 11 studio albums later (not to mention a
best selling book, a
great screenplay,
some acting and several soundtrack projects) he is still going strong. But, instead of sitting on his musical laurels he decided to get back to basics and, in 2006,
grew a huge moustache and formed
Grinderman – a four piece with a primeval hybrid Birthday Party/Bad Seeds sound [
No Pussy Blues |
Honey Bee]. Fellow Mefites, I ask you to raise a glass to
Mr. Cave… And, especially if you are not familiar to his work, don’t forget to “look inside” for my primer on the enigma that is Nick Cave, one of the
finest song-writers on the face of this miserable planet.
[more inside]
posted by the_very_hungry_caterpillar
on Sep 22, 2007 -
98 comments
The Flat Earth Society considers the notion of a round earth to be a conspiracy. Flat earthers
turn to the Bible to support their claims. A
map of the flat earth (oddly similar to the
UN logo), where
N is the central open sea, I, the circular wall or barrier of ice, L, the masses of land tending southwards, W, the "waters of the great deep," surrounding the land, S, the southern boundary of ice, and D, the outer gloom and darkness, in which the material world is lost to human perception.
A 3D view of the
Zetetic universe.
You know who else thought the earth was round?
posted by desjardins
on Sep 19, 2007 -
39 comments
Meet Lee Mercer. He wants to be the next U.S. president, and he's "solved every crime in America and the world for the last 15 years dating back to before Christ."
posted by rollbiz
on Sep 10, 2007 -
71 comments
Darwin's Deadly Legacy illustrates how Charles Darwin caused the Holocaust. This documentary, from
the late Dr. James Kennedy and his Coral Ridge Ministries, features not only rare, Bigfoot-esque glimpses of the notoriously camera-shy
Ann Coulter, but also Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project. Of course,
Dr. Collins hates everything about the documentary and claims that his footage was simply spliced in under false pretenses, and even
Michael Behe distances himself from the entire production, disagreeing as he does with its central tenets. Oh, and the ADL is pissed, but when aren't they? Anyway, not even arch-conservative websites with "We Need Alan Keyes For President" interstitial ads
think the documentary is worth very much.
And it seems that Hitler himself had a grand old time pimping out Christianity and denying that we came from apes. (
More,
more.) So
watch the fucking trailer and
learn yourself some history.
posted by Sticherbeast
on Sep 10, 2007 -
69 comments
Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal by Joel Salatin. This Saturday will mark this article's four year anniversary. Frankly, I was mildly surprised not to have found it mentioned before in MeFi. It's a good read about a sad state of affairs; how our government is turning its own people into outlaws, because freedom has been traded in for an illusion of security.
...but then we already knew that. Don't we?
posted by ZachsMind
on Aug 29, 2007 -
110 comments
Spending years clarifying my observations of the community and putting them down on paper slowly revealed a society beset by a fatal condition; an affliction that has been destroying us at an ever increasing rate for two centuries and must eventually return us to barbarism. A final result that should be no surprise, as it has overtaken every other civilization; a fate that appears as inevitable and as irreversible as old age with its increasing feebleness and dementia. I was no longer interested in why our bureaucracy was full of incompetents? but why our society was full of incompetents? My original aim to improve my community with technology was replaced with answering the question, why does a community age like any other creature?
Philip Atkinson knows: civilization is in decline. And he's determined to
tell you about it. Find out the truth about
Nelson Mandela,
AIDS,
obesity,
parenting,
standard weights and measures, and, of course,
the Ten Commandments. We're
screwed, guys. Sit down,
read a book, and
watch it burn.
posted by nasreddin
on Aug 22, 2007 -
44 comments
Christs, Communists, & Rock 'n' Roll is an excellent introduction to a tradition of anti-rock writings and recordings by the Religious Right. In the 1960s, there was
David Noebel who wrote
Communism, Hypnotism, & the Beatles and
The Marxist Minstrels. In the early 1970s,
Reverend Riblett constructs a seven-foot cross out of rock music records and sets it aflame with gasoline. Michael Mills finds
hidden Satanic messages in Bow Wow Wow and the Grateful Dead, while Bob Larson valiantly
debates Mandy, a 13-year-old fan of the Cure. The motherlode is probably the
cassettes of John Todd, who traveled the fundamentalist circuit in the 1970s claiming to be a former witch and a member of the Illuminati, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. (more inside)
posted by jonp72
on Aug 20, 2007 -
31 comments
Louis Wain became one of the most famous British illustrators of the late Victorian and Edwardian era after trying to cheer up his wife Emily by drawing portraits of their pet cat,
Peter. In addition to publishing a popular
children's book about kittens, he was a
founder of the U.K's
National Cat Club who was instrumental in promoting the
Cat Fancy movement, which encouraged Britons of all classes to view cats as lovable pets instead of household pests. Unfortunately, after Wain's wife Emily died of breast cancer, Wain gradually went mad due to
psychosis and
late onset schizophrenia, ending up in London's notorious
Bethlehem Hospital (the etymological origin for the word
bedlam). While at Bedlam, Wain continued to draw, but his cat portraits transformed into pure
geometric abstraction and
psychedelic fractals, but some see harbingers of madness in cryptically titled works, such as
Early Indian Irish and
The Fire of the Mind Agitates the Atmosphere. For more insight on Wain, check out this
1896 interview and this
short film dramatizing the progression of Wain's schizophrenia through his art.
posted by jonp72
on Aug 12, 2007 -
25 comments
Nazi Pop Twins is an
eerie documentary that debuted this year on BBC's
Channel Four about the neo-Nazi teen folk musicians,
Prussian Blue. The girls are managed by a neo-Nazi stage mom from hell, and the girls already seem to be more interested in shopping at the mall than singing white power lyrics. One of the creepiest scenes includes the twin girls on a phone call with their prison "pen pal,"
David Lane, the Neo-Nazi convicted of the murder of radio talk show host,
Alan Berg. Lane refers to the twin girls as his "fantasy sweethearts," raising issues about whether an obsession with genetic "purity" leads to
pedophilia on the Racist Right. Watch the documentary on YouTube (Parts
1,
2,
3,
4, and
5) (Warning: may be exposed to YouTube comments from racist asshats.)
posted by jonp72
on Aug 11, 2007 -
165 comments
