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The Goleta Air & Space Museum/ Goleta Natural History Museum While looking for hot spring photos, I found this virtual museum. It is loaded with amazing shots of warbirds in flight and the latest in space travel On the other hand some very well done nature photography. Including desert panoramas This is all the work of one man.
posted by hortense at 11:39 PM PST - 13 comments

singing in the rain, as interpreted by david "elsewhere" bernal . Also discussed here.
posted by ishmael at 11:26 PM PST - 26 comments

breaking CAPTCHAs. In this case the programmers were able to use software they had already designed to analyze images of people.
posted by delmoi at 10:57 PM PST - 30 comments

China's Latest Innovation: Fish Wine
The French used grapes, Russians fermented potatoes, Koreans put ginseng in their drink and Mexicans distilled cactus plants to make fiery tequila.
Now China has made wine out of fish.
posted by fenriq at 9:56 PM PST - 43 comments

Web design guru versus the telemarketers: designer Andy Clarke has posted his experiences with vendors of telephone services, windows, kitchens and advertising, as well as selected lines from other encounters; if the web-design thing doesn't pan out he may have a future in comedy...
posted by ubernostrum at 9:34 PM PST - 16 comments

You can give airline miles for tsunami relief. Link goes to a Goggle tsunami info page. Full airline links are inside.
posted by arse_hat at 8:04 PM PST - 13 comments

United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in [insert country]'s presidential election despite a [insert terror group] terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from [insert besieged capital city], 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the [insert terror group].

....A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President [insert idiotic Texas Republican]'s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in [insert besieged country]. The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in [insert date], to which President [insert idiotic Texas Republican] gave his personal commitment when he met [foreign puppet politician], the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.

Dateline? Sept. 4th, 1967.

Fact-Checked with archived NYT links at Daily KOS.
posted by taumeson at 7:49 PM PST - 81 comments

Surgical Eyes - source of info about complications and their treatment from Lasik and other vision correction surgeries.
posted by Gyan at 6:43 PM PST - 32 comments

Hypothesis as thought-crime ...Now, however, a new brouhaha has erupted [at Harvard]and it seems impossible that Summers [the president]will emerge from this one without serious erosion of his moral authority. The trigger was a statement he made at a conference, suggesting that the reason there are more men than women in the mathematical sciences at top-flight institutions has to do with a small statistical difference in inate ability, which becomes a pretty large disparity when one looks at the 'high end' of the respective distribution curves... The fatal words did not set forth his main theme, but merely constituted a brief aside, thoroughly hedged and qualified. Nonetheless, they touched off a firestorm of indignation, the most striking aspect of which was the intemperate response of a number of feminist scientists, who offered no counter-arguments, but simply declared the whole idea misogynistic and therefore forbidden intellectual territory.
posted by Postroad at 6:10 PM PST - 69 comments

TV Tickets! A great gallery of tickets to TV show tapings, some going back to the 1950s. Includes some fascinating commentary by Mark Evanier.
posted by braun_richard at 5:28 PM PST - 7 comments

Plan your escape route. [flash]
posted by monju_bosatsu at 4:57 PM PST - 15 comments

Pokemon causes cancer. Looks like they're not just limited to epileptic seizures anymore. (via Gamespot)
posted by riffraff at 3:29 PM PST - 13 comments

Interview with a Link Spammer. [via] Get to know one of the scummy linkpimping bottomfeeders who abuse our referrer logs and weblog comments, then take measures to protect yourself. AnnElisabeth.com has much more (just keep scrolling), and of course, check your own weblog software for rel="nofollow" updates.
posted by brownpau at 1:42 PM PST - 47 comments

FREE BOXES!
posted by jimmy at 1:12 PM PST - 100 comments

Remote control helicopter videos. Wow.
posted by jonah at 1:07 PM PST - 22 comments

Quicktime virtual reality panoramas of thousands of picturesque places in the Western United States and Canada. Feast your eyes on The Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Yosemite, Mossbrae Falls, Monument Valley, a Ghost Town, the Cascades, Palm Canyon, Joshua Tree, Las Vegas, Redwood Forests, poppy fields, palm groves, and Bumpass Hell. (via Highways West) (previous Mefi appearance)
posted by euphorb at 11:49 AM PST - 8 comments

Handling Porcupines, Trolls, and Other Online Vermin
posted by redneck_zionist at 11:14 AM PST - 39 comments

10 most important ideas of 2004: blogs and the Internet highlights some interesting views on the relationship of blogs to mainstream journalism. In light of the recent discussion relating to that topic, it is interesting to see some new views emerge.
posted by TNLNYC at 11:09 AM PST - 10 comments

M & M Sorter Because you're Lazy
posted by srboisvert at 10:40 AM PST - 32 comments

Tracy Boulian's sports photography is dramatic, humane, sometimes eerie, and sometimes simply beautiful.
posted by alms at 10:35 AM PST - 11 comments

World's Smallest PacMan Game [Flash, sound]
posted by carter at 10:08 AM PST - 16 comments

NYC man pledges to visit 1000 bars in 2005. That's an average of about three per day, and as of yesterday he was already up to 135. Pray for his liver.
posted by mathowie at 10:03 AM PST - 31 comments

Judge backs Guantanamo challenge A US judge has ruled that special military tribunals being used to try hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba are illegal.
posted by borq at 9:56 AM PST - 27 comments

Esref Armagan is an accomplished painter, and has been blind since infancy. Brain scans show he uses his visual cortex while drawing, but not while imagining an image (as a sighted person does.)
posted by Zed_Lopez at 9:24 AM PST - 12 comments

Pretty slick mind-reading trick... Perhaps wizened MetaFilter readers will see through its inner workings, but to me, this site just looked like magic. The page vanishes after a minute of disuse, so you may need to link more than once. (My first post on MF.)
posted by humannature at 9:01 AM PST - 36 comments

Thinking with Type The online companion to the book of the same name offers a nice little online primer on the finer points of typography, including my favourite new online game: Dumb Quotes. Remember kids: only you can prevent poor kerning.
posted by Robot Johnny at 8:42 AM PST - 15 comments

"Why is my birth certificate a state secret?" asks Bastard Nation. The group's fight for unconditional access to non-falsified birth records - start with The Basic Bastard, including a history of sealed adoption records in the USA - has enemies, which of course include Fox's "Who's Your Daddy?"
posted by mediareport at 6:07 AM PST - 62 comments

Pushing the open source agenda to the international stage. Brazilian Pop superstar / Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil, Grateful dead lyricist John Barlow and others participated yesterday in a World Social Forum gathering in Alegre, Brazil to urge a free open source software policy in the developing world. An open source constitutional discussed previously on metafilter here.
posted by tidecat at 5:42 AM PST - 23 comments

"You have the audacity to call me intelligent.” We covered Spongebob promotes the gay here. Now comes an amusing coda: a catfight between the Dobson forces, who started an anti-media email campaign, and Keith Olbermann, who printed and ridiculed said email. Dobson's people claim victory because Olbermann spent so much time on them, and Olbermann, a trifle defensive about the secular media, makes more fun.
posted by CunningLinguist at 5:27 AM PST - 83 comments

SBC to Acquire AT&T for $16 Billion or Death to the Deathstar    "Luke, I am your father![pdf] "    -Noooooo... oh wait, now I own you.
posted by gren at 5:15 AM PST - 25 comments

Stem cells-->neurons. Scientific American link. Also discussed most recently here.
posted by yoga at 4:29 AM PST - 12 comments

MakePovertyHistory. "The gap between the worlds’s rich and poor has never been wider. Malnutrition, AIDS, conflict and illiteracy are a daily reality for millions." This seems like an interesting endeavour, with people like Nelson Mandela involved, as well. I'm a bit of a cynic about this because one of the biggest endorsements has come from Gordon Brown. He's a known quantity, and I wonder if this is another P.R. run to bolster his international credentials. Oh, and there's a possibility it could be blocked before it gathers enough steam -- so much for Soft Power.
posted by gsb at 2:51 AM PST - 18 comments

Mapping couplings at a high school Sociologists graphed the romantic and sexual relationships of 80% of an entire high school (832 out of ~1000 students). The research indicates that high schoolers lack sexual alpha-persons resulting in partner maps that are mostly long lines rather than the more hub and spoke like maps common in adult maps.
posted by Mitheral at 12:14 AM PST - 43 comments

Swearing Jesus - Is that what you got, pendejo?
posted by growabrain at 11:44 PM PST - 14 comments

The Future of time "Designers from more than 72 countries explored and visualized personal and portable timekeeping 150 years into the future" (via Gravity Lens)
posted by dhruva at 9:28 PM PST - 19 comments

Canadian Milk Bags
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 9:12 PM PST - 94 comments

I, for one, welcome our cockroach robot overlords. (Be sure to check out the video.)
posted by neckro23 at 8:34 PM PST - 15 comments

filmaffinity.com looks like another useful tool to get recommendations for your viewing pleasure-once more of us start rating! It's in English and Spanish now (with more languages yet to come). Movielens seems promising as well. IMDb Pro looks cool too, though I haven't gone that far. However, this guy says beware!!
posted by HyperBlue at 8:06 PM PST - 11 comments

Israeli Pro-Palestinian activist Tali Fahima to remain in custody. Tali Fahima grew up in a conservative desert town in Israel and voted Likud for years. As the second intifada erupted she read about the brutality of the occupation on the Internet and eventually travelled to Jenin refugee camp where she met Zakariyeh Zbeideh, a local leader of the terrorist organization and Fatah offshoot, Al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade. She was arrested and jailed in Israel, accused of translating a document for Zbeideh into Arabic. that allowed him to warn fighters marked for Israeli assassination.

Fahima has been under arrest nearly six months. Her case has gained prominence not just because she is an Israeli Jew supporting Palestinian resistance but because she is a Mizrahi, a Sephardic or "Arab" Jew. This group has historically formed a solid bloc of support for aggressive policies against the Palestinians. [MI]
posted by By The Grace of God at 7:15 PM PST - 30 comments

"Unsatisfactory movie viewing can only be attributed to human error." The Denver Post examines the way technology can help viewers find their next favorite movie.
posted by bonzo at 5:37 PM PST - 17 comments

“If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits”

Prostitution was legalized in Germany just over two years ago, and brothel owners, who must pay tax and employee health insurance, have been granted access to official government databases of jobseekers and have equal status with any other employer. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse. Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job or lose her unemployment benefit.

“There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry. The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits.”
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 4:13 PM PST - 118 comments

I came upon an enchanting gallery of Lac Léman ice storm photos via presurfer today, which then led me to some rather beautiful scenes of the the Alps. There was also an amazing shot from space, and a link to another site where I followed hikers to les Massif de Bauges and le Massif de la Grande Chartreuse. OK, I didn't get my work done today, but I had a marvelous trip to the Alps.
posted by madamjujujive at 3:54 PM PST - 16 comments

Everybody At the Beach! (.mov, slightly NSFW) - Need New Body's music has been described as psychedelic, unnerving, and all-out spastic. But really, what's not to love about a band with lyrics like "Pen pen pen! Where's my pen?!"
posted by buriednexttoyou at 11:03 AM PST - 19 comments

What Star Wars SHOULD be. Because parody is GOOD.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:42 AM PST - 34 comments

Alex Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. Grey has been around for a long time but hasn't been linked here before. He has a new DVD out called World Spirit, which you can watch clips from online. [Via Future Hi.]
posted by homunculus at 10:34 AM PST - 11 comments

It's only a matter of time before Canada's last bastion of smoke-filled cafes frequented by tortured artists succumbs to the trend sweeping the nation, and the world. The real question is: do they care about our health, or are they trying to stop a conspiracy? As long as they don't ban poutine, I think we'll be okay.
posted by dazedandconfused at 10:02 AM PST - 77 comments

Bosnia's horrific war memories There were countless horrors in the wars which led to the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. A Serbian army general has now surrendered to the authorities and will go to the United Nations tribunal in The Hague to answer war crimes charges dating back to 1999. But what happens once camp guards have served their sentences? Dragan Kolundzija (Kole) stood trial in The Hague in Holland in 1999 Dragan Kolundzija, Kole to his friends, is sitting at the bar of the Hotel Prijedor when we enter....
posted by Postroad at 9:54 AM PST - 1 comment

Flickr-related projects like this depend on licensed photos. The red bands on this image show unlicensed photos, and how much the project could grow. Also of interest is Color Fields, and the Squared Circle Color Picker.
posted by hypersloth at 9:40 AM PST - 14 comments

Fred Halliday sets out an alternative thesis on the forces behind our historical era. Are we trapped by ‘Three Dustbins’ left over from the Cold War: Deep-frozen dictatorships and ethic conflicts, an arrogant and unreflective West and finally a disorganised and sometimes ill informed opposition to all this? I don’t know – but it’s an interesting idea.
posted by The Salaryman at 8:51 AM PST - 6 comments

Iraq Votes
posted by Tullius at 7:58 AM PST - 133 comments

Nothing is more damning than silence.
posted by Mick at 7:58 AM PST - 81 comments

Blackface : From mainstream entertainment to (nearly?) being considered a hate crime. Do we still have 21st century minstrel shows? Can one "plainly see similarities between the insulting stereotypes acted out by blackface minstrels like Al Jolson in the 19th and early 20th century and today's actors who play exaggerated, cutesy roles of gay people in the 21st century" ? Here is a larger question: Is humor and ridicule a necessary first step down the path to eventual acceptance? Is that what Spike Lee is saying in Bamboozled or is he saying we haven't progressed as far as we think?
posted by spock at 7:09 AM PST - 32 comments

For 170 years, crossing the Channel from the UK to France would have brought you 11 days forward in time, and crossing back would have brought you 11 days earlier. Why? Because the Church of England wasn't about to adopt a new Calendar instituted by a Catholic pope. After all, if the old style was good enough for Caesar.... In fact, it took over 300 years for the new Gregorian Calendar to come into use throughout Europe, causing, no doubt, more than a few missed lunch dates as people forgot to convert between them as they traveled. There are, of course, many other calendars in use around the world, and no shortage of people suggesting that let's do the time warp again.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 6:47 AM PST - 16 comments

Beyond boxers or briefs: Undergarments vary much more than the current styles we find in the nearest haberdashery department or at Victoria's Secret. Mormons have the temple garment. Suffragettes invented bloomers, the next bold step after pantaloons. But throughout modern Western history, women tended to wear dress-like undergarments, (with or without accompanying drawers) though both 19th century men and women wore the union suit, an earlier type of long-johns.

Of course, there's always the earliest of them all, the loincloth, worn by the ancient Egyptians and Tarzan. Similar is the malo worn by some Pacific Islanders, the Japanese fundoshi (warning: excess of manflesh), and the more elaborate Indian dhoti, the male companion to the sari.

And we mustn't forget the bra! Though not a lower-body garment, it has had a long--if tumultuous--history worthy of quick mention.
posted by lychee at 3:42 AM PST - 9 comments

Author and satirist Ephraim Kishon dies, aged 80.
posted by ori at 1:45 AM PST - 7 comments

Estonian TV-Commercials from the 80's by Harry Egipt.
posted by lazy-ville at 1:40 AM PST - 12 comments

Laura Secord ,Elizabeth Barnett and the Five Nations Mohawks, arguably, made Canada possible.
posted by arse_hat at 11:08 PM PST - 7 comments

America's Biggest Dick {nsfw} Sundance Online Film Festival {sfw}
posted by hortense at 9:39 PM PST - 20 comments

Those OLD states are totally 2004. I should wait until Thursday, but: If you're fed up with the idea of living in America OR Canada, consider moving to The State of Jefferson, a county on the Cali/Oregon border with big dreams and a kickass flag. Of course, they haven't seceded yet, but when they do, it's only going to be a matter of time before we can all live in the utopian Republic of Cascadia, where, as Jefferson residents, we'll run on Metric Time and help strengthen Cascadia's southern border against Californian incursions.
And hey! Public radio!
posted by dougunderscorenelso at 8:54 PM PST - 20 comments

Dr. Ecstasy. (NYT) A peek inside Sasha Shulgin's infamous lab.
posted by xowie at 6:41 PM PST - 22 comments

Flipside No. 1. Before MTV and Vans got ahold of it, this is what punk rock looked like: Tiny, grimy, Xeroxed and rad. Tip o' the hat to the Boingstaz and our own Mr. Bali Hai
posted by arto at 6:10 PM PST - 6 comments

What can a giant rhyming cat teach kids about conveyance safety? Safe-T Rider kicks it old-skool for the Elevator Escalator Safety Foundation.
posted by LinusMines at 6:09 PM PST - 11 comments

Momblogging. The NY Times (reg. required) looks at some blogging mamas. As someone who's regularly losing friends to the new-parent netherworld of suburbia and early nights, I had previously had little interest in reading about childrearing. I checked out Bad Mother because I'm a fan of the author's husband - the novelist Michael Chabon - and realised it was a hoot. I also like the Pessoptimist. So what other good bringing-up-baby blogs are out there?
posted by liam at 5:15 PM PST - 23 comments

Hello to you, my name is Liquor Control Bee (wav). Meet L.C. Bee -- his songs are sure to keep your kids uncrunked. Part of an elite cabal of juvenile moralizers, L.C. Bee is currently collaborating on an album with Daren the D.A.R.E lion (WAV). These kids today, you know.
posted by yonation at 3:55 PM PST - 28 comments

"Greek art will never keep the workers from claiming their world; in fact, it will help them to realise what a stunted life they have hitherto led." wrote one of the supporters of the Workers Educational Association. The WEA was started to provide a college level education to workers. It's rival, the Pleb League, accused them of selling out to capitalists. The classics have inspired people, and continue to do so today.
posted by QIbHom at 2:08 PM PST - 12 comments

Trashbat.co.ck. From the twin serpents of Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris - both men linked and discussed here before - comes their latest experiment. It's a series on one Mr. Nathan Barley, and while it's hard to tell precisely what it shall be, the pedigree screams quality.
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:14 PM PST - 16 comments

Of the few memories I still have of childhood, Ed Emberley is tops among them. Though I am to this day a miserable artist, his drawing books were staples of my young life. And I always thought he was my little secret. [via BoingBoing]
posted by absalom at 12:50 PM PST - 13 comments

Double Cheeseburger? I'd hit it. Oh man, the buns on that quarter pounder are totally hott.
posted by Count Ziggurat at 12:35 PM PST - 75 comments

Jim Capaldi, legendary rock & roll drummer and Hall of Fame inductee, died Friday at the age of 60 after a brief fight with stomach cancer.
posted by geeknik at 12:12 PM PST - 8 comments

Errol Morris : respected filmmaker, editorialist, grump, and creator of some great commercials [QT]. The Sharp series is noteworthy for him straying from his usual non-fiction work. His site is chock full of interesting stuff for a Saturday surf.
posted by furtive at 11:18 AM PST - 9 comments

USAF playing cat and mouse game over Iran and yes: there is no hard evidence that this is taking place. But we do recall what Bush had earlier said about the axis of evil and his warnings to Iran about nuke capability. "The U.S. Air Force is playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with Iran's ayatollahs, flying American combat aircraft into Iranian airspace in an attempt to lure Tehran into turning on air defense radars, thus allowing U.S. pilots to grid the system for use in future targeting data, administration officials said. "We have to know which targets to attack and how to attack them," said one, speaking on condition of anonymity.
posted by Postroad at 9:22 AM PST - 67 comments

ytcracker - "if this is your first time to ytcracker.com, allow me to thank you for coming here. i am the self-proclaimed king of true computer nerd rap. i represent the dirty nerdy south and digital gangsters worldwide. after conquering chess clubs across the globe, my mission has been to provide my fellow hackers, spammers, carders, and phreaks something to get down to."

I suggest f*ck antis about fighting the anti-spammers, drink more, post more about message board hijinks, and the instrumental techno tune, baby be my twisted pair.
posted by Argyle at 9:15 AM PST - 12 comments

Want to get buried in a fish, an airplane, or car? A visit with Ghana's fantasy coffin manufacturers just might help you achieve your dreams for death. Check out the pictures.
posted by drezdn at 8:50 AM PST - 11 comments

NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead.
posted by Dean Keaton at 4:42 AM PST - 20 comments

Forget about P&G and Gilette, how 'bout Google & Firefox? Is Google developing their own browser? They appear to be hiring Firefox developers. Can Googzilla be far behind?
posted by fixedgear at 3:58 AM PST - 25 comments

Alan Aldridge was called "His Royal Master of Images to Their Majesties The Beatles" by John Lennon, and is probably best known for his Beatles Illustrated Lyrics, but I was looking for his delightful illustrations for "The Butterfly Ball", and found some here and here click through for larger images), and then was lucky enough to also find another web collection of his work grouped under the heading "Animal Spirits". Don't miss the wonderful self portrait from his gallery pages.
posted by taz at 1:56 AM PST - 10 comments

Thanks for the memories ..."I know it’s a fallacy * That grown men never cry Baby, that’s a lie * We had our bed of roses But forgot that roses die * And thank you so much..."
posted by growabrain at 11:56 PM PST - 10 comments

Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can... (NSFW)
posted by Robot Johnny at 8:58 PM PST - 38 comments

Hey kids! Guess who's first cousins with our new Secretary of State? why, it's Vaginal Creme Davis! Juicy tidbits from the multitalented first cousin Ms. Rice would rather you not know about, and who wishes that Ms. Davis wouldn't mention to anyone. Very juicy, and NSFW probably. : >
posted by amberglow at 8:13 PM PST - 30 comments

Revolution Radio is a concept that died in Minneapolis years ago. It never had a chance to take off before being assimilated by the RadioBorg -- the idea that you play good songs, regardless of whether or not they fit under some canned "format." The Suburbs. The Beatles. G-Love and Special Sauce. X. Tori Amos. Adam and the Ants. Loretta Lynn. Trip Shakespeare.Their playlist definitely leans more toward the "alternative" side of the dial than anything else, but now, thanks to Minnesota Public Radio's brand-new station, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the musical variety. Submit a request online. Not fortunate enough to live in Minnesota? You can still listen along to commercial-free radio a couple of different formats. Viva la revolution!
posted by RKB at 7:27 PM PST - 39 comments

National Lampoon appears to be less than optimistic about the election in Iraq. Nevertheless, Bush seems to expect much of what's depicted in that satire, he manages to maintain higher hopes in the end. I'm sure Jim Henry would love to give a pre-election pep talk.
posted by ThePrawn at 6:02 PM PST - 15 comments

Juvenile NSFW Star Trek video [Windows Media via B3ta]
posted by Pretty_Generic at 4:43 PM PST - 34 comments

1. Glom onto wannabe Hollywood scene
2. ???
3. Profit!

posted by NortonDC at 4:38 PM PST - 18 comments

Hannah Höch was one of the great queer female artists of the 20th century and one of the brilliant minds behind the Berlin DaDa Movement. One of the pioneers of photomontage, Höch's work is still among the best in the medium even today.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 3:55 PM PST - 5 comments

Etch-a-Sketch options: if you don't want to buy one of several off-the-shelf choices, you can modify a classic Etch-a-Sketch so that it uses a serial mouse. Or play online (Shockwave required). And for the less active, why not order one showing your portrait for $5,000 to $8,000? (See the gallery here for a dozen examples of the artist's work, and the artist's website for full information. ) [Preventive strike against double-post monitors: some MetaFilterite comments about Etch-a-Sketch can be found at this June 2000 post.]
posted by WestCoaster at 2:50 PM PST - 10 comments

Best use of beer ever.
posted by knutmo at 2:37 PM PST - 48 comments

Wikipes is another application of wiki. Everybody go in, put in some of your favorite recipes, and cook dinner for your sweety. Thank me later.
posted by mychai at 2:16 PM PST - 20 comments

International Ombudsmen: There's one for Europe, several in the United Kingdom. Ireland has one, as does Northern Ireland. Australia has a really great one. In Canada and the USA, Ombudsmen oversee individual provinces and states. Neither has a federal ombudsman with government-wide jurisdiction.
posted by dfowler at 1:42 PM PST - 5 comments

gorgeous women getting waxed for the first time (sfw) "There's hardly a square centimeter of nudity in this video for a catchy pop tune by Markus Nikolai, but we're certain there's a bunch of gently sadistic Brazilian wax fetishists out there getting off on the facial expressions of all those cute twentysomething girls with Australian British accents experiencing the skin-wrenching thrill of the wooden spatula for the first time."
posted by tsarfan at 1:19 PM PST - 44 comments

