September 20, 2016

The Great Fall of Chyna

How WWE's Greatest Female Wrestler Disappeared by Jason King [more inside]
posted by The Gooch at 11:33 PM PST - 14 comments

Natural Friends

Kitten cuddles baby chick. And there's [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:42 PM PST - 18 comments

She just wanted her mother to love her a little bit less

Ursula Vernon (Hugo Winner and Nebula Winner) has started posting a serial novel, Summer in Orcus. [more inside]
posted by Hactar at 10:02 PM PST - 14 comments

You Ought’er watch

The Vancouver Aquarium has a baby otter cam. [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 5:05 PM PST - 42 comments

The largest refugee camp in the world, Dadaab in Kenya, 25 years old

While the International Court of Justice in The Hague takes up a dispute between Kenya and Somalia over maritime oil and gas reserves this week, Human Rights Watch alleges that Kenya's plan to close the Dadaab refugee camp complex, amidst protest from Somalia, violates the UN's 1951 Refugee Convention, which requires that repatriation of refugees must be voluntary. Earlier this year Kenya's Interior Ministry announced that the camp, covering 50 km² (20 mi²) and home to nearly 300,000 people, would be closed by November. Ground was broken to construct the earliest portions of Dadaab in October 1991 by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as a temporary measure to aid Somalis fleeing from their country's civil war, but as the years passed the site became home to refugees from other conflicts and to refugees from drought and famine, at its height holding more than half a million people. [more inside]
posted by XMLicious at 2:53 PM PST - 13 comments

“That looks like a bad dude, too,” the second officer said.

The Shooting of an Unarmed Black Man in Oklahoma [The New York Times] The Police Department in Tulsa, Okla., released video [YouTube] [Graphic Content] on Monday of an encounter during which, the authorities said, a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed black man who could be seen raising his hands above his head. The department opened a criminal investigation into the shooting and said the Tulsa County district attorney, Steve Kunzweiler, would review its findings. The federal Justice Department opened a separate civil rights investigation. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 2:43 PM PST - 289 comments

six hundred petrified dragon eggs

I’m from New York. I once paid two thousand dollars a month to live in the freight elevator of the former Filene’s Basement, in Union Square. Then I paid five thousand dollars a month to live in the garbage chute of a postwar luxury condominium on First Avenue. It’s important to live in terrible places when you’re young.
posted by griphus at 2:06 PM PST - 74 comments

A short video on humility

The time when Ray Charles beat Willie Nelson in Chess (SLYT)
posted by dfm500 at 1:19 PM PST - 9 comments

Subway Doodles

An artist doodles creatures interacting with NYC subway riders.
posted by agatha_magatha at 1:06 PM PST - 10 comments

We got too many runaways eating up the night

That album, for me, was musical hell. I joined the band in '74, and gradually the music had become vacuous, sterilized, escapist. It was an embarrassment. We had band meetings with big arguments. I probably should've tried harder to oppose it. I had a family. -- An oral history of Starship's "We Built This City."
posted by Chrysostom at 12:58 PM PST - 181 comments

Control Not Justice

Every year, the vast majority of murders in Chicago go unsolved. The city's homicide-clearance rate of 26% (a case is cleared as soon as someone is charged) is less than half the national average. The rate for non-fatal shootings is 10%. Meaning, if you shoot someone in Chicago, you have a pretty good chance of getting away with it. Alex Kotlowitz writes here about how Chicago law enforcement's abysmal homicide-clearance rate may be contributing to violence in the city. (previously)
posted by AceRock at 12:54 PM PST - 12 comments

How Shelton Johnson became the Buffalo Soldiers’ champion

The Park Service’s best-known ranger is determined not to let the African-American soldiers fall into obscurity.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:43 PM PST - 6 comments

