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What happens when you mix one part color and one part astrology? You get Pantone Birthday Colors.
posted by Orb at 11:58 PM PST - 40 comments

UNSCAM: The scandal surrounding the UN and their oil-for-food program with Iraq hasn't received a whole lot of media attention and hasn't, surprisingly, even been brought up on MeFi. It boils down to Saddam Hussein taking the money from oil sales and using it to give kickbacks to France, Russia, and the UN itself, while Saddam built palaces and such, rather than buying food and medicine. It's complicated, but could be the biggest public financial scandal in history. It is unfortunate, but not surprising, that Russia is trying to block any investigation into the matter.
posted by MrAnonymous at 11:48 PM PST - 93 comments

So You Think You Might Be A Writer? Just because you write? An astute essay by Joseph Epstein poses the uncomfortable question: are you weird enough? There's something very unnatural and unhealthy about writing (as opposed to reading, for instance) - but what is it? [Via Arts and Letters Daily.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 7:24 PM PST - 51 comments

The Pentagon as Global Slumlord -- by Urban Theorist Mike Davis (author of City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear):
The battle of Fallujah, together with the conflicts unfolding in Shiia cities and Baghdad slums, are high-stakes tests, not just of U.S. policy in Iraq, but of Washington's ability to dominate what Pentagon planners consider the "key battlespace of the future" -- the Third World city.
His recent essay, Planet of Slums provides more on the ever-growing living- (and battle-?)spaces for hundreds of millions.
posted by amberglow at 5:27 PM PST - 31 comments

What's on TV tonight? Nothing! That's right, it's the tenth annual TV turn-off week. I've actually done this in the past three years, though last year I cheated and just watched everything a week later on TiVo.
posted by mathowie at 4:31 PM PST - 86 comments

There are numerous reasons proffered to drink juice. It's easier to drink a small serving of juice than to eat a large serving of fruits and vegetables; that much is intuitive. An oft-plagiarized article claims that juicing frees nutrients that otherwise could not be absorbed, cites 1940s research that chlorophyll can aid in hemoglobin synthesis, and claims that 1 cup of carrot juice has the nutritional content of 4 cups of chopped carrots (although cranking the numbers [pdf] gives an answer closer to 2 cups.) Skeptics argue that much of this talk is hype, correctly noting that juice is not a miracle disease cure as some hucksters claim, and that by juicing you are discarding beneficial fiber. But absurd juicing claims aside, is there any reason needed beyond the great taste? [more inside]
posted by quarantine at 3:57 PM PST - 18 comments

Food From Sweden.
posted by hama7 at 3:42 PM PST - 24 comments

Amazing vintage microphones. Stumbled into this site looking for reference photos...what I found instead was detailed technical specs, vintage advertisements, old time photos, bios of audio pioneers....and lots of microphone tech-pr0n photos. Beautiful. This guy knows more about this than I will probably ever know about Anything. This page explains why it was built...and I think it is a great example of why the web works as a brainfood potluck.
posted by th3ph17 at 2:42 PM PST - 8 comments

Beer, like people, comes in all shapes and sizes. Now 2,246 beers from around the world to view, comment on, and admire. From the beautiful Negra Modelo to the insane 17% Samuel Adams Triple Bock. For a more American-centric beer review page, check out Beer Advocate. Full of beer snobbery that extols microbrews while pissing on all macros. Not that it's a bad thing, we all support our favorite microbrew, don't we?
posted by geoff. at 2:34 PM PST - 27 comments

The Goldman Environmental Prize has been awarded to seven people. Sometimes considered the Nobel prize for the environment, it's given to people from six regions of the world, each winning $125,000. The winners include Margie Richard of Norco, Louisiana, and Rashida Bee and Champa Devi Shukla from Bhopal, India, who have respectively fought two of the world's largest chemical companies for justice following chemical plant leaks in their towns (the Bhopal accident killed 20,000 people.)
posted by homunculus at 12:40 PM PST - 2 comments

Saudization is the process of hiring Saudi Arabian nationals to join the Saudi workforce and is an interesting counterpoint to the US phenomena of outsourcing. The goal of Saudization is to discourage reliance on foreign workers as well as to combat domestic unemployment, which is worsened by the rapidly swelling ranks of restive, undereducated youth. Unfortunately it's not as easy to put into practice as it sounds.
posted by rks404 at 12:24 PM PST - 3 comments

The 2004 Lyttle Lytton winners were announced. The premise is simple: write a terrible opening line (of 25 words or less) of a hypothetical novel. In case you're wondering the winners in 2003 and 2002 were discussed previously. [via kathrynyu]
posted by mathowie at 12:13 PM PST - 9 comments

Remember the weirdness with Bush's hypnotic rainbow tie last week? Now you too can experiment with creating mesmerizing patterns on Project LITE's Moire page.
[via j-walk blog]
posted by moonbird at 12:11 PM PST - 5 comments

How much of the Earth's resources do you use?
posted by crunchland at 12:05 PM PST - 53 comments

Seamus Heaney's Top Hip Hop Picks. Sort of. (You know: Seamus Heaney.)
posted by Shane at 10:16 AM PST - 9 comments

Batman and Robin have been spotted on the streets of Whitley england, saving damsels in distress, scaring wrongdoers and even chasing naked men from football fields. Other self-made superheroes making news range from the amusing to the disturbing. Even MTV and Stan Lee are jumping into the fray with a casting call for a reality TV show where contestants will compete against each other in a show designed to develop their superhero characters and test their mettle as defenders of justice.
posted by Stuart_R at 9:28 AM PST - 14 comments

More clash from the right. Political Scientist Samuel Huntington has gone domestic with his “Clash of Civilizations” (previous MeFi links here and here). In his new article, “The Hispanic Challenge” (soon to be a book entitled “Who Are We”), he highlights the threat hispanics pose to what he has decided is "the Anglo-Protestant culture of America."
posted by AwkwardPause at 3:02 AM PST - 165 comments

Ennobling the Seeds. Can genius be donated?
posted by Gyan at 1:59 AM PST - 1 comments

Ice Age Floods Institute. In recent geological time immensely powerful, cataclysmic Ice Age Floods regularly swept across the Pacific Northwest. A proposed Ice Age Floods National Geological Trail is in the works. Virtual tour of Glacial Lake Missoula.
posted by stbalbach at 1:09 AM PST - 6 comments