Dr. Katz has multiple sclerosis. A great profile of comedian Jonathan Katz, who is now battling the horrible disease.
posted by braun_richard at 12:47 PM PST - 22 comments

Carol Hersee playing tic tac toe with a clown is one of the most widely-seen images on television. The demi-famous Test Card F, its history and purpose.
posted by Captaintripps at 12:23 PM PST - 22 comments

Fair Use and "Digital Environmentalism" - NYU journalism head Robert Boynton reviews four recent books (the 4th) about intellectual property and the public domain.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:22 PM PST - 2 comments

Dick Cheney, Dressing Down I can't decide if this is interesting cultural criticism or ridiculous nitpicking about something that isn't very important. Maybe it's both. Side note: It's a nice change to read about a male politician's appearance and wardrobe for once.
posted by scratch at 12:08 PM PST - 113 comments

Hell Yes... It's time for some Friday Flash Fun! (Well sort of, since even though this video was probably created in Flash, it's delivered in crap-tacular streaming format) Anyway, everyone's favorite white-boy (or "guero") hip-hop superstar is back in action with a new video [rm] [asx] for his forthcoming album. The video was created by Flash maestro Mumbleboy, and for those that found Beck's last outing a little vanilla for their tastes, it signals a welcome return to the man's Chunky Monkey roots. Enjoy!
posted by idontlikewords at 11:49 AM PST - 18 comments

Things you'd like to say at work. Having a tough day at work? Dreading a particular meeting? Come prepared, and arm yourself.
posted by djdrue at 11:37 AM PST - 12 comments

Levitated: the Exploration of Computation Digital flash art ranging from generated poetry to evolution. I could waste hours on this page.
posted by ozomatli at 11:00 AM PST - 6 comments

Got certain DVD ? Join class action, get replacement ! Apparently MGM mislabeled (or simply sold ?) from 1998 to 2003 a few hundred DVD titles as Widescreen format while they were not really Widescreen. As one must respect MPAA they must respect our looking in this list to see if our dvd titles are in the list and our joining class action. Let's not be on the receiving end for a change ! (via HardOcp (SFW))
posted by elpapacito at 10:54 AM PST - 22 comments

Spongebob is pointed at as causing moral decay today. But the idea of blaming animated characters for societal ills is nothing new. The 1934 Production Code changed the scantily-clad Betty Boop into a wholesome girl. Racial stereotyping dominated cartoons of the 1940s. The Flintstones even shilled for Winston cigarettes. Should cartoon characters reflect the morals of cartoon watchers?
posted by u.n. owen at 10:30 AM PST - 30 comments

You can drive an 18-wheeler up a cliff, but it still sucks. Scathing and amusing, Gamespot rips a new one in this title from Gamemill. Yet Eric Schomberg would tell you that Backyard Wrestling holds the title of suck. Either way, no matter how evil the reviews get, someone's gotta get granular with a full frontal assault on the worst movies to disgrace video games. And if you still can't figure out what to avoid, there's always Seanbaby to guide you.
posted by TeamBilly at 10:27 AM PST - 23 comments

A Grammar Test - How is your grammar? Are you proficient with the English language? Here is a little test of 34 questions to help you check yourself. Or, perhaps grammar doesn't trip your trigger. You may want to try the Punctuation and Capitalization test.
posted by Crackerbelly at 10:19 AM PST - 48 comments

Easy ways to improve Men's Magazines. Ever notice that the content in men's magazines such as GQ and Men's Health seems a bit vapid? Perhaps they could learn a thing or two from this list of suggested additions. More sharks, less cologne ads. Sounds better already, doesn't it? Now if only they could have Stallone personally deliver the copies to my door. Looks like he could use the work anyway.
posted by kingmissile at 9:44 AM PST - 14 comments

Self-defence with a Walking-stick : The Different Methods of Defending Oneself with a Walking-Stick or Umbrella when Attacked under Unequal Conditions (Part I) (with pictures!) :: via The Journal of Non-Lethal combatives ::
posted by anastasiav at 9:18 AM PST - 20 comments

The Bizarre World of Candy Cigarettes. Profiles of American and Foreign Companies.
posted by greasy_skillet at 8:55 AM PST - 22 comments

Artists from Parastone Studios bring famous paintings to life by creating sculptures from the characters in them: Hieronymus Bosch, Dali, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and more.
posted by driveler at 8:38 AM PST - 7 comments

"Stop Bitching, Start a Revolution!" • In the same comic deadpan spirit as his other video, Evan Maloney from Brain-Terminal.com consoles protesters on Inauguration Day with softball questions and Hero Builders toys.
posted by jenleigh at 8:11 AM PST - 12 comments

Dark matter drifts through Earth so I'll spit to avoid the needle...
posted by mcgraw at 7:30 AM PST - 27 comments

Iraq - Pulitzer prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh shares his thoughts on the path of america. (streaming video and audio, transcript included. Video is long, 20 minutes 49 seconds. Worth watching) Seymour Hersh works for the newyorker. He is best known for breaking the My Lai massacre story from Vietnam.
posted by sourbrew at 6:57 AM PST - 24 comments

Same-sex marriages in Canada may be coming soon, but that's nothing. The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that it's OK to masturbate in front of your windows! (Full ruling here, previous mefi discussion here.) The Conservatives in Canada worry that all this moral decadence may lead to polygamy, but Canada's had a polygamist community for some time now. Still, the government does seem to be examining the issue. Meanwhile, parents in Atlantic Canada are outraged their children are learning about mutual masturbation and oral sex. What's next -- adults-only barbershops? Oh, wait....
posted by showmethecalvino at 5:07 AM PST - 52 comments

Ever notice a little too much sax in 80's music? (Warning: Slow loading page---lots of embedded Quicktime.)
posted by tss at 10:01 PM PST - 37 comments

We're all to blame. In January 2002, Scott Ritter called Iraq a "phantom threat" and warned us of Ahmed Chalabi's "dubious motivations" for fomenting a war based on phony intel. Now Ritter is saying that we're all responsible for Iraq, because we, as a public, bought into the unproven argument that Iraq had WMDs. In that light, how should we view the Iranian situation? Is it fair for the US to use its power to insist upon arguably hypocritical terms for a fellow signatary to the Non Proliferation Treaty? Doesn't Iran have legitimate rights for nuclear development? Shouldn't we demand proof of a nuclear weapons program before we even consider starting a conflict our military believes would most certainly escalate? The Bush administration says that "there's NO DOUBT that Iran continues a nuclear program"... an obvious lie. There is no proof of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Period.
posted by insomnia_lj at 9:35 PM PST - 100 comments

Get to votin'. In Sydney, the first votes were cast in the Iraqi elections, 48 hours before it starts in Iraq itself. I went down to the nearest polling booth to get a feel for the turnout. It's being organised by the best in the business, but will it make a difference if nobody comes to the party?
posted by cosmonik at 8:11 PM PST - 15 comments

And then there were 3 --(salon, watch ad or use bugmenot) One day after President Bush ordered his Cabinet secretaries to stop hiring commentators to help promote administration initiatives, and one day after the second high-profile conservative pundit was found to be on the federal payroll, a third embarrassing hire has emerged. Meet Michael McManus. Who's next in PayolaGate? And in the Senate, they're going to be introducing a 'Stop Government Propaganda Act.' Even Jonah Goldberg (on the right) is actually calling for a real investigation .
posted by amberglow at 7:29 PM PST - 47 comments

Liquid Information. Does it change anything? Or is it just like the Trillian wikipedia lookup function, only not as good?
posted by bingo at 6:47 PM PST - 18 comments

Sports Illustrated explains seven or eight professional soccer/football teams, including highly regarded Manchester United and FC Porto, are interested in "a phenomenon, probably the best player to come out of Brazil" : Jean Carlos Chera, nine years old and 4' 6". A video (additional source) [wmv format, 8MB] demonstrates Jean's abilities.
posted by quam at 6:42 PM PST - 46 comments

Richard Price: The Comeback Kid of American Literature. [MI]
posted by jonmc at 6:13 PM PST - 20 comments

Cartography is a skill pretty much taken for granted now, but it wasn't always so. Accurate maps were once prized state secrets, laborious efforts that cost a fortune and took years (or even decades) to complete.

How things have changed. (Yours now, $110) It took almost 500 years to map North America, but it's only taken one tenth of that to map just everything else. In the last 50 years, we've been able to create acurate atlases of two planets and one moon (with a second in the works). Actually, we've done a lot more than that. We're actually running out of things to map.

Maybe Not.
posted by absalom at 5:51 PM PST - 17 comments

"Precious Lord" sung by Mahalia Jackson (mp3)
No artist brought more acclaim to gospel music than Mahalia Jackson (October 26, 1911 – January 27, 1972). Beginning in 1950, her divine (.wav) talents were featured weekly on Studs Turkel's radio program, and through her music and gentle personality she became so beloved worldwide that her funeral rivaled that of royalty. Mahalia sang "Precious Lord" at Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s funeral -- at Mahalia's funeral, Aretha Franklin did the honors. Mahalia was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame posthumously in 1997. Word has it she also made a mean okra gumbo.
posted by miss lynnster at 5:22 PM PST - 6 comments

Little-Known U.S. Document Signed by President Adams Proclaims America's Government Is Secular Some people today assert that the United States government came from Christian foundations. They argue that our political system represents a Christian ideal form of government and that Jefferson, Madison, et al, had simply expressed Christian values while framing the Constitution. If this proved true, then we should have a wealth of evidence to support it, yet just the opposite proves the case. Although, indeed, many of America's colonial statesmen practiced Christianity, our most influential Founding Fathers broke away from traditional religious thinking. The ideas of the Great Enlightenment that began in Europe had begun to sever the chains of monarchical theocracy. These heretical European ideas spread throughout early America. Instead of relying on faith, people began to use reason and science as their guide. The humanistic philosophical writers of the Enlightenment, such as Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire, had greatly influenced our Founding Fathers and Isaac Newton's mechanical and mathematical foundations served as a grounding post for their scientific reasoning.
posted by Postroad at 5:19 PM PST - 48 comments

When Good Things Go American. Fans of The Office on the BBC may feel a redundacy after watching the NBC pilot.
posted by orange clock at 4:45 PM PST - 107 comments

404 Research Lab . Not that I'm sorry for the double post, but I was inspired by this 404 and went searching for some more. Some of them are funny, some let you play games, some are just creepy. What's everyone else's favorites?
posted by daHIFI at 3:49 PM PST - 19 comments

Introducing the Gizmondo handheld games console from Tiger Telematics. It's like the PSP, only DOOMED.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 3:43 PM PST - 23 comments

Visitors to the US tagged with RFID chips? They already use them on goods and livestock, but soon also foreign visitors will be earmarked. Will it make the US a safer country?
posted by kika at 3:36 PM PST - 33 comments

This is, quite possibly, the funniest TV spot for an independent videogame retailer I've ever seen. Not that there are many out there (funny ones, I mean). There's more here and here. (via Joystiq, requires QT)
posted by riffraff at 3:33 PM PST - 16 comments

Boing Boing says he's a Lynx user , but British Telecom declared him a hacker and that's what the BBC is carrying. There's no way to tell who's right yet, but I'd say the Bloggers are betting on Lynx user. Anyone got an update?
posted by krisjohn at 3:27 PM PST - 30 comments

PublishAmerica is having a rough month. After being sued by 150 authors who felt they were deceived by the company, and taking a beating a couple of days ago at the hands of the Washington Post, PublishAmerica has become the object of an elaborate hoax perpetrated by a group of science fiction writers, a novel called Atlanta Nights, by one Travis Tea. [more inside]
posted by mathowie at 3:12 PM PST - 23 comments

This week's Time for Kids magazine, [fifth-grade reading level req.] includes an interesting feature on Tree Climbers International an organization that teaches people how to climb nearly any tree... Not just a sport for kids anymore. These days, large trees that were once considered too big to climb can now be scaled with ease and safety. Even by grown-ups.
posted by RockyChrysler at 2:23 PM PST - 5 comments

Malu cachu (that's Welsh, I'll leave the interpreting to you) - a comprehensive guide to swearing in 165 languages. This probably offers the most appeal to the younger crowd, subverting classroom etiquette undetected--but it's not without its draw for the inebriated. It may also be a good idea to cross check your business name before going global. A representative of AmaCorp visiting Japan is likely to catch a few odd looks.
posted by ThePrawn at 2:16 PM PST - 14 comments

What is it? It's Crispin Glover's feature film. (NSFW)
posted by mr.marx at 1:49 PM PST - 35 comments

Czech? Check. Tech? Check. Clothes? Not so much. [probably NSFW] via Gizmodo
posted by stonerose at 12:42 PM PST - 32 comments

Da Vinci's workshop discovered - Florence. Also CTV link here.
posted by yoga at 11:46 AM PST - 12 comments

Welcome to Scrappyland. A site devoted to a long-lost cartoon character from the 1930s.
posted by braun_richard at 11:30 AM PST - 12 comments

Family ties unraveling. Henry Heimlich, the inventor of the Heimlich Maneuver for choking, has been hounded for more than two years by a persistent critic, who who has used multiple aliases to gather information on Henry Heimlich and his associates. He's used a web site to attack Henry Heimlich's research theories. He's called for investigations by the Ohio Medical Board and the Ohio Attorney General's office.

The critic is Peter Heimlich, the doctor's son.
posted by tizzie at 11:26 AM PST - 55 comments

Redneck ebonics triumphs. Merriam-Webster online now gives "nu-kyu-lar" as an alternative pronunication of "nuclear." While dictionaries have become more descriptive and less prescriptive over the years, shouldn't they at least list it as [idiotic variant]?
posted by QuietDesperation at 11:05 AM PST - 152 comments

"Can a bad man be a good poet?" Some well-written thoughts on morality, matters of taste, and art by David Orr.
posted by lilboo at 10:20 AM PST - 30 comments

A9 yellow pages features PHOTOS!!! So A9 starts doing yellow pages, and I'm thinking, big deal, right? But then, I think, ok I'll check out some Italian restaurants near my work, cause it's close to lunch. And that's, well, ok, but what's the big deal? But then, I click on one of the little numbers in the map, AND THERE'S A PHOTO of the restaurant, right there! And little arrows, so I can WALK UP AND DOWN THE STREET!!! And here's how they did it! (via kottke)
posted by jasper411 at 10:07 AM PST - 70 comments

Mojo's top 100 soundtracks -- well thought out, with some rediscovered classics, and a few obscure gems. [via largeheartedboy]
posted by btwillig at 10:05 AM PST - 32 comments

How to manipulate groupthink: Create a group participation technique that looks and sounds equitable and solicits feedback. Use the feedback to isolate leaders, loudmouths, pushovers and those who agree or disagree with your hidden agenda. Set these groups against each other until your hidden agenda moves from a subject for debate to a principle accepted as true that frames the debate. Start a cable channel! Hope America doesn't learn how to fight back.
posted by basilwhite at 9:55 AM PST - 15 comments

Moan Home!
Jenna Jameson, further pushing into the mainstream and "coming" to a cellphone near you, is now going to sell her "moan tones" for $2.50 a pop.
Best bit of the article? "If you can get her to say my name then I would buy it. I need that kind of personal attention," said New Yorker Julian McCullough.
posted by fenriq at 9:30 AM PST - 3 comments

A Natural Solution for a Tighter Vagina Dry sex is extremely popular in Africa due to the sensation of tightness and additional friction it provides, despite the fact that it is associated with higher rates of HIV transmission. But if you don't have access to mutendo wegudo (soil with baboon urine), Scott and Cynthia Koss have the product for you.
posted by amber_dale at 9:06 AM PST - 62 comments

Naked Washington. The Boy Scout Memorial statues in Washington, DC always struck me as a bit odd. Why is this kid leading a naked man? Or maybe, better, why is a naked man pursuing this kid? Maybe if the guy from Naked Washington gets his book sold, we will all know. Meanwhile, it's available on CD.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:02 AM PST - 8 comments

We Make Money Not Art :: art meets science and technology in the near near future and begets some cool and scary toys.
posted by anastasiav at 8:28 AM PST - 4 comments

An Iowa law outlawing spinning rims? I admit that spinning rims are goofy and have no redeeming social value but outlawing them? When Spinning Rims Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Spinning Rims
posted by halekon at 7:51 AM PST - 61 comments

Got a Secret? (Discussed briefly previouslyhere) The idea behind Frank Warren Artomatic exhibit was simple: distribute 3,000 post cards asking the public to share a secret with him anonymously by reply mail, and sit back and wait for the replies. Some of the post cards are now on display at the Anne C. Fisher gallery, but if you can't make it to the Georgetown show don't worry, Warren has created a "Postsecret" blog where you can see some of the most interesting replies. (via DCist)
posted by indiebass at 7:48 AM PST - 13 comments

For everything else there is mastercard (NSFW, Flash)
posted by aj100 at 5:38 AM PST - 42 comments

Philadelphia's Masonic Temple looms enigmatically near city hall. Visit, and marvel at the Corinthian Hall, the Renaissance Hall, the Egyptian Hall, the Oriental Hall, the Norman Hall, the Gothic Hall, and the Ionic Hall. Untangle the inscrutable symbology of George Washington's Masonic Apron. Browse the extensive library (if you're a mason). Even bring home a spoon.
posted by deafmute at 5:08 AM PST - 16 comments

Learn to Safecrack! [pdf] Last year, computer scientist and cryptologist Matt Blaze drew ire from the locksmithing community for publically revealing information on how to create the master key to a lock (previous MetaFilter discussion). He's back with a paper on cracking safes. Once again, locksmiths are up in arms over Blaze's disregard of trade secrets. Apparently, safes adhere to the principle of security through obscurity rather than Kerckhoff's Law. [via]
posted by painquale at 3:55 AM PST - 8 comments

Ivan Noble's Tumour Diary The BBC's Ivan Noble has been keeping an online diary of his fight against a malignant brain tumour. Alas, his illness is now getting the better of him, and this will be his final column. He has been, at times, an inspiration, incredibly brave and totally honest about his illness. As a former colleague, he shall also be remembered fondly. Start from the beginning, it's a must read.
posted by scaryduck at 2:56 AM PST - 9 comments

When is suicide selfish? Yesterday in Los Angeles a suicidal local man stabbed himself in the chest, slit his wrists, and drove his car up onto train tracks, lost his nerve and hopped out at the last minute, to watch in anguish as not one but two trains collided with his car and with each other, killing 11 people (so far) and injuring almost 200 others. [more inside]
posted by LondonYank at 2:19 AM PST - 97 comments

Where does he get those wonderful toys? The paper toys of Chris Ware.
posted by Dreamghost at 12:35 AM PST - 17 comments

The One Second Film. Your name could be listed above Christina Ricci for only $5.51.
posted by fungible at 11:13 PM PST - 8 comments

Misty Keasler's photographic essays range from quirky views of her east Texas extended family and Japanese love hotels to unsettling essays on orphanages and the Guatemala City dump. flash. via gordon.coale.
posted by madamjujujive at 10:06 PM PST - 12 comments

Just in time for Valentine's Day, it's Trailer Trash Turleen, now with trash-talkin' action!
posted by mr_crash_davis at 8:59 PM PST - 5 comments

Etiquette Hell For those who throw good manners, common decency, and proper etiquette to the wind, here is a website collecting stories about social gaffes that are often hilarious.
posted by livingsanctuary at 8:18 PM PST - 14 comments

Faces of Meth : a visual study of the physical effects of drug abuse.
posted by crunchland at 8:09 PM PST - 64 comments

Blogs are a phenomenon. Technorati, a blog search engine, tracks 6,406,667 blogs. Two years ago, it tracked 100,000. About 27% of adults now read blogs, up from 2% in 2003. But really they're nothing new, says Kevin Maney in USA Today.
posted by rushmc at 7:01 PM PST - 34 comments

Kevin Sites takes a break from Iraq.
posted by srboisvert at 6:47 PM PST - 12 comments

Unexplained death in a nutshell. In the 1930’s International Harvester heiress Frances Glessner Lee built one-inch-to-one foot scale models of violent crimes.
posted by arse_hat at 6:37 PM PST - 15 comments

While Abu Musab al-Zarqawi declares a "bitter war" against democracy, Josh Muravchik suggests that Realists—"those who are skeptical of injecting issues of freedom, democracy and human rights into the conduct of foreign policy"—have historically been less in-step than pro-democracy Idealists. Responding to Bush's Inauguration Day comments about confronting tyranny in the coming years, many Iranians cheered.
posted by jenleigh at 5:11 PM PST - 56 comments

Eyes on the Screen : As was noted here previously, due to issues over clearance rights, 1987's ground-breaking Civil Rights Movement documentary Eyes on the Prize hasn't been available for ten years. Downhill Battle is doing something about it: "On February 8th help us bring this film back to a nationwide audience. Download the film today and organize a screening in your city or town."
posted by webmutant at 4:59 PM PST - 19 comments

climateprediction.net is the largest experiment ever to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century. it's a collaborative project a la seti@home, and they have come up with some interesting results. we've heard about climate change before, but this study indicates that things might be significantly worse than initially thought (double the temperature increase as previously predicted). maybe this is all okay though, even good for you. if you'd like to see that idea nicely debunked, i suggest you check out trust us, we're experts. a lovely little book about how much we can trust all of these studies. makes you wonder if we should have signed this.
posted by christy at 4:33 PM PST - 21 comments

September 11, 2001 is an online documentary from the Library of Congress with "nearly 170 audio and video interviews, totaling 40 hours, with photos, drawings, written narratives and poems." (About the collection.) [via Salon]
posted by kirkaracha at 4:01 PM PST - 15 comments

Long ago, in 1998, the EU looked at the future "... The implications of vertical and horizontal proliferation of this technology and the need for an adequate political response by the EU, to ensure it neither threatens civil liberties in Europe, nor reaches the hands of tyrants."
posted by hank at 3:41 PM PST - 7 comments

"To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about..." - John Waters

Gotta give him credit... he never loses the ability to shake people up, this time on NPR.
Listen for yourself to the "offending" piece here. (Safe bet he's giggling about it all...)
posted by miss lynnster at 2:25 PM PST - 21 comments

Man dances his way around the world [wmv - 36MB] getting jiggy on a mountaintop, busting moves in an impenetrable forest, dodging Hanoi motorcyclists with his finely tuned moves, and, well, I wouldn't want to give anymore away. It's the feel good movie of the season.
posted by donovan at 2:23 PM PST - 32 comments

Jó szórakozást! A collection of 101 of the strangest commercials I've ever seen. Blame it on 1980's Hungary. Or just the 80's. Or Hungary. [via memepool]
posted by Igor XA at 1:43 PM PST - 14 comments

Who thinks this stuff up? Further to concerns discussed here regarding the torture of Guantanamo detainees, some interesting stories are emerging from those released about the creativity of gonzo military interrogation. Eww.
posted by cosmonik at 1:34 PM PST - 37 comments

Budweiser is pulling their "wardrobe malfunction" ad from the Super Bowl because they think someone might be offended by it. But, you can see the ad here: -- after going through their tough "age filter" and then clicking to the commercial. When you can't even make fun of stuff begging to made fun of anymore, that will be a sad day.
posted by narebuc at 1:23 PM PST - 40 comments

How do you donate to charity, play videogames and prove just how freakin' money you are in one fell swoop? If you're Jay Mohr, this is how.
posted by riffraff at 1:11 PM PST - 17 comments

Coulrophobia (fear of clowns) has been around for eons, but there are also people who just plain hate clowns. Perhaps the hatred is a reaction against the rise of clowns in popular culture. Not only have the clowns branched out from their comedy roots, but they have helped to inspire music styles as well as dance movements. Or perhaps this hatred is just an extension of the phobia and a means of coping. Many clowns have embraced their negative image, which has led to a relatively new species of clown - the Evil Clown. Not to be confused with actual clown criminals or the whole clown pr0n phenomena (SFW except text), but rather the clowns who entertain as villains, monsters, and of course the evil clown musicians. Where did the love go?
posted by p3t3 at 12:54 PM PST - 36 comments

