Incident reports from police departments can be boring, staid affairs. Not so with those from University of Texas at Austin. This week's highlights include a budding horticulturist with a marijuana growing habit, a non-alcoholic student with catlike reflexes and a man who enjoys singing in trees. Via TM Daily Post.
posted by Leezie on Jan 28, 2012 - 22 comments

Image of the Year. From the article: "If you want to go shallow for an Image of the Year, you can't do better than Paris Hilton, seen through the window of a Los Angeles sheriff's car, weeping as she's being hauled back to prison to complete a probation-violation sentence. But when you first notice the credit on that now infamous picture, there's a double take. The image came from the camera of Nick Ut, whose picture of a little girl burned by napalm, naked and running directly toward the camera and into the conscience of the American people, became perhaps the most powerful and influential vision of the Vietnam War. Not only was the Paris Hilton image taken by one of this country's most celebrated war photographers, it was taken June 8, 35 years to the day after the devastating image of 9-year-old Kim Phuc fleeing her bombed-out village. Let's put these two pictures up on the wall together for one last, end-of-the-year look, and see if something emerges."
posted by kittens for breakfast on Dec 30, 2007 - 52 comments

96 Minutes... 40 years later. Texas Monthly has an article that, through eyewitness accounts, tells the tale of Charles Whitman. Forty years ago today--before 9/11, Columbine, Oklahoma City, "going postal"--Whitman perpetrated an act of public terror that impacted the national conscience. It all began when he killed his mother. Then he started typing a letter that, after he killed his wife, he finished hand-writing. Then he went to the Tower with a small arsenal and began the slaughter. Over 96 minutes he killed 13 more people and wounded 34 others until off-duty Officer Ray Martinez made it to the top of the tower and killed Whitman. (more inside)
posted by dios on Aug 1, 2006 - 71 comments

Texas Riparian Law I found this intriguing because I 1) live in Texas, 2) have walked many Texas creekbottoms, 3) have a lot of lawyer friends, and 4) as an English major, find the language somehow beautiful.
posted by rleamon on Jun 29, 2006 - 25 comments

Four Corners - A Literary Excursion Across America "There is no experience that compares to being on all fours in four states at once while waving ones behind toward a blinking camera. Even Columbus would have appreciated this." Good reading here.
posted by WolfDaddy on Jan 30, 2004 - 1 comment

For the gamer who has everything. Character skins (and more) for Unreal Tournament designed by (and based on) former pornstar Asia Carrera. NSFW.
posted by jpoulos on Jan 13, 2004 - 36 comments