August 1, 2015

You get disqualified if you don't have your hands behind your back.

American schoolkids had spelling bees, British schoolkids had Shakespeare competitions, Malaysian schoolkids had choral speaking: a Greek-theatre-inspired cross between spoken word and choir, commonly used to teach English. [more inside]
posted by divabat at 10:45 PM PST - 10 comments

The Imaginary Network

The Imaginary Network rounds up under categories the various subreddits for imaginary art such as Imaginary Cityscapes, Ebony, Architecture, Ruins, History, Science, Starships, Aww, Weather, Armored Women and more.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:18 PM PST - 12 comments

What to eat at 28 North American airports

What to eat at 28 North American airports
posted by escabeche at 8:38 PM PST - 46 comments

A Ribfest in Every Town

Ontario has hit peak ribfest. This is a distinctly heartland phenomenon: More than two-million people will visit one of the province’s 65 ribfests this summer. (There are only three dedicated ribfests in British Columbia; Alberta has two.)
The surprising politics of Ontario's growing ribfest industry.
posted by parudox at 7:02 PM PST - 28 comments

“There was art before him and art after him and they were not the same.”

Caravaggio [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] Art critic Robert Hughes reflects on the work of troubled Italian artist Caravaggio.
posted by Fizz at 5:02 PM PST - 7 comments

Charny's Questions

Geoffroi de Charny (c. 1300 – 19 September 1356) was a French knight and author of at least three works on chivalry. One of his works, Questions for the Joust, Tournaments and War consists of a series of open-ended questions regarding the law of tournaments and the proper conduct of war. The complete set of questions has been translated into English and made available online. [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 5:01 PM PST - 13 comments

revolutionize

Are you someone who thought the Segway had too many wheels? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:44 PM PST - 117 comments

"The seed of death is the most bitter and beautiful of all."

The Last Days of Kathy Acker by Jason McBride. Mathias Viegener, the friend who stayed with the author during her final month, also wrote an account of her passing called Cannibal Acker. Shortly after her death, her friend Peter Wollen wrote an obituary, Death (and Life) of the Author.
posted by Kattullus at 3:17 PM PST - 6 comments

Tarkovsky on Tarkovsky

Shot between 1962 and 1986, Tarkovsky’s seven feature films often grapple with metaphysical and spiritual themes, using a distinctive cinematic style. Long takes, slow pacing and metaphorical imagery – they all figure into the archetypical Tarkovsky film (Note: free versions of these films have been here before, links have sadly died in the old posts). [more inside]
posted by infinite intimation at 2:16 PM PST - 18 comments

You... you imbecile. You bloated idiot. You stupid fat-head you.

Adam Frost and Melanie Patrick of the British Film Institute take a look at film noir and what makes a film noir-ish.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 1:05 PM PST - 12 comments

The Thousand Year Journey

My best friend, Jedidiah, quit a job that he loved to ride his bicycle from Oregon to the southern tip of South America. I joined him for a month and a half to ask why.
posted by saul wright at 10:46 AM PST - 13 comments

Ten points to Gryffindor!

Simon Pegg as drunk Ron Weasley wishing Harry Potter a happy 35th Birthday. Weasley previously got smashed to celebrate the occasion back in 2013.
posted by Artw at 10:00 AM PST - 30 comments

Annual Beer Float

Annual beer float in Helsinki, Finland. The event causes heartburn to bureaucrats as it doesn't have an organizer, no one applies for permits and it just kind of happens.
posted by zeikka at 9:34 AM PST - 22 comments

eating a maple bacon donut on a Citi Bike en route to Whole Foods, yoga

"Gentrifiers are people with medium or high incomes moving into low-income neighborhoods, attracting new business but raising rents, and often contributing to tensions between new and long-term residents. Sociologists coined the term, which alludes to the European gentry—and which has only become more loaded at a time of skyrocketing rents and profound demographic changes in American cities. But are you a gentrifier?" [SLSlate]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:02 AM PST - 143 comments

Gotta be KD

Kraft Mac and Cheese officially changes its Canadian name to KD Staple of children and dorm rooms everywhere, Kraft Dinner ("macaroni & cheese" to our friends down south) will now be officially branded as KD in Canada. [more inside]
posted by St. Peepsburg at 7:35 AM PST - 67 comments

“The life I’m living right now is just so much more fun.”

As the demand for tech labor grows, ambitious teenagers are flooding into San Francisco. There’s no official tally of the number of teens who work in tech, but Fontenot estimates that there are as many as a hundred recent high school dropouts working on startups in the city. Some were too distracted by programming projects and weekend hackathons to go to class. Others couldn’t pay for college and questioned why they should go into debt when there is easy money to be made. Still others had already launched successful apps or businesses and didn’t see why they should wait at home for their lives to start. In Facebook groups for young technologists, they saw an alternative: teens lounging in sunny Dolores Park (dolo, as they call it), teens leasing expansive South of Market office space, teens throwing parties whenever they want. And so they moved to San Francisco, many of them landing in houses like Mission Control. -- The Real Teens of Silicon Valley: Inside the almost-adult lives of the industry’s newest recruits
posted by Room 641-A at 6:49 AM PST - 41 comments

Complex Systems Break in Complex Ways

The RISKS Digest Turns 30: In February 1985 Adele Goldberg, the President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), published a letter in the Communications of the ACM expressing concern with humanity’s “increasingly critical dependence on the use of computers” and the risks associated with complex computer and software systems. On August 1st 1985 Stanford Research Institute's Peter G. Neumann responded by creating RISKS@SRI-CRL. [more inside]
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:01 AM PST - 15 comments

"Have the arrow pointing in the direction of the flow of music."

Famed debunker James Randi (Wikipedia) teams up with Ars Technica to test the AudioQuest Vodka, a $340 Ethernet cable whose superiority to run-of-the-mill Cat 5 cables, as per a review by Audiostream.com, is as plain as day.
posted by Gordion Knott at 4:45 AM PST - 100 comments

U2 is the world’s foremost creator of Oh Man, So Deep faces

Probably this is the first time Bono has ever publicly baptized a long-dead wife-beater into postmortem Irishness at Ellis Island, but honestly I wouldn’t know, because I mostly ignore his activities in his role as The Living Incarnation Of Thirst. Mostly this is just the convenient, and conveniently ridiculous, news peg I am using as an excuse to point out that he is an annoying doofus who has been peddling emptily profoundish, nauseatingly wholesome, sexless Disney World theme music to milquetoast nice bros for longer than I have been alive, and I wish he would quit it.
Albert Burneko puts the boot into Bono and U2, along the way taking swipes at John Lennon and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. You might want to calibrate your outrage with his views on cats.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:13 AM PST - 123 comments

Auralnauts Star Wars: The Saga Continuums

Episode 1: Jedi Party. Episode 2: The Friend Zone. Episode 3: Revenge of Middle Management. And now, Episode 4: Laser Moon Awakens. See also: The smoking and youth biology PSAs. And, of course, this (previously).
posted by BiggerJ at 12:17 AM PST - 7 comments

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