This year has been declared the World Year of Physics. Why 2005? To celebrate 100 years since Einstein published three papers that revolutionized physics. In the U.K. and Ireland it is being called Einstein Year, but there are many events planned around the globe.
posted by achmorrison at 12:51 PM PST - 5 comments

Lithium Picnic is one of the multitude of fetish/goth photography sites, but with a low key, only slightly snobbish attitude and many great photos. Apnea, Anyssa, Domiana. (Main link is possibly NSFW, all the photos I linked to are SFW, but others on-site probably are not.)
posted by Captaintripps at 12:38 PM PST - 10 comments

Bossa Nova, Balanco and Samba of the 1960s Get past the Girl from Ipanema and cocktail clichés and check out the music, musicians and cover art of classic Brazilian records. There are hundreds here for looking and listening.
posted by The Salaryman at 12:31 PM PST - 14 comments

Architect Philip Johnson -- first winner of the first Pritzker Prize, and builder of glass houses, is dead at 98. He outlived his rival Frank Lloyd Wright by 47 years. He helped bring modernism to America but would later leave it behind.
posted by gwint at 12:10 PM PST - 31 comments

Is it gone now? The Suck archive seems to have disappeared. For me Suck.com was and still is best of the web, nothing else comes close. Co-founder Carl Steadman’s site, with depressed, cryptic, brilliant and Plastic-hating notes, seems to be fading away as well (Google cache). Well, at least we’ve still got his suicide note.
posted by Termite at 12:02 PM PST - 30 comments

Cancer, Chemicals and History. Some of the biggest chemical companies in the US have launched a campaign to discredit two historians who have written a book about the industry's efforts to conceal links between their products and cancer. Some of the internal documents referenced in the book can be found at the Chemical Industry Archives, a site dedicated to exposing the industry's attempts to conceal the dangers of their products. [Via Disinformation.]
posted by homunculus at 10:28 AM PST - 11 comments

As Iraqis go to the polls on Jan. 30, it will be a daunting first exercise in democracy.
posted by furtive at 10:13 AM PST - 30 comments

"The nation's new education secretary denounced PBS on Tuesday for spending public money on a cartoon with lesbian [BUNNY] characters, saying many parents would not want children exposed to such lifestyles." The "Postcards from Buster" series features a peripatetic bunny, Buster, who travels the country learning about diversity. The new head of the Department of Ed has requested that PBS return the money it used to develop the show featuring the sapphic rabbits. PBS has decided not to distribute the episode to its affiliates, but WGBH has promised to make the show available to stations who want to air it.
posted by mudpuppie at 10:04 AM PST - 55 comments

In vogue during the Middle Ages, chastity belts are making a come back in Pennsylvania. Get yours today from the Pennsylvania State Legislature in time to celebrate their annual Chastity Awareness Week. But of course, what's good for the goose is good for the gander (NSFW) so I expect all (unmarried) Pennsylvanian legislators to be similarly outfitted. Your tax dollars at work to the tune of a quarter billion dollars.
posted by trii at 9:38 AM PST - 25 comments

Let us re-introduce you to Henry Bekkering. "...Most have seen the original...but if you don't know, now you know." (video with sound. sound not necessary to appreciate 40 inch vertical leaps and a two-footed leap from the foul line) [first post]
posted by Al_Truist at 9:38 AM PST - 8 comments

"If a scholar or expert gets paid to do some work for the government, should he or she disclose that if he writes a paper, essay or op-ed on the same or similar subject? If this is the ethical standard, it is an entirely new standard." So says syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher, defending against revelations and accusations by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post (warning: reg required) that she neglected to disclose that she was paid by the Administration for Children and Families Home Page (part of the Department of Health and Human Services) for consulting work inteded to promote the Administration's "pro-marriage" policies in 2002. Gallagher took a pro-Administration stance repeatedly in her column that same year. Gallagher ultimately cops out with, "I should have disclosed a government contract when I later wrote about the Bush marriage initiative. I would have, if I had remembered it." After Armstrong Willaims got caught with his pants down, is "honesty" old and busted, and "I don't remember" the new hotness? (via tp)
posted by mkultra at 7:34 AM PST - 40 comments

Green Neocons
posted by Bag Man at 7:29 AM PST - 31 comments

Dream Job. "It's Linklater's faithful adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly, which is being brought to full paranoid life via Bob Sabiston's gloriously surreal software abilities, which, as in the team's previous Waking Life, utilizes hi-def filmmaking overlayed with a rich, rotoscope-inspired animation. Thirty-plus animators, and, here's the catch, so pay attention: They need more." [via]
posted by gsb at 7:11 AM PST - 43 comments

InspEARations - As part of their 75th anniversary celebration of Mickey Mouse in 2003, Disney collaborated with celebrities and designers to create new takes on the classic pose. The statues include work by Dick Vitale, Jerry Bruckheimer, and James Gandolfini, among others. In case you missed it the first time, they're bringing these statues on tour to parks around the country this spring and summer.
posted by shawnj at 6:09 AM PST - 18 comments

Have you heard of Will Christopher Baer? He writes twisty, noir fiction. His trilogy of Phineas Poe books (Kiss Me, Judas, Penny Dreadful, and Hell's Half Acre) have just been re-released, and Kiss Me, Judas was optioned for a movie. (more inside)
posted by braun_richard at 6:03 AM PST - 7 comments

False Advertising -- A gallery of parody. [via Life in the Present]
posted by Ljubljana at 4:57 AM PST - 13 comments

Boozer vs. monk: the epic. Graphic Forums' Battle Grid is a showcase of "Photoshop tennis"-style showdowns wherein the first player presents an image, and the second player posts a response that incorporates at least some portion of the previous image... and so on. This particular battle began began July 26, 2003 and the latest entry was mid-December, 2004; presumably the battle will continue. This post from September shows a thumbnail synopsis of the action after 26 rounds. A nice (though time-consuming!) thread to follow if you are a fan of collaborative improvisation.
posted by taz at 4:50 AM PST - 7 comments

And then there was one. Following the death of his neighbour Ishaq Levin, Zebulon Simentov has become the last Jew in Afghanistan. There have been Jews here since at least the eighth century, but now Simentov is on his own.

But the saddest fact of all is the fact that up until his death the two men hated each other.
posted by ciderwoman at 4:27 AM PST - 20 comments

US ISP Verizon decided late last year to block any email sent from outside the US. I thought the bounces I was getting from my Verizon contacts were glitches until I googled and found this.

The arrogance of Verizon is astonishing: "If it's really important you might want to make a phone call".
posted by essexjan at 2:35 AM PST - 43 comments

A Snowy Tribute to Calvin and Hobbes
posted by lacus at 11:40 PM PST - 20 comments

Seems the media's STILL scared of looking too closely into BUSH's history... and WHO helps him cover up on the way...
posted by samlam at 10:52 PM PST - 8 comments

A trifecta of photographic sites: TrekEarth,TrekLens and TrekNature.
posted by Gyan at 9:36 PM PST - 9 comments

Bring it trombONe! After watching this I am now wondering how fine a line there is between confidence and just being crazy. quicktime movie, some laughter may be required
posted by Hands of Manos at 9:30 PM PST - 41 comments

As we saw last spring, Toronto's York University has limited the student's right to protest, here noted by Excalibur, York's largest student newspaper. The Toronto Star's article on last Thursday's peaceful anti-Bush protest complete with police intervention (video here, try this if that doesn't work) sparked a reaction by the York University Faculty Association. YUFA also remarked on the restriction of freedom of expression by York's administration. The administration has released two press releases so far, the first on the day of the protest, and the second to emphasize the students' responsibilities and limits. The protest has sparked plans of further protests and reports that the protest was misrepresented in the press. CUPE 3903 wrote an open letter to the administration criticizing their actions (PDF, p.11), and compared the situation to Berkeley's Free Speech Movement in the 60s.
posted by heatherann at 9:04 PM PST - 22 comments

How much? (sun times link) So the story is we're going to have an estimated $427 billion shortfall. So what does that mean? According to this guy the deficit is more of a metaphor than something real. According to newhouse news service the deficit gets added to the national debt (and is terrifying). According to this guy the deficit is not a well defined concept Will it stimulate the economy? Increase taxes? It's too complex for me even though it's in the news a lot. $7.9 trillion in debt doesn't sound good though... I think I'll just keep blaming this guy.
posted by Smedleyman at 8:32 PM PST - 30 comments

The sexual doldrums caused by the likes of Zoloft can apparently be counteracted by drugs like Wellbutrin. If by "counteract," you mean "cause a two-hour orgasm while shopping."
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 8:21 PM PST - 53 comments

After School A documentary is being made about the rise of sexual molestation in schools by teachers. As someone who is trained as a teacher, I find this extremely shocking and disturbing.
posted by livingsanctuary at 7:43 PM PST - 27 comments

Not another top 50 ! Movie deaths.
posted by johnny7 at 7:24 PM PST - 37 comments

The end of the endless September. "America Online on Tuesday confirmed that it will stop supporting access to newsgroups." Thus ends what many labeled the greatest plague upon the Internet, the (triple posting) barbarian horde that descended upon Usenet when AOL added Usenet access for its members.

This is when Usenet returns to utility, readability and civility. Right?
posted by NortonDC at 5:19 PM PST - 53 comments

The Dictators. Even in this age of crate-digger archaeology, especially when it comes to the roots of punk rock, this band of Bronx miscreants is little known except to cognoscenti. The stream of punk most identified with The Ramones (unapologetically crude three-minute pop singles, pop culture obsessed, based around fun, what Tom Carson called "deadly serious kidding") began with these guys first three albums and lives on in the work of The Muffs, Nashville Pussy, The Supersuckers and countless others. A rock and roll treasure often overlooked.
posted by jonmc at 5:04 PM PST - 27 comments

Post Secret is a group confessional, where the site admin solicits deep, dark secrets from anyone that sends theirs in via postcard, then scans them in, and hijinks/hilarity/psychosis ensues. Kinda like grouphug, but more visual and has a bit of a barrier to entry.
posted by mathowie at 4:44 PM PST - 25 comments

Four employees fired for refusing smoking test. This month, Weyco Inc., a Michigan based company in the health care industry, has gone forward with its plan to fire any employees that smokes cigarettes, even if it's done in their own homes. This is being done primarily to save money on health care. Weyco defends its position.
posted by bobo123 at 4:35 PM PST - 144 comments

Meatpacking is the most dangerous factory job in America says Human Rights Watch. According to the New York Times, this is the first time HRW has issued a report criticizing a single industry.
posted by banjotwang at 3:41 PM PST - 21 comments

Two Johnny Carson Clips You Won't See on CNN This Week I remember seeing this (the first one) when it happened. But I must confess I missed the phrase "hang him." (via google video search Radosh.net)
posted by soyjoy at 2:49 PM PST - 103 comments

Learn to Pray
posted by Pretty_Generic at 2:38 PM PST - 21 comments

Which will freeze faster, a liter of water at 60° F or a liter of water at 80° F? Meet the Mpemba effect.
posted by BlueMetal at 2:22 PM PST - 41 comments

Are you in the market for fine art? Have you considered looking at Costco [Philly Enquirer link]? Last week, an original, authenticated Pablo Picasso sketch sold from their website for about $35,000. Currently you can purchase Mourlot edition lithographs by Modigliani and Chagall, as well as prints from the Picasso Estate Collection with a click of your mouse. Would you trust Costco for your fine art purchases?
posted by ScottUltra at 2:04 PM PST - 10 comments

Matt Cooper (no, not this Matt Cooper) is a 21-year-old political science student at the University of California at Davis. He's also running for President. In 2020.
posted by Vidiot at 11:58 AM PST - 41 comments

Photographs of London Underground Stations Taken on black and white film, then coloured in photoshop. A nice example.
posted by carter at 11:18 AM PST - 34 comments

The Human Connection Institute. With a friend, gaze at a painting. Point out what one of you perceives until the other can see it too. Take turns doing this, exploring if you begin to feel greater empathy or even the beginnings of telepathy. Are you more heartfelt and insightful together than you are alone? The art gallery of the Human Connection Project.
posted by tidecat at 11:06 AM PST - 17 comments

They’re petrifying wood in the lab next door.

I am certain they’re coming for me next.
posted by mcgraw at 10:36 AM PST - 9 comments

Not only is pop star Ashlee Simpson lip syncing and manufactured, but so are some of her fans:
"I just read about Ashlee in us weekly. Those guys at the football game were total jerks." -- mandyc19

Welcome to the world of message forum viral marketing, "street team" advertising, and corporate shills. That "fan" posting in forums about Court TV, The Smoking Gun, or shows on Fox isn't a fan at all -- just another type of spammer -- only this time employed by giant media corporations.
posted by jca at 10:24 AM PST - 79 comments

A fantastic example of old meets new, a man spends weeks crafting the perfect Christmas gift for his wife, with spectacular results. I give you the typewriter-keyboard conversion: a true labor of love. Makes me want to dig up my grandpa's old Underwood and give it a go.
posted by Igor XA at 9:06 AM PST - 26 comments

Surrational Images - A More Perfect World - The hallmark of Mutter's remarkable imagery is the distinct sense that the elements of each picture belong together, even though the combination may violate the laws of physics. Click pictures for descriptions.
posted by hypersloth at 8:38 AM PST - 14 comments

It's Australia Day! Some of the highlights this year include someone not a sportsperson being chosen as Australian of the Year and of course the Sam Kekovich lamb advertisments with such classic lines as "you long haired dole bludging types are indulging their pierced taste buds" and "the soap avoiding pot smoking hippie vegetarians may disagree with me but they can get stuffed".
posted by Talez at 8:14 AM PST - 20 comments

Castle ZZT is a site for comics.
posted by jimmy at 7:58 AM PST - 15 comments

More of our successes in spreading freedom and liberty around the world. It seems that access to broader information about the conditions existing for civilians within our proactive foreign policies endeavors lies with NGOs, who's focal points are human rights.
posted by threehundredandsixty at 7:48 AM PST - 12 comments

Nominations for 77th Annual Academy Awards: OK, so Sideways gets nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay (Adapted), Best Supporting Actor aaaand Best Supporting Actress, but Paul Giamatti--arguably the linchpin of the whole flick--gets stiffed. (Jamie Foxx, on the other hand, gets nominated twice...not that there's anything wrong with that!)

Travesty, or just an indication of an incredibly rich "Best Actor" field?
posted by LairBob at 6:25 AM PST - 152 comments

Goodbye and good riddance to William Safire. Though, yes, admittedly not good form to post a link to an Op-Ed piece, let alone several, Safire's retirement from the Times' Op-Ed pages is something of a landmark event, even to those of us who grew up reading his On Language pieces (which will continue) and did not yet know of his past as a speechwriter for Richard M. Nixon. His opinions were sometimes aggravating, and other times, infuriating, but they were always well-written. [many NY Times links]
posted by psmealey at 5:21 AM PST - 18 comments

Bambi with love.
posted by loquacious at 1:29 AM PST - 38 comments

Is Anal Sex Fair to Women? n+1 investigates. [probably NSFW]
posted by neckro23 at 11:04 PM PST - 174 comments

I knew it would be proven one day...
posted by trinarian at 10:54 PM PST - 34 comments

“Ain’t the Lord good?” You can finally watch Part 3, “The Son of the Robert Tilton” in all his glory. And usually, like third generation rendering, the director relies on larger explosions, bigger special effects and more dead bodies… “God, I don’t have a thousand dollars! But you do!” (Interestingly, according to the website, the original VHS/DVD of “Pastor Gas” is only 4 minutes long…) “In other words, you’ll be ahead instead of behind! Hello?” Send your donations to or call 214-620-6200, PO Box 819000, Dallas, TX 75381. Stinking heathens!
posted by growabrain at 10:40 PM PST - 1 comment

Google video search. Search transcripts of recent television shows. Catch up on your Judge Judy.
posted by eatitlive at 9:56 PM PST - 41 comments

Draftfreedom --a new group applying their marketing and communication expertise to help prevent the draft. Take a look--maybe this new approach can get thru?
posted by amberglow at 9:21 PM PST - 38 comments

Jorg Schniedmayer and Armin Scrinzi's road trip photos of China These images are part of a large photo essay.I think the Lake Karakal, the best nature photography I have seen, lately.
posted by hortense at 8:56 PM PST - 8 comments

Carlos Cortez, Rest in Peace. Carlos Cortez-- poet, woodcut artist, veteran wobbly, WWII conscientious objector, longtime contributor to The Industrial Worker newspaper, longtime board president of working-class publishing house Charles Kerr Publishers, passed away last week. In a time of dime-silly protests, we lost a great man (Chicago Tribune) who leaves behind a simple, powerful example of sustained resistance.
posted by juggernautco at 8:11 PM PST - 8 comments

Gay cartoon characters, you say? Spongebob ain't got nothin' on Bugs.
posted by May Kasahara at 6:18 PM PST - 50 comments

The Aztecs at the Guggenheim. The hypercivilized, unimaginably savage Aztecs perceived the stability and very survival of the world in the view of their religion. The key belief was that certain gods, having sacrificed themselves to make human existence possible, demanded incessant repayment in kind. It seems that one of the reasons they could not resist Cortes was that they could not think outside the terms of a faith that they believed to account for all eventualities.
posted by semmi at 3:31 PM PST - 24 comments

Anyone up for a quick game of Murderball?
posted by lemonfridge at 3:02 PM PST - 14 comments

Auntie re-launches her Internet Radio Player, which should be fully operational tomorrow. It looks as though it will feature some truly user-friendly facilities. The numbers: it will feature 500 extra hours of programming and over 80 more programmes,and they've read over 30,000 e-mails to find out what people want.
posted by Holly at 2:19 PM PST - 25 comments

Global warming approaching point of no return...
Climate change: report warns point of no return may be reached in 10 years, leading to droughts, agricultural failure and water shortages. The possibilities include reaching climatic tipping points leading, for example, to the loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (which, between them, could raise sea level more than 10 metres over the space of a few centuries), the shutdown of the thermohaline ocean circulation (and, with it, the Gulf Stream), and the transformation of the planet's forests and soils from a net sink of carbon to a net source of carbon. Countdown to global catastrophe
posted by y2karl at 1:36 PM PST - 79 comments

Uhoh. Tony Blair's new Education Secretary Ruth Kelly is almost certainly a member of masochistic Catholic cult Opus Dei, as featured in The Da Vinci Code.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 1:27 PM PST - 52 comments

Glass and Light Very cool gallery of glass and plasma sculptures by Ed Kirshner, of Aurora Sculpture. Found via Mona – the Museum of Neon Art, in LA. The Mona site includes an eclectic gallery section, too. I especially enjoyed Eric Ehlenberger’s floating jellyfish (more of his work here), Brian Ferrin’s “Blind Faith,” Vince Koloski’s neon crop circle, and David Wilson’s amazing hand-blown neon lifeforms.
posted by Man O' Straw at 1:04 PM PST - 6 comments

Best. Protest. Ever. If you read the story last week about an artist in Bayreuth, Germany who's been sticking little American flags into piles of dog crap, here [via jwz via bb] is what looks like that artist's official site.
posted by mediareport at 12:48 PM PST - 78 comments

"Rose . . . is as close to us as family". Rose Mary Woods, who died Saturday at 87, was Richard Nixon's private secretary. In 1973 Woods was transcribing secretly recorded audiotapes of Oval Office conversations , working on a June 20, 1972, tape of a conversation between President Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, that might have shed light on whether Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in three days earlier. While she was performing her duties (.rtf file), she said, the phone rang. As she reached for it, she said she inadvertently struck the erase key on the tape recorder and kept her foot on the machine's pedal, forwarding the tape. More inside.
posted by matteo at 12:46 PM PST - 16 comments

British TV Channel 4 is to dramatize Belle De Jour. The - possibly fake - blog of a London prostitute has already been adapted into a book. I say bring on 'Rebecca's Pocket the movie' and 'Doc Searls the musical'.
posted by liam at 12:14 PM PST - 14 comments

He spent a lifetime peddling smut and once had an $11 million fortune, but after losing everything and becoming just another homeless New Yorker, Al Goldstein is now happy pushing bagels instead of porn.
posted by terrier319 at 12:10 PM PST - 15 comments

A great interview with Stephen Colbert from today's Fresh Air on NPR. (Windows Media)
posted by The Thnikkaman at 11:39 AM PST - 30 comments

It's not the other white meat, but it seems cows have yet another use.

"That's some good shit, man (in my very best Tommy Chong!)."
posted by LouReedsSon at 11:32 AM PST - 14 comments

Israeli researchers discover gene for altruism Why are some people more prone to give charity or put themselves in danger in order to help others? A team of Israeli psychologists claim they have the answer - they've located the first gene linked to altruistic behavior.
posted by Postroad at 10:40 AM PST - 24 comments

Come out, experts from the woodworks! Neu5Ac and Neu5Gc are sugars found on cells present in nearly every mammal, from chimps to pigs. When scientists altered the genes of mice so that they couldn't produce them, the mice died. However, unlike our closest relatives, humans lack a gene that makes Neu5Gc. The gene is not gone, but rendered silent by a fatal mutation, one that occured approximately 500,000 ago. Now, note that it is illegal to produce any new embryonic stem cell lines. Any scientist will tell you that extant and legal human stem cell lines have been existing in calf serum and often on layers of mouse "feeder" cells for growth. As such, they are immersed in a bath of antigen and if re-introdcued would elicit a strong immune response. I.e. although of human origin, they would be treated as foreign cells if injected. It is likely they would be rejected if injected with today's techniques anyway, but this may represent another significant hurdle for research, one that could be sidestepped with more progressive policy. (Via The Regular)
posted by willns at 10:33 AM PST - 32 comments

The Centaur Three years after its Human Transporter was supposed to change the world, Dean Kamen's innovation factory unveils a successor that just wants to have fun.
posted by Shanachie at 10:29 AM PST - 18 comments

Basket balls. (.swf) (SFW)
posted by mic stand at 10:28 AM PST - 38 comments

Insecure Weatherman vs. Confident Weatherman (Windows media)
posted by Robot Johnny at 10:18 AM PST - 39 comments

Old Wood Working Machines. Covering only North American manufactures, the OWWM website (referred to as the mothership) has 1160 scans of manuals, flyers, catalogs, and sales literature dating back over 100 years. The FAQ is extensive and has exploded spinning off many pertinent articles. OWWM also has almost 2200 user submitted, machinery profiles showing machines as found and/or restored. One of the highlights is a write up on what appears to be the very first (PDF) Delta Unisaw which was built before WWII and aside from mostly cosmetic changes is still built today.
posted by Mitheral at 8:44 AM PST - 10 comments

Advance Warning The 26th Annual Mooning of Amtrak will take place all day Saturday, July 9, 2005, Laguna Niguel, Orange County, California, U.S.A. "Attending this event may be hazardous due to the large concentration of silly people." Front page includes non-explicit pictures of people mooning, and pictures of trains.
posted by carter at 8:38 AM PST - 11 comments

Thingster is an open-source weblogging service for locative media. It's also the backend for BooksWeLike, which describes itself as "activist e-commerce" and is sponsored (partially) by AlterNet. It's part of a movement for social sharing services, which seems to be an extension of what was previously discussed here.
posted by Human Stain at 7:43 AM PST - 9 comments

The Chopper Show commercials are awesome! They're 30 minute (or longer) commercials for a dealership in Las Vegas. They're obnoxious, over the top, and mesmerizingly amusing. It boggles my mind that there are people who purchase cars based on these commercials, but I can understand why The Chopper is so popular in Las Vegas. If you can't speak spanish, I recommend El Chopper en Espanol - it's even funnier if you can't understand the sales pitch.
posted by Fantt at 7:41 AM PST - 26 comments

Jazz, Funk, Soul, Disco joints sampled in House, Hip-hop, and others [via memepool]
posted by cmicali at 7:39 AM PST - 19 comments

The Tsunami Song. Hot 97, the most popular hiphop station in the NYC area, has been airing this song [mp3] for the last week, poking fun at tsunami victims, replete with racist and otherwise offensive lyrics.
posted by adampsyche at 7:21 AM PST - 133 comments

Food preparation is important.
posted by Vaska at 7:16 AM PST - 18 comments

Buy your mac a drink, she's 21 years old today. On january 24th 1984 Apple introduced the Macintosh, and thanks to a bunch of German mac-geeks the public TV broadcast from that day with Steve Jobs is available on the web.
posted by dabitch at 5:40 AM PST - 35 comments

Even Tinier Trees! I've always been interested in the tiny trees my father so carefully pruned, but now I can trump him in the size department with even tinier trees, and these are portable. (non-english site, but clearly marked english available)
posted by nile_red at 2:58 AM PST - 6 comments

Post-Abortion Grandparents' Kit. Your heart still aches for the grandchild you'll only hold in heaven. This kit will help you to identify and overcome post-abortion syndrome in your daughter and in your family.
posted by orange clock at 10:36 PM PST - 129 comments

Online Vulva Museum Possibly NSFW.
posted by quasistoic at 10:20 PM PST - 17 comments

The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience This is the question this article from Christianity Today asks. It shows some scary stats for anyone involved in the Protestant church, that the lifestyles of Evangelical Christians is not really all that different from the rest of society.
posted by livingsanctuary at 9:23 PM PST - 128 comments

Perverted, God-Hating Frenchies vs. Inbred, Sex-Obsessed Yokels
Truth About Liberals #1: They're Just As Moral As Conservatives
Truth About Conservatives #1: They're Just As Smart As Liberals
An interesting article on the role of faith by Steven Waldman that exposes 'moral values' as not being the sole domain of either side while pointing out that the media continues to polarize by playing tempest. Via Speaking of Faith on NPR.
posted by geekyguy at 8:23 PM PST - 60 comments

Who's in the mood for some crunches!!!? Alright everybody, time to FEEL THE BURN!!!
posted by jeremias at 8:20 PM PST - 17 comments

Etiam non mortua sum!
posted by IndigoJones at 6:37 PM PST - 22 comments

Serial Killer Art Review Tired of the Gustav Klimpt posters you bought when you were a freshman? Grown tired of the faux antique absinthe poster you bought at Ikea? How about spicing up your decor with a splash of bona fide serial killer art? This site showcases the best of the worst.... reviews and grades of serial killer artwork. Enjoy!