God's Own Country: the nation of Yorkshire

Yorkshire is a county in t'north of England. It has a distinct range of dialects; for example 'nowt' means 'nothing', 'who?' means 'what?' and 'how are you?' is asked ... differently, with further variations across the county. Yorkshire is famous for its pudding, caustic cricket commentary, rhubarb, having its own day, one of the earliest surviving film fragments, the chocolate bar, poetry, tea, and ferret legging (alternative explanation). The anthem of Yorkshire, On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at, is about hats, death and cannibalism. Like other English regions, such as Cornwall and Wessex, Yorkshire has movements towards devolution, greater autonomy and ultimately independence. But what is the essence of Yorkshire? [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 12:41 PM PST - 39 comments

"Do you guys ever think about when we were just pets?"

Dogtor is a short, sweet animated film by Rhea Dadoo about friendship and reflecting on personal journeys--also dogs!
posted by amnesia and magnets at 11:31 AM PST - 9 comments

Silencing Kurdish Voices

An on-the-ground report from post-coup Turkey, where the Kurdish press is facing stepped-up repression.
If we were doing this kind of journalism in another part of the world, we would get international awards, but here, our reward is punishment.
posted by adamvasco at 10:21 AM PST - 5 comments

poing poing poing

Deer pronking at Poole Harbour. [more inside]
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 9:44 AM PST - 30 comments

"If I can do this many paintings of it, it's a problem."

Artist Patrick Martinez memorializes victims of police violence by way of vintage school supplies. [more inside]
posted by Sara C. at 9:37 AM PST - 5 comments

Poor Willard

The concept is simple: rat birth control The rat’s primary survival skill, as a species, is its unnerving rate of reproduction. Female rats ovulate every four days, copulate dozens of times a day and remain fertile until they die. (Like humans, they have sex for pleasure as well as for procreation.) This is how you go from two to 15,000 in a single year. When poison or traps thin out a population, they mate faster until their numbers regenerate. Conversely, if you can keep them from mating, colonies collapse in weeks and do not rebound.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 9:11 AM PST - 73 comments

Girlhood Gone: Notes from the New Nashville

After returning home to Nashville following many years away, Susannah Felts assesses the city’s changing face through the eyes of a native, and as a woman raised in the South. (slLongReads)
posted by Kitteh at 8:56 AM PST - 21 comments

El Día Nacional de la Lucha Libre

By unanimous proclamation of the Senate of Mexico, tomorrow is El Día Nacional de la Lucha Libre, or the National Day of Lucha Libre, Mexico's variety of professional wrestling. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:36 AM PST - 13 comments

You're going to hear some serious @#$%...

Audiobooks for the Damned (main site, previously) have been forging ahead in their quest to audiobook-ify film novelizations, and have finally released one of their holy grails - a seven-hour audiobook of George Gipe's legendarily insane novelization of Back to the Future Part I, as chronicled in Ryan North's B to the F (read it chronologically here, also previously). [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 7:18 AM PST - 23 comments

25 years of Belle

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the release of Beauty and the Beast, Angela Lansbury Sings the title song at Lincoln Center [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:07 AM PST - 11 comments

Only Disconnect

"If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out. Years later, the joke was running thin. In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out....My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?” On the costs of the always-connected life: Andrew Sullivan, "I Used to Be a Human Being" (nymag.com).
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:35 AM PST - 105 comments

Conservative, Brutal, and Anonymous ... Often Monotonous

Today, our flesh comes to us from the Internet, and not only what we consume but how we consume has changed since the porn wars. Porn is abundantly more, in every way: there are more people, more acts, more clips, more categories. It has permeated everyday life, to the point where we talk easily of food porn, disaster porn, war porn, real-estate porn—not because culture has been sexualized, or sex pornified, but because porn’s patterns of excess, fantasy, desire, and shame are so familiar. Making Sense of Modern Pornography by Katrina Forrester in The New Yorker
posted by chavenet at 2:30 AM PST - 69 comments

The mysteries of the least known Brontë sister

The Shape Of Emily’s Coffin
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:01 AM PST - 9 comments

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