This is my first (and probably creepiest) post.
posted by mannythedog at 5:55 PM PST - 30 comments

The Dead Letter Office, where you can leave your parting shot to the world. The letters are sad, funny, touching, angry, and insightful. [more]
posted by emelenjr at 2:15 PM PST - 19 comments

With Venezuela harbouring and aiding Colombian rebels; namely the leftist FARC is the US administration looking to intervene in Latin America? Possibility discussed here
posted by adamvasco at 2:14 PM PST - 30 comments

On the heels of Dog Blog comes Goggle Dog. Another whiskey please. Another Pyrrhic whiskey.
posted by punkbitch at 1:17 PM PST - 15 comments

How does a man enter the realm of the monstrous? How broad or thin is the border between the normal and that realm? The Making of a Molester (NYT Mag.).
posted by semmi at 12:28 PM PST - 51 comments

The Death of Yesterday Twenty years ago, an everyday virus destroyed Clive Wearing's brain. Now, all he can remember is music -- and his wife. Here, Deborah Wearing tells how their enduring love has become the one constant in a marriage without memory.
posted by matteo at 12:10 PM PST - 29 comments

Would You Like Fries With That? Fourteen McDonalds in Oregon and southeastern Washington have been linked to the call center operated by SEI-CCS Inc.,(link works in IE only...) a Fargo, N.D.-based company that works closely with McDonald's. The call taker in Grand Forks enters your order into a computer and relays it back to the home restaurant, where it pops up on a screen in the kitchen. Meanwhile, a digital camera photographs your car as you drive through. The photo pops up on a separate screen next to the order at the drive-through cashier's window to match the order with the car. A total of 50 McDonald's are expected to be on line within a few months, including seven more of Adams' restaurants and five in the Portland area, he said.
posted by pwb503 at 11:52 AM PST - 57 comments

Goodnight, Johnny. The King of Late Night is dead at 79.
posted by Vidiot at 11:11 AM PST - 170 comments

Anti-Porn Law Is Unconstitutional A federal court in U.S. v. Extreme Associates has struck down the federal anti-obscenity law. In this case, the government argued that "entertaining lewd and lustful thoughts stimulated by viewing material that appeals to one's purient interests . . . . is immoral conduct even when done by consenting adults in private." The court, however, wanted no part of this moralizing, as it declared "upholding the public sense of morality is not even a legitimate state interest."
posted by expriest at 11:07 AM PST - 30 comments

Dogblog - Jon Sung takes us on a magical journey through San Francisco, and its many fluffy dogs.
posted by Simon! at 7:59 AM PST - 14 comments

Windows users: are you on the lookout for good free software? Worried about spyware, adware, malware, hijackers, or just plain lousy code that likes to play havoc with your system? Look no further. It's pricelessware to the rescue!
posted by MotorNeuron at 6:52 AM PST - 39 comments

It's Carnival Time! In 2002, Silflay Hraka launched the internet's first carnival: The Carnival of the Vanities. Carnivals are showcases of the best that blogs have to offer; bloggers send in posts they have made that they are especially pleased with, and a rotating editor collates them into a weekly edition with editorial comments. Think of carnivals as best-of-the-blogosphere magazines. The Carnival of the Vanities (current edition here) doesn't have any particular focus, but a number of offshoots dedicated to specific fields have popped up. Stay up to date on blog postings about philosophy, science, history, the early modern period, sex, Canada, and (if desperately bored) cats. A new carnival about atheism, The Carnival of the Godless, will be coming out at the end of the month.
posted by painquale at 5:25 AM PST - 5 comments

Do not eat MintyMP3. Cool DIY mp3 player.
posted by punilux at 4:13 AM PST - 14 comments

Hacking Coke machines, courtesy YouCSD.com
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 3:06 AM PST - 31 comments

Fantastic Photoshop Engraving Technique! A bit of work, with astonishing results.
posted by Colloquial Collision at 9:09 PM PST - 21 comments

A house of cards. Trapped by the blizzard, our elaborate system of creature comforts seems like nothing more than a house of cards that Mother Nature so easily knocks down. Bryan Berg knows how to make a real house of cards.
posted by caddis at 8:21 PM PST - 10 comments

Pansies! Think you've got it bad? Bad like this? Bad like this? Perhaps you think you've beat this one? Visit the Digital Snow Museum to put things in perspective.
posted by mudpuppie at 6:37 PM PST - 38 comments

Did the Interim Iraqi Defense Minister have these two Americans murdered for $300 million? In the middle of a election that will decide who controls Iraq, Interim Iraqi Defense Minister Hazim Shaalan has announced that Ahmad Chalabi -- a rival candidate -- will be arrested on 13-year-old charges. But why now? Shaalan says Chalabi "wanted to malign the reputation of the defense ministry". How?
1> Shaalan claims Chalabi released documents accusing Shaalan of being a former member of the Mokhaberat, Saddam's intelligence service. (Shaalan claims political fraud, with the intent of silencing his claims against the Iranians.)
2> Chalabi claims that Shaalan flew $300 million in U.S. currency to a shady businessman in Lebanon, bypassing financial controls, the public bidding process, and Iraqi government oversight.
So, how does this tie in with Stoffel and Wemple? Stoffel recently alerted senior U.S. officials that the Iraqi Defense Ministry was involved in a kickback scheme involving a shady businessman in Lebanon and a multimillion-dollar arms deal. Late last year, Stoffel, a prominent Republican donor and arms dealer, met with aides to Sen. Santorum, R-Pa. Santorum wrote Donald Rumsfeld on Stoffel's behalf, asking him to raise the issue with Shaalan. Stoffel was later invited by the Coalition to arbitrate a solution with the Lebanese businessman. After several days, the arbitrator told the businessman to pay Stoffel -- a debt which is still unpaid. Upon leaving the base, Stoffel and Wemple were attacked and killed nearby. A video from a previously unknown terrorist group claimed responsibility, but one expert suggests that the video may be "manufactured". A reporter recently granted an interview with an Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman was forbidden to ask "dangerous" questions about the contract. Stoffel and Wemple are survived by their wives and five children.
posted by insomnia_lj at 1:21 PM PST - 26 comments

AH, IS THIS NOT HAPPINESS "Chin Shengt’an was a 17th century playwright who once found himself stranded with a friend in a temple for ten days because of a rainstorm. While thus secluded, the pair compiled a list of the truly happy moments in life. The wonderful thing about Chin’s Happy Moments is their lack of piety. Material pleasures are not rejected in favour of loftier ones." Lovely elegant idea. If you need an antidote be sure to also look at Crap Jobs and Crap Holidays.
posted by milkwood at 12:02 PM PST - 14 comments

North Korea is the most secretive country in the world today, with its main railway lined with walls so high that its foreign passengers can't see the countryside.
posted by semmi at 10:52 AM PST - 18 comments

USA Today and others are reporting that Doubleday will be publishing "[t]he original thoughts of Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders" in a book to be sold in the U.S. (and presumably abroad). From the CNN article, Doubleday plans on donating proceeds from the sale to charity, and openly describes plans to flaunt U.S. law by NOT paying royalties for the use of source materials.

What are the ramifications for a publishing company (which relies on royalty payments and preservation of copyright for self-survival) to ignore their own rules (and U.S. law) when it suits them? Should we expect anyone in the U.S. to care about the royalty payments to these two individuals? Furthermore, could Doubleday's stance affect any of the other copyright infringement actions currently being taken by U.S. organizations?
posted by aberrant at 10:22 AM PST - 30 comments

Architecture of Density, by Michael Wolf • Dizzying photos of Hong Kong high-rise buildings. Think of bamboo stalks, Lego pieces, spinal columns, circuit boards...
posted by dhoyt at 9:54 AM PST - 35 comments

A National Guard soldier in Iraq blogs about the birds and the local ecology. Here's an audio interview with "John" from today's Weekend Edition. Follow along with this Middle East Birding Guide (Arabic language .pdf in 10 separate chapters, lots of pretty pictures).
[Note: Iraq is home to many threatened and endangered species].
posted by moonbird at 9:46 AM PST - 4 comments

From muse to master Lee Miller started out as a Vogue model, but by 1930 she had moved behind the lens to take piercing photographs -- culminating in her rage-fuelled portraits of Nazi kitsch. The "Lee Miller: Portraits" exhibit is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from February 3 until May 30. More inside.
posted by matteo at 9:40 AM PST - 15 comments

Lending a trunk , Sumatran elephants have been enlisted to search through the tsunami debris in Banda Aceh. Sure-footed, with a keen sense of smell, they can find bodies still buried in rubble; Medang, who can lift 3 tons, pulled a tree off a Toyota. Here are some Sumatran elephant photos and a bunch of elephant links, Sumatran and otherwise.
posted by Julie at 8:37 AM PST - 3 comments

Why haven't you settled down yet? (impermanent no-login link) Time has discovered that people are no longer graduated, married, and parenting by 22. Twixters are using their 20s to jump between jobs, apartments and cities instead of becoming adults. The reasons? Colleges seriously out of step with the real world, the ubiquity of choice, declining wages and plenty more. Personally, I blame the Toys-R-Us ad song for conditioning a generation to not wanna grow up.
posted by revgeorge at 8:09 AM PST - 103 comments

I'm taller than Al Roker (.swf) and Alfred Hitchcock but shorter than Czar Peter the Great. Compare your height to hundreds of celebrities with Tall or Not.
posted by NickDouglas at 7:09 AM PST - 37 comments

The German Joke of the day . "In Germany, We have ways to make you laugh."
posted by ronsens at 5:38 AM PST - 23 comments

The Great Dying. 250 million years ago, mass extinction was not brought about by a cataclysm of rock, but by global warming.
posted by orange clock at 3:25 AM PST - 21 comments

Music for the Kind : A half-completed tentative lineup for the fourth annual Bonnaroo Music Festival has been announced. With no advertising budget, the festival draws 90,000 fans to the pastures of Manchester, Tennessee for some of the best that live music has to offer. Smaller local festivals, like Langerado and Wanee Festival in Florida, have popped up featuring many of the same artists. Phish may be phried, but the music jams on and there could be a brighter future for selling music than more MTV.
posted by trinarian at 3:16 AM PST - 12 comments

Hubble doomed again (more inside)
posted by kyrademon at 2:14 AM PST - 10 comments

"Because We Have a Duty to Build Iraq, I Will Participate in the Elections." MEMRI translates Iraqi election videos (clips here.)
posted by Yelling At Nothing at 12:34 AM PST - 26 comments

eXeem Lite , the spyware free version of eXeem! Violate eXeem's copyright for fun and profit.
posted by Iax at 9:18 PM PST - 40 comments

"Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting."
Karl Wallenda, January 21, 1905 – March 22, 1978

After 43 years of waiting, Karl's adopted son Mario Wallenda, now 64, rejoins his family dynasty and returns to the high wire. (more inside...)
posted by miss lynnster at 9:11 PM PST - 11 comments

BBC TV's Newsnight programme listed some Iraq-related blogs, including a tragic US soldier's blog [previously discussed here] . Interesting to me were the first-hand Iraqi views of the occupation. In one, a local girl blogs her responses to the WMDs that were never found and to the controversial Marine execution in Fallujah [discussed here], and describes the use of Valium in wartime.

For those of us who wish to hear the views of Iraqis, there's Words from Iraq, which collects posts from a spectrum of English-speaking Iraqi blogs, such as this description of the banality of kidnappings.
posted by iffley at 6:27 PM PST - 19 comments

Cursor Miner's Library (flash). [via screenhead]
posted by ulotrichous at 5:34 PM PST - 2 comments

Sony fesses up and admits that they've screwed up in the past. But they say they're sorry, and they promise that they'll stop hitting consumers with ATRAC, half-baked PSX units and flawed PlayStation Portables.
posted by riffraff at 4:40 PM PST - 31 comments

Searching For the Wrong Eyed Jesus. An oddball alt-country road trip romp through the South. [warning Flash and Music]
posted by srboisvert at 4:05 PM PST - 7 comments

Mold A Rama! Remember those plastic lions, tigers and gorillas? How about an Abraham Lincoln bust or locomotive? You remember those machines where you stuck a quarter in and watched as 250 degree plastic was pumped into a mold and then automotive antifreeze was hosed in to supposedly cool the mold before the animal was pushed into the compartment below for your waiting hands. Remember the burnt plastic smell? Those really hot to-the-touch animals that you wore down your parents until they gave you a quarter animals are not just simply things from your fading memory. Uh uh, new molds are being made even today. Not good enough you say? Then buy your very own vintage Mold A Rama for a mere $9,500!
posted by Juicylicious at 2:27 PM PST - 43 comments

The Temple of Hayah: a religion that renders its followers immune to the any laws other than the Ten Commandments. Followers need not pay taxes. But TOH is mad at Wikipedia because Wikipedia hate-crimed TOH. So TOH suggests that you tip off the FBI.
posted by ba at 2:21 PM PST - 22 comments

Do you dig the Mad Ape Den? It is a fun and new dot com to jot wee lit. I beg you, cop the Mad Ape Den gig if you jot in our web gab box.
posted by mendel at 2:13 PM PST - 23 comments

[W+(D-d)]xTQ MxNA = Monday, January 24, 2005 will suck.
posted by hellbient at 1:35 PM PST - 32 comments

Simon Hoegsberg's latest project involved stopping passersby and asking what they were thinking at exactly that moment. These are their thoughts and portraits.
posted by freddles at 1:34 PM PST - 16 comments

Bunny Suicides
posted by ColdChef at 12:45 PM PST - 60 comments

Flashback This has got to be one of the strangest and most beautiful things I've ever seen. (Flash, requires audio, has lots of pretty colors and runs almost 10 minutes.) I have no idea who the artist is but he obviously spent a lot of time putting this thing together. Does this give anyone else the feeling that they are trippin?
posted by daHIFI at 12:32 PM PST - 13 comments

Instead of liquid water, Titan has liquid methane. Instead of silicate rocks, Titan has frozen water ice. Instead of dirt, Titan has hydrocarbon particles settling out of the atmosphere, and instead of lava, Titanian volcanoes spew very cold ice.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 12:18 PM PST - 28 comments

As a sufferer of Seasonal Affective Disorder, I was interested to discover this village's proposed solution. Were they inspired by Gustav Graves, d'you think?
posted by Specklet at 12:08 PM PST - 10 comments

While culling my clippings file for the big move, I came across Ragtime: No Longer a Novelty in Sepia, which led me to the The Rag-Time Ephemeralist, a labor of love by one Chris Ware , whose 'The Acme Novelty Library' and Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Boy In The World I had long admired. The Ragtime Ephemeralist's mention of Out of Sight - The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895---here's a review from Musical Traditions--and, its very own links page, as a consequence, led to this post about Ragtime, Cakewalks, Coon Songs and Vaudeville, with a slight nod to Barbershop Quartets. There's more, of course...
posted by y2karl at 11:41 AM PST - 27 comments

Made your Valentine's Day plans yet? Do you have the guts to suprise your SO with something like this?
posted by internal at 11:05 AM PST - 85 comments

All About George. He's curious, he's clever, he's cool, he makes millions without words. Just one of many online exhibitions at PhotoArts. (via Everlasting Blort.)
posted by scody at 10:42 AM PST - 5 comments

A candid exchange on Fox New about yesterday's inauguration's pomp and splendor between Judy Bachrach from Vanity Fair and Brigitte Quinn from Fox. (apologies for the link, it was the only one I could find)
posted by threehundredandsixty at 10:25 AM PST - 88 comments

Art In A Box! : Modern artist Joseph Cornell made a name for himself by creating minature collaged works in boxes back in the 1930s when collage was still a relatively new art form. While his works and life story are often romanticized, the fact remains that he was both incredibly creative and incredibly strange. Certainly one of American Art's finest. (see old mefi post from 9/02)
posted by grapefruitmoon at 9:42 AM PST - 10 comments

Pop Lockin is a great way to waste some time today. And maybe learn a new step or two to show the little Mrs. this weekend [Flash required]...
posted by Miyagi at 8:30 AM PST - 11 comments

Mona Kuhn: (NSFW) Photographs. An interview with the artist is here, other images are here. Kuhn is among the photographers whose work is on display now at the Photo L.A. art exposition (Santa Monica Civic Auditorium). Again, her images (nudes, non-graphic) and most of this post's links are generally not safe for work. This one, instead, is SFW
posted by matteo at 8:16 AM PST - 8 comments

Forty years ago, three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were murdered in Mississippi by KKK members. Edgar Killen, who allegedly engineered the killings, pleads innocent.
posted by semmi at 8:06 AM PST - 5 comments

He's going but apparently not fast enough for some. The long and storied career of Dan Rather began in Texas, catapulted after his reporting on the Kennedy assassination and is marked over the decades by on-air outbursts, tantrums and what some might call just plain weirdness. Among yesterday's inauguration coverage TV highlights was Dan getting choked up at a marching band playing a patriotic song. Meanwhile, the scandal that brought him down continues. Should Rather resign now? What does he owe to the producers who have been fired? What does he owe viewers? What is his legacy? And who (or what) should replace him?
posted by terrier319 at 8:02 AM PST - 43 comments

Fatboy Slim covers 'The Joker' With kittens! (Windows .asx link) (via milk and cookies)
posted by punilux at 6:37 AM PST - 39 comments

SpongeBob Gaypants? conservative christian groups warn that the fictional cartoon character SpongeBob Squarepants "is being exploited to promote the acceptance of homosexuality."
posted by three blind mice at 5:02 AM PST - 99 comments

She may not have the grey matter, but what's that matter anymore, anyway? A recent study shows that men have more gray matter, women have more white matter and in the end these differences seem to be no matter. Apparently men have more raw computing power, while women have a more efficient infrastructure -- resulting in similar general intelligence.
posted by ThePrawn at 3:38 AM PST - 27 comments

Inaugural protest pics (series begins at that photo): Kevin Smith attended the inaugural protests and took some (IMHO) really good photographs that you weren't likely to see on any of the mainstream media outlets. Outside of the subject matter itself, I enjoy his photos and wanted to share these given this sets timeliness. In particular, I like this one and love this one. Non protest pics can be find by using the first link and then navigating back through his archives.
posted by jperkins at 11:24 PM PST - 80 comments

The City [Parts I & II, each a 15:00+ minute realPlayer video].
An urban planning film from 1939 that takes a nostalgic look at country life, compares it to the hustle and bustle of 1930s big city life, and presents a utopian alternative. Reviews of The City, Parts I & II, can be found at the Prelinger Archives if you want to read about them before you commit to watching the 30 minute movie. I tripped across this while surfing around on the forums at Cyburbia: The urban planning portal. Also notable: Music by Aaron Copland.
posted by Doohickie at 9:28 PM PST - 14 comments

Ta-Da List is 37 Signals' latest offering is free sharable to-do lists. You can keep them to yourself, share them with only specific people, or share them with the world. So now you have no excuse for forgetting to buy milk on the way home.
posted by riffola at 8:49 PM PST - 28 comments

Terrorist Video Bloopers Chicago comedy troupe Teatro Bastardo spoofs the hostage video: Three warnings: 1. Windows Media Player required 2. Funny AND offensive 3. Might be low-bandwidth
posted by lilboo at 8:12 PM PST - 26 comments

Protest Warriors Clash • Gil Kobrin of the Protest Warriors went down "under a hail of black boots" belonging to anti-Bush peace activists. "It wasn't much of a contest. ProtestWarrior's contingent numbered 13, the other side in the hundreds. If they won any hearts and minds, no one said so." Meanwhile, DC activist group Anarchist Resistance issued their call to action: "There's nothing left to salvage in this empire that is the U.S. government. It's time to bring it down." AR is listed as a resouce by the Internet Liberation Front who Kos reported "hacked and defaced six Republican websites" yesterday. Some commentary on civil disobedience by Thoreau & ActUp.
posted by dhoyt at 7:12 PM PST - 86 comments

Knight's Tour Notes. More than you ever wanted to know about knight's tours on a chessboard.
posted by Johnny Assay at 7:06 PM PST - 7 comments

Idiotarod. The Iditarod is the famous long-distance race in which yelping dogs tow a sled across Alaska. Our Idiotarod is pretty much the same thing, except that instead of dogs, it's people, instead of sleds, it's shopping carts, and instead of Alaska it's New York City.
posted by thanatogenous at 6:46 PM PST - 12 comments

Avatar High - you are back in school. Better study for that test. Hey, what are you doing Friday night? Flash fun for Friday. (best for those younger than you, but still interesting)
posted by caddis at 6:33 PM PST - 10 comments

Do you speak American? The companion website to a PBS series, full of interactive language and dialect tools. You can map your attitudes about regional correctness, guess the speaker's home, learn about American varieties, track the history of certain words, hear samples of regional dialects, and more.
Further reading: Dialect Map of American English [image], Slanguage's local terms, and this collection of local phrases.
Previously on MetaFilter: The Dialect Survey (and results), The Speech Accent Archive, Pop vs. Soda.
posted by stopgap at 6:03 PM PST - 13 comments

The 50 Most Loathsome People of 2004 Funnier than The NYP 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers. And you're in it, to boot.
posted by Space Coyote at 5:37 PM PST - 41 comments

Muppets Overtime via (MoFi) QT
posted by shawnj at 4:42 PM PST - 25 comments

Bollywood Record Covers Crazy Bollywood soundtrack LP covers. My likes? This one and this one. No, I have no idea what they say either.
posted by bdave at 4:40 PM PST - 11 comments

suck squeeze bang blow (SFW)
posted by jonah at 4:22 PM PST - 21 comments

Dr Hugo's Museum of the Mind - Synaesthesia
posted by Gyan at 2:19 PM PST - 22 comments

While the rest of the country seemed focused on the $40 million dollar block party in Washington, D. C., those of us down in the Big Easy were having a protest the best way we knew how, with a jazz funeral, or more specifically, a jazz funeral for democracy. What else would you expect from a party city that voted 77% for Kerry.
posted by Igor XA at 2:04 PM PST - 33 comments

Bob Marley's works enter the Grammy Hall Of Fame - including No Woman No Cry, Marley's tale of his time in the ghetto of Trench Town, Jamaica (photos)...Marley gave his friend Vincent Tata Ford writing credits, in part, to keep Ford's soup kitchen running...
posted by tpl1212 at 1:26 PM PST - 16 comments

U.N. Oil for Food Program. Former Bob Dole running mate, Jack Kemp was recently "quizzed" by the FBI about his involvement in the scandal.
posted by rocket_skates at 1:18 PM PST - 7 comments

Shot In Our Name. Seattle's arts weekly The Stranger graphically expresses popular sentiment this day in urban America.
posted by newton at 1:16 PM PST - 18 comments

TLE, possibly one of the most common diseases, believed to affect 600,000 to a million Americans, remains obscure. It is what afflicted Julius Ceasar, Alexander the Great, and Dostoyevsky. Known through the work of Bear and Geshwind, it is virtually impossible to diagnose except in a severe cases where a seizure can be witnessed by an MRI or EEG, also because of the controversial theories on personality. While a neurological disorder, it is treated by psychiatrists, and when medicated, artists have often felt that the muse has left them.
posted by scazza at 1:15 PM PST - 38 comments

With all the talk about the emergence of Europe as an economic rival to the US, is there a more likely rival emerging? A real strategic partnership between Russia and China could be exactly the combination of nuclear power, boots on the ground, and economic momentum to truly create a new bipolarity. Apparently, there has been serious collaboration in military philosophy between the two powers at least since the USSR broke up, and flash gamers have known about it for at least a couple years, but now it is becoming very real. Conventional wisdom says that there are longstanding disputes over trade and territory, but things generally seem to be warming up. You want to know what the world will look like in 20 years? Look to Siberia.
posted by milkman at 1:04 PM PST - 9 comments

Dell dismisses "one-product wonder" iPod as a "fad". Also says cheerleader who rebuffed him in high school "not that pretty, had a big butt and I think she was gay anyway."
posted by Dome-O-Rama at 12:28 PM PST - 67 comments

Nothing like spending time on the beach... with your laptop. (.mov trailer)
Geeks On Board is a documentary about a unique phenomenon, a one-week cruise designed for people who have an extraordinary relationship with their computers.
posted by jba at 11:48 AM PST - 7 comments

The Condi Conflict: Finally, here is a compelling list of reasons why Bush was forced to give Condoleezza Rice the position of Secretary of State. This makes it absolutely clear: On the left... On the right...
posted by jb_thms at 10:23 AM PST - 35 comments

The One Man Star Wars Trilogy is a one-hour, high energy, nonstop blast through the first three Star Wars films. The catch is, there's only one cast member. Charles Ross, the writer and solo performer, spent too much of his childhood in a galaxy far, far away- adulthood has been similar. Ross plays all the characters, recreates the effects, sings the music, flies the ships, and fights both sides of the battles.
I'm not so sure I want to see him playing Carrie Fisher, especially in E6
posted by Hands of Manos at 10:23 AM PST - 21 comments

Researchers Report Bubble Fusion Results Replicated. Bring on the Mr. Fusion, please.
posted by loquacious at 9:44 AM PST - 44 comments

Uh Oh! Giant Squids, not to be confused with your regular, everyday squids, are washing up by the hundreds on the beaches of Southern California. This may be because Giant Squids are taking over the world!
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 9:26 AM PST - 61 comments

Tiger Woods in Dubai shagging drivers off the top of the Burj Al-Arab.
posted by jonson at 9:21 AM PST - 26 comments

"Yes, I'm comin' back to serve a second term..." JibJab strikes again (flash).
posted by Robot Johnny at 8:07 AM PST - 43 comments

Blackout Some sites have gone black today in protest of black box voting and/or four more years of Bush. But, actually, I haven't seen many. Are people tired of fighting or is this just a poorly-organized effort no one knows about?
posted by sparky at 7:56 AM PST - 62 comments

New research takes steps towards finding the "gay genes." A study conducted on gay brothers in more than 100 families found several genetic regions of similarity with linkage to sexual orientation. This is kind of dense (scroll to the bottom of the page for the FAQ), but that's because it hasn't been written up in the press so there are only journal doc's and scientific summaries available.
This is the press release, which is clearer (Microsoft Word).
This is the article on the study, as published in the journal Human Genetics (PDF).
posted by joe_murphy at 7:46 AM PST - 106 comments

Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger An Exploration into the Structure of Web Presentations. If there’s a funner Schwarzenegger site, tell me about it.
posted by growabrain at 7:29 AM PST - 4 comments

CIA Predicts European Union Will Break Up Within 15 Years. With all the attention focused on Iraq, this new CIA report seems to have slipped under the radar. Europe's dismal economic prospects and the continent's unfavorable demographics could have dire consequences for the EU, result in the dissolution of NATO and generally @#$?! up every post World War II/Cold War alliance that has been formed over the last half-century. Not that the CIA has ever been wrong...
posted by Heminator at 7:28 AM PST - 65 comments

Internal Amazon.com Conference - Liveblogged Interesting approach to sharing the wealth - Amazon.com has rounded up an interesting roster of tech speakers for a private conference - and decided to allow an internal blogging team to liveblog the speeches. Links to their talks (from yesterday and today) are here. (Speakers include Rick Dalzell, Joel Spolsky, George Dyson, James Gosling, Eric Neustadter, Rael Dornfest, Gregor Kiczales, Craig McClanahan, Brian Aker, Gavin King, Bela Ban, Michael Tiemann, Margo Seltzer and Arlene Capismalis, Chris Hofmann, Bjorn Freeman-Benson and Guido van Rossum)
posted by kokogiak at 7:08 AM PST - 6 comments

Guess what? Another poll (since MeFites enjoy them sooooo much)! This one is a take on how much the world trusts and loves Bush.
posted by acrobat at 6:52 AM PST - 7 comments

Let's be friends
posted by srboisvert at 6:41 AM PST - 36 comments

Oh, the Humanity! "I'm a professional musician & I would like to share with you a song that I have just completed, I consider to be one of my most important and controversial pieces of work to date..." [via] I'm looking forward to the next versions of, "Sirhan Sirhan, who are you?" and "Oswald was a patsy."
posted by gsb at 6:06 AM PST - 10 comments

Creating Bush's God Talk by Michael Gerson, Bush's chief speechwriter. According to University of Washington professor David Domke, author of "God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the War on Terror", here's how Bush's God-Talk Is Different ("When Bush speaks of God, he positions himself as a prophetic spokesperson rather than a petitioning supplicant".)
Bonus: "On What Did They Solemnly Swear? Which president opened his inaugural Bible at random in haste? Which didn't swear at all?". Test your knowledge of presidential inaugural Bible use with this quiz.
And: Prayers of the Presidents -- From George Washington to George W. Bush, a sampling of personal and public prayers of America's presidents.
posted by matteo at 5:04 AM PST - 14 comments

One of those geography quizzes that we all know and love. This one involves throwing darts at a map of Europe.
posted by jacquilynne at 4:27 AM PST - 42 comments

Tomahawk® Brand Cruise Missiles Because not all Block II Nuclear Variant cruise missles are alike... Look for the name you can trust!
posted by jimjam at 2:59 AM PST - 31 comments

Who will be the next president of World Bank?
posted by hoder at 1:17 AM PST - 4 comments

A child's brain is like a sponge. (NYT reg) Thank God Focus on the Family is here to save us from gay sponge brainwashing and the left's obvious agenda to get us all to Think Pink.
posted by ElvisJesus at 1:14 AM PST - 23 comments

A multiplayer text editor . Free and realtime. I think this is my new favorite thing.
posted by 31d1 at 9:52 PM PST - 21 comments

kontraband.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their noses, or why.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 9:48 PM PST - 20 comments

Lib.ru maintains a delectable archive of interviews, conducted in English, with Vladimir Nabokov. Scroll down for the English.
posted by ori at 9:04 PM PST - 15 comments

Life Goes On: Just as curbing rampant capitalism in post-9/11 America is letting the terrorists win, I guess canceling vacations to Indonesia would be to let the tsunami win... [via Geisha asobi blog]
posted by Doohickie at 8:24 PM PST - 28 comments

"The implant is designed to allow signals from the motor cortex to be collected, processed and analyzed, eventually producing an interface with a personal computer." It seems to work. Watch the video.
posted by bingo at 8:06 PM PST - 22 comments

Natural phenomena named after Frank Zappa "This series of articles describes a variety of Natural Phenomena - marine, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial - which have been named in honour of Frank Zappa, the smallest being a gene belonging to a bacterium, the largest being an entire planet."
posted by dhruva at 7:48 PM PST - 13 comments

The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website
posted by painquale at 7:43 PM PST - 17 comments

"Glorious Beer!" as sung by Mister Dan W. Quinn, for the Columbia Phonograph Company of New York and Paris. (Recording circa 1899 - Realplayer)
posted by miss lynnster at 6:41 PM PST - 13 comments

Judy Henske. One of The Great Lost Artists of the early 60's folk/blues revival. An original among hacks and pretenders. Forgotten by most beloved by many, including crime novelist Andrew Vachss. A torch singer worthy of the name.
posted by jonmc at 6:33 PM PST - 26 comments

A golden buckle on the steel girdle of Russia : Completed in 1905 and considered to be among the major masterpieces of Russian engineering, the Circum-Baikal Railway offers Trans-Siberian Rail passengers breathtaking views of the world's oldest lake and its rugged surroundings. Over only 72 kilometers, the railway's designers had to construct 200 bridges and viaducts and 33 tunnels to navigate the terrain.
posted by sellout at 5:56 PM PST - 11 comments

A Nation of Faith and Religious Illiterates The sociologist Peter Berger once remarked that if India is the most religious country in the world and Sweden the least, then the United States is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. Not anymore. With a Jesus lover in the Oval Office and a faith-based party in control of both houses of Congress, the United States is undeniably a nation of believers ruled by the same.
posted by Postroad at 5:35 PM PST - 30 comments

book. For thirty-six weeks, a sketchbook was sent in random order between four artists: two in Brooklyn, two in Belfast... [Flash]
posted by Armitage Shanks at 4:13 PM PST - 9 comments

The anti-Homestar Runner?
posted by funkbrain at 3:54 PM PST - 26 comments

Lenin's Tomb: Alternative Designs. (via The Argus)
posted by Ljubljana at 3:30 PM PST - 7 comments

A year ago, NYT reporter Nicholas Kristof purchased two Cambodian prostitutes (discussed here). Today, he's published an update, along with a multimedia presentation about the girls' lives.
posted by mudpuppie at 3:17 PM PST - 19 comments

shooting in tal afar, iraq
what will become of these poor children?
posted by specialk420 at 3:11 PM PST - 74 comments

.... Numbers vary but are only going down. Belgium has none left. Neither does New Zealand . Australia losts its last decorated member, and the remainder are a handful only. Likewise Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom (notably Mr Anderson) and France. Germany has a few, one of which whom share with France. And let us not forget there were women present. As recently as two years ago, some countries could count the numbers in four figures. Today- generally in the low twos. Spare a moment sometime this week to reflect on them now. A lot of them are not going to make it to November 11 2005. (Astonishingly, many countries do not keep tabs on this sort of thing, but anyone who finds this more moving than ghoulish can find updated information here. )
posted by IndigoJones at 2:12 PM PST - 26 comments

FBI: SEARCH FOR 'DIRTY BOMB' IN BOSTON The Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency Placed On Standby Status...Developing...
posted by ZenMasterThis at 1:45 PM PST - 79 comments

Star Wars bloopers and outtakes. [70 mb .mov]
posted by adampsyche at 1:43 PM PST - 19 comments

Britain's Abu Ghraib. (NSFW, but soon to be seen everywhere.) With Iraqi elections just days away and the next British elections scheduled tenatively for May, pictures have been released of British soldiers torturing and abusing prisoners in a style shockingly similar to Abu Ghraib. Soldiers are already being charged. Their defense? "I was just following orders..."
posted by insomnia_lj at 1:29 PM PST - 34 comments

Troy Hurtubise can see through walls. Remember Troy? He is the inventor of the Ursus Mark VII bear-protection suit. The National Film Board of Canada has even documented his first invention in film called Project Grizzly. He claims his new invention, the Angel Light, can see through walls and detect stealth technology.
posted by WinnipegDragon at 12:49 PM PST - 53 comments

OH MY GOOD GOD THERE’S A GIANT SQUID ATTACKING THAT SUBMARINE! A tribute to the greatest Disney World ride that ever existed. R.I.P. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
posted by _sirmissalot_ at 12:17 PM PST - 23 comments

Origami is a endeavor that is undertaken by many, using what's available. Often, that is money. Sometimes simple, and sometimes complicated the result is often spiffy and incorporates the bill's features into the design.
posted by apathy0o0 at 12:02 PM PST - 7 comments

The shift from Colin Powell to Condoleeza Rice at the State Department could have important implications for the future of American foreign policy. Some of the commonalities and differences between them are revealed in Powell's essay, and Rice's essay. (via Foreign Affairs)
posted by semmi at 11:40 AM PST - 14 comments

For the neighbor kid who keyed your car, for the paperboy who rode his bike through your daisies, for the pack of urchins who were throwing snowballs at your car last week, you now have a wide selection of ideal gifts. Roll to taste.
posted by Gooney at 11:37 AM PST - 7 comments

NutritionData.com is a free and very useful website for detailed nutrition information, including the in-vogue Glycemic Index; their own Fullness Factor, a measure of how filling foods are per calorie; and others. Their Better Choices Diet makes use of the Fullness Factor to make consuming less energy than you use easier to do without going hungry. Previously mentioned in response to this AskMe question.
posted by callmejay at 10:57 AM PST - 13 comments

Get rid of all those Gmail invites "Welcome to isnoop.net's gmail invite spooler. This page offers a place for people with Gmail invites and those who want them to come together with minimal effort and fuss."
posted by dhoyt at 10:39 AM PST - 31 comments

filetype:doc For those of you who don't know, Google allows you to limit your searches to files of a certain type. It reminds me of the world wide web of '93 in a lot of ways, before the web become so commercialized and vapid. Little bits of randomness.
posted by delmoi at 10:11 AM PST - 13 comments

Napoleonic Literature : A good repository of information and e-books on Napoleonic warfare. I found the article on rockets to be very interesting. Enjoy!
posted by dazed_one at 9:39 AM PST - 8 comments

Seti farming for those who just can't "crunch" enough. Including photos of his farm, past and present and resources for building your own.
posted by ThePrawn at 8:28 AM PST - 23 comments

Hitman.us is certainly a parody, offering, for a reasonable $20,000 fee, to remove the unwanted from your life. One of the rotating ads on the site, however, points to bustoutdealer.com (registered under the same name), which, with a fee under $4,000, looks like it may be serious.
posted by nobody at 7:42 AM PST - 16 comments

TellBush.org Call 1.800.734.1463 To Leave A Voice Message For Bush. Your Voice Message Will Appear On TellBush.org And Get Itself Emailed To Bush At The Whitehouse. As messages are recorded, a flag gradually builds on the website.
posted by Hands of Manos at 7:27 AM PST - 41 comments

The Legacy of Grammy Mirk , by her descendants.
posted by plep at 7:02 AM PST - 2 comments

There aren't very many there yet, and the signs are illegible for all but the 3rd set of photos, but I still really like the idea behind These are the People in my Neighborhood. You walk around your neighborhood and take pictures of people holding signs with the lyrics from Sesame Street. Very interesting and probably a good way to actually meet your neighbors. via
posted by willnot at 6:50 AM PST - 8 comments

One does not simply walk into Mortor.
posted by swift at 6:16 AM PST - 60 comments

One man's real and imagined lives, in pixel art.
posted by Tlogmer at 6:03 AM PST - 11 comments

Athens chief fumes at US lewdness claims because, out of 3.9 billion people (and about 56 million of them in the United States alone), 9 people in the United States complained of nudity in the opening ceremonies. It's one thing to have our very moral, rather infintesimal minority running what we all see, but what happens when that morality clashes cross-country? (The complaints are old news; the Grecian response is not.)
posted by FormlessOne at 6:02 AM PST - 60 comments

Google, others announce attempt to fight comment spam. Take away the PageRank bonus and they'll stop, right? Right?
posted by ubernostrum at 1:16 AM PST - 71 comments

Today's Music Tomorrow. "For the Finest "Cutting Edge" of Sound Transcendence Technology with Deluxe Dynamic Psychedelic Engineering for full phase Alpha States of Ultra Conscious Realization Imagery, in practical down to earth realistic simplistic easy to percptualize [sic] musical terms." And of course: "...born with a genius level I.Q., Vegetarian Vegan..., Astrologer, Artist, Writer, Health Expert, Hetero..." In particular check out the mp3s of the drum tracks. (Though maybe that U2 song does sound a little better.)
posted by TiredStarling at 12:42 AM PST - 8 comments

Newsflash! 'E.E. Cummings', not 'e.e. cummings' (via the inexorable LanguageLog)
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 12:36 AM PST - 24 comments

Roman ball games and Roman board games. Complete with literary references, ancient artwork, and instructions for playing the games yourself. So let's all sing: Aufer me ad arenam (to the tune of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame").
posted by stopgap at 12:07 AM PST - 2 comments

EA Plays Hardball Just in case locking up the NFL license wasn't enough...
posted by ga$money at 7:27 PM PST - 36 comments

An Industrial Art Gallery Is it just me, or do you find hand-drawn mechanical diagrams capturing concepts of physics strangely soothing?
posted by cosmonik at 6:41 PM PST - 23 comments

Is this any way to sell Volkswagens? [note: QT link] This "viral ad" for the VW Polo has been making the rounds, leaving a trail of exasperated disgust, outrage, and guilty snickering in its wake. VW's ad agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, however, claims that it's bogus. (I asked them). Paging Snopes.
posted by digaman at 5:23 PM PST - 67 comments

Fractal Maze, one of the most evil puzzles I have ever encountered. It's documented briefly at mathpuzzle.com (scroll down a bit), which also features a smaller fractal maze.
posted by Wolfdog at 4:24 PM PST - 16 comments

From MathNet to that silly song about the number nine, Square One was one of my all-time favourite programs as a kid. It hasn't been released on video or DVD, but luckily there are plenty of fansites with video clips, pics, and other media to take you on a trip down mathematical memory lane.
posted by sanitycheck at 4:11 PM PST - 25 comments

THE HASSELHOFFIAN RECURSION is just about the best thing I've seen in a while. (warning: haunting image ahead)
posted by mathowie at 3:23 PM PST - 82 comments

"Thunder Warrior." In the 1980s, the Italian movie industry -- better-known for "spaghetti" reimaginings of Westerns, crime movies , and "After the Bomb" flicks -- also gave us the Rambo rip-offs "Thunder Warrior" and "Thunder Warrior 2." Only instead of a Vietnam veteran, the hero was a Navajo warrior battling anti-Indian prejudice. (Windows Media File; possibly NSFW) Via.
posted by inksyndicate at 3:19 PM PST - 7 comments

Americanism—and Its Enemies
Puritanism did not drop out of history. It transformed itself into Americanism.
David Gelernter is a contributing editor of The Weekly Standard and professor of computer science at Yale. This essay helps to explain American religiosity..to the rest of us.
posted by dash_slot- at 2:40 PM PST - 49 comments

Springdale Arkansas is now home to the largest population of Marshallese outside of the Marshall islands. ...They all spoke so highly of Springdale and how great it is to work the overnight shift in a chicken factory in the Ozarks. What a strange irony that everyone I knew in Arkansas considered paradise to be on South Pacific islands, with no schedule and great fishing. ..Articles by Christopher Leonard and photos by Benjamin Krain
posted by thisisdrew at 2:12 PM PST - 7 comments

The world's largest passenger plane. The new Airbus "superjumbo" has a 262-foot wingspan, a tail as tall as a seven-story building and it cost $13 billion to develop. In a three-class cabin layout, the A380 will carry 555 passengers -- 33% more than the plane it is designed to displace, Boeing's veteran 747, Sir Norman Foster's favorite piece of modern architecture. The A380 has 49% more floor space. How the plane's extra space is used will be left up to airlines. Low-cost carriers could operate the A380 with a single economy-class configuration accommodating as many as 800 passengers. Virgin company chief Richard Branson said his airline, which has ordered six A380s, will offer private double beds for first-class passengers and casinos. Airbus trailed Boeing Co. until 2003, when it delivered more planes than its U.S. rival for the first time -- a feat it matched last year. Boeing will unveil next year the much smaller, new 7E7 -- with 200 to 250 seats.
posted by matteo at 2:06 PM PST - 49 comments

Salam Pax Interviewed on Zed.
posted by The Thnikkaman at 12:58 PM PST - 8 comments

Boxer Go Barbara Boxer
posted by milkman at 12:33 PM PST - 78 comments

Letters To Martha. A blog novel (a blovel? a nog?) about an unemployed man who writes to Martha in jail. Updated every Tues and Thurs.
posted by braun_richard at 11:55 AM PST - 14 comments

MYSTERY TWISTER 2005 is an international crypto competition. During the year 2005, different tasks will be set, altogether 13 CryptoChallenges, CC1 to CC13, of increasing difficulty, such as, for example, decrypting an encrypted message or forging a digital signature. The variety of topics, which will be covered by the collection of challenges, is intended to provide a survey of modern cryptology. Powered by the Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany), registration required.
posted by tcp at 11:34 AM PST - 2 comments

Viva la Biotech Revolution! Embargo or no, Castro's socialist paradise has quietly become a pharmaceutical powerhouse.
posted by dov3 at 11:18 AM PST - 16 comments

Recent neuroscience research suggests that Democrats and Republicans are not nearly as far apart as they seem (NYT). Will an awareness that we are conning ourselves to feel alienated from each other help to close the political gap? Or, are we conned by science and the media?
posted by semmi at 11:00 AM PST - 16 comments

"In his talk... [Harvard President Larry] Summers also used as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral parenting. Yet she treated them almost like dolls, naming one of them 'daddy truck,' and one 'baby truck.'

"It was during his comments on ability that Hopkins, sitting only 10 feet from Summers, closed her computer, put on her coat, and walked out. 'It is so upsetting that all these brilliant young women [at Harvard] are being led by a man who views them this way,' she said later in an interview." Summers then responded with the currently in vogue non-apology apology.
posted by occhiblu at 10:48 AM PST - 180 comments

"Survivor" winner Richard Hatch didn't declare his million bucks to the IRS. He'll be arraigned Jan 24.
posted by CunningLinguist at 10:24 AM PST - 52 comments

Picasa 2 Google's entry into the world of photo sharing and management has been released to the world... and it's totally free. Back when Google acquired Picasa, I heard a lot of "it's a total ripoff of iPhoto" well, folks, this version can do things that Photoshop can't even do, to say nothing of how it outshines iPhoto.
posted by coldon at 9:16 AM PST - 60 comments

Dog day in Iraq. PFC Connor, a Marine mascot previously mentioned in this post, was hunted down and killed just 24 hours before his planned departure from Iraq. "We found you at six weeks old. Not much more than five pounds, you lived on potted meat and long life milk. It was all we had. You grew into a little puppy, an Iraqi dog with an Irish name from Boon Dock Saints. For all the times you ran away . . . you ran to me as fast as you could when I whistled for you. It was those times that I loved you the most."
"I'm wondering why they created this policy. Were dogs barking and attracting insurgents? Were they playing fetch and accidentally bringing home IEDs instead of their stick? Does Rumsfeld just hate puppies?
"No, no, and possibly."
posted by insomnia_lj at 9:15 AM PST - 41 comments

Back from the dead? The first mainstream review of the new Amiga hits the 'web. It's taken several years (discussed here at the back-end of 2000) but finally there is new hardware and software available.
Will it set the world alight (again)? Who will replace Debbie Harry and Andy Warhol at the launch party? Will it need to (or be able to) compete with the new Macmini? And - perhaps more importantly - where are Amiga, Inc., and who are KMOS?
posted by Chunder at 6:47 AM PST - 33 comments

Is copyright killing culture? Some documentary filmmakers certainly think so.
posted by shawnj at 5:23 AM PST - 142 comments

Everyone is talking about Clint Eastwood's new movie, Million Dollar Baby (trailer). What you may not know however is that the movie was based on a short story in a book by the name of Rope Burns: Stories From The Corner by the late F.X. Toole (aka Jerry Boyd). The book by the way was called, "...the best boxing short fiction ever written," by James Ellroy of L.A. Confidential fame. Back in 2000 Toole gave an amazing interview on Fresh Air about spending the last 20 years of his life as a cut man and the last 40 years of writing while trying to overcome his fear of rejection before getting his first book published at age 70.
posted by pwb503 at 12:06 AM PST - 19 comments

Learn Disco! They say it drives the chicks wild... maybe you'll finally get a date!
(The end of the video is the grooviest part. Courtesy NewToday.)
posted by miss lynnster at 11:13 PM PST - 40 comments

Following up on our discussion of a classic Salinger short story, I find myself surprised - nay, shocked - that nobody has posted a link to the classic short story "Guts" by Chuck Palahniuk.
posted by GriffX at 10:45 PM PST - 27 comments

If you have heard of the bands Lightning Bolt, Arab on Radar or Forcefield, chances are you've heard of the legendary space known as Fort Thunder - an artists collective in an otherwise neglected part of Providence known as Olneyville -where roughly 100 artists and musicians lived, worked, and held underground music shows. After the demolition of Fort Thunder in 2001, a number of those artists began again in a different space known simply as Oak & Troy. One year ago this month, on one of the coldest days on record, the residents of that fertile creative space were also evicted, this time with just two weeks' notice. But where there is innovative music there are dedicated audiophiles, and last week one of the former residents of Oak & Troy released a 10-CD compilation of some of the best music to happen in those amazing spaces. See if you can pick out the extracurricular projects of members (or former members) of AoR, ff, Dropdead, thee Hydrogen Terrors and Olneyville Sound Station.
posted by antimagnet at 9:51 PM PST - 15 comments

Fat Truckers Union is just one of 35 sites hosted by Alkem foundation. While at F.T.U. don't miss The Golden Age by scrolling right and set aside 8 hours to play the flash game. Bridgeport seems to be a band that plays in livingrooms. I'm not sure what GPI is other than it has a lot of small print. (contains flash, shockwave, sound and a few other things i don't know what they are.)
posted by mss at 9:19 PM PST - 6 comments

The Cactus Project is a "transgenic artwork involving the fusion of human genetic material into the cactus genome resulting in the cactus expressing human hair." See also the Artist links link for more transgenic art.
posted by dhruva at 7:59 PM PST - 25 comments

A Plea for Better Manners or- How to be an Ugly American from the comfort of your own home. On the plus side, these two are now broadcasting from a New York station that is collecting for tsunami relief.
posted by IndigoJones at 7:39 PM PST - 30 comments

Before they were nobodies. There are a few bands who never quite made it huge but influenced everyone who ever saw or heard them (the Velvet Underground, Capt Beefheart, Sonic Youth). The best were The Replacements. And recently from their defunct website comes a complete early show of theirs, broken up in bite sized chunks, via quicktime. (more inside)
posted by tsarfan at 7:13 PM PST - 69 comments

Victorian era projectors and directors.
posted by arse_hat at 6:42 PM PST - 2 comments

Ten Reasons --from going to McDonald's (Did you know that Happy Meals are a loss leader?) to becoming a miser (It's a weightloss plan that really works) and more. From AK13, a great little brit web mag.
posted by amberglow at 6:12 PM PST - 23 comments

Weatherman fired for on-air MLK day racial slur. I hope someone has video because I wouldn't mind seeing this dood go out like a sucka.
posted by wbm$tr at 5:58 PM PST - 105 comments

The message is clear - don't get busted eating anything but Lamb this Australia Day. (Possibly NSF vegans/vegetarians/etc. links are .wmv)
posted by fullysic at 5:52 PM PST - 25 comments

The Digested Read at The Guardian reduces popular books to 400 words and a conclusion. Recent notables include Belle du Jour ("Sometimes I lie about my age to clients. Sometimes I even lie to my friends. I guess you must be wondering whether I'm lying now.") Crichton's State of Fear ("Author's note: I'm very, very clever and have read a lot and you're all stupid wishy-washy liberals.") and Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons ("At least it covered her breasts, whatever they were. Charlotte knew men might want to touch them, but she didn't know why as she had never read Cosmopolitan.") Possibly NSFW if you have an employer with no sense of humor. On preview: Individual Digested Reads have been linked in previous discussions on Henry James and Camille Paglia.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 3:56 PM PST - 9 comments

I’m coming over to New York from England next month for a few days and wondered if you could recommend any restaurants/bars for me and me chums to visit? We’re staying on the Upper West Side. Any help would be much appreciated!
posted by orange clock at 2:34 PM PST - 42 comments

What the World May Come To. "THE school books tell us that the earth is a round globe, or, to be more exact, an oblate spheroid - a ball with the ends slightly flattened, as in an orange. This is, of course, true of the general appearance of the earth as it might be viewed from the moon or from Mars, and we may see it proved more or less by watching the earth's shadow on the lunar surface during an eclipse of the moon. But the earth is slowly but surely changing its shape, and already it is in process of becoming a tetraedron, or a pyramid." (Via Incoming Signals, which quite properly calls the author "sort of the Time Cube guy of the World War One era.")
posted by languagehat at 2:22 PM PST - 20 comments

I envy the Japanese for the enormous clarity that pervades their work. It is never dull and never seems to have been made in haste. Their work is as simple as breathing and they draw a figure with a few well chosen lines with the same ease, as effortless as buttoning up one's waistcoat.....
--Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, 24 September, 1888
The term "Japonisme" came up in France in the seventies of the 19th century to describe the craze for Japanese culture and art. Van Gogh, like so many other Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists, was one of the admirers (and collectors) of Japanese art. He defined himself as “a simple worshipper of the eternal Buddha”, and the most peculiar among his many self-portraits is "Self-Portrait as Buddhist Monk" (see a comparison here and here), painted in 1888 and dedicated to Paul Gauguin. More inside.
posted by matteo at 1:49 PM PST - 10 comments

Bill Gates... so hot [via BoingBoing].
posted by digaman at 1:21 PM PST - 60 comments

Some of you (and clearly the bad guys are among them) don’t always remember that this game, and all accounts and derivative products, are the property of the United States Army. America's Army is the Official US Army Game. Funded by the military, the game is free to download and play online. As of this posting, the game has 1741 servers and 8318 players online. In a post to the game's official forums (the post itself required registration to view and now seems to be gone), a developer warns cheaters "The Army is angry, and we’re coming for you."
posted by ludwig_van at 12:10 PM PST - 33 comments

Remote control shark. No mention of attaching lasers. Yet.
posted by mecran01 at 12:03 PM PST - 12 comments

Who says you can't make money on the web? A group of college kids had revenue of over $405,000 from their humor site in December, and now have a story in The New Yorker. I'm in the wrong business.
posted by braun_richard at 11:43 AM PST - 21 comments

NASA has released some pictures from another moon The article has some pictures - almost actual and computer-enhanced of Titan. There are also links to the radar signals Huygens received in its descent to Titan and Cassini sent back to NASA. (They sound a bit like a Vespa buzzing past a window.)
posted by Cranberry at 11:24 AM PST - 28 comments

Josh Fruhlinger: he reads the comics so you don't have to. Makes Mary Worth fun again!
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 11:04 AM PST - 23 comments

To set the record straight: While the country was busy with CBS and Rather's mistake, the story of Bush going AWOL was lost.
posted by semmi at 10:26 AM PST - 91 comments

Espionage and the Orange Revolution -or- How Ukranian spies prevented a crackdown on protestors in Kiev. (NY Times)
posted by Tullius at 8:46 AM PST - 12 comments

Why is Red Peters not famous like George Carlin, for example? When you hear his famous songs "Ballad of a Dog Named Stains" or "Blow Me (You Hardly Even Know Me)", you know he’s an unrecognized genius. More on "I Laughed, I Cried, I Fudged My Undies”. Short Amazon introductory clips here
posted by growabrain at 8:18 AM PST - 15 comments

Rebirth of the Semantic Web. On the heels of the Technorati taggregator, the Oddiophile bookmarklet, the tag search (new today!) and much ensuing buzz, Jeff Jarvis brings up people tagging. This concept drove Friendster and FOAF, both of which petered out. But with Technorati's elegant synthesis of photo, link, and post tagging, the web may once again tap into networked individualism.
posted by NickDouglas at 7:35 AM PST - 23 comments

Ultimate Recycling Rug hooking must be one of the simplest and cost-effective of crafts (basically, cut old clothes into strips, use burlap, insert hook, pull up loop of fabric), and so it’s all the more amazing that it can be used to achieve such cool, painterly and stunning results. If you click on just one link in this FPP, make it this one, made by a Japanese woman out of her grandmother’s old silk kimonos. I’ve selected just one excellent, comprehensive rug hooking web site, but there’s a lot of resources and information available on the web for this craft if you’re interested.
posted by orange swan at 7:25 AM PST - 12 comments

Stand By Your Statue - like all the best ideas, this one is simplicity itself: you find a statue, you stand by it and imitate it while one of your mates takes a photograph. What could be easier? What could be more entertaining? It's the kind of thing the Internet was invented for!
posted by The Ultimate Olympian at 6:32 AM PST - 23 comments

Authentic GOP.com Healing a divided America.
posted by ColdChef at 5:37 AM PST - 62 comments

Jeffrey Rowland, creator of Wigu, author of I Was a Teenage Billionaire Psychopath, and owner of a brilliant illustrated blog, has unveiled his newest project - the TV Network Channel.
posted by Simon! at 5:13 AM PST - 10 comments

Boohbah Zone. Monday Flash Fun. On acid. With teddy-bear-seal-things.
posted by armoured-ant at 4:43 AM PST - 27 comments

3 Hive This is a great source for free, legal and cool mp3's. The folks at 3hive have put together a great collection of links to bands and the free mp3's they have available, including a short description/bio of each artist. New posts appear almost every day making this an excellent source for new music. Radio who needs it!
posted by mule at 11:50 PM PST - 8 comments

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask). Circadiana is a new specialty blog dedicated to chronobiology. As a night owl (I'm posting this link at 2:45 AM), I look forward to many late nights reading this site.
posted by painquale at 11:43 PM PST - 14 comments

The next step? And so on... Seymour Hersh, the fellow that broke the Abu Ghraib story (more) is now saying in the New Yorker that the US has been operating covertly in Iran (and possibly as many as 9 other mid-east and S. Asian countries). As this BBC article says "Mr Hersh could be wrong. But he has a series of scoops to his name, including the details of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal last year. His track record suggests that he should be taken seriously."
posted by edgeways at 10:13 PM PST - 119 comments

Read J.D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" if you're bored at work this week (or stuck in a Mexican hotel). And when you're done with that dig into the rest (with a couple of exceptions) of Salinger's published work.
posted by cmaxmagee at 9:15 PM PST - 50 comments

With all of the talk and posts about itunes, the RIAA, P2P, etc. I thought that I would take this opportunity to point out that there are hundreds of great, free music files online that are legal to download. Sites like Soundloads which posts links to new music every day, Garageband which features up and coming bands, and CNet's music site that lets anyone and everyone upload their files to share with the masses, all feature some great music. And the creators of the music are asking you to download the files for free and add them to your playlists.

I've also downloaded some good music from epitonic.com, purevolume.com, audiostreet, even blogs can be a good source of new, free, legal music downloads. While you're not gonna find the latest big media pop diva or boy band, you can find good music if you take the time to look a little.
posted by copacetix at 8:27 PM PST - 17 comments

Naïve in Thailand: The misadventures of an unprepared 43-year-old Brit who drops everything to try and help with tsunami rebuilding. Pet peeve? "The only real irritation has been the American Christian volunteers."
posted by NortonDC at 8:24 PM PST - 88 comments

Empty your pockets before attending the Presidential Inauguration. Among items forbidden are pocket tools, explosives, animals -- and in case they forgot to mention something, "any other items at the discretion of the security screeners that may pose a potential safety hazard"
posted by ThePrawn at 5:39 PM PST - 48 comments

Chika Honda, falsely imprisoned for ten years by Australian authorities for heroin smuggling, and never pardoned, tells her story in her own words [Real Audio] in this Walkley Award-nominated documentary. This is a wrenching story of incompetence by the federal police, legal aid services, media-influenced juries and the problem of translation in legal investigations. Listen to her story and decide on her innocence for yourself.
posted by DirtyCreature at 4:19 PM PST - 6 comments

Blogs contribute to political reform in Iran (New York Times): Former vice-president of Iran, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, said that he learned through the Internet about the huge gap between government officials and the younger generation. "We do not understand each other and cannot have a dialogue," he said. "As government officials, we receive a lot of confidential reports about what goes on in society. But I have felt that I learned a lot more about people and the younger generation by reading their Web logs and receiving about 40 to 50 e-mails every day. This is so different than reading about society in those bulletins from behind our desks."
posted by hoder at 2:52 PM PST - 7 comments

A fun time waster for anyone stuck in a Mexican hotel room, like me, or bored sitting at home. A joining of del.icio.us and flickr. Related to this askme
posted by mss at 1:06 PM PST - 7 comments

Carnivore, the gold standard for conspiracy theory, has apparently been mothballed. An interesting element of this is that Carnivore has been removed from service not because it is invasive of civil liberties, but rather because it has failed to perform against commercially-available monitoring technologies. Of course, since we do not know what those technologies *are*, it may be that they have built into them considerations of individual rights to privacy that Carnivore could not be altered to respect. However, given the drift of the US on matters of data privacy, this seems unlikely... So, what are the programmes that do it better than Carnivore? What do they have to offer that Carniviore doesn't, or is it just the ISPs are now offering information straight to the government? And does this mean that it is no longer fashionable to append long strings of exciting-sounding nouns to emails? (Apologies if this is old news to the more plugged-in - this report has only just been released under FOI)
posted by tannhauser at 11:08 AM PST - 27 comments

An in-depth profile of Generation X dads. As one myself, I think it gets most things right. However, if you want to take paternity leaves and go home early and spend more time w/family, it helps to have money to actually do that!
posted by braun_richard at 10:52 AM PST - 29 comments

The real Kraftwerk pocket calculator! With a sound sample of it playing 'Computerwelt'. I never knew this existed!
posted by starscream at 10:23 AM PST - 16 comments

There are many different types of sundials, from the very large to the small and portable. Some of the more unusual specimens include the spectacular new Sundial Bridge in Redding, CA, topiary and garden sundials in Britain, and, perhaps most lovely, stained glass sundials, rare now, but more common from the 16th through the 19th centuries.
posted by madamjujujive at 8:54 AM PST - 23 comments

Northumberland Rock Art. An archive of Neolithic and early Bronze Age rock carvings from north east England. I'm browsing by motif, but you can make your own!
posted by steef at 8:07 AM PST - 4 comments

Extra Oomph . A bit like Ralph Stedman in style, Linda Zachs gives us her beautiful, her bizarre, her funny, and her inspirational. and sometimes her commercial.
posted by es_de_bah at 6:21 AM PST - 8 comments

A chapter from Edward Tufte's upcoming book is online. [link contains roughly 2.2 MB of scanned images] Tufte, discussed here previously and author of what could be called the Strunk and White for scientists, statisticians, producers and consumers of visual information, takes a stab at a few issues right up the average MeFite's alley: the 9/11 commission report, fraudulent medical studies, and the rather dubious quantitative work of this unfortunate economist/art historian. For the ShillFilter suspicious, check out some of the great threads that haunt his site.
posted by fatllama at 11:20 PM PST - 24 comments

Metahistory. A system of demystification of histories, historians, journalism, and journalists who claim to present things "as they are", while providing some brilliant methods for determining in what ways a given account lacks "complete objectivity" and how it can be seen as ultimately ideological.
posted by stbalbach at 9:21 PM PST - 57 comments

Physically and sexually mistreating detainees at Abu Ghraib under orders... 10 years.
Abusing prisoners, raping a young Iraqi boy, and lying under oath(allegedly) because you're a "go-getter"... $164 million, $16 to $85 million.

Knowing the President and members of congress on both sides of the aisle have your back so long as you're not enlisted(wouldn't have covered corporate types, but what the hey, thought I'd toss it in)... Priceless!
posted by rocket_skates at 7:33 PM PST - 76 comments

Journalism's vacation from the truth One day after Tucker Carlson, the co-host of CNN's "Crossfire," made his farewell appearance and two days after the network's new president made the admirable announcement that he would soon kill the program altogether, a television news miracle occurred: even as it staggered through its last steps to the network guillotine, "Crossfire" came up with the worst show in its 23-year history
posted by Postroad at 4:23 PM PST - 44 comments

Eight years of Reading Rainbow's children's story winners. (This one's a gem.)
posted by Pinwheel at 1:16 PM PST - 8 comments

Taking care of the children, present, past, America and elsewhere... (following on from XQUZYPHYR's Thursday post, with all NYT links reg-free)
posted by billsaysthis at 12:54 PM PST - 2 comments

Farmer Homer McFarland is being sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Monsanto corporation. His crime? Replanting his crops' own seed, as farmers have done for millennia, which violates the biotech giant's intellectual property rights, the company claims. Quietly, Monsanto's aggressive "seed police" have been suing farmers in 25 states for years, often settling out of court for huge sums, according to the Center for Food Safety's new report, Monsanto vs. US farmers [PDF link]. For more information, also see a new documentary called The Future of Food.
posted by digaman at 11:32 AM PST - 55 comments

iPod World [QuickTime]
posted by Pretty_Generic at 11:17 AM PST - 15 comments

Do you remember Hüsker Dü? No, not that Husker Du, this one. This site contains one of the most complete collections of guitar tabs I have ever seen for any band. It might even exceed my previous favorite band site, Swervedriver.com, if not in flash, then in content. The owner of the site seems to be more of a Grant Hart fan than a Bob Mould fan, as there are tabs for most of Hart's solo stuff and for Nova Mob, but only a smattering of Mould tunes and none for Sugar. There is also, suprisingly, a tab of the Posies' excellent song (and loving tribute to the Huskers) "Grant Hart".
posted by psmealey at 10:39 AM PST - 60 comments

TCF bank dooces The Star Tribune , pulling all their ads from the paper after A Star Tribune columnist posts a negative column about a TCF exec's blog .
posted by drezdn at 10:37 AM PST - 16 comments

If Terry Gilliam and Rube Goldberg made flash games, they may go something like this.
posted by onkelchrispy at 8:33 AM PST - 75 comments

The gallery of random art: computer generated random images posted daily, with voting enabled. To see the most popular images since the project began, check out the best-of gallery.
posted by moonbird at 7:17 AM PST - 10 comments

The Brampton Bugle News, Culture, Health, Fashion, Jobs and much, much more. The charming English village of Brampton in Derbyshire goes on-line. Brampton’s Website offers a “behind the scenes” view of British village life written by the people themselves (and most of them seem to contribute). Click also on the banner/display adverts which provide deeper insights. Some pages have sound….when you least expect it! Other than that, SFW.
posted by JtJ at 7:09 AM PST - 10 comments

Rubberboy [flash & music]
posted by srboisvert at 6:48 AM PST - 8 comments

The biology of B-movie monsters ; ancient Greek curse and love magic; the correspondence of Elizabeth I and James VI; Egil Skallagrimsson, poet and killer; the mythology of Harry Potter; Pinocchio's cultural heirs; Tiananmen's legacy; experimental art in China; the question of Hatshepshut's character. Articles courtesy of the Fathom Archive, 2000-2003.
posted by plep at 6:19 AM PST - 11 comments

The General Dennis J. Reimer Training and Doctrine Digital Library. Infantry Platoon Defense. Combat in Built-Up Areas. Land Navigation. Field Fortifications. Land-Mine Warfare (Part I). Ground Surveillance Assets. Electronic Warfare. Introduction to Tactical Radio Communications. Basic Baton Techniques.
posted by Ritchie at 5:57 AM PST - 8 comments

The Rocky Horror Muppet Show.
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:55 AM PST - 22 comments

The damage wrought by the construction of an American military base in the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon must rank as one of the most reckless acts of cultural vandalism in recent memory. And all the more so because it was unnecessary and avoidable... but given that it was, the US authorities were very aware of the warnings of archaeologists of the historic importance of the site. Yet, as a report by Dr John Curtis of the British Museum makes clear, they seem to have ignored the warnings. Dr Curtis claimed that in the early days after the war a military presence served a valuable purpose in preventing the site from being looted. But that, he said, did not stop "substantial" damage being done to the site afterwards not just to individual buildings such as the Ishtar Gate, "one of the most famous monuments from antiquity", but also on an estimated 300,000 square metres which had been flattened and covered in gravel, mostly imported from elsewhere. This was done to provide helicopter landing places and parking lots for heavy vehicles that should not have been allowed there in the first place...

Cultural vandalism. Months of war that ruined centuries of history. American graffiti.
posted by y2karl at 12:45 AM PST - 62 comments

Speaker Touts Stripping to 8th Graders as a lucrative career, causing a collective freakout in our sex obsessed culture. If your considering stripping as possible career path here are some things that you should know.
posted by thedailygrowl at 9:23 PM PST - 74 comments

the stanford prison experiment ,first posted in Feb 2001, can now be compared to the actions of soldiers who have served in Abu Ghraib. It's an illustration of how one can get carried away with a role and not act as one would normally. No, not an excuse. Thank you Plep!
posted by snsranch at 8:00 PM PST - 32 comments

The Salvador Option --sending Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, in imitation of our actions in El Salvador. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. More here, including this: In Iraq, in fact, as in many other places where the United States has tried to train ethical armies to fight dirty wars, the Iraqi troops are tacitly expected to do what American troops won’t. A fundamental purpose of the upcoming elections on January 30 is to create democratic legitimacy for whatever extreme measures the newly organized military decides to take.
posted by amberglow at 7:25 PM PST - 18 comments

Global dimming. It's official. Particulate pollution in the air has decreased the amount of sunlight reaching the earth. How much? A fraction of a percent? Try 10% globally over the past 50 years. Worse yet, global dimming is thought to be counteracting CO2 and its greenhouse effect, lessening the worldwide temperature increase called global warming. Why's that bad? Because, in the coming decades, particulate pollution is expected to level off, while CO2 emissions are expected to rise strongly, multiplying the effects of global warming as we know it. "That means a temperature rise of 10 degrees Celsius by 2100 could be on the cards, giving the UK a climate like that of North Africa, and rendering many parts of the world uninhabitable." Holy fucking shit! [via kottke]
posted by scarabic at 7:18 PM PST - 74 comments

Rent-a-Midget. "Think about the best party you've ever been to, wouldn't it have been better if there was a midget there? Another boring day at the office, why not have one of our little people go down and bring some life in there!"
posted by cedar at 6:19 PM PST - 15 comments

Planes, Trains, and Plantains, or the Greatest Essay Ever Written.
posted by swift at 6:07 PM PST - 27 comments

Everybody loves Magical Trevor. (flash)
posted by scrim at 4:55 PM PST - 21 comments

In 1995, Microprose released Master of Magic, a game best described as Magic: the Gathering meets Civilization. Despite a daunting list of bugs, the game developed a strong following. It's one of the top 150 games of all time (nevermind the date!), and easily one of the best turn based strategy games ever. Lots of people would love to see this franchise revived, and the good people at Stardock [makers of Galactic Civilizations] are trying to do just that. Godspeed!
posted by absalom at 4:42 PM PST - 29 comments

Concentration Test NSFW! Nekkidness Inside!
Friday fun, not work safe in any way and contains nudity mostly directed at the male population or anyone who likes boobs.
A new take on the old "Follow the Ball" game. Also in German and Danish.
posted by fenriq at 3:23 PM PST - 36 comments

Whatever happened to Jordan? This is perhaps the most thought-out dissent regarding Michael Jordan as sports god I've ever read. I have to say I agree, even though I was a Bulls fan growing up. What did he ever really stand for?
posted by Leege at 2:04 PM PST - 52 comments

Kitty the screen cleaner: FridayFlashFilter fluff. Works better than a lint-free cloth. [via the hotlinks]
posted by fatllama at 1:25 PM PST - 21 comments

Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project. Explore alternative futures, by creating own scenarios for global changes within the next 15 years.
posted by Gyan at 11:07 AM PST - 9 comments

Do you consider yourself a latter-day "beatnik"? Even young fans of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg proudly christen themselves with the tag beatnik these days, apparently unaware that word was originally coined as a term of ridicule by San Francisco columnist Herb Caen. "Beat" was indeed used by Kerouac to denote both "beaten down" and "beatitude" -- a state of revelation. He first heard the word spoken by a Times Square hustler and writer named Herbert Huncke; then another writer, John Clellon Holmes, popularized the term "Beat" in a New York Times article headlined "This is the Beat Generation." But the original Beats did not approve of the term "beatnik" -- combining "beat" with the Russian "Sputnik," as if to suggest that the Beat writers were both "out there" and vaguely Communist -- as this hilarious dialogue [note: MP3 link] between a very young Ginsberg, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and an excruciatingly square talk-radio host makes plain.
posted by digaman at 11:05 AM PST - 45 comments

Jennifer Aniston explains everything in her blog. Well...um...probably not. But the interesting thing about this blog is how many of the people in the comments section assume it's really her. Odd.
posted by braun_richard at 10:23 AM PST - 44 comments

Yet another dead microbiologist. Why was Joeng Im of the University of Missouri, a 72 year old protein chemist, stabbed to death, stuffed in the trunk of his car, and burned? Was it a random act of violence? Was it a former student bent on revenge? Or is this biologist merely following in the footsteps of 40 other microbiologists and other scientists who have mysteriously died in the past 4 years? Scientists like David Kelly, Steven Mostow, Ian Langford, , Don C. Wiley, David Wynn-Williams, Michael Perich, Gene Mallove, and dozens of other scientists? Is it too presumptuous, too "tinfoil hat" to suppose that someone is killing off the microbiologists of the world, for some nefarious purpose?
posted by Sir Mildred Pierce at 10:07 AM PST - 46 comments

Ship shape? Welcome aboard the SS United States. Her maiden voyage was July 7, 1952, where she set a trans-Atlantic record which still stands. Her passenger list included such luminaries as Marlon Brando, Salvador Dali and Harry Truman. Several sites document the effort to save her from being sold for scrap or sunk. Far from her former glory, she now lies at anchor in the Delaware River in Philadelphia, a sad counterpart to her former self.
posted by fixedgear at 9:53 AM PST - 23 comments

It worked! Huygens has successfully landed on Saturn's moon Titan and the Cassini orbiter is sending good data back to Earth as I type. Isn't it amazing how we can take a probe the size of a compact car, send it on a 7 year journey in the most inhospitable environment imaginable, deploy a sub-probe that has been dormant for that entire time and land it where we had planned on another solar body so far away that it takes 67 minutes to get a signal back and forth. Exploration and research has never been so cool.
posted by tgrundke at 9:52 AM PST - 37 comments

Jorma Kaukonen shares his thoughts on his former bandmate's recent death
Drummer Spencer Dryden of Airplane dies. Dryden recorded on a number of the Airplane's most famous albums, "Surrealistic Pillow"; "After Bathing At Baxter's"; the live "Bless Its Pointed Little Head"; "Crown Of Creation"; and "Volunteers." Read the CNN article.
posted by turtlegirl at 9:37 AM PST - 10 comments

Into the realm of Henry Darger When Henry Darger died in Chicago on April 13, 1973, he was a destitute man whose final days were spent at a home for the elderly. Now, 30 years later, Darger ranks among the greatest outsider artists America has ever seen. Found in the astounding clutter of Darger's one-room apartment was a 15,000-page fantasy epic, bound by hand in 15 volumes, titled "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion." Along with this were three separate volumes filled with 300 drawings, including 87 multi-sheet horizontal panels, some 12 feet long with drawings on both sides. The discovery of Darger's NSFW work spawned numerous books, a play, a British rock band (the Vivian Girls), and an excellent y2karl MetaFilter post. And now there's also Jessica Yu's documentary "In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger," a portrait of the reclusive artist that has been shortlisted for the upcoming Academy Award nominations. Again, Darger's art can be disturbing and must be considered not safe for work (more inside)
posted by matteo at 9:36 AM PST - 30 comments

Why the Mac Mini may signal the end of Apple as a traditional computer company. Jobs might well be looking beyond Apple's role as a niche computer maker with this new product.
posted by clevershark at 8:55 AM PST - 101 comments

Friday flash frustration. Along the same lines as the Hi Q game I used to play as a kid, and equally addictive. I'm not sure what speaks more about my IQ: that I can only get 3 balls left, or that I can't stop playing. Ripley's has several other games as well. There goes Friday.
posted by howling fantods at 8:41 AM PST - 15 comments

Fabulous images of the Moscow Metro underground, also known as "the people's palaces". Click "M"s on the entry map to view gorgeous (often architecturally surreal) panoramic images, and visit the picture gallery for sweet details. Via Jorgen at Viewropa.
posted by taz at 7:37 AM PST - 24 comments

Testing the limits of credit card receipt signatures. Are there any?
posted by DBAPaul at 6:53 AM PST - 60 comments

Throw paper in the bin game. - Satisfying.
posted by kenaman at 6:08 AM PST - 25 comments

The Trip Receptacleswas a series of three 3-hour shows consisting of all-psychedelic, all-entheogen radio, featuring names like Leary, Grof, Capra, McKenna and more. Nearly four hours of shows on mp3. [via FutureHi].
posted by moonbird at 4:49 AM PST - 23 comments

European Space Agency's Huygens Probe Ready for Spectacular Mission to Titan
Mission managers for the European Space Agency's Huygens probe said the spacecraft is on course for its descent to Saturn's mysterious moon Titan on Friday, Jan. 14. The probe, which detached from NASA's Cassini orbiter last month, will be the first object to explore on-site the unique environment of Titan, whose chemistry is thought to be very similar to that of early Earth, before life formed. The data gathered during the probe's 2 1/2 hour descent through Titan's atmosphere will be transmitted from the probe to the Cassini orbiter and then back to Earth.
Make sure to stay tuned in this morning for updates.
posted by garethspor at 10:37 PM PST - 68 comments

R.I.P. LawGuy1975 (Realvideo interview)
posted by euphorb at 9:25 PM PST - 12 comments

Pentagon's bizarre sex bomb. Cue the Pat Benatar.
posted by theonetruebix at 8:46 PM PST - 54 comments

Live Ween • Tabulature • Videos
posted by dhoyt at 8:13 PM PST - 24 comments

Creative Commons and Wired have launched CC Mixter; a commons pool for music samples and remixes. Mix artists can now browse, download, remix, other artist's samples and tracks, then upload their own work for the same purpose. To celebrate, a bunch artists have donated music, and a couple of competitions have sprung up. Listen here.
posted by armoured-ant at 7:57 PM PST - 3 comments

Considering buying a tank from Amazon? Meet the JL421 Badonkadonk, a "a completely unique, extremely rare land vehicle and battle tank" from NAO Design that sells for $20,000. Yes, its real (and comes with a free T-shirt). Of course, its not on sale, unlike the mysterious $23,000 Gulbransen Bottle Organ - now 21% off!
posted by blahblahblah at 7:57 PM PST - 22 comments

Blinked is Malcom Gladwell's latest short, concept driven book about how instant judgements are often correct, but equally often dangerous. Two reviews on S****.com and S****.com [ad thingie to watch] make for great reading themselves. Gladwell's long been a favorite of mine, and I don't think I'm alone here. Previously cited works include one of the best essays I've ever read, about the ultimate pitchman.
posted by allan at 6:55 PM PST - 33 comments

Thinking of buying a PSP anytime soon? Before spending up to $400 for an imported unit, check this out: Engadget, among others, reports that the new PlayStation Portable will eject the currently-playing disc if the device is twisted a certain way. And if you don't believe it, see it for yourself (avi & mpeg, last link NSFNintendoDS).
posted by armage at 5:58 PM PST - 30 comments

Philosophical Powers! The greatest minds of all time now have great bodies to match! Philosophy's (and theology's) greatest superheroes now in action figure form! Thrill to Arrogant Aristotle, Angry Anselm, Dangerous Descartes, Nefarious Nietzsche and more!
posted by The Thnikkaman at 3:46 PM PST - 40 comments

Dr. Jay's Street Style is a site where the hip-hop fashion-minded critique each other's outfits. It's supremely entertaining because these guys pose tough — and then "holla" catty comments about mismatched colors and outdated brands. Be sure to check out the Hall of Style for the best and worst of the site. [via]
posted by arielmeadow at 3:20 PM PST - 79 comments

Six Degrees of Snapper Carr. Addictive if you've read lots of comics; nonsensical if you haven't. As a special bonus, read up on Snapper's shocking origin.
posted by COBRA! at 2:29 PM PST - 6 comments

The folks at Threadless have launched a new collaborative contest type way to make shirts at OMG Clothing. You sign up, submit a slogan, and everyone votes on them, with the best scores getting made into shirts. Threadless has always done graphical submissions, but I suspect more people can come up with a funny phrase than a crazy cool vector art graphic.
posted by mathowie at 2:08 PM PST - 12 comments

Got hay? The USDA helps you sell hay in Tennessee and buy hay in Minnesota.
posted by NickDouglas at 1:50 PM PST - 22 comments

Sony explains the PlayStationPortable's launch delay. The bestselling PDF, now available on Amazon for $750.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 1:29 PM PST - 32 comments

Play with her Curiously clever.
posted by Voyageman at 1:24 PM PST - 40 comments

"Larry, we're going down, Larry," "I know it." This day twenty-two years ago, Air Florida Flight 90 took off from DC National Airport, in heavy snow, with insufficiently de-iced wings. A minute after takeoff, the plane crashed into the packed 14th Street Bridge, crushing several cars before falling into the Potomac River and sinking into the icy water. [More inside.]
posted by brownpau at 1:02 PM PST - 30 comments

"Researchers have discovered the hidden laboratory used by Leonardo da Vinci for studies of flight and other pioneering scientific work in previously sealed rooms at a monastery next to the Basilica of the Santissima Annunziata, in the heart of Florence."
posted by ScottUltra at 12:56 PM PST - 28 comments

While looking for photos of Sacramento, CA I came across The World City Photo Archive. Find your favorite city from around the world (organized by country) or check out photos of landmarks.
posted by Bag Man at 12:49 PM PST - 11 comments

Borat strikes again. Sacha Baron Cohen, star of HBO's Ali G Show, hits another unsuspecting American audience, this time as Borat Sagdiyev, Kazakhstan's sixth most famous man. "And may George W. Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq." Kazahkstanians say the darndest things!
posted by ludwig_van at 12:19 PM PST - 52 comments

The US Government pronounces the Food Pyramid dead. More information from the USDA. Hail the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005! The guidelines won't be released for a couple months yet, but some graphics on Food Groups, being On The Go and Physical Activity are being circulated as teasers.
posted by FlamingBore at 12:12 PM PST - 18 comments

Nippaz with Attitude! The Sex Pistols, Ramones, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Nirvana, and AC/DC ...for babies.
posted by Robot Johnny at 11:41 AM PST - 20 comments

Evolutionary Stickers Struck-down. (login req'd)
"In a ruling issued today, U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper said the stickers, which call evolution 'a theory, not a fact,' violate the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution."
(A pseudo-follow-up to a post from November 2004)
posted by grabbingsand at 11:38 AM PST - 37 comments

I LOVE YOU I WANNA LOVE YOU TENDER . You could be my only sweet surrender. I would never bring you any kind of sorrow. (38 Mb QT)
posted by Peter H at 11:29 AM PST - 23 comments

"Do you like this, the greedy scrabbling in greasy boxes, the whole herd determinedly chomping and chewing and slurping . . . don't you feel even a little bit as if you're in the pig barn, at exactly the moment the big trough full of ground intestines slops over for all to rush towards and snuffle in?"

Why movie going sucks by Russell Smith of the Globe and Mail.
posted by Quartermass at 11:11 AM PST - 84 comments

A World of Invisibilia. "The pictures are simple enough: the people in the photos have been digitally removed and replaced with drawings. Yeah, I know... anyone can trace a drawing. But so what? I am doing it, and you're not. You're sitting at home doing nothing." I like the effect, and I'm sure it's been done before but I can't place it.
posted by gsb at 10:42 AM PST - 34 comments

Tip and Shout: 2'' Tape: "But last Friday, [Jeff] Tweedy hit a snag as he prepared for a session in Wilco's Chicago studio space: Nobody could find any of the professional-grade audio tape the band is accustomed to using."
posted by pfafflin at 10:31 AM PST - 37 comments

The journal of an American soldier. Although it's typically my policy not to reveal the identity of people I know in Iraq, I am making an exception in this case. The journal above belongs to Michael Smith, a LiveJournal friend of mine who died in Iraq on Tuesday when an RPG hit his Humvee. Mike was 24 years old and leaves behind family, friends, and a newlywed wife, who he married in Korea shortly before he deployed to Iraq. As is tradition on LiveJournal, his last journal entry has become a memorial of sorts.
posted by insomnia_lj at 9:36 AM PST - 75 comments

Blue Anus A small, mysterious neon sign in a window on the fourth floor.
posted by growabrain at 8:52 AM PST - 62 comments

Mysterious, high-energy celestial particles slam into Earth.
Zooming past our galaxy’s stellar graveyard?
Information sent via teleportation as aging stars turn to Martini bar.
posted by mcgraw at 8:19 AM PST - 4 comments

The 5th Dentist :: a photoblog
posted by anastasiav at 8:15 AM PST - 11 comments

Iraqi Rebels Taunt
Departing from fiery Islamic slogans, Iraqi guerrillas have launched a propaganda campaign with an English-language video urging U.S. troops to lay down their weapons and seek refuge in mosques and homes. The video, narrated in fluent English by what sounded like an Iraqi educated in the United States or Britain, also mocked the U.S. president's challenge to rebels in the early days of the insurgency to 'bring it on'. "George W. Bush; you have asked us to 'bring it on'. And so help me, (we will) like you never expected. Do you have another challenge?," asked the narrator before the video showed explosions around a U.S. military Humvee vehicle.

I do wish I could find a link to the video and "bring it on."
posted by nofundy at 6:44 AM PST - 38 comments

Beware, Hiccups. (CGI, .mov)
posted by page404 at 3:20 AM PST - 8 comments

BOG LEECH! Game sprite horrors! Lovecraftian nightmares!
posted by jimmy at 2:18 AM PST - 5 comments

MU QT [via S/FJ]
posted by felix betachat at 11:43 PM PST - 22 comments

Everyone hates spyware (even MS is getting into the anti-spyware game) for a whole host of obvious reasons, but someone out there must like it, right? One person tracked down the people that love it so much they've given millions of dollars in funding for spyware companies. That's over $100 million to make more spyware. If you check out the portfolio of some of these investment firms (1, 2, 3, 4 and even the dude in charge of The WELL is in on it?!) there are quite a lot of everyday brands funded by the same group that fuels such great software as the uber evil Gator.
posted by mathowie at 10:26 PM PST - 19 comments

Scary recipes from the past! Included: Jello molds with meat inside, weird dinners made with hot dogs (including Circle Dogs, which would be the name of my band if I had one), and tuna spaghetti. Actually, I'd like to try some of the desserts...
posted by braun_richard at 10:25 PM PST - 26 comments

Big Crash! An iceberg the size of Long Island is about to impact a land-bound ice mass in Anarctica. Stand back!
posted by erebora at 9:04 PM PST - 10 comments

The NHL? Fix it for forget it. ESPN suggests how we could start over.
posted by tranquileye at 8:37 PM PST - 70 comments

Everything will be good. (flash) via ELVIStazo
posted by madamjujujive at 8:03 PM PST - 19 comments

Maps
Looking for Maps? Please click on the country of interest.
• Australia
• Canada
• France
• Ireland
• New Zealand
• United Kingdom
• United States

Found while searching for this thread.
posted by fenriq at 7:12 PM PST - 23 comments

Platonic Ideal? Or banality? Some chums and I were having the classic argument over 3d package superiority when we discovered, overjoyed, that they all had one thing in common, the Utah Teapot. I didn't realize this oddball shape had a history, or that is was real . . . but if the virtual (actual scan!) isn't your gig, whip out yer foldin' fingers.
posted by undule at 7:09 PM PST - 12 comments

Some films are great, others bomb, but only one truly stank. Twenty-five years ago today, "Scent of Mystery" opened in New York and became the only movie released in Smell-O-Vision.
posted by ..ooOOoo....ooOOoo.. at 6:45 PM PST - 10 comments

THE SITE OF MOVIE MAGAZINES has it all... Whether you like Continental Film Review, Trash Times, or Sleazioid Express, if it's low-budget, they probably have it.
ATTN: Magazines mostly NSFW, unless your tastes run more towards the Christian Filmworks oeuvre....
posted by lilboo at 6:40 PM PST - 3 comments

Yet more amazing secret new stuff from Apple already in store. Maybe.
posted by skylar at 4:45 PM PST - 35 comments

Was the Amazon rain forest home to complex societies?
posted by stbalbach at 4:15 PM PST - 8 comments

Mappr demonstrates the potential of open web APIs by plotting recently uploaded Flickr photos onto their locations using an interactive map of the US. Map24 mixes Mapquest and Keyhole (previously discussed here) by doing realtime zooming on your driving directions; good for not losing context on those tricky merges. The National Map lets you see overlaid info from the US government's geologic surveys. What are some of the best designed interactive map sites?
posted by acid freaking on the kitty at 4:06 PM PST - 19 comments

Bob Marley goes home? Looks like Bob Marley will get what he wished for here and return to Africa. Well, his bones will anyway. I always thought exhumed was an interesting word, see also disinter.
posted by fixedgear at 3:01 PM PST - 23 comments

The DNA of Literature. The Paris Review, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, makes available free .pdfs of fifty years of interviews with leading writers.
posted by rushmc at 2:37 PM PST - 7 comments

The University of San Diego maintains an archive of Ethics Videos on the Web, with RealMedia streams of thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum [Wikipedia] (on "Shame, Stigma, and Punishment"), Richard Rorty, and many others. Check out the full catalogue or browse by topics such as End of Life Decisions or Bioethics. [RealPlayer required to watch videos.]
posted by ori at 2:09 PM PST - 4 comments

"I don't see how you can be president at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a relationship with the Lord," said George W. Bush yesterday. (Really? I do.) While giant crosses are banned from next Thursday's inauguration, Jesus likely won't be, despite Michael Newdow's protestations. By the way, the benediction is scheduled to be delivered by The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, who also got the honor in 2001. Back then, he said to millions of bowed heads gathered to mark the beginning of the Bush presidency: "We respectfully submit this humble prayer in the name that's above all other names, Jesus, the Christ. Let all who agree say, 'Amen.'" After gay rights, is discrimination against atheists the next great civil rights battle of our time? Or should we just shut up and move to France?
posted by Saucy Intruder at 1:10 PM PST - 85 comments

Roots Manuva's "Ventriloshiznit Machine" Recombine rhymes as you please and hear them spit back via Mr. Manuva with this flash toy/promotional item for his new single "Colossal Insight." Helpful for the flow-impaired or those who would like those magnetic poetry things more if they were recited to them by a bobble-head MC. [Flash + Audio]
posted by Swampjazz! at 12:58 PM PST - 6 comments

Linguists Gone Wild Linguists from The American Dialect Society and the Linguistic Society of America recently met to vote for the Words of the Year, in various categories—Most Useful, Creative, Unnecessary, Outrageous, and Euphemistic; Most and Least Likely To Succeed; and an overall Word of the Year... no one really cares unless we pretend that These Are Important Words That Define Us as Americans. Still, that's marginally better than the alternate interpretation: This Is How Scholars Waste Their Time When They Could Be Doing Real Work.
posted by weepingsore at 11:42 AM PST - 23 comments

MGM animator Irv Spence's cartoon diary for 1944. A cartoon of the day's happenings for every day in 1944 -- reprinted daily thoughout 2005. "These images are scanned from xeroxes an incalculable number of generations removed from the originals. Apparently, no amount of shoddy reproduction can suck the life out of these drawings..."
posted by Robot Johnny at 11:23 AM PST - 6 comments

It's official: US gives up search for Iraq WMD.
posted by airguitar at 10:57 AM PST - 220 comments

Woman Blows Up Home, Roaches Survive ... A 20-something woman in Jersey City, NJ, had a roach infestation, so she bought a few roach foggers and set them off in her kitchen. She then walked out of the house just before the pilot light on her stove ignited the fog. The resulting blast blew out a window, messed up the kitchen, and -- in a lucky break that saved her from injury -- slammed the door shut behind her. The truly sad part is that the roaches survived both the fogging and the explosion, according to firefighters who put out the blaze.
posted by nathanrudy at 9:38 AM PST - 39 comments

B of the Bang. Manchester's commemoration of the Commonwealth Games "unveiled" tonight. This is far from the first Thomas Heatherwick design to grace urban areas: other sculptures of note include Paddington's roll-up bridge, Newcastle's Blue Carpet, some roundabouts in Essex and this, er, thing. Shame his website design doesn't match the beauty of his other creations.
posted by grahamspankee at 9:29 AM PST - 8 comments

Charles Eames (1907-78) and Ray Eames (1912-88) gave shape to America's twentieth century. Their lives and work represented the nation's defining social movements: the West Coast's coming-of-age, the economy's shift from making goods to the producing information, and the global expansion of American culture. This Library of Congress exhibit outlines major themes of the Eames' life and voluminous works, including architecture, furniture, and the film Powers of Ten. It is wonderfully illustrated with artifacts, photos of their life and work, and examples from the Eames' collection of 350,000 slides.
posted by carter at 9:22 AM PST - 14 comments

Life in the future. In the year 2,000 "everything will be so easy that people will probably die from sheer boredom." Workweeks will be 24 hours and the home computer will be the new status symbol.
posted by caddis at 9:19 AM PST - 45 comments

Knight's American Mechanical Dictionary Containing over 3000 pages the Knight's American Mechanical Dictionary was billed as A description of tools, instruments, machines, processes and engineering; history of inventions; general technological vocabulary. Published in 1876 it is a great resource for those trying to figure out how things were done in the time of our great (great?) grand parents. Ilustrations, upwards of 5000 engravings, include a ride inside monocycle, trestle bridges, compound microscope, clod crushers, washing machines, spoke driver, hydraulic wagon-tipper, and a farmers tool-house. Warning: the book has been scanned in and all the item links are to 100-150K images.
posted by Mitheral at 8:12 AM PST - 10 comments

Ann Telneas is an editorial cartoonist. She started out working for Disney Imagineering as a designer. She has also been an animator for various studios in London, Los Angeles, New York and Taiwan. She now holds many awards for her cartoons and is in several prestige publications. Her works are an impressive array of political caricatures, feminism, and cultural issues
posted by Hands of Manos at 8:04 AM PST - 11 comments

Upon this desiccating planet, will I employ religion to increase pain threshold. Why? So I may get my freak on.
posted by mcgraw at 8:01 AM PST - 28 comments

Texan MeFites, finally there's a candidate you can believe in. Singer/Songwriter, novelist and now statesman. God bless america...
posted by jonmc at 7:23 AM PST - 44 comments

sacred science The scientific method is a tool for determining objective truth about the world around us, right? But not everybody thinks so. From being a proof of God's existance to a mere socio-pilotical construct, scientific humanism is under attack.
posted by MadOwl at 3:31 AM PST - 50 comments

Boycott Bush's inauguration by not spending any money on inauguration day
posted by three blind mice at 2:24 AM PST - 50 comments

More incredible stuff from MacWorld!!! Extra little bonus item announced!! Weeeee! I'm sure you all can't WAIT!!!
posted by jimjam at 2:09 AM PST - 106 comments

Another working blogger bites the dust - "This was moaning about not getting your birthday off or not getting on with your boss. I wasn't libelling anyone or giving away trade secrets."

The company he worked for, Waterstones, saw differently. More on the subject here.
posted by triv at 1:31 AM PST - 56 comments

Animals!
posted by jimmy at 10:15 PM PST - 37 comments

Red, White and Blue Dogs of War Just found this story in The Nation about a decision by the Bush administration to hire Aegis Defense Services to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq. The trouble is, its boss, ex-British Lt. Col. Tim Spicer, who is responsible for actually starting a coup in Papua New Guinea in 1996, among other things. Perhaps Bush, the free market disciple, is beginning to think that he needs to hire some mercs to make up for all the reserve and Guard guys quitting. If the Army needs more help and advice, they could hire this or that homegrown "consulting firm."
posted by Leege at 9:05 PM PST - 21 comments

Did you know there's a department of the Smithsonian dedicated to saving the sounds of the past? Old phone rings, coffee percolators, home movie projectors, and much more.
posted by braun_richard at 8:38 PM PST - 19 comments

ResumeWiki is a community edited resume centre. You post your profile (goals, etc) and assume the community of peers will give you comments and possible edits. Their ResumeWriting section has some interesting links, and could be the place to stay up caught up on HR snobbery.
posted by McGuillicuddy at 7:45 PM PST - 2 comments

In her new book written with Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation (NYTimes), Dr Temple Grandin, an animal behavior expert and inventor of the squeeze machine, uses her experiences with autism to explore the intricacies of animal behavior. She argues that animals do have consciousness, that language is not a prerequisite and other theories that bring insight into both animal and human behavior. (More)
posted by effwerd at 7:45 PM PST - 34 comments

Yet another del.icio.us ? "One of the main purposes of social bookmarking systems is allowing people to see what other people are bookmarking. I frequently find things that people are linking to very interesting, and thought it would be nice to slap together a system that could tell me, automatically, what lots of other people have just bookmarked. Thus, oishii was born".
posted by azul at 6:42 PM PST - 10 comments

A vote for Al Gore is a vote for the complete annihilation of all possible worlds. Definitely old, but also funny... especially if you like philosophy.
posted by The Thnikkaman at 6:23 PM PST - 16 comments

Dear Dan, I am writing this memo to explain what happened to the case our NeXTCube Computer, Serial Number AA001032....
posted by casarkos at 6:07 PM PST - 20 comments

Some stories are longer than others. In the early 1900s, Burro Schmidt spent 32 years (or 38, depending on your source) digging a 1/2-mile tunnel through a Mojave mountain. Why? Because it was easier than hauling his gold and his burros down the back road. "Solely, he labored long days.... The tunnel was solid granite, which needed no shoring, except at the entrance to the tunnel. Being at 4200 foot elevation there was a shortage of oxygen, making his labor even more difficult. He was trapped many times by falling rock and injured as many times." (But the story doesn't end with him. More >> )
posted by mudpuppie at 5:37 PM PST - 11 comments

Bush Picks New Homeland Protector Bush has chosen Judge Michael Chertoff to be the next Secretary of Homeland Security. The liberal Alliance For Justice concedes that Chertoff is "a talented attorney and an intelligent, committed public servant," but cites his role as counsel in the Whitewater investigation as a reason for caution. Other government watchers are somewhat chilled by the fact that Chertoff is the second Bush cabinet nominee to be connected to the torture scandal.
posted by expriest at 4:36 PM PST - 24 comments

Feral Cities. Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power. It would possess at least a modicum of commercial linkages, and some of its inhabitants would have access to the world's most modern communication and computing technologies. It would, in effect, be a feral city.
posted by stbalbach at 3:32 PM PST - 35 comments

Meet The Lucky Ones. (more...)
posted by miss lynnster at 2:32 PM PST - 66 comments

Abandoned call girl messageboard circa 1998 The unprotected internal board of a call girl service. Wow. [via]
posted by Count Ziggurat at 2:07 PM PST - 49 comments

FRANK MUST DIE The profit of positive thinking.
posted by page404 at 1:18 PM PST - 29 comments

Schnappi! Contrary to popular belief in the rest of the world, the German pop charts are not dominated by over-the-hill American TV stars. In fact, the current #1 single, outselling even the usual imported subjects is a silly little ditty about a baby crocodile. (Think of it as the German version of SpongeBob Squarepants, kindasorta.)

I'm passing on the earworm to all of you via the four versions listed here. You're quite welcome.
posted by chicobangs at 12:29 PM PST - 30 comments

Civil War Maps The Library of Congress just published an online collection of approximately 2,240 Civil War maps, with information about the collection and a History of Mapping the Civil War.
posted by kirkaracha at 12:00 PM PST - 6 comments

John Peel's Successors Named. Begining on February 1st, John Peel's week night show will be succeeded by OneMusic, three shows hosted by three DJs. The three chosen to fill those gigantic boots? Huw Stephens, Ras Kwame, and Rob da Bank. Good luck gents.
posted by helvetica at 11:53 AM PST - 8 comments

Apple has announced the following:iPod shuffle, Mac mini, iWork. MacMerc has a play by play of Job's keynote address at Macworld. I suspect 2005 is the year Apple takes over the world.
posted by chunking express at 11:42 AM PST - 236 comments

Announcing The Winners of The "I Look Like My Dog Contest" (thanks daypop!)
posted by lilboo at 10:26 AM PST - 28 comments

Artocracy is aiming to use the net to democratize yet another expensive thing in the world: the sale and distribution of art works. While the first works offered aren't that impressive and having to use your own inkjet is a limiting factor, I like the direction this is going in. From their Gallery, you can purchase prints from a dozen or so artists, in the range of $20-50, and then print as many as you wish at home. The Seattle PI has a full story. Perhaps this will spark a "long tail" of small change art sales from folks used to getting several thousand per canvas sold, while at the same time allowing any Tom, Dick, or Harry to have some nice looking apartment walls at home.
posted by mathowie at 9:54 AM PST - 16 comments

IBM to give away 500 patents. Curiouser and curiouser. Why now? And, what patents? IBM makes a great deal of money licensing their patent portfolio - is this meant to stimulate additional licensing? How does this fit in with the open source movement? In other news, IBM just received the go-ahead to sell off their PC unit to a firm that just won a rather large contract to provide PCs in China.
posted by FormlessOne at 8:48 AM PST - 17 comments

The Portsmouth Sinfonia to return? In 1974, Gavin Bryars rounded up a group of novices and enthusiastic amateurs, called them the Portsmouth Sinfonia and let them loose in a recording studio. The result: some of the most disturbing classical music ever committed to tape. Intrigued by the concept, the legendary Brian Eno signed up and played clarinet for the orchestra, adding a certain star cachet to the cacophony. On the back of sympathetic TV coverage, there followed a now-legendary concert at London's Royal Albert Hall. Thirty years later, there are plans to release Portsmouth Sinfonia's output on compact disc by way of celebration. A brazen attempt for quck laughs and publicity, a serious exploration of entropy in the musical medium, or simply an early entry in the torture tape experiment?
posted by scaryduck at 4:50 AM PST - 36 comments

Once, i had a secret lovelife.... The urge to act out an entirely different persona is widely shared across cultures as well, social scientists say, and may be motivated by curiosity, mischief or earnest soul-searching. Certainly, it is a familiar tug in the breast of almost anyone who has stepped out of his or her daily life for a time, whether for vacation, for business or to live in another country. On secret lives, for good and bad. We're in this too: "I think what people are doing on the Internet now," she said, "has deep psychological meaning in terms of how they're using identities to express problems and potentially solve them in what is a relatively consequence-free zone." Yet out in the world, a consequence-rich zone, studies find that most people find it mentally exhausting to hold onto inflammatory secrets - much less lives - for long. (NYT, reg.req.)
posted by amberglow at 4:25 AM PST - 35 comments

He flies through the air with the greatest of ease,
the only difference being he has no trapeze.
Past MeFi. QT plugin required for first link.
posted by riffraff at 2:51 AM PST - 25 comments

CoasterSims.com. Just because nature is full of icy death outside doesn't mean you can't sit in your computer chair and scream like a damn fool on a roller coaster.
posted by qDot at 1:46 AM PST - 3 comments

Sam Loyd's Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles, Tricks, and Conundrums (With Answers) I hereby put this version of Sam Loyd's 1914 work into the public domain. (Ed Pegg Jr, 2005) Who is Sam Loyd? Remember the Donkey Puzzle? The 15 Puzzle? These and 4,998 more...
posted by vacapinta at 10:33 PM PST - 16 comments

Poker player plays for 24 hours in a row? Yawn. Online poker player plays eight tables simultaneously for 24 hours in a row? Interesting.
posted by bdk3clash at 10:03 PM PST - 19 comments

At first glance it would seem to be something one would find in some photoshop gallery. But then one finds out that she has been forced to justify her work, for they are pictures of freshly killed animals. Much to the dislike of some craigslistians. With the growing uproar, there is even a petition going around (though petitions like that are hardly rare.) Is this a work of someone seeking attention through offending people? Or someone unable to use photoshop? Whatever the case, I’m sure PETA will join in. . . . Wait, it has.
posted by TwelveTwo at 9:34 PM PST - 88 comments

PSST! Wanna get rich? Make a cardboard chair and sell it!

No, I'm serious. Based on a design by architect Frank Gehry that is now in the Guggenheim, these chairs apparently sell for some good cash. Engineers and design students have been doing the cardboard chair project for years, but I think it's time for the common folk to get in on the action. Need inspiration? Check out some more stuff . . .
posted by ashbury at 9:19 PM PST - 17 comments

RIP commercial jingles. Looks like the era of "I'd like to teach the world to sing" and "Oh I wish I were an Oscar Mayer weiner" is going away, thanks to the use of pop and rock songs.
posted by braun_richard at 8:19 PM PST - 62 comments

A history of robots in the Victorian era, featuring Boilerplate, the mechanical marvel of the 19th century.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 6:32 PM PST - 11 comments

Diana's Death Foretold in the Work of Morrissey!!1!!11!! (via the mighty Monkeyfilter)
posted by Quartermass at 6:00 PM PST - 23 comments

Son of Bees or Bees Knees? Looks like the Halo crowd may have uncovered another I Love Bees or maybe just the Bees Knees?
posted by metameme at 4:25 PM PST - 25 comments

This Highway Adopted By The Ku Klux Klan The US Supreme Court has declined an appeal by the state of Missouri seeking to reverse an 8th Circuit opinion which allows the Ku Klux Klan to adopt a highway. Under the controlling ruling of the 8th Circuit, "desire to exclude controversial organizations in order to prevent 'road rage' or public backlash on the highways against the adopters' unpopular beliefs is simply not a legitimate governmental interest that would support the enactment of speech-abridging regulations."
posted by expriest at 3:42 PM PST - 108 comments

Library Musical. "Sometimes, you are moved by such a strong emotion that you can only express it through song. As we learn from musical theatre that emotion can swell up anytime: in a corner deli, on a playground, in an open field--and even at the library."
posted by adrober at 2:16 PM PST - 14 comments

I resign. So there.
posted by miss lynnster at 2:07 PM PST - 36 comments

Bask in the glory of one of Australia's greatest tourist attractions.
posted by Vaska at 12:26 PM PST - 14 comments

How many lawmakers does it take to declare war? Used to be 218 of the 435. Now, in a time of crisis, it's potentially less than 12. This is something that has been looked at before. Is this the best possible solution?
posted by rocket_skates at 12:25 PM PST - 30 comments

Robert X cringely's tech predictions for 2005 Discuss.
posted by delmoi at 12:07 PM PST - 16 comments

The city of Austria was saved from invasion by pretzel-making monks. The first pickles may have been pickled in India, circa 3000 BC. The hush puppy may have originally been made with deep-fried lizard. Learn all manner of food lore with the Food Timeline!
posted by unreason at 11:16 AM PST - 8 comments

Pre-20C Optical Toys and Illusionary Devices - The Laura Hayes and John Howard Wileman Exhibit of Optical Toys, at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. Includes animations and short videos of kinoras, thaumatropes, phenakistoscopes, zoetropes, and praxinoscopes.
posted by carter at 11:05 AM PST - 5 comments

Shove It is a maniacal logic game. [Flash]
posted by gwint at 11:02 AM PST - 12 comments

SPREE an escape from reality : a follow up to this thread from September. Sides 3 and 4 now posted.
posted by greensweater at 10:11 AM PST - 1 comment

Back in Decemeber of 2002 Christa Worthington was murdered in the small Cape Cod tourist (and home of the 'livliest' nude beach on the Cape) of Truro, MA. Despite an active investigation and a $25,000 reward there has little progress in the search for the killer. This has led to a police request for voluntary DNA samples from 790 men. Civil libertarians (ACLU press release in .doc format) are concerned that, though voluntary, police have stated that, "that those who refuse could face some scrutiny." The Dept. of Justice, on the other hand, feels that DNA is a means to prevent crime. Though more common in the UK and Europe, mass DNA testing has been used several times in the United States, most notably in Lousiana where more than 1,000 men were tested in the search for a serial killer.
posted by cedar at 10:10 AM PST - 58 comments

The Dark Room Magic of NPR.
posted by anathema at 9:30 AM PST - 55 comments

The Rapanui (of Easter Island), the Mayans, and the Norse colonists of Greenland all share one similarity: each culture was brought down by preventable, human-cause environmental catastrophe. Sure, Michael Crichton says it's all bunk, but Jared Diamond (the author of the infinitely discussable, Pulitzer prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel) recently came out with a new book that suggests that maybe we ought to be worried after all. Hear him discuss it on NPR's morning edition.
posted by absalom at 9:28 AM PST - 20 comments

Imagining the Internet. What will become of the internet? And how far off have prognosticators been about it thus far? Submit your own predictions, if you dare.
posted by rushmc at 9:11 AM PST - 25 comments

Do you want to be a writer? "Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon?... Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble; it is why no one can ever write this book. Complex stories, essays and poems have this problem, too -- the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he had never noticed. He writes it in spite of that." Luminous and wise writing advice from Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, one of the most beautiful books written in the last hundred years (published when Dillard was 29). As a writer myself, I am often asked by younger folk how to become one. Dillard says best what I would tell them.
posted by digaman at 6:35 AM PST - 67 comments

Happy Happy (both pdf) The burgeoning field of happiness studies is unearthing all sorts of interesting findings, many of them summarized in these two articles by University of British Columbia economist & "Professor of Happiness" John Helliwell. Rich countries are not happier than poor countries; people tend to revert to the mean after a happy event; money has only a modest effect on happiness; and, hey, good news! you get happier as you get older.
posted by mono blanco at 1:39 AM PST - 11 comments

The Torture Tape Experiment Create for combat purposes a tape so wretched and foul that anyone who listens to it for 24 hours will never be able to think straight again. Warning: dangerous MP3 files contained within.
posted by boost ventilator at 11:20 PM PST - 62 comments

"Like New York City's MTA, SEPTA has a tourist-friendly pass that for $5.50 allows for 24 hours of riding across the entire system. On Saturday, the 4th of December 2004, I tried to fit as much into one day as I could. . . get your pass ready, we're boarding."
posted by deafmute at 11:00 PM PST - 26 comments

Drummer Wanted: Must have reliable gear, play in the pocket and have good chops. Humans need not apply.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 10:00 PM PST - 25 comments

Meet the mashups.
posted by semmi at 9:22 PM PST - 37 comments

The 50-year career of Al Hartley. Part of Stan Lee's early stable of writers at Timely-Atlas, Hartley's perhaps best remembered as the creator of Spire Christian Comics. The series, which included comic book adaptations of popular Christian narratives such as God's Smuggler [pdf], and original stories like The Gospel Blimp [pdf], and Hansi: The Girl Who Loved The Swastika [pdf], also included 19 titles starring Archie [pdf], Jughead and the gang.
posted by RockyChrysler at 9:13 PM PST - 6 comments

Famous works of architecture that you can fold up and put in your pocket.
posted by cmaxmagee at 8:05 PM PST - 8 comments

How much does Oprah make every second? Find out that and more at The Salary Clock! Enter a famous person's salary (or your own) and find out your real-time earnings.
posted by braun_richard at 7:35 PM PST - 23 comments

If rats can distinguish between Japanese and Dutch , why would Elvis have looked like this at age 70?
posted by mcgraw at 7:26 PM PST - 20 comments

Liquid Sculpture uses bubbles in the liquid to draw three-dimensional graphical patterns. (via)
posted by buriednexttoyou at 2:27 PM PST - 7 comments

Nick Cave -- Babe I'm On Fire -- The greatest music video of all time. The RealVideo file has better audio. Lyrics (useful)
posted by Pretty_Generic at 2:23 PM PST - 50 comments

A Picture of the Future, You're not in It An address to the John F. Kennedy School of Government...September 11th, 2011
posted by timsteil at 2:12 PM PST - 41 comments

Thanks to Yahoo's video search, I've spent the morning thrilling to movies from Nasa's earlier space programs. Ed White does the first american spacewalk, the crew of apollo 8 sends out a christmas message (wonder how that would play these days), Neil Armstrong goes for a walk, Buzz Aldrin gives a science lesson, John Young goes muddin', Apollo 17 lifts off from the moon. Galileo gets his due via Apollo 15, as does Kubrick, via Skylab. all this makes the Challenger explosion just incredibly sad.

Though I still don't know why searching for apollo 8 turned up gay porn and I don't wanna know.

What is really interesting though, is watching this Apollo 17 astronaut work on the moon. His body is moving in all sorts of subtle ways that highlight how odd it must be to work in lower gravity.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:14 AM PST - 34 comments

Is circumcision an AIDS weapon? To cut or not to cut? Does circumcision prevent the transmission of HIV? It was deemed "An acceptable strategy for HIV prevention" in Bostwana and a study looking at the magnitude of females who get infected with HIV/AIDS/STDs through circumcision
posted by halekon at 10:01 AM PST - 20 comments

The mystery of Stefan Mart and the 'Tales of the Nations'. "The Tales of Nations" was not an ordinary book that you could buy in a book store, and it's mysterious narrator/illustrator disappeared into the darkness of Hitler's Germany, seemingly without a trace. Learn the background, read the stories, and view all 150 fabulous colour illustrations — "small in size, but strong in expression, each a microcosm packed with action, each a feast for the eyes like a beautifully set jewel".
posted by taz at 2:54 AM PST - 20 comments

The Salvador Option. As a retired four star general conducts an open ended review (to be fair the DoD paints this as"just not accurate") of the military's entire Iraq policy, serious consideration is being given to this legacy of the Reagan administration (see John Negropante, ambassador to Iraq) in an effort to put the insurgents on the offensive. Involving cross border "snatch and grab" operations and possibly assassination teams it's a policy that was and is to this day controversial. The controversial part? The 70,000 or more left dead in the wake of a campaign of terror led by death squads. This gross human rights violation eventually led to the formation of an international truth commission.
posted by rocket_skates at 2:38 AM PST - 64 comments

Organizing the Hipster PDA has become even greater. Following up on his initial post on the matter, Merlin Mann has produced an extension of the Hipster PDA based on the knowledge he's gained in the past year. (via bOING bOING)
posted by Captaintripps at 11:56 PM PST - 48 comments

Swarming is a guerilla tactic that goes back to the days of Alexander the Great fighting the Scythians (more here and here). It was used by the anti-WTO protestors in the late 90s and is being used against US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. New equipment being developed by the military will attempt to use swarming behaviours.
posted by rks404 at 10:10 PM PST - 20 comments

Atlas of Canada including environmental, social, and economic overlays. Similar resources for US and down under.
posted by stp123 at 9:39 PM PST - 5 comments

There's a lot to be said for a town that mourns a goose. While on an early morning walk last month, a newspaper reporter happened upon the body of Lucy the goose, who, up until then, had been holding court on the town's waterfront for more than ten years. Kind of a touching story, from a tiny town in Maryland.
posted by emelenjr at 9:30 PM PST - 26 comments

Administration Paid Commentator (WashPost membership rqd) The Education Department paid commentator Armstrong Williams $241,000 to help promote President Bush's No Child Left Behind law on the air, an arrangement that Williams acknowledged yesterday involved "bad judgment" on his part. I'm sure y'all check the Washington Post regularly, but isn't this simply bribing a journalist?
posted by punkbitch at 7:50 PM PST - 44 comments

GovTrack.US ... Using the Technorati API these folks track not only the votes and speeches of members of the US Congress, but also what's being said about them in the blogosphere. You can track them both with e-mail alerts and RSS feeds. There's even a way to embed info from GovTrack on your site if you are focusing on particular legislation.
posted by nathanrudy at 7:28 PM PST - 11 comments

The Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, with Margeaux Mundeyn, Pavel Törd, Ida Nevasayneva, Vladimir Legupski, Sveltlana Lofatkina, Olga Supphozova, Lariska Dumbchenko, Fifi Barkova is reviewed by Joan Acocella, "they pass through the joke and come out the other side, where the subject, having been laughed at, is once again embraced, enthroned." pic 1, and 2 .
posted by semmi at 6:59 PM PST - 5 comments

Scientific American: Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth. Four academic psychologists review the data in the latest Scientific American, and conclude: "Boosting people's sense of self-worth has become a national preoccupation. Yet surprisingly, research shows that such efforts are of little value in fostering academic progress or preventing undesirable behavior." Perhaps unsurprisingly, groups that promote boosting self-esteem haven't shown much interest in this research. Extra points to the authors for correctly using the word "floccinaucinihilipilification."
posted by enrevanche at 6:20 PM PST - 43 comments

NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory recently detected [reg required] the largest explosion ever detected in the universe: an eruption releasing the energy of hundreds of millions of gamma ray bursts. Just to put it in perspective, a single GRB releases enough radiation to wipe out just about everything human beings would require for survival in a 1000 light year radius. (The Milky Way spans ~100,000 light years, while the United Federation of Planets spans about 8,000). Arthur C. Clarke has gone so far as suggesting that GRBs might be one of the reasons for Extra-Terrestrial silence: Gamma Ray Bursts are so large and inescapable, a single one would wipe out even an enormous galactic empire. Makes killer asteroids seem downright quaint.
posted by absalom at 5:10 PM PST - 23 comments

Meta meta meta self. Photographer Donald Andrew Agarrat plays -- er, poses with himself.
posted by mudpuppie at 4:19 PM PST - 18 comments

Because "honky" is fun to say, and a lot of us could use some angry, profane, hilarious, and well-intentioned advice.
posted by blendor at 3:29 PM PST - 21 comments

A student asked the Master, "What is the nature of the Unofficial Daria Movie Rumor Page?" The Master repiled, "The Page is a long, confusing story told backwards. It is lies and half-truths, yet it is the greater truth. It is a mirror, a puppet show, a morality tale, a fiction which is real life, an homage yet the reverse of an homage. It is the future, set in the present, retelling the past. It is the present, set in the present, retelling the present." The student said, "Huh?" The Master continued, "If all else fails, look at the very bottom of the Page, past the links and the Web rings." The student, not understanding, did as the Master told him. It was then that he was enlightened.
posted by pieoverdone at 3:02 PM PST - 17 comments

Everything you need to know about screenwriting. From John August, writer of Go, Big Fish, Titan A.E.,the upcoming Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and the Charlie's Angels movies (ok, we'll forgive him that last one). Very helpful, very down to earth advice.
posted by braun_richard at 2:25 PM PST - 17 comments

Mattingly, shave those sideburns, hippie!
posted by malaprohibita at 1:32 PM PST - 30 comments

Do you feel like you're not quite up-to-date on the subject of polygamy? Not quite sure what a "poofer" is? Well, have no fear. The Office of the Utah Attorney General has produced "The Primer", which you can peruse online in its entirety here [PDF].
posted by mr_crash_davis at 12:09 PM PST - 9 comments

Is this a library or a Borders? A Denver Post writer laments the availability of CDs, DVDs, and not so intellectually stimulating reading material at the Schlessman Family Branch Library (part of the Denver Public Library system), and calls into the question the library's purpose. Should libraries give the people what they want, if what they want is an Ashlee Simpson CD?
posted by schoolgirl report at 9:15 AM PST - 119 comments